Robert Plank

This is something I was thinking about presenting at my next live seminar...

But I'll share it with you here anyway!

It's something that most people who teach "productivity" leave out, and I see marketers FORGETTING this over and over again, even though they should know better.

This is "supposed" to be a programming concept but when I worked with other programmers, almost none of them knew about this, let alone implemented it...

It's Keeping Your Stuff SHIPPABLE!

I'll explain.  Think about the order you see items (as a buyer) in a "fully optimized" sales letter... Read More »

You guys had a ton of good guesses about my most hated word... but the word I'm trying to get rid of is: WORK!

No one wants to do work. My girlfriend always says, "I have to go back to work after lunch" or "I got to work at 10 o'clock."  I keep correcting her... you aren't going to work, you're going back to the rehab center to help old people and make a difference.

1. When Jason and I hold e-classes, he always gives out "homework" and I get him to rename it to that week's "challenge."
2. Jason never says he is "sick" ... instead, he has the flu or has a virus he needs to get rid of.
3. When I get off the phone with business partners, I've stopped saying, "Get back to work."  Instead, I say things like, "Get back to having fun building your business."

Finally, when I get an angry customer, his e-mail usually says a PHP script didn't "work" ... what a waste of time, because I always have to reply and say, "How did it not 'work?'  Was there an error message, did you try anything?"

Even when something "works" in a positive way, it's still not specific enough... it needs to be benefit-oriented.  (The script didn't just "work" ... it showed up on the page and gathered opt-ins!)

Look at how many of you took time of your day to answer the previous post... you were escaping your "work!"  (Ironically enough, the very FIRST answer within 10 seconds was the correct guess.)  You need to find a way to make your so-called "work" enjoyable... turn it into a game:

• Friendly competition: Get an accountability partner and try to earn more money than him.
• More output: If you wrote 10 articles last week, write 12 articles this week.
• Less time: If you spent 20 hours building your business last week, do those same tasks this week in 15 hours and take Friday off.

Many people ask me and Jason how we get more done in a week than most people do in a year, how we can work for long stretches of time without burnout and always stay motivated... it's because we don't WORK!  We have fun writing copy and creating video products.

For the rest of the day today, count the number of times you say the word "work."  If you said it 10 times today, then make it a goal to say it 9 times or less tomorrow.  After that, only say it 8 times in a day... until you stop using the word "work" altogether.

80% of getting things accomplished and making money is just having the right mindstate, not necessarily the best skills... that's why so many people went ga-ga- over Time Management on Crack.

At the very least, catch yourself whenever you say this bad word.  That's a step in the right direction.

Price training your list and your customers IS real. If people are used to getting everything from you for $10, there's going to be a price shock if you jump to $500.

So you're stuck working way too hard trying to land 10-dollar cheapskate customers.

You need to work your way up to at least 100 bucks per sale.  Consider if you want to raise 700 bucks... you can either make 7 sales at $100, or 100 sales at $7. Which do you think is easier?  Getting just seven sales. Read More »

I added a small daily task to my schedule, starting yesterday, that I CHALLENGE you to try:

Record One Video Every Day

This is going to be a daily video diary for your business. (I recommend a Camtasia video, not a webcam video... but in some niches, Camtasia doesn't apply very well.)

Here are the rules:

Rule 1: I don't want you to show it to anyone other than yourself, just stick it in a folder somewhere. You can turn this into a paid product, or show it to ONE business associate but do not just give it to the general public for free.

Rule 2: I don't care what it's about as long as it relates to your business. Yesterday I spent 18 minutes explaining why February 2008 was my best month, passing up June 2007, and what things I did different than last year. You can record for 5 minutes or 30 minutes, but it has to be in one take.

Rule 3: If you end up showing it to someone else, it has to be a paid product. Membership video, DVD, one time product, whatever... just DON'T give it away as a blog post.

I was just thinking last night that recording videos is something I can't do consistently. I can write consistently because I have lots of practice, especially from posting in this blog. But videos... out of the 20+ infoproducts I have out there, 14 are video-based. Videos are my weakest skill at the moment.

Do you remember my three tips to fast infoproduct creation? Let's see how they stack up against the daily video challenge...

1. It doesn't have to look good, just be good. That's the whole idea here. You spend 5 minutes creating the sloppiest video ever, because the video DOESN'T have to be that great and no one is going to see it.
2. Get excited about your topic. You're choosing what to talk about so why not? I think that if you make enough videos on enough subjects, you will find something to talk about that you are excited about.
3. Practice. You're recording a video EVERY DAY. This technique is practice... by definition. You'll establish good habits for yourself and in no time, videos will be a cinch for you to make.

Can you get to recording your video already? If you're worried about taking time out of your day, limit yourself to five minutes.

The video you record might end up being your next product.

The video could just be you going over your to-do list for the day... describing what you did and didn't accomplish. Maybe you'll watch it again 6 months from now and notice how your business has changed over time.

