The difference between success (and lack of success) might surprise you:

Successful people are negative, yet optimistic
This goes against everything you've been taught.

There's a clear difference between being negative and being a "downer."

Being negative confirms your critical thinking and self-preservation skills. For example, if a guru makes available a new course, being negative… jaded… or skeptical helps you make better choices.

But being a downer is different. It saps the energy out of you.

Avoid (most) dream stealers
Let's face it, most of the people you love are slaves to the system. They don't understand self employment. In many cases they'll never understand what you do for a living (no matter how hard to explain it to them). So showing your excitement to them is going to seem weird. Some might even think you're in some sort of cult.

Instead, I simply suggest keeping your thoughts to yourself. If asked what you do for a living, lie and say you're still looking for a job. Instead, meet up with like-minded businesspeople and share your excitement with them.

Most important, never let the people close to you talk you out of your dream (unless they have direct experience chasing the same dream).

Finally, they say you earn the average income of your five closest friends. With that said, have a hard look with who you hang out with.

Following is a surefire way to failure
Everyone started off as followers. But the most successful business owners I've interviewed quickly became leaders in their field. They became the "go to" guys and had people following them.

On the other end, those struggling to generate their first online buck have subscribed to every "guru" and "expert" freebie. This is incredibly time consuming and unproductive. If you must subscribe to a "guru" or "expert" ezine, make sure you get value out of it… not freebies disguised as sales pitches.

Eliminate all distractions
That includes everything from the television news to your local newspaper. The media is nothing more than our government-sponsored propaganda machine — paid to keep you in the dark about the really important stuff. They hypnotize us (literally and figuratively) with terror, fear, and distractions (like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears). Engaging in distractions should be your reward, not your way of life.

Just say no
Speaking of distractions, think about all of the time you waste talking on the phone, answering emails, and chit chatting. The most successful people refuse to answer their own phones… they check their email just once or twice per day, and chit chat only when all of their work is complete.

Say goodbye to unnecessary expenses
Think about all of the things you pay for on a monthly basis, and see if you can eliminate them.

For example, do you really need an expensive cell phone? I got rid of mine years ago — saving me almost $40 a month (and most important, saving me from wasting time chit chatting).

How about your office space? Can you work from home instead? I made the switch in 2000 and it was the best move ever. I've reduced my overhead to just $89 a month (and that includes hosting my website). I hardly use my car (just under 5,000 miles this year), and I don't fret about the high cost of gas (because I hardly travel anymore).

Increase your heart rate
When I'm feeling sluggish and need a quick jolt of energy, I skip the caffeine and start a light exercise routine. I jump rope, stretch, and do a quick round of cardio. I also bring my infant son for a 85-minute powerwalk just after dropping my other son off at the bus stop. You'd be amazed how much energy you get just after your exercise routine.

Invest money wisely
Not all self-help courses are scams. Some are even quite good. Find the right course and shorten your learning curve significantly.

Most of the best courses stay well below the radar. They're almost never cross promoted. And they never make outrageous income claims.

Stay under the radar
Successful businesspeople avoid the spotlight. They happily toil under the radar. And instead of boasting about their riches, they are instead great listeners.

Repel above-the-radar heroes
When I asked the most successful people who they admire, they always mention names you've never heard of.  Just about every well-known expert is a charleton in disguise and won't give you the real secrets to success. These pied pipers (a leader who entices people to follow themselves to their own doom) sell us dreams and fantasies of riches. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Avoid inventing the wheel
Dan Kennedy (the guru of the gurus)  suggests dipping your toe into the water before you dive in.

In other words, instead of creating a product first then marketing it, he suggests reversing the process and selling a product first… then create the product. The idea is if your test sells well – great… rush and make the product. And if the product doesn't sell, move on and offer refunds. This way, you don't waste your time creating something that's not wanted by your marketplace.

On paper, this is sound advice. But in reality, it almost always sets you up for failure. Because in the rare chance that your product sells well, you tend to slack off and enjoy your new-found rush or cash. Then your customers get angry… you in turn get angry at your customers for getting angry… and you never finish your product. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this.

