It’s kinda funny when you really sit back and think about success…

… I mean… what does the word “success” look like to you?  What picture do you see when you think about “success”?

Just this afternoon I was getting some work done and finishing up a few things on this little launch that we’re doing over at our private money website (an offshoot of the real estate site)… and I got to thinking about the success that I was *hoping* we would have next week.

And truthfully…

I kinda bummed myself out there for a few minutes.  Weird huh?

My Image Of Success Was…

As my wheels were turning in my mind thinking of the people we are going to help next week… and the profits we’d make in return for our time and effort we’re going to put into coaching our students to success… I seriously didn’t get all that excited about the profits.

Not because I didn’t think our coaching program didn’t rock (it surely will… we’re seriously giving waaaayyy too much for the chunk of change we’re getting in return.)

But… what it was came to me tonight when I was watching a video of a guy a year younger than me who has the freakin’ world by the toe right now… and is “successful” (in my eyes).  He’s in the real estate world… but that’s not what caught my eye… it was how he was out there having fun and doing things that most people wouldn’t do because “man… I’ll never do that” creeps into their minds.

Furthermore…

I’d be willing to bet that this kid still feels like he’s nowhere near where he wants to be right now because his picture of true “success” is bigger and grander than where he is now.

And to tell you the truth… earlier today when I was thinking about how successful next week would be, I was that guy that let the “I’ll never do that” creep into my mind (but just for a second .

Here’s The Thing

This little launch that we’re doing is a very small launch just to our internal list… and this is truthfully the first launch that I’ve ramrodded the marketing strategy from start to finish.

And…

Even at this moment I feel like there are a couple missing pieces in the whole thing that may or may not make a big difference.

You see, all of this crept into my mind and made me compare my “success” next week to a low metric that I had set in my mind as our “ultimate goal”… and this low metric still wasn’t all that impressive.

So, just about half hour ago I got up from my computer (finally) and started to clear my mind and really think of where I am and what success will mean… not only next week but in the next 1, 5, 25 years.

And truthfully…

I realized that I slipped into a trap of momentarily mentally shooting too low and not defining my success to where I truly know I want to take it… and where I know we will take it.

Redefine Your Definition of Success…

Here’s the deal, ever since that little mindshift (about half hour ago) I’ve been looking at the project in a whole new light… and have a new motivation to drive this project to success way higher than I had “hoped” for just a week or two ago.

And in the end, when the dust settles… I can guarantee that the launch will be better off… for my partner and I and for the students because I’m carrying this new definition of success forward.

It’s a small mindshift…. but sometimes all it takes is to redefine your definition of whatever success is… and stop shooting for just “success”… but shoot for “true success”.

What’s True Success?

Pretty simple really.

Think of if its an ideal world and if you could have anything… if your project (or launch in my case) could hit whatever metrics you would absolutely love and be completely thrilled at hitting… you know… that “ideal” outcome.

That’s true success.

Too many people (myself included… in momentary lapses) shoot too low.  Too many people have success in their minds and then over time that vision or picture of true success erodes down to just plain ol’, “Ya, that was a success“.

When in reality, it should be more like, “that freakin’ rocked! If I had to script it I wouldn’t have written it any differently than this!“.

Really, in my opinion… that’s when you hit true success… and thats when you live up to your potential in work, play, and this one and only life we’ve got.

Thats just me though.  How about you?

On day 4 (or is this 5) of my 30 day chronicle of my life and biz… in an attempt at creating a ritual of writing everyday… I am scatterbrained as ever.

Here’s the deal…

I’m in the middle of this little launch in my real estate business… and it’s heavy on videos and audio that to tell you the truth… I’ve crammed the last week to really create for our readers.

As you know… my wife and I are buying our first house… and we’re having some little speedbumps that are keeping us from closing when we want to close… and these speedbumps are costing us a bunch of money, time, and headaches.

And…

I’m working on about 3 other projects that are all suffering a bit as of today.

Here’s why…

I Can’t Focus Right Now!

I wrote a post about the importance of focusing a while back and… just like all entrepreneurs… sometimes fall off the focus train and become completely scattered.

Today I’m in one of those modes… and it sucks a big one.

You know the feeling… you have a few projects going… get phone calls… have new fires come up… and all of the sudden you look back at your day and you see that you pretty much got a whole lotta nothing done.

For instance, today I recorded a podcast, got our next video for the rei site done, put out a couple fires… one of which is really eating at me right now (the one about the house and it closing later than we wished… and costing us a bunch of money)… and a couple other things.

Heck, I wasn’t even going to write this blog post today because I thought I didn’t have the time to do it… until I remembered that I had already publicly voiced that I’m going to write for 30 days straight and if I didn’t I would do something big that I really don’t want to do.

