Robert Plank

I honestly want to make sure you are doing something every day and making progress towards making more money every single day you are online. That's why, since it's November now and Christmas is coming up, I want to share with you which items I use every single day to stay happy, get things finished and enjoy life...

Philips Hf3485 Wake-up Light Plus ($150)

It's really important to wake up early and get as much accomplished in your business before noon. When I had days off in college, I'd sleep until 12PM to 2PM and not really get anything done on a typical day -- not good! But when I had to balance internet marketing and a day job, I found myself waking up early (5AM or 6AM) and I'd get more finished during that one focused hour than I used to do in a week.

Now that I am full time with internet marketing, it's even more important wake up early (and usually go running or swimming) so that I can hit the ground running every morning and have afternoons and evenings free to relax and unwind. Routine is important. I don't use the alarm clock function on this, but when I wake up, I reach over and turn on this light. It shines a very bright light that completely wakes you up and gets you ready to hop out of bed in just a few minutes.

Cuisinart SS-780 Coffeemaker ($169)

I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I do like to make tea or hot chocolate and on occasion put some ice cubes in a mug and pour iced coffee. This machine is amazing. You put a cartridge on the top of the machine and it makes one cup for you at a time (you can adjust what size your "cup" is) then you just throw away the cartridge or "K-Cup." They make several flavors, my favorite is the Chai Latte. If the machine is off it takes about 3 minutes to warm up and then about 30 seconds to make a cup. If the machine is already on standby then it literally takes 30 seconds to make yourself a cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa and then you're back to writing some emails, making some products and generating some traffic.

G-SAFE 2TB ($560)

We all take backups for granted. It's not an exciting subject even though at some point or another we have all lost files we wish we could get back. I used to store all my files on my hard drive... bad idea. Then I tried putting things on a USB stick... also a bad idea. External hard drive... even worse! And Internet bandwidth is not yet fast enough where we can store 100% of our files online in the cloud (especially video), so here is the next best thing.

This is external hard drive that connects using USB2. If your computer has an E-SATA port then it will run even faster. But I store all my videos, products, articles, graphics, all my large files on this device. It holds two 2TB hard drives but what makes this special is it "mirrors" the data on both drives. It's basically a constant backup. So if one hard drive ever fails (it hasn't happened yet) you can slide it out, stick a brand new hard drive in its slot without even turning it off, and it will back up all your data to that 2nd drive.

iPad 2 16GB 3G ($579) & Logitech Zagg Keyboard ($102)

It takes a lot of willpower not to use my iPad at home to play games all day, but when I'm traveling it's a must-have. It's a lot more convenient than taking a laptop on the road: it's lighter, smaller, and the battery lasts a lot longer, and although it can't do 100% of the things a laptop can, it's pretty close.

When I travel, I put movies (sometimes internet marketing courses) on my iPad, I can browse the internet, play games, write emails to my list, use a word processor. But the biggest headache is the keyboard. I've tried a few iPad 2 keyboards and this is my favorite. It connects via Bluetooth so I can use this keyboard for my iPhone as well, it stands up and doubles as a case. It's also not too small which has been my complaint with many of these keyboards. I have used my iPad 2 and Logitech Zagg keyboard to write articles, emails, and sales letters from the plane.

Roku Player ($100)

If you haven't removed live TV from your home yet, I would encourage you to. Just the fact that I can't waste time flipping channels or watch reality TV gives me extra hours of free time every single day. If you're single or live alone then this is your motivation to make friends. If you have a family then this is your way to spend more time with them. But I'm not saying remove all TV, just live TV.

This box costs 100 bucks (one time payment) and plugs into your TV whether it's HDMI or Composite-RCA, and then connects to your home network over Wifi. It streams all Netflix movies right onto your TV. If you subscribe to Hulu Plus (7 bucks a month) then it streams about half of all Comedy Central, NBC, ABC, FOX. Whatever movies or TV shows aren't on there are probably available for you to buy on Amazon Instant for about 2 to 4 dollars. I consider this a far better (and cheaper) alternative to using cable TV.

I hope that gives you something to get yourself if you want to be more productive, someone who has a birthday coming up for a loved one for the upcoming Christmas season. What item do you use to make yourself more productive?

