062: How Is Your Online Business (And Your Personal Life) Doing, on a Scale From One to Ten?

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank, Show episode 62 How is your online business and your personal life doing on a scale from one to 10?

Robert Plank 0:15 You wouldn't invite a thief into your house, so why would you allow thoughts that steal your joy to make themselves at home in your mind. Eleanor Roosevelt says, Great Minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events, but small minds discuss people. Brian Tracy says that I found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, be more active and show up more often. And Dan Kennedy says, one in 60 are millionaires in the US. One in 1460 are millionaires in the world. I'm Robert Plank. Welcome to the Robert Plank show, where we talk about internet marketing and making money online from home. And what I want to talk to you about today is thinking in terms of a scale of one to 10, it's the weirdest thing that the computer programming nerd logic applies in so many ways to real world situations, especially when, if left to our own devices, we will lack common sense, And we will be basically on a downward spiral into negativity and not making money and generally being unhappy. If you don't write the ship every once in a while, then that is the course that you're headed towards. But if you take a second every, you know, couple days, couple weeks, to look at the bearing on the compass, so to speak, and realize that, well, if the things you're doing, if they're if they're making you happy now but miserable later, that's not good. If the things that you're doing on a day to day basis are making you miserable and even happy that you're being miserable because you don't have to try, that's not good either. I mean, I don't want to list a whole bunch of sob stories, but um, the the day that I announced to my internet marketing subscribers, and this was many, many years ago now, but the day I announced, and this was on a march 25 I believe that it was my last day of having a day job when I haven't been on a day job since one of the immediate replies from a customer of mine who asked for a refund of everything that he'd ever bought, and his reasoning was, Well, cool, now You've made it, and now you don't need the money. And it was kind of, like, almost like a negative, like revenge based kind of, kind of a response. I saw a lot of membership courses such as membership Q and webinar Crusher, and one of our buyers actually asked for a refund, and his reasoning was that he was 68 years old and didn't like that. There was a flashing green border on one of the parts of our video. For literally about 10 seconds, there was a flashing green border somewhere, and he didn't like that. He was so old that he just couldn't handle a flashing green border and wanted a refund. I mean, there's been some kind of silly and ridiculous reasons for people asking for refunds. And the thing is, if you sell digital products online, or you sell anything online, or I guess, even if you sell anything using credit cards, then you pretty much are at the mercy of credit card companies for handling refunds. But I mean, refunds are about only about 1% of your sales, so it shouldn't affect more than 1% of your thoughts or your day or your decision making. But I mean, there are some silly ones. There's one person who bought a $15 plug in from us, and it worked perfectly. And he also wanted to upgrade to an additional module, but he didn't like how much the additional module cost, so he asked for a refund of both things. He bought, kind of strange. Well, we bought. He sold a course called Graphic dashboard, which you can get at. Graphic dashboard.com which shows people how to use our point and click templates to create banners, e covers, DVD and book covers, without Photoshop, without any kind of software at all. It's pretty cool. And in one of the modules, we showed a way to make money using this, using, you know, the software, and it was only one tiny part of a whole larger course. We got a refund request from someone who wanted their money back because they didn't believe that that part of the course worked. It's not that they tried it and it failed, or it's not that that was the entire courses. It was that one little section scared this person because of their own fear they wanted to be for the entire course. So I'm not complaining not doing a bitch and moan session. Light goes on. But what's important to realize is that we scare ourselves a lot of the time, and only if we were a little more aware of the reasons we scare ourselves, maybe at first, for those first couple of days, it might be almost a little painful looking inward, realizing what led us to where we are now, and that we might need to change, maybe not change our outsides, but change our way of thinking so that we make better decisions in the future, maybe less rash decisions in the future, or maybe if something gets you upset, angry, sad or nervous right now, if you can dissect or break up that problem. Smaller pieces, or realize your triggers. You realize the people who are bringing you down, if you have a bad support system, anything like that, then you can begin to adjust. And so, you