A photo I snapped that night in Washington Square Park where we talked about Michaels New Book - The Education of Millionaires

In June this year while visiting Lewis Howes in New York City,  Lewis introduced me to author Michael Ellsberg.

Win a copy of Michaels new book “The Education of Millionaires”:

To win all you have to do is leave a comment below. It’s that simple.

I will pick a winner by Sunday Night and yes the quality of your comment will help!

On Wednesday March 30th Lewis Howes and I had the honor of hosting Peter Guber on a webinar to discuss the topic of story telling. Peter just came out with a new book called Tell to win – Connect, Persuade and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story.

This webinar was one of top 3 favorites of all time. It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to talk to someone as accomplished as Peter.
To give you an idea of peters success – he is the Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment. Films he personally produced or executive produced, including Rain Man, Batman, The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Gorillas in the Mist: and many more. He is a minority owner of the Golden State Warriors, has been the CEO of Columbia Pictures, etc. The list goes on and on – if you care to see more check out Peter Guber’s Wikipedia.

The book is fascinating and really explains the power of story to win (for lack of a better word . After reading the book and talking with Peter On the webinar I had a personal revelation that confirmed the true power of story. For now watch this replay and let me know in the comments if you want to hear about my personal experience with story telling to sell.

Enjoy.

Almost a year ago I wrote a really popular post called How I get Massive amounts of stuff done. In that post & video I showed you a short simple to-do list method I developed over the years.

In the last few months I have been using Google docs to make my todo lists. It is awesome tool to keep all of your to-do lists in one place and also to delegate tasks to other team members.

If you like simple solutions – you’ll like my method.

This short video shows you exactly how I do it.

If you liked this – check out the original “How I get massive amounts of sh*t done” post.

Here’s a video with me from the first time that I ever spoke live on stage. It was at Than Merrill’s Info Empire event earlier this year in San Diego. I was just watching it and I had the same nervous butterflies as if I was back on stage. It’s so strange. . . I’ve done webinars for tens of thousands of people and rarely do I ever get nervous. I’ve now spoken a bunch of times on stage and I don’t get as nervous; but man, that first time was such a rush! Anyway, this is just a snippet from the first few minutes of my speech. I actually tell a pretty funny story about how I first got into Twitter. Enjoy.

Interview with David Siteman Garland

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Book Review

About a year ago I had the pleasure of virtually meeting David Siteman Garland (@TheRiseToTheTop) on Twitter. The more I learned about him the more impressed I became with what he was accomplishing online in such a short period of time. I noticed he was interviewing and featuring some of the top pros in the marketing / blogging / new media industry. He hosted interviews With big names like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, some guy named Sean Malarkey,  Tim Ferriss, etc.

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business Get the book on Amazon here.

What impressed me the most was how smart his approach was. He was networking and forming alliances with all of the top people in our space and doing it at a rapid pace. His hustle & drive was inspiring. Needless to say I was excited to read his new book Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business.

Here’s my honest review:

Get this book if you have a business, brand or product. Smarter, Faster, Cheaper is full of practical advice that works. I know it does, because as I read through the chapters I kept relating his experiences and advice to things I had been doing myself online for the last couple years.

What I really like about this book is David doesn’t say “this or that strategy” is what you “have to do”. Instead he exposes you to what he has seen work for himself personally and also what’s has worked for all of the brilliant people he has interviewed. He did a good job of introducing  a ton of good ideas that work well to cultivate relationships and business using mostly free tools available online.

David’s explanation of how the business mindset has drastically changed in the last few years is spot on. He talks about the power of collaboration with other business’s that may share the same customer base. He dives deep into video marketing and using online video to build your brand, which (chapter 7) is a must read.

This book  should be required reading for any college student getting a degree in business or marketing.

For me personally, there weren’t any major light bulb moments but it was  a good refresher and reminder of a plethora of great ideas to build my business online. It was a fun read and time well spent.

It was inspiring and I found it hard to read more than 20 pages at a time without wanting to put the book down and work on the ideas that kept racing through my head. David does a great job of inspiring you to take action which in my opinion is the mark of a good business book.

If you enjoyed “Crush it“, “The Four Hour Work Week“, “Un-Marketing“, “Purple Cow” or “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” — you’ll love this book.

Side note: While searching for photos of David for this post, I came across this and couldn’t resist sharing it with you. David is gonna kill me for posting this but whatever – enjoy.

Caption Contest: Leave a comment with your caption to this photo to win.

The 5 funniest captions will win a copy of David’s new book:

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business

I will pick the top 5 funniest captions and announce a winner this Sunday night. Enter as often as you’d like.

Unreal Hail Storm – Baseball Size Hail [Video]

I found this on Break.com via Digg.

Unreal – Wait till the one minute mark of the video. All hell breaks loose.

Pool Bombarded by Incredible Hail Storm – Watch more Funny Videos

The other day I was surfing around Facebook and I noticed something strange. In the language settings I noticed a language titled “English – Pirate” So I clicked it and to my surprise someone over at facebook has developed a language setting for pirates.