Notice: Only 31 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

Here's something I've been doing for years, that literally saves me a MINIMUM of at least an hour per week, which is 52 hours per year.

Because things are more fun to discover (and remember) when we assign cutesy names to them, let's call this the Accordion Method.

When it comes to blogging, e-mailing, Tweeting, creating membership content, or anything... they simply don't manage their time well. They burn out their blog too fast.

You can be better. You can be cautiously optimistic and schedule your content ahead of time.

And here's how to do it:

1. Schedule six short blog posts, one month apart. That means where most people have six weeks or six days of content, you have six months worth...
2. When you have time, write six more blog posts -- remember where talking SHORT posts or re-use your old articles...
3. Now, compress it back down into six months -- so it's a new post every 15 days...
4. If you have less than six months in the queue, schedule more monthly posts -- but if you hit 12 months, compress all posts 30 days apart back into 15 days

Get it? It's like an accordion... out, and in, and out, and in...

At the worst case, you only have a post or two, which means you have 1-2 MONTHS of content.

• Maybe this is for a $7/month membership site... add more content, bump it to $17/month or $27/month or higher
• Maybe this is for a blog... you can leave it on autopilot for months
• Maybe this is for your email sequence... you can actually have that thing sending messages automatically

The average person might get excited about their blog at first, write a bunch of stuff, then have nothing new to say... but not you! You used the Accordion Method!

Do you pre-schedule any of your blog or autoresponder content this way? Are you going to, from now on?

I was talking to someone the other night who was afraid to run a webinar. A lot of people are. Many of you have "enough" technical skills to do it, enough knowledge about your topic to present, but "something" is holding you back.

Let's change that in this blog post, for you, right now!

Play Video

Go ahead and look at this page carefully, because it's going to help you make a sale (if you are a marketer), help people (if you are a teacher), conquer public presentations (if you are a speaker), and so on.

First, I am NOT a self-help expert of any kind. But I have run 359 live webinars (697 hours) so I know a couple of things about webinar confidence and public speaking.

You and I both have our own unique set of problems. Let's solve those problems for you, not in one huge step but in a couple of SMALL pieces at a time...

News Flash:
You Have Only Have 8 Emotions (Seriously!)

As a nerdy computer programmer, I like to take apart what makes us work. And according to psychologists (I'm not one and haven't read ANY books about psychology) you have 8 basic emotions:

• joy
• trust
• anticipation
• surprise
• fear
• anger
• sadness
• disgust

That's it! Anything else you feel is either one of these in greater or lesser intensity (i.e. rage, jealousy, distraction, annoyance, interest) or is a combination of these (i.e. love or guilt).

"But dammit Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a psychologist." That "psychology" explanation looks like a bunch of ideas thrown at me. I like to deconstruct and simplify things.

This information isn't available in any book, only right here. At least not assembled in the way I've done it here. Let's get it into a step by step formula you can apply today.

Eight things are a lot to keep track of... are four key concepts easier? Of course they are. So let's keep in mind that each of these 8 emotions has an OPPOSITE... for example, the opposite of being "happy" is "sad", right?

Four Positives and Four Negatives

That means you really only have four negative and four positive states:

• ANTICIPATION (positive) <--> SURPRISE (positive)
• JOY (positive) <--> sadness (negative)
• TRUST (positive) <--> disgust (negative)
• fear (negative) <--> anger (negative)

(I've put positive emotions in ALL CAPS and negative ones in lower caps to make this more readable.)

The "green" and "orange" colors don't mean good or bad, it's just so you can tell which are the opposites of one another. For example, "joy" and "sadness" are opposites because they have different colors. (This is important for later.)

Here's something else you should notice from these (2 + 2 + 2 + 2) eight states:

• With 2 of the "positive" emotions, the opposite is a positive
• With 2 of the "positive" emotions, the opposite is a negative
• With 2 of the "negative" emotions, the opposite is a positive
• With 2 of the "negative" emotions, the opposite is a negative

You can have all the knowledge and all the skill in the world, but if your emotions (especially fear) hold you back, if you can't "get over yourself" so to speak... then you can't do anything!