Quite frankly, most of the time, your product won't sell too well because you're in love with your idea — not the marketplace.

Successful entrepreneurs bypass this concept and take an existing product or service that's selling well and just make it a little bit better. Then, they apply better marketing to the sales process.

In simple speak, successful people avoid new inventions.

Avoid rushing
Insiders call this "get it out the door mode." You quickly create a half-baked product (or service) and see if it sells.

Personally, I've never had any success rushing things out to the marketplace. And out of all of the successful people I've interviewed, neither have they.

Cap on success
Without exception, every failed marketer I've interviewed wanted to make as much money as possible.

This mantra is a surefire recipe for failure.

Successful business people have always have the end goal in mind and work backward to achieve it.

Fail fast
Treat mistakes as steps to your ultimate success. And make these mistakes happen as quickly as possible and get over it.

Successful businesspeople know four out of every five ideas are going to fail miserably or barely break even. But that one out of five is going to work out.

Outsource everything but these
Successful people put tremendous value on their time.

They realize everyone has just 24 hours in a day and just 7 days in a week.

It's for this reason successful people are the masters of outsourcing.

But there are two major exceptions to this unwritten rule:

- Web design
- Copywriting

Understanding web design is easier than you'd think. But knowing how to change colors and fonts and layouts quickly is essential. And by the time you try to explain what you're looking to accomplish to that virtual assistant in the Philippines, it's just as easy to do it all yourself.

Writing your own ad copy is one of the most profitable skills you can possess. When you write your own email blasts and press releases and ad copy, you're able to literally put your marketing on autopilot…

… Most professional copywriters are egotistical and charge WAY too much for their talents. They can because there's way too much demand for their talents and not enough supply. It's for this reason a salesletter can set you back over $10,000 plus a percentage of every sale generated. Plus copywriters are notoriously unreliable.

But when you write good copy yourself, you keep 100% of the income. And you don't have to wait for effort (as professional copywriters are notoriously tardy).

As we see, success is not something taught in high school of college. And success is typically found by doing the opposite of what others are brainwashed into thinking is the "right thing to do."

This campaign took him a week or so to become profitable, but he's now got it tweaked and you could actually just copy this and start making money as an affiliate.

Here’s the nuts and bolts of it…

The Product: The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure (this is his own product on Clickbank, affiliate info is here if you’re interested)

Landing Page: Justin linked directly to his sales video which is at 31DayFatLossCure.com/abs (if you’ve never seen a video like this, the add to cart button pops up at the end of the video so they can order…its pretty cool).

Next, he started making making some Facebook ads…

When he does this, he usually makes up to 30 different ads (mostly testing the pictures in the ads).

Justin found that a great picture gives you the biggest change in click thru rates (CTR). So out of the 30 or so ads he tested, these were the top 3 converting ads.

Just by improving your CTR you can get a much better Cost Per Click (CPC) and your profits are going to go through the roof. If you have a few extra bucks to spend, Justin highly recommendd picking up the FB Ads Manager. This thing literally saves him 20-25 hours each week. Justin simply uploads all of the ads, targets the market he wants and let's it run while he's sleeping.

And by the way here’s a big tip that he got from Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney):

Set up your campaign so that in Clickbank each ad has a different sub ID on the end (much easier to do than it sounds). This way you can track the EXACT ads that are sending you the sales.

Of the ads pictured at the top of this post, Justin actually found that the middle ad generated the most sales (even though it didn't have the best CTR).

Once you have some ads ready, you MUST narrow down and calculate your target market…

Narrowing Your Market For Maximum Money Making

If you’ve ever done any campaigns for fitness/fat loss products, you know that the best market for these products is in the 35-65 year old age group.

Justin targeted each of these ads specifically to women in the 35-55 year old range on Facebook. He didn’t target any specific keywords with these ads, just women in general. Here are the exact settings Justin used:

• Female, 35-55
• United States
• CPC (bidding around .30 per click)

That’s a pretty broad market, but it was still profitable. Since then he's gotten more into niching down by smaller groups of years and also by time zones in the U.S.