know, I talked in a couple previous podcasts about your vocabulary, right, and how there are things like the Eskimos, certain Eskimo tribes have 200 different words for ice, but zero words for war. Now, why is that? Because they use the word ice all the time, and they've never been to war, so they don't have a reason to have a word for a thing that never happens. But in the same line of thinking, if you and I'm not going to ask you to make this list, but theoretically, if you were to sit down for about half an hour and make a list of all of the the the bad, the words for bad moods you could have, right, angry, upset, infuriated, dejected, you. I mean the average person, maybe not you, but the average person would probably be able to make quite a long list of negative emotions, thoughts and feelings they have. And if you ask them to turn over the piece of paper and write words like, you know, happy, joy, fruitful, all the words for, you know, happy, positive things, I bet you that the average person would have about double the number of bad words to list as a number of good words. So the the fix for that is to use more simple and use less negative words. Even just changing the words in your everyday speech will help, but using less negative words and then more positive words, now it sounds like kind of happy go lucky, Fauci self help kind of stuff. So I'm a computer programming nerd, and a lot of the things that I do kind of can apply to common sense and can apply to life, you know, things like well in programming, instead of having, instead of creating all kinds of crazy things in our software program or our app, we like to create the minimum viable product, version 1.0 very simple, you know, very simple functioning program, and so that can apply in your own life, or especially, even if you're in your own websites or blogs or information products, videos, membership sites, you make the minimum viable product first, and then you can go and reiterate and do a better job. So that's just one example of where programmer logic, if you can look at the like the architecture, right, or like the structural kind of stuff that programmers have to do without learning code, you can actually apply a lot to your business, your websites, and even your own personal life. And so what I want to share with you today is this idea of thinking in terms of a scale from one to 10, okay? And if you know, if, if you're having trouble with always repeating the same kind of negative words, even the the positive negative words, right? The majority of people, 99% of people, if you ask how they're doing today, their answer is good. If you ask how their dinner was today, the answer is good. And you don't want to say good, because that's what everyone else says, and you say it so often that that's just what you're used to saying. And so you know, if someone's asked me how I'm doing, my answer might change. It might be awesome, fabulous, fantastic words like that, but multi syllable words, because I want to be more detailed about the positive things in my life and less detailed about the negative things. If that makes sense, it doesn't mean that we're totally oblivious, totally not self aware, but we want to be leaning more towards the positive in life, because I mean replaying the tape and reliving all that negative stuff that's just going to bring us down. And it's so tempting. It's easy to do. It's the evil shortcut. And so

Robert Plank 8:23 think of things instead of answering, well, how you doing today? Answer on a scale of one to 10. One is the worst, 10 is the highest. So if I ask you how you're doing today, maybe the answer is 8.1 so pretty dang good. Could be better. But it's not always 10 out of 10. It's not always 12 out of 10. It's on a scale of one to 10. And so this came into mind because, if you're following us real time, I broke my ankle about a week ago, and you know, maybe you're listening to this podcast years later, but I broke my ankle and I, you know, went into surgery. They had to put in some plates and pins, and you know, I don't remember any of it, because they put me under but when I woke up, they did the usual hospital thing of asking you to rate your pain, if you ever been like in an emergency room, they ask you how to rate your pain. Now you don't want to say two or three or four, because that means you're not really in any pain, right? You don't want to get a baby aspirin to mask your pain. You don't want to get a Flintstone vitamin. But you also don't want to say a nine or 10, because it's not like you broke your your hip, or you broke your giant leg bone or something. But, you know, coming out of surgery, my pain, and I was still kind of, kind of, you know, out of it, but my pain was at about a 7.2 because that was the way for that was, like the only really accurate way to tell the hospital staff, the surgeons, how much pain medicine I needed. Of course, you don't want to say my pains at 1000 but you don't want to say it's at a one, because the drivers see some pain there. And so as they did this and that, then I was able to, over the course of the next few minutes, say, Okay, well now I'm about a 6.5 now I'm at about a 6.1 and I realized, coming out of it, that there have been many times