YouTube is a great tool for marketing your business – if you can avoid the pitfalls…

Mistake #1 – Thinking all you need to do is upload a video and traffic will flood your website. No less than 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, so the competition to get your video seen by viewers is insane. There are tons of high-quality videos that never get more than a few thousand views, and no doubt many more that get even fewer eyeballs.

What to do? First, tailor your video content to what your viewers want and not necessarily to what you want to show them. Always keep the viewer in mind every step of the video making process and put their needs and desires ahead of yours. Next, you’ve got to vigorously promote your video. Social sites are often the best way to get the word out. And third, realize that it takes time, resources and a good idea to make a video people want to watch and pass on to others. It also takes time and resources to properly promote your video. Don’t expect to slap up any old video and watch the sales role in.

Mistake #2 – Thinking you’re too small or new to make video work for you and your business. Just because you need to keep your expectations realistic doesn’t mean placing and promoting videos on YouTube can’t have an impact on your business. Any business, large or small, can use video to its advantage.

Think about what you like to share with friends and tailor your video accordingly. Even a few thousand views can increase your business, and if you get lucky, you might even create the next viral video sensation.

Mistake #3 – Creating a commercial. Online video is about engagement with others, not slapping out another “buy my product” commercial.

Think of your video as doing much more than simply selling a product or service. People on YouTube want to consume and share engaging and fun content, so don’t give them a 30 minute speech on why your product rocks, because odds are they won’t watch it.

Instead, inject fun, personality and pizzazz into your videos. Make them emotional, or thought provoking, or funny, or all three. Ask yourself: If I saw this video, would I send it to my friends? If the answer is no, then keep working on your concept.

Another test to see if you’re on the right track: If you are with friends, would you show them the video? If not, then you might want to start over. A video should grab attention and keep the viewer entranced. It should be short – usually less than 10 minutes and preferably less than 5 minutes. And it should leave the viewer feeling GLAD they saw it, not glad it’s over.

Mistake #4 – Trying too hard. You might think you need to spend thousands of dollars to get a professional video created, when the fact is an amateur type of video might do just as well, if not better.

People generally don’t like “slick” unless it’s of a “Hollywood” caliber – and that’s expensive. People prefer to watch videos of real people doing real things. To illustrate slick versus real, think of an overly smooth sales person trying to sell you a car – isn’t he or she an instant turn off? Now think of an average nice person with a car for sale. She tells you it’s a good car, but the heater takes 10 minutes to warm up and the ride’s not super smooth. Who do you trust?

Or think about the person trying desperately to impress you with how professional he is and how he knows everything about everything, compared again with the average sincere person who readily admits she makes bone-headed mistakes and sometimes says or does the wrong thing. Who do you like better?

Bottom line: Do create videos to market your business on YouTube, but don’t expect your videos to get a gazillion views overnight without promotion. Be yourself when making videos, and always keep the viewer in mind through each step of the process.

…regardless of whether they’re written blog posts or video blog posts. And this can even work on pre-launch videos for your new product launch.

You’ve got traffic, you create great blog posts – and yet only a handful of people bother to comment. Frustrating, isn’t it? You work hard to make a great blog post with lots of information your readers can use, but it feels like nobody cares. Worse yet, your blog has the appearance of a ghost town. After all, the more comments your posts receive, the more popular your blog appears. And let’s face it, everyone wants to be part of something BIG, something that others are involved with.

So how do you get more replies to your blog posts? And for that matter, how do you get people to reply to your pre-product-launch posts and videos? Here are 5 methods I’ve found that work…

1. Ask them. That’s right – sometimes it can be as simple as asking them to take the action. Ask them to respond to your post or to a specific question you place at the end of the post. Don’t make it a difficult question; Asking whether they prefer chunky peanut butter or smooth peanut butter will pull far more responses than asking how to achieve world peace. (I’m exaggerating the point here, but you get my meaning.)