This is why so many people have trouble putting up an optin page, can't YET run a live webinar, and so on. Too many negatives holding you back and not enough positives pushing you forward.

How to Change Your Behavior
(The Way That Really Works)

And I think the reason so many people can't get past it is they either let it take them over, try to ignore it, fight it or even go against it.

You have to REDIRECT it and USE it to your advantage. When I was young, I was in (music) band, played sports and gave school presentations probably just like you.

Anytime I "fought" what I was feeling, it distracted me from hitting the baseball. BUT... if I was nervous about playing saxophone in concert, I would use that alertness to do an even better job than I would otherwise.

(Maybe that explains why I was always stuck in leftfield/shortstop/3rd base in baseball, but was 1st/2nd chair in band class?)

To improve any skill, you need to go from:

1. unconscious incompetence (unaware you're doing it wrong), to...
2. conscious incompetence (find out WHAT you're doing wrong), then to...
3. conscious competence (doing it somewhat right even if you have to work at it), and finally...
4. unconscious competence (doing it automatically as easily as breathing or driving a car).

The seven stages of grief (shock, denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression, acceptance) take you up to "conscious competence."

Twelve step recovery programs (problem, awareness, decision, inventory, admission, readiness, openness, details, repair, inventory, meditation, repetition) stop before you get to "unconscious competence."

Unconscious Incompetence to Unconscious Competence

There are a lot of things I don't know. But I DO know about overcoming your fear of public speaking to run webinars because I've done it. And the secret isn't figuring it all out at once, it's focusing on ONE issue you have (i.e. running one in the first place, slurring your words, stopping for questions, silence or dead air... slowly fixing things, until one day you realize you don't have to try at all...

• 0% of the way there: ground zero
  (not online, not doing webinars)
• 20% of the way there: unconscious incompetence
  (running your first webinar, just doing "something")
• 40% of the way there: conscious incompetence
  (aware of little things you're doing wrong on a webinar)
• 60% of the way there: conscious competence
  (fixing little issues i.e. breathing on a webinar)
• 80% of the way there: unconscious competence
  (running a great webinar automatically)

If you've heard of the 80/20 rule, you know that 20% of the effort will bring you 80% of the results.

Life's 80/20 rule applies here in that the last 80% is the hardest... you can put in just 20% of the effort to achieve an 80% skill level (the beginnings of "unconscious competence") ... but now you're running webinars and doing them correctly: making sales, being a good presenter, recording it, all that good stuff.

Let's connect your "skill" (good or bad) your "emotion" (good or bad)... we want your negative state to be in the past, and your positive state to be in the future, right?

Anger, disgust, fear, and sadness should somehow fit into past -- the "unconscious incompetence" and "conscious incompetence" areas.

Anticipation, joy, trust, and surprise are in your future -- "conscious competence" and "unconscious competence."

When you're incompetent, you're in a negative state. When you're competent, you're positive. But how do you GET there?

Why Don't You Go "Confuse" Yourself!

The key is confusing yourself and let me explain. Think about when somebody won you over by making you laugh, overloading you with information or just confusing you with conflicting information until you gave up. You change your state through confusion.

The lack of confusion is also how you stay in a state, and why you're stuck in the state you're in now. Let's see what happens if we pair the "unconscious" states (beginning and end) with emotions that are NOT opposites, and "conscious" states (middle stages where we're improving) with emotions that ARE opposites -- to add the "confusion" factor where we make a change?

The Exact Roadmap to Do It Today

We get this roadmap of going from "guilt" to "love."

• unconscious incompetence = sadness + disgust = guilt
• conscious incompetence = anger + fear (opposites)
• conscious competence = ANTICIPATION + SURPRISE (opposites)
• unconscious competence = JOY + TRUST = love

(Remember, both "green" or both "orange" next to each other, means they're the same, "green and orange" means they're opposites.)

What you'll do is use fear and anger to rise above the guilt, take some action out of impulse, experience anticipation and surprise once you realize what you're doing, experience the joy of completion and the trust that it's possible to repeat.