Here’s Where I Went Wrong Today

Okay, I finally sat down and reflected on the day a bit.  What made me less productive and more scattered today than usual?

Here we go…

• I went to bed late last night (2am) because I was pushing to get a client’s work done
• I woke up late because I’m the type of guy who has to get 8 hours of sleep or I’m total garbage the next day
• Waking up late pushed back my schedule and I didn’t go through my morning ritual like usual
• I started working BEFORE I wrote out my priorities for the day… and got off on tangents
• I ate breakfast late and still haven’t had a 2nd meal…

All in all, this is the perfect recipe for a very unproductive day and being scattered as heck like I have been today.

How You Too Can Have The Most Unproductive Day Ever

Here’s my simple 5 step roadmap so you too can have your most unproductive day ever.

1. Stay up late and do work that you hate doing… it’s really great for your energy and morale
2. Be sure to wake up as late as possible… then first thing go and open up your computer and check your email (the first thing you do everyday should always be getting distracted as heck by 92 emails in your inbox)
3. Forget about eating breakfast… in fact… forget about eating lunch too… because you’re too busy answering emails and putting out “fires”
4. Don’t plan anything at all… just work on whatever comes up and even then… most importantly don’t completely finish everything you start
5. Stare at the computer screen for 6 hours straight… it’s like the technology version of carrots… very good for your eyes and energizing as heck.

And a bonus step… to follow that day up with another awesomely unproductive day… be sure to stay on your computer all evening and after midnight… then repeat the whole process again.

A lot of entrepreneurs have a tough time with this… I did too for a long time.

How about you?? When do you know when you’re doing a great job as an entrepreneur… either offline or online… doesn’t matter.  How do you know?

• Is it the profits you make?
• Is it the traffic or leads you generate to your business?
• Is it the new projects you get done?
• Is it that you’ve stayed in business for more than 12 months?

I’d guess that most people would go for one of the first two bullets… I did… and still do sometimes.

But for me now…

It’s What My Customers Say About Me

At first when I started out I was always focusing on earning money and seeing how much profits I could squeeze out of my market.  That was when I knew I was doing a great job as an entrepreneur.

But now as I’ve matured as an entrepreneur (both online and offline) I’ve realized that for me… I know I’m doing a great job when my customers take the time out of their day to actually tell me of the great job I’m doing.

It’s awesome everytime I read an email from a reader that basically says that my real estate site is the only one they trust and feel like its worth their time to follow consistently.

That’s a huge accomplishment for me… when you can build a following of people that love what you do for them… the profits will always come.  And they have… all without selling out on my own morals or risking my integrity.

Here’s A Few Awesome Things My Customers Have Said Recently…

Ya, prompted testimonials are cool and are valuable as a marketing tool… but the ones that are totally unsolicited and just come outta the blue by the customer are the best. Here are just a couple of the nearly 100 great emails I’ve gotten over the past several months from my readers… Both of these came in last week.

“Yours is the only REI site worth visiting. You’re not too heavy on the spam and you give a lot of good opinions and reviews.”

- Michael P.

“… I went through your link because I appreciated the extra step you took with videoing the registration and, generally, appreciate your ethical approach and the value you deliver in the limited free time I have to stay up-to-date and consume real estate and internet marketing knowledge.”

- Greg G.

Gotta love those kind of comments huh?  That’s what providing real value and being true to yourself does for ya… the profits always follow.

Strive For Raving Fans and Followers… Not Just Profits

When you strive for raving fans and followers rather than just going after profits… not only (in my opinion) will you end up making more money in the end… but your customers will be way happier… and they’ll stick with you for the long haul.

Raving fans spread the word about your stuff… and help to evangelise the business and your word.  It takes a while longer to build a following than it does to simply throw up some ads and try to pull the wool over the eyes of your prospects… but it’s way worth it.

Give it a try… let me know how it goes.

(or… ask me how the heck I’ve been building a great following in my businesses… maybe I’ll share the specifics w/ ya).

I may have told the story a few times… but I’ve been dabbling online for a couple years now… but really seriously only for the last 6 months or so.

Way back in late ‘06 I started The REI Brain dot Com to help teach investors what I’ve learned about real estate investing… and what other successful investors have learned as well.  That site didn’t start to churn a real income until about March of ‘08… not because it was hard to get it to that point…

… but really because there were specific steps I should have taken a year and a half ago to drive traffic and to monetize the site that I didn’t take until the middle of ‘08.

A Month In Review…

I’m not one for posting monthly “income reports” like some other bloggers do… nothing wrong with it… I just don’t feel the need to validate myself by showing others what I make.