2. Bribe them. Offer them one of your paid products for free when they leave a comment. You can either give the product to everyone who comments, or to the best comment, or 5 comments chosen at random, etc. Choose a product that your readers are likely to want, and if you’re awarding the bribe to everyone, be sure to send it within 24 hours of their posted comment. If you’re awarding it to the best comment(s) or to several comments at random, post the winners on your site so that a) your readers know you really gave away the prize and b) it becomes an incentive for them to post a reply to your next blog entry. After all, if someone else won last time, they’ll be thinking they’ve got a shot at winning this time.

3. Make it a contest. Again, you’re offering a bribe, only this time it’s monetary. For example, offer $100 to the poster who provides the most innovative answer to your question, or to the one who gives the funniest response, etc. Either you can choose the winner, or you can let your readers vote and choose the winner for you. (HINT: This method is also a great way to find out what your reader’s biggest challenges are – thus giving you great ideas for new products your readers WANT to purchase.)

4. Give away the launch. If you’re launching a new product, give away copies of your new product to the best replies to your post and videos, as well as to random posters. This way you get both the posts that take an effort, and the quickie posts from those who don’t want to take a lot of time posting a well thought out answer. This will increase the excitement, increase the exposure of your launch, and can result in some pre-launch testimonials from those who won the product.

5. Be controversial. Taking on topics that hold any kind of controversy will almost always get people talking. People love to take sides, express their opinions, and even get into a discussion. Watch for topics in your niche that spark definite opinions and blog about those – and the replies will naturally come.

6. BONUS Method: While you’re giving rewards out, don’t limit yourself to replies to your posts and videos. Also reward your readers for re-tweeting your content, telling others, referring others, etc. People will jump through hoops for you if you…

a) Are offering great content
b) Make it easy to jump through hoops for you and
c) You reward them for jumping!

Bottom Line: It’s a matter of training your readers to reply to your posts. The more you work to encourage their participation, the more it will become a habit for them to reply. Also take note of which threads tend to get the most response – these are topics that hit hot buttons, and you might want to blog about them more often.

You already know how important content is for communicating your message, getting traffic and making sales. But you might be overlooking a few things that make your content truly great…

Write for your readers, NOT for the search engines. Sometimes we get so caught up in optimizing our content for SEO that we forget we’re really writing for our readers and not Google. Create content that is useful for people, that helps them, educates them and entertains them. Make SEO your second priority in writing your content, not your first. Otherwise your traffic isn’t going to get past your second paragraph before they’re closing your site and moving on to someone else’s.

Write for your readers, NOT for a certain platform. Today all we hear about is social media and everyone wants to know what to put on Facebook, or what to Tweet and so forth to make money. Again, this is the wrong approach and if taken it will cost you. Instead, identify what your users want, and THEN consider which platforms are best for delivering your content. It’s not about Facebook, YouTube, your blog and etc., it’s about giving people what they want.

Don’t be a control freak. It’s easy to fall into the mindset that all of your content must be published on your website so you can stay in control of it, but that thinking will only limit the number of people you reach. Instead, build your content to travel so that it can be downloaded, embedded or shared – thus capturing many more eyeballs and driving those eyeballs back to your site. Think of your content as ambassadors traveling the world to tell others about you, and sending those people to your site. The more your content travels, the more people it will reach, and the more traffic it can then send back to you.

Be fruitful. Are you writing one article or one blogpost a week? Try stepping it up to one a day, or even more. Release as much great content as you can, and don’t get stuck in one rigid rut, either. Develop a range of different content and see what garners both the most eyeballs and the most response. Pay attention to user feedback – they’ll tell you what’s working, what they love, and what they want more of.

Be open. So you planned a series of videos on topic A, and during the second video you mentioned topic B, and people went nuts asking for more information. What to do? Simple – give them what they want. You can finish your series later if you like, but right now you’ve struck gold and you need to mine it for all it’s worth. Give them great content on Topic B, interview an expert or two on that topic, offer them affiliate products on that topic, and so forth. Sometimes we hit pay dirt when we least expect it, and the most foolish thing you can do is NOT jump on it immediately. Money loves speed, and customers love to have their desires satisfied NOW.

Don’t create your content and run. When you make a blog post, go back and ANSWER the replies you get. When you Tweet, stay on Twitter to respond to the responses you get, and so forth. Your follow-up interaction says as much about you as your content, and if you do it right, it says that you’re not just looking to make a fast buck and you DO care about your readers. Which is not only the classy thing to do – it’s also the most profitable in the end.

