I’d like to add that your ability to connect with an audience is directly related to connect with yourself and your own experience. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Lately I’ve been making plans to build a tiny house similar to what they make at Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. One issue is the plumbing on something that’s more or less off the grid. After reading a book on humanure, I realized our plan as a society is to separate ourselves from our own waste and transport it off to treatment facilities when your yard or garden is where it really ought to go. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the cycle of life.

In the past year or so, I’ve taken to eating more raw food. Rather than vegan, I’ve headed down the raw-paleo path. As a people, we’ve generally separated ourselves from our food supply and production. Most of what we consume comes out of plastic bags and cardboard boxes instead of from the ground or from an animal. I can tell you, I notice a huge difference when I switch over to processed or cooked (dead) food for a meal or two. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Over the years, I’ve studied violence. As I’ve mentioned, I was an army medic. I’m also now an instructor candidate with Target Focus Training which teaches how to handle violence by creating injuries in the other guy. Through those experiences, I’ve seen how deluded most of us are about life, death and violence. Most people hope the police show up in time if something ever goes terribly wrong. We’ve separated ourselves from the reality that criminals have no problem using violence to get what they want. We see news about more people killed in our various wars. It seems like most people don’t realize none of those people died peacefully in their sleep. We don’t even get to see flag draped caskets anymore. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Over the last year, I’ve been using running in Vibram Five Finger Shoes. My muscles had to relearn how to run but once I adjusted, I’ve never had another stress injury. Evidently, the vast majority of foot, ankle, knee, etc problems people attribute to running are actually caused by their expensive footwear. If we went barefoot or nearly barefoot, all that goes away. You were made to experience the world through your feet as well. Imagine if you lived your life with your hands in oven mitts all the time. How much sensory input would your hands miss out on? Locking our feet up in allows us to ignore where we’re going and tromp through life totally unaware. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Steve Pavlina is the number one personal development blog by most any measure. He recently posted on Intimacy and Label-Free Relationships. We’re separating ourselves from really connecting with other people by our use and dependence on labels. I highly recommend his post to you.

All that’s to say, if you want to connect with your audience, connect with yourself first. It’s not about perfection but progress. It’s all about your effectiveness and ability to impact the world around you.

When you think of sales, marketing or persuasion, what comes to mind? Do you get excited about the value you’ll get to share with people or are you worried they’ll think you’re just a pushy sales person? What’s behind that concern?

Over the course of my various careers, I sold knives, vacuums, cars, insurance, B2B services, and real estate. What I learned from one industry to the next was that you have to believe in your product and in yourself. If you don’t, something needs to change.

The way to believe in your product or service is to focus on the value people gain from it. The simplest check is to ask whether the value people receive is more than the money they’re giving you. Another measure is the amount of time or money they can save with your product. A more abstract comparison is how good they might feel from owning your product. As long as you know in your gut that they’re gaining from doing business with you, you’re golden.

The way to believe in yourself is to forget about yourself. Really. Of course you take care of personal hygiene, but when it comes time to interact with your customer, it’s no longer about you. The confidence you want in that scenario comes from focusing on serving your customer. They don’t care about your hangups. They have their own problems and if you want them to have the best experience, your best bet is to look for ways to help them solve them. If you’re focused on the other person, you’re not focused on your self – being self-conscious.

The highest form of service to your customers is to empathize with them. Understand why they feel the way they do and you’ll see how to best serve them. No amount of NLP magic will change those fundamentals.

To recap, find a product you can believe in and look for ways to serve people. Then people will appreciate the value you provide.

These have been my experiences so far:

• I’ve followed his blog(s) for approaching 2 years.
• I proofread his first two books and was one of only two people who actually proofed all of the first book. I opted not to do the third because I got tired of correcting the same grammar mistakes over and over AND I’d already read all those blog posts AND I’d finally created a solid product at that point.
• I’ve purchased most of his products.
• I’d considered going to Costa Rica to model him (his personal blog said he’s moving so I doubt that’s a possibility).
• I’d participated in his intern/contractor program on 3 different occasions. The first time, I did every task for about five weeks and then the autoresponder ran out of emails/I quit doing them because there weren’t any new tasks. My two ghost written blog articles were published on his blog.

