Did you miss me? :-)

I haven’t posted on this blog in a while. Not because nothing was going on… au contraire… too much was/is going on.

I don’t know about you, but just like no one is a prophet in their own land… you are never going to be able to see the value of your stuff like other people do.

Even if you think a lot about yourself, familiarity breeds contempt, and your work is going to be “just what you do”, even if it is/would be of tremendous value to others.

This is why I value what has happened in the past 2 weeks.

You may not know, but the bulk of my income comes from marketing affiliate products.

One of the things I have been marketing, ever since I first started to use it some 2 years ago, is the Healing Codes package, a unique energy product where you use your innate energies to heal the cause of disease… I had a cancerous growth fall off my right arm after a few days of using The Codes… so I am a believer.

I signed up to be an affiliate. I made a few sales here and there, but every month I learned a little bit more about marketing, google adwords, etc. and every time I learned something, I immediately put it into practice with the Healing Codes affiliate program. I watched a webinar 5 months ago, and the rest happened:

The past 4 months the commission, grew $400 every month. Why always 400? Beats me. So I have gotten accustomed to the income, they paid directly to my checking account… until the 8th of this month, when, instead or the money, I got an email telling me that my affiliate status was withdrawn and I wasn’t even going to get my last commission.

Why, you would ask. The answer came right in the email: I violated the affiliate agreement: I did not get my ads reviewed by the 3 people assigned to review marketing material… But the email said, my violation was that I used the product name in my advertising… hmmm. How am I supposed to sell something I can’t name?

I made a quick calculation, and saw that I lost $35K just in the first year (calculating the growth trend also). They lost 140K net, for the first year. Interesting. I wonder if they have heard of the expression: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be rich? Choose!”

Anyway, let’s see what I have learned from this incident that is worth for you to read:

1. Before you invest so much time and energy into marketing a product, check if the company really wants you to market their product, or secretly they hope that you will share with everyone, but they will buy from the company directly, cutting you out of the loop.
2. The processes I employed to go from zero to substantial income could help a lot of people out there… so maybe I should find a way to tell people. If I had had a roadmap like that two years ago, I could have started to make money much sooner, and that would have been worth for me to buy. I forgot to say that I used exclusively PPC advertising, my return on my investments was consistently 10-fold, i.e. with a $3500 a year budget I could turn a 31,300 dollar profit. And some of my keywords ran at $5 a click. Which means: this market is competitive, baby.
3. It will be interesting to watch how the Boomerang Principle will play out.
4. I’d love to train an army of affiliates for the Healing Codes company… if I could do it, anyone can do it.

Another thing that happened since I last wrote, is that I did my first “Craft Your Public Persona” presentation. It needs more work, but I am over the hump. I have worked with a client today, who was praising the knowledge he gleaned from our session, and that felt really good.

I am just wondering how to reach all the people who would be interested in that: coaches, consultants, bloggers, marketers, realtors… anyone, who makes a living selling themselves first, an product second. Everyone, who need repeat clients, repeat sales, etc. Everyone, who needs to influence people. Any ideas? If so, please write a comment. I would appreciate it.

And a 3rd thing: I have built a small video sharing site on blogging but you can put the topic in a search box and it finds videos for you… really great… want to check it out? It is at http://www.mavencentral.com/videos

That’s it for now. Please give me your ideas about how to reach my target audience, and if you have any idea what to do with my lost affiliate position story, so that it can make a difference for others.

So long.

Most of us are sure we can. We make decisions based on what we see, and our decisions and actions take us to live the life we live.

Most of us live a life of quiet desperation. It was true at the turn of the last century, and it is true now.

There was a discipline and coaching paradigm I studied and used about 9 years ago. It is based on axiology, the Nobel Prize nominated work of Robert Hartman.

Axiology is the study of value or quality. It is the science that deals with what is good and what is not. Beyond and independent of subjective judgment.

The test (Value Profile) we ran in axiology had 4 parameters by which we could map out the potential for success of any individual.

One of them relates to the title. The parameter is called “clarity”.

We all think we are clear. Yet we can be a lot less than clear if our life is not a symphony and a victory of the human power and spirit. (Got it? That means you and me and even many of the so called demi-gods of our times.)

Clarity is the relationship between your view and reality (like a percentage) or how well what you see and what you think you see overlap.

I like to use an analogy from my publishing/printing background: In order to print a continuous tone, like a photograph, you need to break up the original to dots. The measure is called dot per inch, which means how many dots, each direction, you can print on a paper without the dots touching each other and therefore causing a blotch instead of a clear picture. Newsprint paper is porous, so the density of of dots on that type of paper is maximum 75 dots per inch. Semi glossy magazines and brochures are printed at about 105-120 dots per inch. Playboy is printed at 150 dots per inch.