You might record yourself putting a product of yours to use... now you have an excellent how-to video to bundle with your product. You've just cut down on customer support requests.

Heck, I plan on doing a couple videos of nothing but me working on my project. What a great way to keep yourself on task!

If you know the cameras are rolling, do you think you'll get distracted and check e-mails, instant messages, and forums? Or do you think you'll actually focus on one single thing till it's done?

I thought so.

Please, leave a comment here and let me know if you accept this challenge. If you want to give me a little hint about what your first 5 minute video will be about... go for it... but you don't have to.

If you read through this whole post and DIDN'T comment, that tells me you're chickening out.

You're not a quitter... are you?

Some of you guys have been asking how I did on the $30K month for February... the answer is: I passed with flying colors!

I made it past $30K on Thursday the 26th, with two days to spare.  Here's a breakdown of it:

• Day job: $2,500.00
• Launches and trickle sales: $22,207.03
• Affiliates: $4,846.44
• Membership site: $869.06
• Webinar future payments: $2,000
• Total: $32,422.53

Affiliate sales are way up, just about quadrupled.  I planned to a product launch, resale rights offer, price increase, and e-class per week... but the two product launches went very well and I took a little bit of Eric Holmlund's advice and focused devoting 80% of my time to marketing.

I hit $30K with just two product launches that went VERY well, two resale rights offers that went VERY well, and one e-class.  Here's a list of my accomplishments for the month:

• Made 986 sales.
• Wrote 5 sales letters.
• Wrote 6 blog posts.
• Sent 33 e-mails to my list.
• Paid nearly $1000 in PayPal fees!
• Recorded 50 videos on one Sunday.
• Wrote 2 guest posts, a 9-part guest video series, hosted a 90-minute webinar with a stranger and appeared on 2 interviews.

Tell me why I work a day job again?  When I just made more in one MONTH from internet marketing than I make a whole year the day job?  Oh right, "health insurance." (rolls eyes)

Instead of going on and on about myself, I'll leave you with a few lessons I learned from the $30K month that you can apply in your business right now:

Lesson #1: Focus on what makes money first. If freelance makes you the most money, freelance first to hit your daily goals and then work on long-term stuff like product creation or joint ventures when you're ahead.  Personally, I got a product launch out of the way and then I was free to go about promoting it.

Lesson #2: Have a weekly goal. $30K broken down into 4 weeks is $7500 per week.  So each week, all I had to do was think, what did I need to do to get that $7500?  Usually a couple of product launches and affiliate sales.  $7500 in a week is much less intimidating to me than $30K in a month.  If you're not on that level yet, try for even $750 in a week.

Lesson #3: Have an accountability partner. I couldn't have made it this far without Jason kicking my butt every step of the way, and Jason couldn't have made it to $20K without me asking him why he hadn't launched anything that day.

Lesson #4: Never complain. Another big timewaster and a great way to waste the entire week feeling bad about yourself.  If you have time to complain, you're not busy enough.  This doesn't mean giving up your personal life or anything like that.  But if you sit at the computer 3 hours a day, you had better be working on internet marketing all 3 hours instead of complaining!

Lesson #5: Do as much with the time you have as you possibly can. Get an early start to the day if possible, and NEVER EVER do any internet marketing work at your day job unless it's before, after, during lunch or on breaks.  My girlfriend wakes up at 5 AM most mornings to babysit, so I got her to wake me up before she left so I could work without any distractions.

What did you think? Do you have close-ended monetary goals for each month and each week?  An accountability partner?  If not, maybe you need my Time Management on Crack productivity report and videos to get you where you NEED to go.

What's my goal for March 2009?  $31K.  What's your goal for this month? Please comment below with your goal and how you plan on getting there.

Let me tell you about the first product online that got me to pay higher than $100 for the very first time (this was years ago).

He called it a "Because I Can" sale.  Basically the guy put together a huge package with a bunch of his own products, including resale rights.

• This was long before that kind of thing was common!
• JV giveaways didn't exist yet...
• Pitch webinars didn't REALLY exist yet...

He set the start price at $37 and the end price at something like $297, and the sale only ran for about 3 days.  Every few seconds the price would jump up a fraction of a penny.  I waited until it was above $100 before I bought.

Back then I think my highest priced product was $197, and if I sold two copies of it in a week I would be jumping for joy. I might not have had a $1000 launch yet.  I was still full-time in college, rent was only $625 a month (a lot for me at the time).  I didn't have a full time job or any other source of income.

But... I Still Bought!

What got me to buy?  Scarcity!

Read More »

Quick update on the 30K month: I left it in a blog comment but here it is again. The launch of WordPress Crusher (how to make your own WordPress plugins using my fill-in-the-blank PHP templates) made me $6500 in 24 hours, income for the past 4 days is now over $7000 (so I'm very close to hitting my goal for the week).

Three more quick things: the sales letter converted at 16 percent, all I did was send one e-mail & make one forum post, and I'm awesome.