The thing that gets me about James’ business is that he refuses to communicate with his customers. I can appreciate his motivation to do the most immediately profitable thing. But as one of his most loyal customers I’m really frustrated with my experience.

Some grievances I have (only because I have no other way to contact his business):

• On two occasions, I wasn’t paid for my contractor work.
• His Life Management 101 product was an absolute waste of money. I don’t need to pay for a half hour audio telling me not to watch TV.
• His DVD creation product was mostly a waste of money too. It’s a video version of the instructions you can get for free from Kunaki. Robert Phillips has a more thorough video for half the price if you want help via video. I’d pass on his cover creation product though. If you want to learn to do covers, get my graphic design product coming out soon. The rest of the info is available via Kunaki.
• James has been fairly incindiary to his customers and even peers online. He had a couple of posts back in the day accusing one of his students of lying and stealing one of his products. If you went and read the accused person’s blog it seemed like the story didn’t line up as he’d actually purchased the product in question and had gotten permission IN PERSON to do what he did. It seems like if James hadn’t sequestered himself and refused to communicate with anyone, that could have been avoided.
• I personally got flamed by James’ blog once too for saying something regarding TV. When I read the post response to my comment I thought who in the world would have said watching TV was okay. I went back to the comments they referenced and realized they must have meant me even though I said nothing of the sort. I realized it wasn’t James that wrote that so I wrote a tongue in cheek response saying his contractor in India was overreacting to what my contractor in India said.
• His business’ posts have become 80% junk since diegonorte.com started. They’re obviously written as filler. Most aren’t even worth the time it takes to scan and figure out they’re junk. The fact that he obviously isn’t concerned his business is cranking out junk concerns me as a business practice.
• A couple of times, his franchise system didn’t give me another viable task. I clicked through to the next task and it wanted me to critique and article for example. But there was no article. Another time, it wanted me to comment on something like 20 blogs. I combed through the list of 100+ urls given and found that most of them either 1) weren’t blogs, 2) weren’t in English or 3) hadn’t been posted to in several months. There was literally no way for me to complete the task or to tell them I couldn’t.
• I purchased MuVar 2009 but it didn’t include complete directions. Some features mentioned in the sales letter I got via email weren’t even mentioned. I really don’t like learning from video for most things but what I’ve heard is those videos are the exact same ones as for the prior version of MuVar. I think the software must work, I just don’t know how to do it. I did spend 2 full days trying to set up one page. After the video instructions way didn’t work, I tried everything else I could imagine with nothing to show for it.
• I must have subscribed to a trial version of James’ newsletter last year. I recall receiving a couple of issues and thinking they weren’t worth $25. It was mostly his MuVar testing results which I’d already seen elsewhere. I only received a couple of issues so I forgot about it. Turns out that right around Thanksgiving I get an unexpected $300 charge for subscribing to his newsletter. I might be mistaken but it seems that I subscribed to a one year trial but only got 2-3 months of it. I sent an email to get a refund but never heard back. No doubt they don’t offer refunds and I don’t want to argue with PayPal at this point. I just got the first issue in the mail so I’ll check that out before I do anything else.
• His business offered a Christmas special. I missed it last year so I made sure to check it out this year. It was supposed to be most of his products on sale plus a free trial of his Ranking Factors software. I plugged my url into Ranking Factors and it didn’t work. Great. Thanks. I checked out the rest and the only actual discount was on his email customer service – did I mention that? If you want customer service, you have to pay for it. I was intending to wait until Jan to start working on MuVar again and pay the $25 for them to help me work my $50 MuVar product. Hopefully I don’t have to explain the ethical problem I have with that but it’d still be worth it monetarily to get MuVar working. The customer service option was only $1 so I figured why not. The form only allowed something like 62 characters so I did my best to explain my MuVar delimma. Here’s the response I got back yesterday:

Thank you for the opportunity to serve you.