When you look at a newspaper picture, sometimes you are not sure if the person has a mole or just there is a shadow or maybe a blotch of ink where you thing the mole is. Glossy brochures are better, Playboy is really really really good.

I use this dot per inch analogy to show that we normally see the world in certain level of clarity (dots per inch). In order to be clearer, one thing we can do, is to add dots where there are not dots.

Another is to remove the blotches, that in clarity’s terms are the misconceptions: societal, familial, or personal.

Adding dots is a simple learning process coupled with friends of colleagues that can help you with. (Critiquing is an important tool, though most people hate it… sorry to say.)

Removing blotches is harder, and this is my specialty. Distinctions are the major tool for tha. Distinctions are those invisible things that once they become visible, lots of blotches disappear. Read my other posts an sites on that http://www.squidoo.com/distinctions or http://www.sophieschoice.org/new-site-on-squidoo-just-for-distinctions/

And come back for more… I am the Distinctions Queen, so all my posts will take you deeper into this rabbit hole.

I have a friend that asked me to post for her a few times a day on Craigslist. Not my favorite activity, but it meant the difference of her being able to work or not, so I decided to help her.

The few days became a month…

Now, if you don’t know Craigslist the way I know Craigslist, here are a few interesting facts: people that post (for themselves or others) on that site are very competitive and live in a scarcity mentality.

Craigslist does not police its boards, it is left to the visitors to “flag” inappropriate content, or spam. And flagging they do.

For one, that site is a spammers’ paradise. The spam ads, thinly disguised as regular ads, some days, take up as many as 80% of the ads.

But guess what? those are NOT the ads that get removed, oh no, what gets removed are the competitors’ ads. Boggles the mind.

Some advertisers have even smartened up, and they copy the format of the spam, so that they don’t get removed.

In the first week I got sucked in, big time. I am not telling you this because I am proud of it, I am telling you because I’ll need this for the punchline of this letter :-)

At the beginning of this week, my friend’s ads were all flagged, all the way back 45 days earlier. I only wonder how long it took for someone to go back and seek out her ads that far back.

My first reaction was to go and flag THEIR ads… whoever THEY were… and then it occurred to me: If and when I do that, I become just like them.

Instead I prepared a post with the title: “The Boomerang Principle”

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Hi Guys! Whoever is removing ALL my ads,
even taking the time to go back to the
beginning of November to find them all…

The Boomerang Principle says that what
goes around comes around.

And then I just continue with her ad copy, as if nothing happened.
This was 4 days ago… the ad is still there.

But the real lesson to learn is what happened to me:

First off, since I first posted for this friend, my income had dropped about 40%… not good.

Since I posted The Boomerang Principle, I have recouped my losses. In 4 days…

There is truth in The Boomerang Principle.

PS: If you haven’t figured: The Boomerang Principle is just one name of the famous Law of Attraction.

…And the Law of Cause and Effect… the law underlying Karma. The law supremely important in Kabbalah. And as we see, the law extremely important to my finances and my well being.

If you make money, you belong to one of these categories of moneymakers:

1. You trade your time for money. You have a job. Your income has a limit, because the amount of hours and the amount of money customarily paid per hour is limited. This is true if you are a cleaning lady, if you are a dentist, or if you are a movie star… (which shows that the limit can be high, but it is a limit nevertheless). You trade your life for money…
2. You are self-employed: see #1. it is still a job…. How do you know it? If you are not working (sick, vacation, work on something else), you don’t earn money.
3. You own a business but it needs you… it may not have a limit, but you still trade your life for money. See #1 and #2
4. You own a business, and you set it up such, that it sporadically, if ever, needs you, or your time, or your expertise. Unlimited income, and your life is yours.
5. You made money earlier, and now your money is working for you. The problem: did you trade your life for that seed capital?

As you see, #4 is the most desirable way to make money: you can have your cake and eat it too.

Now, if you are like most of the readers of this blog, you are a coach, consultant, trainer, or a combination of these.

What is the fastest and most reliable way to be in the position of #4 for you?

Well, if you are like me, you have a lot of knowledge, you have been tested by having clients as a coach, consultant, of speaker. Which, in business terms, means: you have knowledge that other people want.

So for you, the best way to create a business, or a part of a business that makes money even when you sleep, sick, or on vacation, is to create a passive income source: work once, and get paid, over, and over, and over, and over.