$30,000 is a very significant number for me because it's about what I make per year at my day job, after taxes and deductions.

Speaking of day jobs and numbers, did you ever watch the 1960's TV show The Prisoner? It starred Patrick McGoohan (who just passed away a couple weeks ago) as a spy who quit his day job...

... Only to be abducted minutes later and sent to a remote island which looked like a retirement community. They played mind games on you to figure out why you quit. He never revealed why he quit, because he didn't know if "The Village" was run by the East or the West.

It was the wackiest show ever. They had cordless phones (in the 60's!), cameras hidden in statues, helicopters that flew on autopilot, and mechanical chairs that came out of the floor. Nobody had a name, only numbers. I think maybe four people in all 17 epsiodes actually had names. The main character was Number 6. You never met Number 1, and he hired a new Number 2 to run things every week.

You didn't know who was good or bad.
If you tried to escape, a giant weather balloon chased you.

Six is a very important number because that's the minimum number of blog posts or follow-ups you need. You know how your prospects need to see your message 7 times on average before they buy? They see your page, that's the first time, then get on your list and get 6 more follow-ups, that makes 7 total.

If all you need is 6 things to tell your subscribers, that's not very hard at all. Think of 6 tips off the top of your head, schedule them as blog posts a couple of weeks apart, you've got a few months of content... you don't have to blow your wad with just one post.

Got a post-sale list to fill? Think of 6 skills they should have learned from your book, and which page number they should be on, then quickly write those 6 e-mails (no longer than 2/3rds of a page each), saying... flip to this page and do this and this. Here's something extra you might not have thought about just from reading the book.

Or, even easier. Share 6 URLs on your niche with them. Go to Digg.com and type in your keyword, or even look at your own bookmarks and figure out what applies the most... make sure to stick the call-to-action to buy your product in every e-mail.

If you schedule those follow-ups about one week apart, you can just about make it to the end of the refund period AND make it seem like you keep "checking up" on your customers to see if they're ok. Plus it's a chance to upsell them to another time-saving solution they need...

That's what I'm scheduling for the follow-up content for WordPress Crusher... 6 really awesome resources for WordPress plugin developers, I send a quick e-mail and add my two cents in there. Like, did you know that item #3 on this guy's blog post could also be used for this... I bet he didn't think of that. ("He didn't think of that" e-mails and tips are my favorite kind.)

I consider The Prisoner to be one of my favorite TV shows of all time... it was like if "Lost" had aired in the 1960s and was British.

Example of a typical plot: The Village finds Number 12 (guest star), an agent who looks extremely similar to Number 6 (main character). Number 2 (who runs the village) tells Number 12 that his job is to replace Number 6... so that Number 6 comes home and finds Number 12 eating his food, using his shower and so on, so that he will doubt his identity, crack under the pressure, and reveal everything.

Number 12 doesn't do a very good job. Number 6 challenges Number 12 to a fencing match, a soccer game, and so on but Number 6 wins them all. Then... plot twist... it turns out that Number 12 (the infiltrator) is actually the real Number 6! They've already brainwashed him into thinking he is Number 12, on a mission to become Number 6. The "real" Number 6 is really Number 12, and he's working for the baddies trying to brainwash Number 6! Confused yet? Me too... and I love it!

There's another lesson to be learned here. As crazy and creative as this show is, you could really only create two types of episodes for it: one of Number 6's latest attempt to escape, and the Village's latest attempt to brainwash Number 6.

If you think of writing e-mails, sales letters, blog posts, solo ads, and so on, with this "categorized" thinking... it's a lot easier to come up with ideas. I probably shouldn't give this away as a blog post, but here are my categories to come up with content... it's called RAT GUM:

• Rant: Go on a tangent about something that makes you happy or angry.
• Affiliate Review: Review someone else's product.
• Tutorial: Explain how to perform a step-by-step task.

• Guest Survey: Ask your readers what they think about something.
• User Feedback: Spin a new blog post based on one of your commenter's suggestions.
• Monthly Summary: Talk about what you did this month.

I based those categories off of the 65 posts I already have on RobertPlank.com. Now, when it comes time to write that next blog post, it's a lot easier to say... I want to write this kind of post, and THEN think of the idea, than think about the idea from nothingness.

Just as I'm sure when Patrick McGoohan wrote an episode of The Prisoner (he wrote most of them), he first thought about what type of episode he was going to write, before writing it.

Exactly the same as the writers on "Lost" do now... pick a character, decide if it'll be flashback or flashforward, then write. Even in the current episodes where they have changed up the format of the show BIG TIME, they still have to categorize before they do anything.

Just like WordPress Crusher shows you 7 different types of plugins you can create in 20% or less time than it would normally take. If that wasn't enough, gives you real life working WordPress plugins created from those fill-in-the-blank WordPress plugin templates... that do everything from import articles and RSS, give prizes for comments, automate the ten comment rule... and so on...

Be seeing you... make sure to comment below. Do you have a different type of blog post that doesn't fit into the RAT GUM formula?