You asked the following question:

I can’t get MuVar 2009 to work. Not enough space to explain.

It wasn’t presented in the form of a question or it wasn’t gramatically
correct so we first had our team reword your request into a gramatically
correct question format.  Here is what we were able to reword it to:

How can I get MuVar 2009 to work without enough space on my server?

Here is our response:

MuVar 2009 doesn’t take very much space at all on your server.  The script
files are less than 100K.

MuVar does store data about all of your visitors and sales but even the
most modest hosting plan should be able to handle tens of thousands of
visitors and hundreds of sales.

With hundreds of sales, you can easily upgrade to a most robust hosting plan.

MuVar 2009 is extremely simple to use.  It is sold on a CD with all of the
script files and step-by-step videos showing every step of installation
and setup.  Most people are able to install MuVar 2009 in less than an
hour the first time.  After the first time, 10 or 15 minutes is much more
typical.  There is nothing complicated at all about installation or
configuration.

It’s really that simple.

We also offer an email consultation service and a monthly coaching service
if you ever have any specific questions.  Training is never an issue with
any Diego Norte product including MuVar 2009.

I hope this answer helps.  Please contact us at this URL if you have any
other questions:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/prd/1002/

Sarina Hendrickson
Nashville, Tenessee, USA Office
http://www.DiegoNorte.com

If you missed that, they not only didn’t answer my question, but reworded my question into a ridiculous question and answered that instead. All I can say is I’m really glad I didn’t shell out $25 for that.

I’d wanted to invest in James’ franchise system now that I’ve gotten a grip on how to create some unique products. I’m not going to though because my experience with it as a user has been so poor. Even so, I’m still interested in seeing how his latest experiment with homepages goes. And even after all that, I still took advantage of his 24 hour special yesterday to add another 10K publishers to my article marketing database.

I have really mixed feelings about Diego Norte. On the one hand, I really admire the hands-off systems style business James has built. I gather he’s now a multi-millionaire because of it.  On the other hand, I think half of what his business is churning out is junk and damaging to the relationship his business should be trying to cultivate with its customers. I agree it’s good to be profitable but not at the cost of cheating people out of money and spreading ill will. That doesn’t seem like it’d be profitable long term.

I’d normally avoid saying anything negative about anyone in particular. James just doesn’t have any other way to give feedback except product purchase. I guess the only feedback he wants is product purchases through MuVar. I’m pretty sure the flaw in that thinking though is that MuVar doesn’t measure repeat purchases and lifetime customer value.

Any comments? I don’t want this to be a rail against James post but I’d like to hear any thoughts regarding business systems, product creation, profitability, longevity, etc.

I think we got a couple of inquiries and only one person came over to look at it. We ended up renting to a brother of one of the current residents.

Since then, I’ve learned what I know about hypnotic writing. I only went to Harlan’s NLP Copywriting seminar last September.

Several weeks ago I posted another ad for a roommate. This time I got 17 email responses in about 24 hours before I took the ad down because I didn’t want any more responses. I invited 8 of those to come look at our place… and they all showed up. Most of those would have been fine but our first choice seemed the most excited (and oddly beyond coincidence) so that’s who we went with.

I post the two ads below to show the differences in “creative” type ad writing and hypnotic writing that uses pacing and leading and quite a bit of Milton modeling. Rereading that first ad, I think I was trying to be humorous to sound more like a real person… keep Austin weird [a local motto] style. It feels like I was trying too hard when I see it again now.

The hypnotic ad is more about creating an internal experience for the reader. Of course the numbers also reflect things like the month, the current real estate market, etc.

Another difference on the second ad is that I got email inquiries with subject lines, “room for rent sounds perfect” and “my imagination is excited.”

Non-hypnotic 1st ad:

$$$$ All Bills Included- 3 Roommates Seek a 4th For A Brentwood 4-2

We are three 20 something males. We’re mostly quiet professional types. We all keep the place pretty clean. We’re smoke and drug free but drink in moderation.