Justin thinks there’s also a lot of money to be made targeting keywords. For example, you could target people who like “The Biggest Loser” which is over 1 million people on Facebook — he hasn’t tried this yet, but he's confident it would convert pretty well.

The Profits

Overall on this campaign, Justin invested a total of $493.76 and brought in $621.19 in revenue. So the overall profit for the campaign was $127.43. Now you might not think that’s much money, but here’s how he's going to scale it out…

… During this test campaign, Justin was capping his ad spend each day to $50. Now since this campaign is profitable, all he needs to do is increase his ad spend to $300 or so dollars per day, and within a few days this will easily turn into a $100 profit each and everyday. That’s an average of $36,500+ per year.

Not to mention, Justin hasn’t even started targeting this campaign to men.

Now a question most people usually have is “what’s better, CPC or CPM?”

CPC vs. CPM

This campaign was all run on CPC, but he's been playing around with CPM lately.

Here’s the deal though…

… Facebook recently changed its algorithm, and they are trying to push direct response marketers over to CPC. In simple speak, the days of dirt cheap CPM clicks are pretty much over.

But that’s ok, because even a campaign like this you could still easily make $20k-$30k a year as an affiliate just by direct linking.

On a campaign like this your goal should be to get as many people to the landing page as possible – for as cheap as possible. If you can find cheap .10 cent clicks this Facebook campaign would be an absolute gold mine.

Now that leads to the next big tip, which is improving your click through rate!

How To Increase Your CTR on Facebook Ads

One of the keys to making a bunch of money on Facebook is to keep your CTR high.

Now the big problem with this (unlike with Adwords) is that the same people are seeing your ad everyday they login to Facebook. So after about 7-10 days your ad is going to lose its good CTR, and you’re going to need a new ad.

If you have a picture that’s converting well, you can do something simple like adding a colored border or circle around the image.

If that doesn’t work it’s time to test 20-30 new pictures, and then you can simply bring your old one back in a few weeks.

Justin Goff is the owner of The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure.

Is your objective to generate further interest in your product or service?  Generate a phone call?  Have customers place orders by direct mail or phone?  Generate phone calls for inquiries or product sales?  Fill in the BRE for a follow up sales call?  In store visit?  Whatever your objectives, state them in writing – then draft your letter to fulfill those objectives.

Marketing Tip #1. Include copy in the Johnson Box.  This is the hot spot to begin your direct mail letter.  This small are is 2” x 3” above the salutation but across the page on the right hand side.  Include one or two lines flush right – to highlight your offer, pitch your best benefit, or for teaser copy to make the reader read the rest of the letter.

2. The salutation: salutation should be as personal as possible without the danger of turning anyone away.  This is a high risk area, if it’s too far off readers won’t identify with it.  So better safe than sorry here.  Be as personal as you can but don’t take chances.

Examples would be “Dear Motorcycle Enthusiasts”  “Dear Colleagues” “Dear Pet Lovers”.

Also, adding “and Friends” can increase familiarity and loyalty.  “Dear Neighbors and Friends”  “Dear Dog Owners and Friends”

3. Write benefit-packed direct mail marketing letter copy.  Show your best stuff first – why wait till you lose them?  Then immediately expand on the biggest and best benefit.

Marketing Tip #4. Don't try to write your direct mail letter in a few minutes.  Don’t forget – this really isn’t a letter – it’s a highly stylized ad designed to look like a letter.

Like any good ad, a polished letter takes hours to create – both write and design.  You can’t dash it off like the letter you write to grandma every Thanksgiving to make sure she remembers you at Christmas or Hanukkah.

It takes me 5 to 8 hours to write and design a clean, crisp one page direct mail letter; more if I’m hung over.  If it takes you less, let’s compare notes.  No, no TV on, either – even if it is on only in the background.

5. Make it look like a real letter — the personal medium that it really is.  Use typewriter style type (Courier).  Include a personal salutation.  Use an informal writing style.  Short words – like you’re writing to a friend.  You are.  Sentence fragments are OK.  This isn’t English class, and the only grade you receive is by readers placing orders… or not placing orders.  Your choice.