Not only have they developed the language, they have gone to great links to change almost every aspect of common text in Facebook. It’s impressive and entertaining. Some of my favorite lines are:

• What be troublin ye?  replaces –  What’s on your mind?
• T davy jone’s with it!  replaces – Delete
• 10 Sorry louts think they’re your mates. replaces 10 friend requests
• Shiniest booty – Fresh booty. replaces Top news – Most recent

The list goes on and on – even the notification emails are in Pirate. Check out this video I made to demonstrate how to change your language settings. Also about two minutes in, I play a prank on my wife with her settings.

Enjoy.

About 5 months ago, a mutual friend Introduced me to Than Merrill as he was needing help figuring out how to use Twitter for his online business and for his real estate business. He had been fledgling along for over a year and was not getting any value out of  Twitter.

In the few weeks that followed that introduction we had several phone calls & one on one webinars where I got a good understanding of his goals and needs and gave him some advice on how he could use Twitter.

In this call you will here how Than & his company:

• Added 9,000 new leads to their email list
• Added over 150,000 new followers in 5 months
• Tracks his progress on Twitter (he has this down to a science)
• Spends 5-10 minutes a day on Twitter & remains effective and relevant
• And much more

Listen Here

A few things to note –  we did this on skype with the webcams running and at one point when I was asking him about the value of the lead – I saw him reach for his iPhone, so you’ll here me ask him “are you calculating the value of the lead?”. I should have recorded that skype call with video, I dont know why I didnt think to do that.

The most Important thing I want you to take away is that Than had a plan.  He had a simple blueprint and the tracking in place to measure his results. Anyone can do this – that is if you have the discipline to make a plan – measure your results and stick with it.

It was a pretty fun call and I think we will do a follow up – so please if there is anything more you want to hear or for me to ask him – leave it in the comment section and I’m sure I can get your questions answered.

In this post & video I want to share with you a technique I use to maximize click throughs -(not opens) with each email.

I know every email marketer always talks about the importance of split testing and open rates – but in this video I want to share with you a little technique I use to maximize click-through rates with each email I send.

There are two types of emails or goals typically when sending an email:

1. Opens – Good for branding or getting a message out.
2. Clicks – Getting people to take action on an offer or promotion.

Open rates are very important, but if I have a link in my email and I want people to take action and click it, I am more concerned with clicks. This example can also be used to figure out which headline to use to get maximum open rates, but again – in this example I am looking for the best headline that gets people to take action and click.

In this video I split tested 3 headlines and the results were pretty impressive. Watch the video and learn – One of the results which did NOT have the highest open rate, yet had an astonishingly higher 33% click-through rate.  Thats a huge difference and potentially could result in much higher sales.

Watch the video 2:53 (opens in a new window)

In all 3 emails I essentially used the same message. In the third email I added a few paragraphs so the subject line was relevant with the message being sent.

Here are the results

Email #1 Subject – “Did you See this?” Click here to see actual email

Opens – 191

Clicks – 46

Email #2 Subject “Huge webinar this week with Brian Tracy” Click here to see actual email

Opens – 231

Clicks – 30

Email #3 Subject “Staring at a frog today?” Click here to see actual email

Opens – 209

Clicks –  39

As you can see – Message #1 had the best subject line to maximize clicks. If you clicked on the links and looked at the actual emails, you noticed the message in the email used  for #1 & #2 were identical. For whatever reason #1 had a 33% higher click through rate. Something in the first email’s subject line inspired the action takers.  So that’s the reason I used it to mail to the rest of the list.

To explain further – I’ll use real numbers.

That email ended up going out to approximately 25,000 people between different lists. It ended up averaging around an 8% click rate – resulting in approximately 2000 people viewing the registration page. If I had been solely focused on “open rates” and not paying attention to the “click-through” rates I would have used email # 2. Had I done that It would have resulted in approximately 1300 people clicking through.  Thats a huge difference.

Another way of looking at it, in a recent launch Ryan Deiss did of a facebook product – his affiliates were  earning an average of $3.55 per click COMMISSION.

If that offer were mailed to 40,000 people with an 8% click through rate – that would have netted approximately $11,360 in earnings. A 33% lower click-through rate would have netted approximately $7500 in earnings.

I didn’t promote Ryan’s offer – but if I had – you can bet I would have split tested the emails and subject lines.

How I use this method – I segmented a portion of my list.  I emailed the 3 messages to approx 1150 for each message. Then waited a half hour and looked at the results. I find that typically after 100 people have opened each email – that is a good enough sample to gauge results.

At that point a winner was pretty obvious in email #1. Ironically the results for #1 improved throughout the day. At the time I declared it the winner – it was converting clicks at a 28% higher rate.

I’ll do a follow up to this post and show you some more examples in the coming weeks. Until then, leave a comment , tweet this or click one of the 38 sharing sites below. Muchas Gracias.

This has to be one of the funniest, clean & safe for work videos I have seen in a while. Before you watch it, consider this social media tip.

I like to share funny thing’s on social media. I recommend you do the same.

These types of posts get a lot of traffic and re-tweets on Twitter. When someone RT’s you on Twitter it includes your username which inevitably drives traffic back to your profile, which inevitably gets people to follow you and exposes them to you or your business. Also because Twitter has such a limited profile and lacks photos, videos etc – People will inevitably click on your website.

Tip – Share funny things in the late afternoon or evening. They get a lot more traction that time of day. Share inspirational and educational things in the morning.  Quotes work really well in the morning!

Anyway – here’s one of the funniest videos of a “port a potty” prank.