We’re located in the Brentwood neighborhood and a short walk to the #1 bus route on Lamar, a coffee shop, fast food, and McCallum High School. We’re right between 35/183/Mopac. We have all the dishes we need. We have a basketball hoop in the driveway and a set of kettlebells. There’s one year old carpet throughout. You’d share a bathroom with an almost compulsively clean guy.

We share wireless internet and we split the cost of cleaning supplies/TP/paper towels. The walls are fairly thin so if you like to crank up the stereo all the time or have screaming nightmares, this probably isn’t a good fit. The living room will accommodate up to around 25 people for social gatherings. We don’t have or plan to get a TV. The room is in the back, unfurnished and has 2 large windows.

There’s no deposit and it’s available June 1. The landlord wants a one year lease. He’s pretty quick about fixing things.

The recent hypnotic ad:

$$$$ bills included – a home and private room (NW side of Lamar/2222)

Imagine a quiet neighborhood… you rocking on the porch, enjoying the large shade tree in front or the basketball hoop out back. Or perhaps you’d enjoy seasonal roses or pomegranates.

The Lamar bus stop, a coffee shop, a neighborhood park and fast food are all a short walk away. Our neighborhood, Brentwood, ranks as one of the best neighborhoods in Austin. We’re close to it all… 183, 35, Mopac, UT or downtown.

Inside… a large living room, antique coffee table, wi-fi, modern appliances, gas burners, two refrigerators, pool table, guitar hero, kettlebell set, Kirby vacuum and ample cooking space. There are 4 rooms and 2 shared bathrooms.

The roommates… easy going guys aged 27-30, clean and considerate. We often savor a good brew. Both guy or girl are fine for us.

The landlord… pays all bills except internet. He works out leases on a personal basis.

The room is around 10′ x 12′ including 2 large windows facing east and south. Small, confined pets are fine.

The room is available August 1st.

Email to arrange a tour.

What else do you notice between these two ads?

Click on the video to send it to your friends or make your own.

I’ve got a club and a district officer role this time around and it all came down at the same time. When I told one of our new club officers that, she asked why anyone would want to do that. Everyone has their reasons for joining Toastmasters (a communication and leadership organization if you didn’t know). Serving in a leadership capacity is a totally different level though. It wasn’t until I got into district leadership that I started taking the program seriously and speaking regularly.

My reason for the "extra" involvement is that after all the different organizations I’ve been a part of… churches, corporations, the army, the public school system, soccer teams… I consider Toastmasters to be one of the best. It gives people the opportunity to improve themselves. You don’t have to have a set of beliefs or be coerced into anything. You show up… you’re challenged… you have fun… you get better.  If anything promotes world peace, it’s empowering people to act on their own beliefs.

If you’re a copywriter or anyone who wants low risk practice in persuasion, I can’t recommend Toastmasters more highly. You can write your speech and get immediate feedback from an audience.

On to profiles… Ryan Healy wrote on how to know if you have the traits of a freelance copywriter. It’s good stuff. As I’ve been working on an NLP model for copywriters, I’ve noticed a few things. One is that there’s almost NO consistent trait among copywriters other than having a creative process that consists of researching, writing and editing. Beyond that, everyone’s an individual.

So while the grandmasters of copywriting enjoy describing what makes a great copywriter, what they’re probably really saying is what they believe makes them a good copywriter. Every master in any field will write about what unique traits they have. The truth is that there are lots of good copywriters out there who don’t fit any mold.

And then if you consider yourself an entrepreneur first, there’s even more variety there. Somehow most of those guys keep pounding out bad ads year after year and still make money. Of course they’d make more if they improved their marketing skills but just about everyone knows a story like that.

One consistent across almost all organizations and professions is value and influence. Where are you providing value and how are you influencing others to convey that value?

I only had a few hours until I was to make the announcement (due to procrastination on my part) and most of that time was already accounted for in other events.

I decided to throw some patterns in there anyway just to see what would happen.

