Every time you repeat a habit, whether it’s a good habit or a bad one, it strengthens the neural trench network.

Imagine a pristine field of knee-high grass. If you walk across that field just once, it barely shows. Take the same route several times and there is now a path. Walk that path hundreds of times and you have a trail. Walk the trail thousands of times and you have a dirt road.

The more times you repeat an action, the faster your brain will guide you back to taking that
same action and the easier it is for you to take it.

But if you stop walking that path, the field will eventually heal itself. And if you stop doing bad habits, you will reprogram your brain to stop guiding you towards those bad habits.

How do you reprogram your brain?

 

1. Discipline 

Studies show you have far more discipline in the morning than at any other time of day. That’s why, if at all possible, you should start a new habit first thing when you wake up, when discipline is the highest. For example, if you’re creating a course, work on it each morning for 30 minutes before you do anything else. 

2. Focus

Instead of attacking your work haphazardly, focus on just one thing at a time.
For example, one video in your course, one chapter in your book, one page of your website and so forth. Don’t try to break every bad habit at once, or create every new, good habit at the same time. Focus your efforts and build on that.

3. Be Bold

Don’t strive for a little goal when a big one will make you more passionate. Do what they say cannot be done. What goal will get you out of bed at 6am with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning?

4. Manipulate Your Environment

Clutter is not conducive to getting work done, nor are distractions. Create a space that is used only for your work. 

5. Take Consistent, Daily Action.

Without exception, take action every single day for the next 6 weeks. Better still, take daily action for the next 52 weeks until the habits of starting, completing and shipping are so ingrained, it’s nearly impossible for you NOT to do these things.

6. Habit Stack

When the brain learns a new song, it will not simply link together the notes already in your memory. Instead, it will develop a region that encodes the entire song. In the same way, you can stack one new good habit on top of an existing good habit to develop an entirely new brain region dedicated to this habit stack.

For example, if you already get up early in the morning, stack a new habit on top of this such as writing for 30 minutes as soon as you wake up. 3 weeks later, stack the habit of taking a 5 minute break and then writing for another 30 minutes. Or add the habit of going for a run.

Each time you add a new habit to the stack, the entire stack is rewritten in your brain, making the entire stack of habits automatic and requiring virtually no discipline to accomplish each day.

 

Read our full March Newsletter here

TRACTION: HOW ANY STARTUP CAN ACHIEVE EXPLOSIVE CUSTOMER GROWTH

In Traction, serial entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares give startups the tools for generating explosive customer growth.

‘Anyone trying to break through to new customers can use this smart, ambitious book’ Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.

Building a successful company is hard. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers.

 

Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and offers a three-step framework to figure out which ones will work best for your business.

No matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

Read our full March Newsletter here

 

You got fired by your dumb-bag boss. You got flamed by a social media troll. You got a lousy review from some know-it-all pretender who couldn’t find her own butt with her hands, much less do what you do.

Good.

Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can either curl up in a ball in your closet and never come out……or you can use your anger to propel yourself to new heights of success.

In 1983 a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band right after they signed their first record deal. They were about to record their first album in New York when they woke up their guitarist and handed him a bus ticket back to L.A. with no explanation.

What the heck??!

It’s a long bus ride across the U.S., and by the time his bus hit L.A., he’d gotten over his self-pity and vowed to start a new band. He decided that this new band would be so successful, his old band members would be green with envy. They’d be flipping burgers and playing lousy gigs in clubs while he was onstage in front of thousands.

 

This guitar player practiced like a man possessed. He searched high and low for the very best musicians for his band – all better musicians than those guys in his previous band.

 

His anger fuelled his ambition and revenge became his muse.

 

He wrote dozens of songs, made numerous musical connections and within a couple of years his band signed a record deal of their own. A year after that, their first record went gold.

The guitarist’s name was Dave Mustaine, now considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in the history of heavy metal music. His band is Megadeath, and they have toured the world many times over and sold over 25 million albums.

 

Great story, right? That is exactly how you can use your critics to fuel your own success.