Your product should be an information product.

OK, you say, that’s easy… And it may very well be! But creating a product will not automatically mean sales, and therefore passive income. You need a Marketing Machine, that you throw the information product in one end, and money comes out on the other, day in-day out.

This sounds like magic, and in a way it is.

Lots of people teach how to do this, but most people still fail. There is only one product that I have tried that teaches this well, at a modest price, and does an exceptional job at holding your hand while you walk “the yellow brick road” to success, and that is the Info Product Dashboard. See the little video below about one principle no one will teach you quite like this way… but it works, it is true, and if you miss it, you are doomed to fail.

I have bought it, and I recommend it. It’s about 80 bucks, and it can be the missing piece of this puzzle for you. Go and get it!
To your success,
Sophie

PS: go and get the dashboard: Info Product Dashboard

I don’t know about you, but information products are both easy and difficult to create.

And for some… it borders the impossible. Even with a close supervision they will go somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine…

For those of us that are willing and able to follow step by step proven processes (I recommend you do that)  there is always the Info Product Dashboard, an online step by step walk you through it, walk with you method…

Check it out. I bought it and I love it. 

More about it after the coaching call that I must interrupt this message for :-)

In the next post I’ll elaborate on it… Now I have to run, I have a teleconference I am leading in 10 minutes… Back shortly. Watch the video.

Most of the people I know are either stagnating because they don’t put themselves in a situation where they need to grow, or they put themselves in the courses and seminars and coaching programs to grow, but they don’t grow because …

Well, what comes after that because is what this article is about.

I was in Landmark Education for 20 years, and I went from seminar to seminar, from course to course, from training program to training program.

In the past three years I probably have done 20 programs, seminars, coaching programs… But only 3 in the past year. What happened?

Good question. I grew.

Very much the way you grow a muscle (especially if you are a body builder), one day you use/overuse a muscle, the next day you allow it to rest, and then do it again.

People that follow the pattern I followed for the 22 years leading up to this year, when I actually grew, actually NEVER grow. They use seminars as a way to avoid actually growing. I was guilty of this, myself. Secretly, in my heart, I knew that my parents were right, that no matter what I did, I would not amount to anything.

A year ago this all changed. I met this amazing woman, Pam Ragland, in a coaching program, where we were both students, ha-ha, how ironic. We struck up a conversation and she said that she can wipe away all my negative thoughts. I was desperate for my negative thougths to go away. Living with the pretense, that some day I was going to use all I learned… while that one day never came, was horrible.

I booked her for a private session, and from that one session I suddenly saw that maybe I was wrong, and maybe there is something I could do with my life. And, to my surprise, I found myself in action. That is when I saw how passionate I am about speakers’ success, and how much I would like to teach speakers to be effective at this craft.

Later I enrolled in Pam’s eight-month program that teaches how to drive this new me, that is now a Ferrari instead of a jalope.

I never doubted again that I can do it. I stopped going to seminars, I even cancelled two seminars I fully paid for. I am working, but I am working purposefully. Much like I used to work on a puzzle when I had the box showing the finished picture… fully knowing that all the pieces are there, and it only takes time to put it all together.

I can tell you, a dream life begins with that box cover… and that certainty. Some people can see it themselves, some people are lucky: some committed coach sees it for them. I am that kind of coach. I have never had a client that did not accomplish what I saw possible for them (boxcover).

Are you still going to all the seminars, reading all the books, buying all the programs, but the results you can show for all that learning are meager to say the least?

The natural way to grow, is to grow in spurts, and then consolidate. Grow intensely, and then harvest the benefits (use the knowledge) until the growth almost starts to slow down. The start it all over again.

I got a thank you note today. I get quite a few of those, I must admit.

They are a great way for me to track how the methodologies and principles I use in my teaching work. I mean, how effective I am, how effective the methods are. They track my ability to make a difference in the world. (Someone please remind me to write about how I view my making a difference… ok?)

This note reads

Today was a huge success. I did not even recognize myself. I was attempting to have a conversation with my sister when she became extreamly agressive upon trying to control me and failing. She was in my face yelling and pacing around in circles. I remained calm and did not attempt to defend myself as the lies flew at me. I was able to stick to the subject and not accuse. At this point her husband jumped in and tried to intimidate me, pointing his finger in my face and yelling. They both looked like mad men ganging up on me. I did not raise my voice or get emotional. This is the first time in my life I had no fear in a confrontaional situation and it felt GREAT! To be honest I think it frightened my sister & her husband. They did not know what to think of me, I have had many weaknesses in the past but now I am strong.

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