Here’s what I scratched together on 3 pocket sized spiral note pad pages:

Do you… remember a time when learning was fun.

You’re excited and fascinated with both the journey and the destination.

Imagine a day devoted to your improvement. Do you want to…

• Improve your voice
• Relax your body
• Iron out internal resistance
• Resolve external conflict
• Align yourself with what you really want out of life

The theme of the fall conference is, "Your Best Self Ever."

We’re taking a value based approach where you could easily pay the full price just to hear any of the speakers we have lined up. It will be a one day conference.

As you’re getting your [registration] fliers, you’re probably already thinking about other members who’d like to come as well.

Then I talked about how to sign up and who to give the money to.

Did it work? Who knows. We had more than the usual number of early registrations but that could have as easily been due to the fact that the price was lower than usual and the value was higher than usual. It was fun trying it out.

If you Google “getting started copywriting” you’ll see over 200,000 results. Most of the advice I’ve seen and followed boils down to a few steps:

1. Study the masters
2. Copy out successful letters
3. Build a swipe file
4. Practice on low risk jobs
5. Build your portfolio
6. Specialize in a market
7. Get bigger clients

What I want to point out is that your path depends greatly on your end goal. Do you want to be a corporate copywriter? Freelance? Or how about run your own business?

Personally, I started out following the above steps before I finally accepted the fact that many of the most successful copywriters write for themselves. Even the top copywriters that still write for clients also have their own products, services, coaching programs, seminars, etc. That’s where the real money and real freedom are.

If you’ve managed to stick to the steps long enough to become a half decent copywriter, branching out into your own business won’t be a terrible shock. Selling is the hardest part of any business and you already have a leg up. Plus, if you go after information products online, you’ve chopped your learning curve down again. And you won’t have to go looking for step 4. You can do your own stuff.

If you follow the career path of many copywriters, the steps that follow after the six above are:

1. Charge your clients more
2. Get more clients
3. Get burned out
4. Have an existential crisis
5. Get fed up and start your own business

Why not start at step 4 in the first list and jump to step 5 in the second? Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

I wanted to elaborate on step 1 in the first list for copywriting and NLP. That was the original question… how to get started.

I read the original guys like Hopkins, Caples and Ogilvy. I don’t recommend anyone start with that unless you want to be a corporate copywriter. For direct response copywriters and entrepreneurs, I recommend you study some of the guys who are doing it well online already. Specifically, I recommend (not affiliate links):

• Michel Fortin – has a great online presence and community
• Clayton Makepeace – master of melding copywriting and existing business (aka profit sharing and royalties)
• Ben Settle – a great resource to go for learning about swiping
• Michael Senoff – an amazing resource for free seminars, interviews and ads on a multitude of business topics. It’s a great place to find ideas.
• Dan Kennedy – he has a number of good books on the basics. I’m looking at a copy of The Ultimate Sales Letter on my shelf. You can see the 2nd edition free on Google Books.
• Google “internet business ” and visit the top results. If they’re private business guys with blogs, they obviously know what they’re doing. Richard Lee, Cybercashology and Terry Dean come to mind.
• [EDIT 5/23/09]I used to recommend James Brausch for his straightforward business formula that went something like “Product + Traffic + Copywriting = $$$.” He’s since sold off his blog and business and the new owners ran it into the ground with poor products and service. Terry Dean has a highly recommended beginner’s guide.

For NLP, it really depends on what you want to do with it. There’s a ton of general info online. Here’s what I recommend:

• If you want a solid general overview, get a book like Introducing NLP by O’Connor and Seymour.
• If you want to learn how to do NLP, you have 2 main options: take a practitioner course or read the original books by Bandler and Grinder and find someone to practice with. The first method would probably be easier although I’ve taken the second.
• [EDIT 10/20/08: Richard Bandler has a new book out, "Get The Life You Want" that has most of his NLP patterns. Each chapter is a background story and the pattern laid out step by step. I highly recommend it as a pattern reference.]
• [EDIT 5/23/09: It now appears that NOTNLP may have streamlined many if not all the patterns of NLP. If you're wanting to do NLP in person, I recommend you check it out.]
• If you want to learn to do Therapeutic Metaphors, learn the vocabulary of NLP first and then get David Gordon’s book on it. Some of it will be lost on you if you don’t know the basics.
• If you want to learn modeling,  get Gordon’s book on it. [UPDATE: Steve Bauer has a more comprehensive list on modeling approaches listed in a recent post . It includes Gordon's book.]
• If you run across something you’re not familiar with look it up in the Encyclopedia of NLP .
• If you want to learn it for personal motivation, get Tony Robbin’s materials.
• If you want to be entertained and awed by it, look for Derren Brown on YouTube. “The Heist ” and “Subliminal Advertising ” are especially eye opening.
• If you want to learn it for a face to face sales context, get Kenrick Cleveland’s materials. I haven’t studied his materials beyond his blog but Harlan Kilstein highly recommends him.
• If you want to learn if for a seduction context, get the Speed Seduction materials.
• If you want to have it done on you without worrying about learning it, get some Paraliminals or visit a hypnotherapist or NLP practitioner. I created a similar product you can download free called Passionate Heart.

And finally, if you want to learn NLP for a copywriting context, get my course. The only thing even like it is Harlan’s $1000 DVDs. Even then, a couple people have commented that my course is easier to understand than his. It’s way less expensive too.

You can get the first lesson free here: http://hypnoticwriter.org .

The idea was to get speakers who could deliver some real value to our members. I know NLP can do that.

After listening to 3 different NLP trainers, only one seemed suitable for our conference. It turns out he happened to be a Toastmaster too and I didn’t know it. The others could use Toastmasters as their speaking abilities left much to be desired.

That got a conversation going with a friend… why is it that many folks in the NLP or hypnosis community don’t lead enviable lives? Even without meeting everyone it’s obvious they weren’t all in the top of health.

For some reason there seems to be a disconnect between knowing and doing. Some of these guys (Richard Bandler included) know NLP backwards and forwards but you look at them and think they must not be practicing what they preach.

It was Mark Twain who said, "The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them." It also seems true that the man who doesn’t apply what he learns has no advantage over the man who can’t learn.

As with all things, you must apply what you learn. NLP is no exception.

I was preparing for a speech I gave at my Toastmasters meeting yesterday. I started to make a list of all the jobs or businesses I’ve had that I’ve been compensated for one way or another.

Since this list is so long, I’ll bold the ones that I held for one year or longer. There’s too many for me to try to order them chronologically. Some I can’t remember when I started or stopped exactly.

The total count comes to 43 though I lumped several of the same things together (ie. pizza delivery for different companies or temporary clerical work).

1. Produce clerk
2. Deli clerk
3. Loss prevention
4. Mover
5. Courier
6. Sacker
7. Vending route owner
8. Knife salesman (Cutco)
9. Restaurant cook (Owens Family Restaurant)
10. Phone book delivery
11. Pizza delivery (3 different companies)
12. Carpet cleaning
13. YMCA after school care
14. B2B lead generation
15. Car salesman
16. Realtor – 3 years
    
17. House cleaning
18. Scored standardized test essays
19. Misc clerical temp work
20. Lawn care
21. Army Airborne Medic – 1 year
    
22. Texas Army National Guard – officer candidate – 2 years
    
23. Substitute teacher – all subjects and ages
24. Clinical trial participant
25. Home remodeling
26. House sitting
27. Middle school math teacher (a year when including subbing)
28. Proofreader – textbooks and paperbacks
29. Fact checker
30. Soccer coach
31. Telemarketing
32. XBox 360 technical support
33. Satellite TV service sales
34. Yahoo classified ads sales
35. Ghost writing articles and blog posts (not paid)
36. Created several websites (including this one)
37. Insurance sales
38. Network marketing – 2 different companies
39. Church college staff
40. Copywriter – part time since 2006
    
41. Self published author (not paid)
42. Online entrepreneur – including this site
43. Marketing consultant