where I've I've used this. One to 10 scale in my own life, and not really realized it like, you know, we went to this place called Santa Cruz a few months ago. And this is where, you know, if you've never been there, it's really beautiful. It's in California. It's near like, you know, San Jose and stuff. It's pretty far up north. So we're talking way further north than than Los Angeles, further north in Santa Barbara, but kind of, you know that area, like north, about like North for the North and Santa Barbara, but south from San Francisco, okay? And you know, there's, like, the beach, and there's roller coasters there. I'm really afraid of roller coasters and roller coasters, in fact, maybe pretty nervous, but I can do a couple of them, as long as they don't get too crazy, like go backwards or flip upside down and things like that. But after doing a couple roller coasters, going on a couple of these rides, I started to get kind of nauseous. And I told my girlfriend, well, you know, I'm 64% nauseous right now. And she kind of made a remark about that. And I realized, and I realized that again, after this last surgery, that that if I am at a loss for words, then I go for that one to 10 kind of rating. And so that's what I would advise you to do in a couple different ways we're going to talk about today. First of all, in your personal life, if someone's asking you how your day is going, they're expecting you to say good or to say great, and that's about the only responses they get. If you go to Starbucks or McDonald's or whatever and they ask you that, well, first of all, they ask you that because it's their job, they have to they have to. They're trained for it. And every single person they've talked to, out of you know, 200 people they've heard from you before today, either they ask someone how they're doing and they just respond with their order. They just treat the worker like a machine, or the answer is good or great. There used to be treaty treated like like mindless robots. And so the weirdest thing, if you have a weird answer, then you will cause in these people what's called a pattern interrupt. And usually you'll get a laugh out of it. I didn't, I didn't believe this until I started doing it, but as soon as you stop answering, good or great, when someone asks how you're doing, sometimes it'll they'll think that's funny, because they're just thrown and caught off guard. And I think that if you even if you ask yourself, how you're doing today, how's your mood today going on a one to 10 scale, I think will help you so much more. And so how can you apply this to to the other things in your business? Well, one thing that I'm going to share with you today is writing and revising especially, I mean, I know that the majority of people aren't very good writers, but there's, I mean, in order to actually like put out some content, you need to be able to put out an okay, first draft. And usually the first draft is good enough, right? Like, if you write an email to your subscribers, you don't have to spell check or revise that you're shooting out a quick email. If you're posting something on Facebook or on your blog. I mean, you don't really have to go back and edit and edit and edit and edit. Well, why? Because this isn't a term paper, and you're not gonna get that much more money if you fix the typos on your web pages, right? Good enough is good enough. And I mean, it's not like you're gonna double or triple your income just because you fixed some typos. This isn't school anymore, where you might have gotten a c minus if you had typos, and you might get an A if you fixed typos. A few typos aren't going to kill you. But when it comes to if you're, if you're like, you know, coming out with, like, a book or something like that, you might want to spend a little more time than a blog post revising a thing like a book. Now the problem, though, is the same thing. We don't want to spend, you know, an hour writing a chapter of our book and then five hours going back and discussing all the typos. Or you might have this book that you written or you spoken out. And, by the way, our course for you to speak out and get a book transcribed and get it published is that make a product.com. Now the big, I mean, the good thing about transcriptions, and the good thing about speaking out a book and getting it transcribed is that it's done quickly, and it sounds the way that you said it. The only problem, though, is that it gets transcribed by a human so then you're gonna have to do some editing, and a spell check doesn't always get the job done. So how do you edit quickly without getting bored so you don't finish it, or without it taking five hours just to just to fix a one hour chapter. The answer is the scale of one to 10. And so what you can do is you have any kind of writing, like a book, you go through and if you want to print it out, that's great. That probably actually be better. So you print it out, and you go through real quick, and you just read the paragraphs quickly, even skim them, and then write a number next each paragraph and just rate it on a scale of one to 10. Now, what does this do? Well, let's say you go down through paragraphs and you write that well, this paragraph is an eight, this is a