Twitter is all about relationships, growing your circle of influence, and yes, RELATIONSHIPS. The better (re: closer) your relationships on Twitter, the more likely people are to retweet your stuff, visit your Facebook page and websites, join your lists and buy your products. So how do you rapidly grow your Twitter following while wielding influence over your followers? Here are 5 tips….

1. Be Yourself. Oftentimes people think they’re somehow ‘not good enough,’ and so they pretend to be something they’re not. The problem is people can smell a phony a mile away. Don’t attempt to be Mr. Know-it-All or Ms. Perfect because nobody is buying that nonsense, and even if they were, they want to know REAL people with real lives, real challenges, and real things to say. Always stay true to yourself because you are a one-of-a-kind original, and as they say, everyone else is already taken anyway.

2. Appreciate Your Followers. Retweet their best tweets (or the tweets that are the most important to them.) Give them a #FF, which means you’re recommending others follow them. Or even send them a direct message. In other words, don’t just interact – promote others and expect nothing in return. The more value you can give to others, the more they will like you, appreciate you, and want to reciprocate.

3. Connect With The Big Dogs. Whatever your niche is, find the influential people in your niche and engage them. Being seen with people in authority is one of the quickest ways to be seen as an authority yourself. Plus, their audience will also notice you, and you’ll gain followers who hold an avid interest in your particular niche.

4. Engage Engage Engage. Answer everyone who engages with you, and see how many followers you can engage yourself. You never know who is going to become your next big client or customer – it could be that new guy with only 5 followers as easily as it could be the seasoned Twitter person with 50,000 followers.

5. Add a Heap of Pizzazz. We’ve already said you need to be yourself, and this is perhaps the best advice anyone can give you. That said, it’s okay to take yourself up a notch. You are unique, so go ahead and amplify that uniqueness and be a little bit larger than life. Be friendlier than you are in real life, be a little bit more flamboyant, go ahead and have opinions (your REAL opinions, that is) and by all means, STAND OUT from the crowd. That last thing you want to do is be a wallflower.

And even if you’re shy in real life, that’s okay. This is the Internet, and so it’s not like trying to be the life of the party in real life – it’s more like portraying yourself in the best light, with the most fun, and the least inhibitions. Frankly, there is no better place for shy people than Twitter – it’s a great way to meet tons of people with absolutely zero risk. After all, you don’t have to send a tweet until you’re certain it says exactly what you want it to say – so you can get it right every time.

6. Have fun. Need I say more? People like to hang out with people who are having fun, and Twitter is no different. So go ahead, have a blast, let the good times roll, and watch your follower numbers increase accordingly!

Okay, so you don’t know anything about SEO, and frankly you don’t want to learn.

It’s not your ‘thing.’

But naturally you want your best sites to rank really high in the natural search results.

So what should you do?

Most marketers will hire someone at $10 or $20 an hour to do it for them.

The problem with this is most of those $10 or $20 an hour workers don’t actually make money by ranking their own sites.

Which is to say, they’re not the best of the best at SEO.

Do you know who is? People who DO get their own sites to the top of Google.

The problem, though, is these experts are more likely to charge you $1,000 an hour for their efforts.

So here’s what you do: Hire a true expert to tell you what needs to be done in 30 minutes for half his hourly rate.

Record the call.

Then hire the $20 an hour SEO person to apply what you learned from the true SEO pro.

Blogging can be a great way to position yourself as an authority and create customer loyalty – if you’re willing to devote the time necessary.

Follow these 9 Tips for Better Business Blogging and you’ll be more successful!

1. Forgo the advertorial dribble. Decades ago some bright entrepreneur realized that if he wrote his sales copy to look like an editorial, he’d get more readers and more sales. Thus we entered into the age of the “advertorial,” and it still works in print publications. Where it does NOT work well is on your blog.

Yes, by all means advertise your products and services on your website, but don’t be devious about it. Don’t make it look like an article when it’s really a self-promotion – it annoys your readers and makes them feel let down when you’ve got them thinking they’re going to learn something new, only to discover they’ve got to pay to get it.