 

There’s one more thing you should know about this story:

The band that was stupid enough to kick Dave Mustaine out was known as Metallica, and they sold 180
million albums. Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest tock bands of all time.

And because of this and despite all of his massive success, Dave Mustaine still considers himself a failure because he was the one who got kicked out of Metallica. Which I guess just goes to show that success and motivation are all about the thoughts you choose.

Dave could have chosen to give up music, but instead he used his anger to motivate himself to became a legend.

Dave has millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of adoring fans and a career doing what he loves. And yet, Dave still thinks he’s a failure because his metric of measuring success is to compare his band
with Metallica.

Dave values ‘beating’ Metallica more than doing what he loves, more than making millions and more than having his own band and millions of fans.

What do you value? And how will you know when you’re a success?

Read our full March Newsletter here

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March Internet Business School Newsletter

Most business blogs are terrible.

They’re used for things like announcements and fluffy content that does nothing to capture leads and
make sales. And if all you want is a place to jot down your thoughts, then skip this article.
But if you want a blog that gets you more leads and more sales with every single piece of content you write, then read on.

Forget about blogging as you know it and instead think of your blog as a learning centre. This learning centre will be a hub for all of your website’s most important content. Visitors will be able to find answers to their problems and find information on what they want to know.

You’re going to create content that resonates with your target audience and influences them to make a buying decision. Your goal should be to educate your prospects into becoming customers, and your customers into making repeat sales.

And you’re going to do this without advertisements for your offerings. The problem with ads is they are
biased and present only one solution to a customer’s problem. This makes prospects skeptical and loses you the sale.

But when you fill your blog with the honest help your prospects are looking for, then you move from being a sales person to becoming a trusted authority. And that gets you readers, subscribers and sales. 

Your website should be your best salesperson, working for you 24/7 to make sales.

I remember years ago when I needed to buy kitchen appliances. I went to a local store and got lucky enough to be waited on by a man who had been in the appliance business all of his life. He didn’t own the store, he just sold appliances, and he knew everything there was to know about every model there on the floor as well as models sold in other stores. He told me point blank which models to avoid and what sort of problems they had. He steered me away from an overpriced model with good reviews because the nearest service person for that model was two hours away, and if it broke, getting it fixed would be a nightmare. He told me what was available at the other stores and how much they were on sale for that day. He knew the factories where each were built, their overall reputations and which brands and models needed the most service calls over their lifetimes. Keep in mind, this was in the mid 90’s before the reliable online reviews were prevalent. It was the only time in my whole life that I truly trusted the sales person. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything; he was trying to educate me on what would be best for my needs.

I wound up buying three appliances from him and one that he highly recommended from his competitor. And I was so pleased, over the next few years I sent him enough business to sell another 2 dozen appliances.

Now imagine your website could be like that sales person. Your content is educational and easy to access, just like asking that sales person questions.

A visitor comes to your site via organic search and lands on an article giving general information about your niche. Let’s use roof repair and replacement as an example. They search for, “Do I need to replace my roof?” and land on your article, “How to know if you need a new roof.” Inside the article you have links to any terms they might not understand, so they can get immediate clarity. You talk about the reasons a roof might need to be repaired, with a link to another article covering each reason indepth. You also offer information on how to know if replacement is a better option, the different types of roofs available, a cost calculator and so forth. Everything they need to know about roof repair and replacement is right there. And woven throughout your content you give anecdotes of roofs you’ve repaired and replaced.

Here’s what’s happening on the visitor’s end: They’re finding the information they’re looking for, and they find it easily on their own and at their own pace.

This content isn’t selling them, it’s instructing them, which goes a long way to creating trust in your company.

Every piece of content offers multiple paths forward, including more specific content and a call to action so they can reach out to you when they are ready. Imagine someone spends thirty minutes or an hour on your website. When they’re ready to call an expert, whether it’s right then or in a month, who are they going to call? You.

The key to making this work is to find out what customers are asking, and then answering those questions for them while organising the content in a way that feels natural and intuitive. You are educating your user through the buyer’s journey.

Homeowners seldom begin with, “I need a new roof.” Instead, they start out on the journey wondering IF they need a new roof, if they can get the current roof repaired, how do they know if there is a problem, who can they trust, how much will it cost, what type of roof should they get… It’s complicated.