four, this is a six. You could quickly go through and average those and figure out, okay. Now, the book I've written here is a 7.0 okay. And and you say, Well, if I want to make it an 8.0 rating of a book, then you can go through the paragraphs and only focus on the ones that maybe you've written a five or a six next to, if someone if some paragraph is to like eight or nine, that's good enough. You don't have to make it a 10. It might not even be a 10, but just go through. And only edit the problem paragraphs. And so that's what we call fixing up the low hanging fruit. And so I mean, can you see that just reading something on a scale of one to 10 really helps us to have better accuracy, especially with what the problem is and where it can be improved? So as we're winding down today's podcast, let's think about a couple of areas in your online business that and maybe, like, if you're saying, Well, you know, my I need more money, or I need to build a bigger business, or things like that, well maybe we could cut it up into, let's just say 10 areas. Why 10 areas? Because I need to have some kind of a number of things I'm gonna figure out here. So off the top of my head. Let's just say that your issues right now are maybe time management and mindset. Maybe your issues are like building the list right. Maybe your issues are follow ups and auto responders. Maybe your list are like, you know, membership retention, right? Maybe your issue or as new customers. Maybe an issue is joint ventures. Maybe, or maybe an issue is free traffic. Maybe an issue is paid traffic. Maybe an issue is like intro products, info products and recurring income. And it may be an issue is big ticket sales and coaching. So this is active income. So the list I just kind of thought out just off the top of my head, it's number one, time management and mindset. Number two, list building. Number three, email follow up and auto responders. Number four, membership retention. Number five, new customers. Number six, joint ventures. Number seven, free traffic. Number eight, paid traffic. Number nine, info product and recurring income. And finally, number 10 big ticket sales and coaching. So what I would like for you to do is look at that list, or maybe, you know, post this list on Robert plank.com forward, slash, 062,

Robert Plank 16:51 so copy that into a Word document, or print out the first page of that blog post, and just write a number next to each of those things and rate it on a scale of one to 10. And don't necessarily, you know, put something at a zero, because if you have a few sales, that's more than a zero. But if you know that a real problem that you have is not emailing the list enough, then maybe you need to focus on the the autoresponder section, or you need to have a 10 day follow up sequence that would only take you an afternoon, and you might even be able to if you've emailed your list before, you can go and look in your autoresponder Sent folder and grab the best emails you've sent, or the ones that you're the most proud of are the ones that got the most clicks, and compile them together into an automatic follow up sequence. So if someone new comes down into your into your email funnel, then they will receive that sequence. And by the way, if all of that just went over your head, you need to join our course at income machine.com to discover how you can set up your online empire and create a list building machine and have an automatic follow up sequence and get all this traffic coming in automatically. But I guarantee that your business is probably under a seven in a lot of these areas, right? Maybe your week on joint adventures, maybe your week on free traffic. You need to start a podcast by going to podcast crusher.com or you need to get some articles written and post them on your blog or feed them out. Or maybe for a paid traffic, just set up a quick five or $10 a day Facebook campaign, but rate these 10 areas of your business and on a scale of one to 10, and average them out so you can tell, okay, well maybe for this month, my business is at a 5.4 and the next month, it might be up to a seven or might be down to a five, but at least this way, you know where things are headed, once again, not to be in a delusional La La Land, or not to be in a pity party everyone feels sorry for me, kind of state, but to get better. And by being more detailed and by using a lot of these real quick tips and tricks, we can ourselves get better. So that's my question for you today. How is your online business and your personal life doing on a scale from one to 10. Join us Inside of our membership area at income machine, calm if you need some month to month help, some guidance, where we meet as a group and we tell you what things are working with the internet marketing right now, and we'll fix your websites, your your email sequences, or figure out why you're not getting traffic, you're not getting sales, or help you with your nature. Help you with anything. Join us Inside of our monthly mastermind at Double Agent marketing.com and check out past episodes of this podcast at my blog, at Robert plank.com thanks a bunch. Leave us a quick review on iTunes. I look forward to talking with you on the very next episode of the Robert Plank show.