Here are the steps you need to go through in order, for example, to get confident with webinars:

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence: (sadness + disgust) Do you feel bad because you're not making enough money? Feel guilty because you're not doing enough? It's okay to blame your "past" self for not doing enough... cry it out so you can move past it. Your present and future self WILL run one webinar this week, it's going to happen.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence: (anger + fear) Remember when someone said you weren't good enough to do something? That same person would probably say the same about you and webinars.Prove them wrong. Are you jealous of someone else, who has more than you do? It's not fair, you deserve it more than they do! Get mad enough to make a difference.

Maybe you could do a webinar better than "they" would... now you have something they don't.

In any case, your marketing message isn't getting out now -- you need to run at least ONE webinar. Try it. What you've been doing so far isn't working it... attack this head-on.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence: (ANTICIPATION + SURPRISE) You're allowed to be a "little" bit nervous trying something, like webinars, that you haven't done before.But one of the cool things about doing a webinar is that you don't know what's going to happen. Doing a webinar means you have to move outside your comfort zone a little bit, but what have you got to lose?

The absolute worst thing that happens is that no one shows up, or no one likes your webinar, and guess what... you're at the same place you are now! In other words, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Once you do this you'll know where your limits are.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence: (JOY + TRUST) You completed the hard part... that first 2 minutes of the webinar when you were nervous, and you powered through it to the fun part.You finished your first webinar, and you're already excited about doing another one. Even if just one person said you were great, that made it all worthwhile, didn't it? You can't believe it took you this long to run a live webinar like this. You want to do it again and again. Your next webinar will be even better.

If you're not ready to run webinars, replace "run a webinar" with "make an optin page" ... "setup a payment button" ... or even "exercising" or "quitting your job" or "dating" ...

I'm not saying I know everything about everything, but you can apply what I know about webinar confidence to your own life, so that you can tackle that problem of having a SKILL but not yet having the CONFIDENCE to put yourself out there.

What do you think?

1. You're overwhelmed by all the new offers you see.
2. You're switching between too many tasks every day.
3. You're doing too much of the work yourself.
4. Your to-do list keeps getting bigger (not shorter) and you can't prioritize.
5. You procrastinate and can't seem to finish what you start.
6. You're a perfectionist.
7. You're unhappy.

1. Choose one "computer free" day of the week, and one "email free" day (even when you're at the computer).
2. Only focus on ONE project this week, such as launching a new product, finishing that sales letter, or creating that membership site content.  Everything else can wait.
3. Outsource just one thing.  I recommend you dictate ten articles (2.5 minutes each) and send them out to get transcribed, that saves you one day of work.
4. Throw away your whiteboard and only write down four daily tasks instead of having a long to-do list.
5. Reward yourself with 30 minutes of TV, a bowl of ice cream, or the rest of the day off for finishing your project early.
6. Be "perfectly complete" instead of "perfectly perfect."  In other words, try to win the high score.  If your goal was to write 10 articles and you wrote all 10 before your deadline, you scored a "perfect" 10 regardless of the quality of those articles.
7. Use the extra money from internet marketing to go on a vacation, pay off your mortgage faster, spend time with your family, or send your kid to college.  In other words, use the money to do something you enjoy.

If you've seen any of the comments on this blog, you know that my posts get a lot of response.

If you've been inside any of my paid webinar classes, you know that I have a lot of successful case studies and success stories from people who did exactly what I told them to.

How do you clone exactly what I did? You use one of these 4 methods to get your followers to take action.

"Know" Phase #1: The Blog Comments

Something you can do right now without launching a new product, even without making a new blog post, is look at the most recent post you've made on your blog and cap the number of comments at 10.

Put a note that says "as soon as that blog post gets 10 comments, you're going to disable comments." You would not believe how many people have told me at live events that they had no interest in leaving a comment on my blog until they heard that they might miss out on it. That's how most of your viewers are as well. They are just barely on the fence about whether or not to comment.

It's up to you to give them that one extra reason. If having 10 blog comments seems like a lot, here's a secret. You should be replying to your blog comments. This means that if 5 people leave comments on your blog and you reply to each individual comment with a comment of your own, that equals 10 responses total. When I say you should cap your blog post at 10 comments, you really only need 5 people to leave comments and then for you to respond to each one.