Read our full February Newsletter here

THE COLD START PROBLEM: USING NETWORK EFFECTS TO SCALE YOUR PRODUCT BY ANDREW CHEN

You’ve got a new product or service you want to introduce to the world.

The problem is, no one knows about you or your product. How do you get those first users onboard? And how do you leverage those first users into a larger market share? Those are the questions Andrew Chen answers in his new book, “The Cold Start Problem,” which promises to explain how to start, grow and defend successful businesses.

It’s difficult to get momentum when there are no existing users, just as it’s harder to start a
car engine when it’s cold.

And if you don’t overcome this cold start problem quickly, your new product will likely die. “A network effect describes what happens when products become more valuable as more people use them,” Chen writes. Think of a dating website – it’s worthless if there are only a handful of members. But as the membership grows, the site become more valuable to both users and the site’s owner.

Many dominant businesses got their early start by serving niche markets, what Chen calls “atomic networks.” For example, Bank of America launched their first credit card just in Fresno, California in 1958 to 60,000 residents. Tinder and Facebook each started in a single college community before branching out.

Conversely, Google tried to launch its failed Google+ social network with a large-scale launch
targeting everyone rather than first establishing a successful atomic launch.

 

“Your product’s first atomic network is probably smaller and more specific than you think,” Chen advises.

Determine who you are targeting as the first users of your product and service and then find a way to get them on board. Tinder initially threw big parties for college fraternity and sorority
members to get them to use the app. Uber offered extensive bonuses and financial incentives for its first drivers, which were targeted in very specific locations.

Says Chen, “The product idea itself should be as simple as possible – easily understandable by anyone as soon as they encounter it. At the same time, it should simultaneously bring together a rich, complex, infinite network of users that is impossible to copy by competitors.” An example is Zoom, with its simple interface and freemium model that encourages new users.

Once a product has succeeded in its atomic market, then its creators can extend it to adjacent
markets, such as other demographics or locations, until a tipping is reached and the product is a success

Buy it now here

Read our full February Newsletter here

In the beginning of his career the comedian Robin Williams couldn’t hang on to money and he made lousy business decisions.

In fact, he didn’t want to be bothered with the business end of anything. He didn’t even want to hear contract details, didn’t know how to publicise himself and despite growing fame he still took every job that came his way – even birthday parties. Can you image having Robin Williams perform at your birthday party? Holy cow. He was continually borrowing from friends and there were days when he wouldn’t have eaten if not for some kind soul inviting him to dinner.

As his fame began to grow he partied until the sun came up and did copious amounts of recreational drugs; yet he is considered one of the greatest performers of all time. How did he do it?

Two things:
First, while people think his performances were spontaneous and off the cuff, most of it was not. He practiced. He worked and honed his craft like a madman. He came up with new bits, tested and tweaked them, and then tested them some more. If it worked, he reused it over and over again. If it didn’t work, he either fixed it or threw it out.

Second, he surrounded himself with people who handled the business side of everything. All he had to do was be the world-class performer he was building himself into.

What the heck does any of this have to do with marketing?

I’m so very glad you asked.

To make your business look as easy as Robin Williams spontaneously throwing out the perfect line, you’ve got to work as hard as he did. Whatever your specialty is, you’ve got to perfect it until you are one of the very best in your field. Once you do that, you can be a star in your niche and sell your products or services for enormous fees and enjoy the love and adulation of your followers. But first, you’ve got to do the work.

Second, you don’t need to be an expert on every facet of your business. Instead, you simply need to bring in people to handle things for you. Robin had an entertainment lawyer, managers, publicity agents and a host of other people who did their jobs in order to allow Robin to do his job. If your specialty is creating information products but you’re terrible at writing sales letters, recruiting affiliates and doing social media, then hire those things out to experts who can do it for you.

Focus on what you do well. Become the best at it. And build a team to handle the rest of it for you.

Read our full February Newsletter here

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MONTH Internet Business School Newsletter

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January IBS Newsletter

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December 2021 IBS Newsletter