Thus, do not title your blog post, “Revealed: 35 Ways to Drive Traffic” and then reveal nothing about driving traffic except the order link to your new product. Instead, title your blog post, “Revealed: 5 Ways to Drive Traffic,” and then GIVE them the 5 ways. At the end, let them know that if they’re interested, you reveal 30 additional methods inside your product and give them the link. They’ll respect you for this, and because you’ve given them good information and demonstrated that you know what you’re talking about, it will actually INCREASE your sales.

2. Be the authority. This goes along with Tip #1, because when you’re dishing about all the latest updates in your industry rather than spending all your time promoting yourself, you become the expert in your prospects’ eyes. And who do people want to do business with? The expert. Who can charge more for their products and services? Again, the expert. Offer up the latest news along with plenty of how-to articles and your readers will come to like and trust you, and thus want to do business with you.

3. Educate, inform and inspire. Whenever possible, use real life stories to inspire your readers. Nothing sells like success, and people love to read how others have overcome the same challenges they’re having. Whenever you’re stuck for a blog post idea, just think, “What do my readers want to know? How can I help my readers and give them value?” Watch the forums for questions that pop up – this is an excellent source for ideas.

4. Show your personality. Building reader loyalty takes time and more than just great information – it also takes personality. Let your own unique style shine through in your posts, and don’t be afraid to reveal insights about yourself, and to even be controversial when it’s called for. Nothing rallies readers like a good controversy, and nothing makes readers more loyal than if they know you well enough to think of you as a friend.

5. Promote your blog. It would be great if you could write it and people would come, but it’s seldom that easy. Use your own network to promote your blog by letting them know each time you’ve made a new post. Guest write for other blogs to promote your own blog. And always ask people to share your blog with others.

6. Ask readers to reply. The more active your blog is, the more appealing it is to new and old readers alike. Always ask your readers to leave their comments on each of your blog posts. You might even consider running a contest to see who can write the best response, and give a prize to the winner.

Whatever it takes to increase comments is something you should consider. Not only does it make your blog appear that much more active and universally liked – it also provides a sense of ownership to each person who takes the time to leave a comment. The more they comment, the more likely they are to tell others about your blog and to return to your blog in the future. And be sure to respond to your reader’s comments so they know they’re being heard and appreciated.

7. Don’t blog unless you really want to. Blogging is a commitment, and while it might seem exciting and fun in the beginning, writing a new blog post every day or two can get old, especially after the first couple of weeks when you feel like nobody’s been reading it. If you’re not sure you can keep a blog rolling, consider writing guest posts for other blogs, websites and email newsletters. Every publisher is looking for new material, and being the guest blogger or writer puts you in front of an entirely new audience of prospects each time.

8. If you’re guest blogging, write a GREAT resource box. Offer them something intriguing with tremendous value for going to your site, and then deliver above and beyond their expectations. This is an excellent method of increasing your list of prospects and becoming well known in your niche.

9. Interview the big dogs. Interviewing others in your niche not only produces great content – it also provides you with powerful contacts and access to their readers when they mention the interview to their own people. So go ahead and ask others in your niche for interviews – the worst they can do is say no, and you’ll be surprised how many quickly say yes. Remember, they want to increase their own readership as well, and it’s a tremendous ego boost to be sought out and interviewed as an expert in their industry.

If there is a Tip #10, it is this: Have fun. Whatever it takes to make your blog writing fun is what you should do, since your enjoyment and passion for your topic will shine through in your posts. The more fun you’re having writing your blog, the more enjoyable it will be for readers to visit and linger.

So yes, have a blast, add humor, don’t be afraid to hold yourself up as an example to your readers, (both good and bad,) put your heart and soul into it, and go for it!

Millions have tried, millions are trying right now and millions will continue to try in the years ahead. There is so much misinformation out there regarding making money online, that you can easily be forgiven for thinking that all these millions are enjoying unbridled success.