Marketing Tip #6. Design your direct mail advertising letter to look easy to read, even if it isn’t.  A well designed direct mail letter increases readership and response. Use lots of white space and direct the eye flow of the reader, don’t leave it to chance or let your computer design it for you.

Use a short one or two line opening paragraph.

Like this.

See how it commands attention.

Indent the first line of all paragraphs.  No paragraph over 7 lines.  Vary paragraph length.  FLRR, never ever justify the type.  Bullet list in the center. Foreshortened paragraph in the body for added visual interest.

7. Accent words you want readers to read, and what you want them to do. Use sparingly: bold, italics, underscore, caps, marginal words. Accent action words always pointing at the phone number and asking readers to call now.

Marketing Tip #8. A bulleted list of benefits in the center paragraph gets high readership.  Visually stimulating letters work best, and everyone reads a short bulleted list.  It can’t hurt to have the last bullet-point ask for the order, or for readers to call right now.

Best Marketing Tip #9. Call to action early… and often.  Soft sell of the product, show the benefits, and sell the phone call hard – this is the secret for success in direct mail marketing.  Ask for the order and the call several times – if you don’t get a call, nothing else matters.  If a person calls, your letter is a complete success.  It did everything you asked it to do.  Then it’s YOUR turn to persuade the caller to become a customer.

10. Sign legibly. This adds credibility.

Marketing Tip #11. Include a PS.  Busy people know the best parts of the offer are often repeated in the PS – make this last shot a response-generator, call-getting, order clincher.  Give your best feature and biggest benefit then make your offer sound irresistible. And ask for readers to call you again.  Give the phone number again, too. Yes, right there in the text of the PS.  Yes, I know it’s in the masthead.

Sure, people know it’s not a personal letter.  But if it’s done well, they’ll somehow overlook that and let you into their hearts and minds. If you’re really good, they’ll also follow by letting you into their wallets.  If your direct mail letter shows them some hard hitting benefits that strike home it will show up here: your telephone will ring.  It’s easy to tell when your letter is successful in direct mail marketing: your phone rings.

Now here’s the 12th marketing tip: it’s the Jeff Dobkin $1 idea. Dobkin’s best copywriting trick of all time, and the best copywriting trick you’ve ever learned in your entire life!

Go back go back and cross out your first sentence.  No, don’t pay me for this idea now, just send me $1 every time you use this.  Having a bad day?  Go back and cross out your first paragraph.  Still… a bargain at just $1!  Better letters = greater response = more revenue, make yours a winner.

Only in direct marketing can you send a personal note to 10,000 or 10,000,000 of your closest friends.  Show them reasons why they should order from you, and they will.

There's no reason for you to struggle with making money with AdSense. If you're ready to get more AdSense income now, you might want to grab these make money with AdSense tips, techniques and methods.

If you're struggling with poor response — get help by reading these practical marketing tips by business-to-business author Jeffrey Dobkin.

And if you're blogging to grow your business, you might be asking yourself this… does allowing blog comments on your blog add more zeros to your bank account?

I don't think it does and I outline my reasons why below.

As a thinking-out-of-the-box internet markete, I THRIVE on getting feedback about what I say or write. My inbox gets a steady parade of new marketing ideas, critiques and suggestions on how to help with my broadcast. And I love it. Life without feedback would be a very lonely life.

But after analyzing the pros and cons of blog commenting, I've decided to block comments on my blog… here's why:

Spam
Most comments come from spammers… either flat out spam, or spam thinly disguised as a legitimate comment. Either way, the vast majority of blog comments are worthless to my visitor.

With the prevelance of blog comment spam, you're going to need to install spam prevention software. And that's great. Programs like Aksimet are great at stopping blog comment spam. But some spam falls through the cracks and you're going to invest time determining if the comment is legit or not.
 
Even worse, you run the risk of having Google ban your AdSense account if you don't weed out spam comments! So that leads into:

Time
Keep in mind that every 10 minutes you spend playing cop with your blog comments is 10 precious minutes you lose writing for your blog. And writing content for your blog is going to attract a heck of a lot more visitors to your website than moderating your blog comments.