At first, you might have to pay people $1 per comment or have some of your friends leave comments, but after a few posts, when the social proof is there, people will leave comments as long as you are sending traffic there from your forum and from your list.

"Like" Phase #2: The Retweet Campaign

When I launch a blog post, after it has filled up the 100 or so comments I like to have, I will close out comments and then mail my list a second time, telling them to re-tweet that blog post.

In the past, I tried to tell people to comment and re-tweet but this works a lot better if you devote one day and one email just to commenting, and after you've gotten what you wanted, devote one day just to re-tweeting one of your posts. On my blog, I use the TweetMeme plugin and just by having that button there, I do get 10 to 20 re-tweets or one click mentions on Twitter.

But when I specifically ask people to re-tweet, it jumps to 50 to 200 re-tweets. That means that 200 different people have mentioned that specific blog post on Twitter which gives me more traffic and more social proof, and I like that at this point, the comments are turned off because that means anyone who comes to my site now has to sign up to my mailing list to be notified when they can comment again.

You can also have fun with this re-tweet campaign by re-tweeting your blog post once per day to drive the count-up and add some kind of prize. For example, if you can get 20 re-tweets of your latest blog post, you will make another blog post this week.

"Trust" Phase #3: Free Live Webinar

Most people have no strategy when they're leaving a blog post. I always do.

When I make a blog post, it's usually to pre-launch my next class or my next email offer. You should be doing the same.

Use the responses you got from that last blog post to create your presentation or to improve the next class you will be offering.

Even if you only have 10 comments, you can pick out about four things that people are having trouble with.

For example, I once made a post on my blog called Forfeit the Race to Free, telling people not to gravitate towards trials but instead be moving their price higher, and although a lot of people agreed with me, some people told me things like they were at first afraid to launch their product and now this advice got them to do it. Some other people argued that more people bought at a low price, which in my experience was false. More people bought at a higher price.

My favorite response to that post was that some – one of my commenters told me that somebody didn't buy from them because the price was too low and the average person thought that because it was so cheap, something must be wrong with it.

All those responses can make a great presentation or augment a presentation that's already ready because it speaks directly to people's fears and frustrations and the best part is you can use the same language, the same phrases people say to you and use that to make a killer headline based on your pressing issue.

"Close" Phase #4: Pitch And Close

You've already taught people something from your emails leading up to your blog post, from your blog post itself, and during your free live webinar. At the end of that free live webinar, all of that info should be coming in together - the emails, the blog posts, the comments, and this live training into a relevant and special offer.

You gave people a lot of tips on overcoming roadblocks but now it's time for them to pay you to get access to the step-by-step how-to system to get them from point A to point B.

Make it a special offer just for people on the call that will be increasing in price soon, have a real deadline so that there is real scarcity, and send them to at least a short sales letter explaining your offer exactly in black and white terms. That way, when people join your class or purchase your report or get your video series, they know exactly what they are getting.

Is your business model anything close to this, the KNOW, LIKE, TRUST, and CLOSE step-by-step system? If not, why not and how soon are you going to implement this? Comment!

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a software program out there, that can save you 20 minutes a day (which frees up five days per year?)

There is, and you might already be using it.

It's called Roboform.

Roboform remembers your passwords and makes it so you can login to all your favorite web sites with one click.

Even if you don't have to rummage around for that password, the act of typing in that password -- even if it's just for a few seconds -- and waiting for the page to load... adds up very quickly if you visit several sites each day like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums, Gmail...

So one day you can save 20 minutes a day RIGHT NOW is to install Roboform.

Want to save 21 minutes a day instead of 20 minutes a day? That means you gain 126 extra hours a year instead of a measly 120.

Just use ONE PERCENT of the advice I give you in my "100 Timesavers" report... and you'll get 6 hours.

Then use one more to get another 6 hours.  Over and over.

The biggest benefit you can give to yourself as a business owner is to remove yourself from the equation. That means automate as much of yourself as possible ahead of time so your daily tasks do not become chores.

You might be surprised at all the ways you can pre-schedule your content and your marketing ahead of time and I'm going to explain six ways to do that right now.

1. Blog Drip

When someone says the phrase "drip content" to me, the first thing that comes to mind and the first thing that should come to mind to you is dripping out content on your WordPress blog.