But, October was an exceptional month for me online (what’s exceptional to me might be pennies to someone else. It’s all relative.)… and I want to kind of break it down a bit how it’s happening.

First off, my online income isn’t all of my income at all… I run a marketing consulting biz and have several great clients on retainer… I own rental units… and I’m actually taking partial ownership to a great company with an excellent partner that I’ll let you know about later on.

But, my online income is fastly making up the majority of my total income… which isn’t a problem with me.

So, here it is… Here’s what I’ve learned as far as how to make money (online or offline)

Providing Value

I’d always heard people say, “If you provide value to other people… true value… you’ll get it returned to you 10x over”.  I’ve always believed it… but I guess I had a hard time figuring out what kind of value I could provide to people.

Anyhow, when I started the real estate investing site I was just posting articles with my commentary.  They were great articles and still bring in some traffic to this day to the site.

But…

I re-looked at what I had written on the site… and it provided value… but nowhere to the point that I had a vision to do for my readers.  My readers are investors who are looking to be successful and make better lives for themselves through real estate… and up until early ‘08 my content truly wasn’t “instructional” enough to really help my readers find that success.

So…

I started to write tutorials, unbiased reviews of products, do free full content webinars, and started to help other guys with great websites and products (that I truly felt were great resources) spread the word too.  Once I started to provide “real value” to my readers it started to come back to me big time.

Product reviews make up probably 40-50% of my online income.  In October these reviews churned in a decent mid 4 figures.

Advertising hasn’t been as big as I’ve wanted it to be… but I really haven’t done ANYTHING to attract new advertisers… that just produces a few hundred a month… but hey, that more than pays for all of my own advertising for the site… so I’m just fine with that for now.

Letting readers know about products (not full reviews, but rather by friendly endorsements) has been pretty good to me… and made up about 40% of my online income again… so mid 4 figures in October alone.  The key here is to once again provide value.  I don’t pitch every product that comes to me… in fact I only “pitch” about 5% of the products that come to me… and they have to meet my own criteria or I won’t endorse them for my readers.

• Have to be of true value… provide great content and instruction for a reasonable price
• Have to be actionable… if something can’t be taken and immediately put to action it’s pretty much worthless to most customers
• I have to actually see and use the product myself… most people online will endorse any ol’ product that comes their way to make a buck.  I guess I’m a bit “odd” in this respect.  I want to build trust with my readers so I only endorse products that I have used and truly believe can help them get to the next level in their businesses and life.  Pretty simple to me really… that way I build value and trust over the long term rather than looking for short term gains.

Those are the main three criteria I use before I promote another persons product.

What All Of This Means…

I know, I know… I tend to get off on tangents sometimes and that’s something that I’m trying to work on right now (my wife always points it out to me when I ramble .

Anyhow, this all has a point and does circle back to the title of this post.

All in all, October has been my best month online and I crossed over 5 figures in PROFITS (not gross revenues)… which was about 3k better than September… and September was better than August (nice little upward trend… like I like to see it .   A $4k day at the start of October helped out a bit for sure… which I can tell ya about later on if you want to hear it.

When I got to adding up my income from October and trying to analyze exactly why the income keeps going up every month… I started to write down the things I’ve been doing recently that I wasn’t doing a year ago.

And it was a bunch of simple stuff… but mainly it all boils down to providing TRUE VALUE with no catch.

I’ve been putting out great content for my readers and clients, being honest, and having no catch.  By no catch I mean… I don’t put out a half assed article or video and ask people to pay a kings ransom to “get the rest”.  Heck, my buddy Patrick Riddle and I even did a full 2 hour workshop completely for free and didn’t pitch one single product on the damn thing at all… but, since that workshop the list that was generated from that little free workshop has generated multiple 4 figures a month… pretty nice huh?

October has been my best month online… not because I’m selling people harder or more… but because I’m giving them more… and being honet with them. That’s all there is to it.  I help my readers get where they want to go in real estate investing and don’t cram affiliate offers down their throats everyday.  Basically, I treat my readers as if they are my close friends (which I kinda have grown to really think of them that way) and I do what I would do for my firneds really expecting nothing in return… but knowing that by helping them it always comes back to me way more.

And… when it comes to the point where I actually create a product and offer it to my readers (which that is coming up very soon… and it’s going to be of huge value)… my readers will trust me more and will already have a high perceived value on my information.  And… of course, any product that comes out of any of my websites or companies will be the best single product to solve that particular problem on the market… and it will be the single best way for my readers to solve that problem. Period.

Anyhow, I’ve gotta sign off… heading to the Oregon State and ASU game today… gotta get ready.

Chat soon. Provide more value.  And help people out along the way.