Dilution of SEO
While it's true that blog comments give your post an added chance of getting featured in the search engines, I find most people who comment instead dilute the search engine optimization of my blog posts.

False Accusation
This is a tough one for me. Because I HATE censorship and love to comment on other blogs to warn others of a scam. However, competitors have been known to make up falsehoods out of thin air. And the last thing I need is a jealous competitor posting false accusations on my blog (and dealing with replying to it).

Legal Issues
Yes, there are laws to protect website owners of malicious and slanderous comments on a blog, but who wants to be hassled with a lawsuit? I don't. That's another HUGE and massive waste of precious time… time I'd rather use to grow my business.

Setup to Fail
Now I love to help people. It's my achilles heel at times.  And when someone asks me a question, I'm thrilled to reply with an answer. I've never once backed down from the toughest questions.

With that said, allowing blog comments is a surefire way to suck a ton of time away from you — giving you less time to work on your marketing.

In most cases, answers to questions require large blocks of time (no matter how hard you try to keep it brief).

But here's the biggest issue for me… the followup comment. More often than not, answering one question opens the floodgates to multiple followup questions. On one hand, you don't want to be perceived as a jerk and ignore the followup question, but it's unfair to your business to reply over and over again.

It's for these reasons I'm confident that I'm making the right choice in closing blog commenting. I'd ask you to weigh in and give me your thoughts on the pros and cons of blog comments, but obviously my comments are closed. How ironic is that?

With that said, I do offer a direct way for people to contact me (via email and support ticket). I find this significantly slashes the time I choose to invest helping readers of my blog.

Over the last year or so, I've been on the receiving end of quite a few unannounced gifting… a token of gratitude for offering my business building tips.

This is awesome. It's really cool to know that people appreciate the hard work. And as the economy continues to plunge, it would seem an unannounced gift is a welcome token of appreciation.

Does your current corporate gift policy actually
hurt your bottom line?

Accepting gifts is almost always tricky… depending on who is making the gift (and the donor's wishes for the gift).
Sometimes a gift is just a gift with no string attached… no catches:

One time I got a $100.00 PayPal cash gift for absolutely no reason. This gifter just enjoyed talking to me on the phone. And this guy is well-known (and well respected in the internet marketing industry). It was great! Very cool move. I tell this story often.

But this is by far the exception rather than the rule. Most other times, a gift is nothing more than subtle (and not so subtle) bribe to squeeze a person for free advice or free services.

I finally decided to pull the plug and develop a super simple corporate ethics policy on gifting:

I'm no longer accepting gifts. Just about every time I do, it costs me more than it's worth.

One time I got a small cash gift, but I then found myself spending hours and hours of time setting up an entire website for free. If I figured out my net pay per hour, I could have made more flipping burgers.

Author and publisher Jeffrey Dobkin ("How To Market a Product for Under $500") has a similar position on free lunches:

"A person calls and says he wants to take me for lunch. I reluctantly agree and we wind up going across the street for a brief lunch – that takes an hour and a half – while he hammers me for marketing information. He then orders a coffee – good for another 45 minutes. Finally, the bill arrives, it's twenty bucks and I ask if I can leave the tip and he agrees. I leave a nice tip as we took so much of the waiters time and they can't turn the table again till dinner. Then when we're leaving he thanks me briefly for the information, but feels like I owe him since he bought me lunch. No thanks. I don't do that any more."

One listener to my broadcast insisted on meeting me and paying for lunch. I bit. And it was a nightmare… the entire lunch was a blatant attempt to sell me an MLM opportunity. It was REALLY, REALLY awkward.

Sometimes a gift was never meant to be… a listener of mine heard me rave about Sather's famous cinnamon buns in Chicago. She actually took my hint and tried to send me some — shipped by Priority Mail, too. There were no strings attached and had all the best intentions in the world. But the buns never arrived at my house… instead they were mistakenly shipped to my PO Box. Yikes! That mistake cost my listener at least $20.00, and all I got were hard-as-rocks buns.

Unfortunately, I find the cons far outweigh the pros. It's for this reason I've put into immediate effect a new, no-gift policy.