WordPress is the #1 blogging platform and my favorite feature about it has always been that you can schedule content ahead of time with no additional plugins needed. When you're writing a blog post, you can choose to submit it right now or you can change the date on it so it appears as if it was written a long time ago, but you can also change the date to a date in the future – for example, date it to be next week or next month.

That post will remain in a scheduled state until the next week or next month and it will automatically be published for you on a timer. You can set not just the date but the time of day so you know exactly when that next post is coming out.

I highly recommend that instead of sitting and writing out your blog's next week's worth of content, write 4 or 5 short posts and schedule them one month apart. That way, you have the next several months of blog posts already scheduled. And guess what else, if you're using WordPress to run your membership site, you're dripping out content inside your paid membership site as well.

2. Autoresponder Drip

The next easy way to drip content is with your email autoresponder.

You might not have notice it yet but your autoresponder gives you the ability to pre-schedule posts in the same way as your blog. You can write an email that will be sent to your list and set it to tomorrow's date or next week's date, which means that you can write your next month or your next week's worth of autoresponder emails and not have to do anything for that amount of time. You could go on vacation for the next week, schedule your next week's worth of emails and now your business will run even though you are not present.

When you are launching a product, one email simply won't cut it. You need to give people multiple reasons to go check out your offer. You need to give people multiple email reminders getting them to look at your webpage. When you're running a webinar, you should send several emails leading up to the webinar to make sure everyone is on the call.

When you make a blog post, you should send traffic to that blog post and even send reminder emails, which means you can schedule your blog post and schedule your autoresponder emails for that blog post.

3. Sales Letter Drip

If you know a programmer for about $5, you can get content on your sales letter dripped out. There's a little thing called "if else" statements.

That means if you want to slowly increase the price of your product – say increase it by $10 once a week for 5 weeks, you can at a special bit of PHP code that will replace your order button with a new one at a higher price every few days. You can run seasonal specials. For example, every month you could rotate in a different bonus for your offer to give different people a reason to get in.

4. Squeeze Page Drip

You can apply the same "if else" technology that you use on your sales letter to your squeeze page as well and you can use it to do the same things – rotate a monthly or weekly offer, and this can be a different headline, a different bonus or even an entire page swapped out for another.

You can switch out one of your opt-in forms after 2 months for a different one and have the first opt-in form send people to a page where they are supposed to re-tweet one of your free audios, but after 2 months, now direct them to a page where it sends them to your blog, which is now filled up with content.

More often than not, if I have a hard deadline for something, if I know I'm going to increase the price, change the headline, change a redirect, I will set it on this timer instead of doing it manually because otherwise I know I might forget.

5. Social Media

Now that you've dripped out your blog post, install a WordPress plugin such as Twitter Tools to leave a Twitter post or a tweet everytime you make a new blog post.

Also, if I know I'm going to be tweeting about something for the next week or two, I will use a scheduling service such as SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to write tweets but set a publication date on them, which means I can write 10 or 20 tweets a time which will be posted once a day or once a week.

If you don't know what kind of scheduled tweets you should put out there, just use 30-day reminders. If you're posting about a blog post today, schedule another tweet in 30 days, reminding people about that old blog post.

6. Traffic Drip

Even third-party services allow you to drip out your content, even if your content appears on other people's sites.

The Traffic Geyser service allows you to upload up to 90 videos at once and determine when they will be scheduled. (I wish Tube Mogul did too.)  When I was using this service for videos, I would record 90 videos at once, upload 90 videos and set the publication date for each and everyone - meaning that I could leave it alone for 3 months and it would send out a new video to the video sites once per day.

EzineArticles even has a premium option which means you can schedule all your articles and determine what date they will be published. Meaning, you can use the same strategy, write or outsource 90 articles, upload and schedule them all and the next 3 months' worth of traffic building are now automatic.

I hope that one of those 6 ways to drip content automatically opened your eyes and made you realized that doing things on a consistent basis doesn't always involve you and doesn't always have to be a chore.

So, which one do you like the best? The blog drip, autoresponder, sales letter, squeeze page, social media, or traffic drip? Post below, letting me know. Thank you.