The real truth of course is that the vast majority are failing. Their hopes of earning a healthy living from home are usually shattered before they have even begun. There is no single reason for this. It’s usually down to a combination of factors, and I intend to look at some of the reasons for the now infamous quote, “95% of people fail in their online business”. Some of the things I list below will doubtless be contested by many people but the harsh facts are that making money online, whilst entirely possible, is not the cakewalk that a lot of people will try to convince you it is.

So, let’s get down to debunking some of the nonsense – hopefully this will save a lot of people a lot of time and frustration.

1) Affiliate Marketing – so much rubbish is spouted by so many people who have never made an affiliate sale in their lives. The affiliate marketing model is indeed a powerful one and has made a number of people very wealthy. However, you are very unlikely to succeed with affiliate marketing without going through an arduous and sometimes lengthy learning process.

A huge swathe of articles you read about affiliate marketing are no more than rehashed PLR articles being used by lame hopefuls who are incapable of writing anything original on a subject that they are hoping to convince you they know all about. You can spot these peddlers of fifth hand information easily enough – look at the sites they link to, check their traffic rankings. Ninety Nine times out of a hundred you will find a cookie cutter website just like thousands of others or a direct link to an affiliate program that they foolishly believe you will sign up for having read their blindingly convincing pitch.

Are they the people to look to for advice? Think before you answer…….

2) Freebie Seekers and Freeloaders – this encompasses so many people it’s laughable. They talk about their “business” and seriously expect others to follow their blind lead. The term “business”, at least to my mind, indicates some sort of investment on behalf of the owner of that business – both in terms of time and money. Those most guilty of this faux pas are usually those who sign up to a free program, usually in the network marketing or MLM arena, and use every useless and pointless form of promotion as long as it’s free.

Much is said regarding failure rates in MLM schemes being so high, but one of the biggest is the freebie mentality. Don’t get sucked into believing you will ever make money online this way. The freeloaders are kidding themselves, but don’t let them kid you. The programs they sign up to for free often offer a paid upgrade and they live in hope (if they ever manage to recruit a single person of course) that they will grow fat on the subscriptions of others. Naturally this rarely happens, simply because they advertise to other freeloaders who have no intention of spending any money on their “business” either, and so the vicious circle continues.

If you don’t believe me, visit any free traffic exchange and look at some of the webpages circulating there. These people are dreamers – they will never make money online until they accept that they are eventually going to have to spend money to make money. Let’s get real here – when you’re looking for potions or energy drinks or some other latest greatest product that is no more than a copy of an already well established brand, is the first place you think to look going to be a free classified site on the internet? Maybe you’d head for the closest traffic exchange? Think – you don’t have to do it for more than a few seconds to see why these things do not work!

3) Throwing up a blog on a free platform and filling it up with Adsense or other PPC ads is unlikely to deliver much success. This applies whether we are talking one blog or fifty blogs. Adsense is great, but it’s also a numbers game – you need big numbers in terms of pages and visitors to make big returns. By big, I mean big – tens of thousands of pages receiving tens of thousands of visitors and you will probably start making a nice income. Throwing up fifty, a hundred or more useless blogs or splogs won’t work even if some people tell you that all you need are a couple of Adsense clicks a day on each one and you’ll be raking in the money. Great theory, but you won’t get the traffic to even generate those occasional clicks in the first place. Throwing up such poor quality free pages will achieve nothing – in fact, you’re more likely to get banned from Blogger and Adsense to boot if you’re not careful. Oh, and don’t think you’ll be smart and use auto surf sites to rack up huge numbers of impressions – using any kind of traffic exchange in conjunction with Adsense will get you banned very quickly.

Our freebie seekers of course will tell you otherwise, expecting you to believe that their PR0 blog with no comments is really generating a thousand dollars for them every month, and that all you need to do is visit this or that site, where you can learn to do exactly the same. You will naturally be directed to a page through an affiliate link – Clickbank or similar – to purchase an ebook that the freebie seeker has naturally never laid eyes on, let alone read.

4) Making millions with PPC advertising. This is a no brainer – all you have to do is pick some keywords, write a snappy ad, link to an affiliate program and give your credit card details to Google, Yahoo, MSN or whoever. You will wake up rich beyond your wildest dreams.

OK, maybe too heavy on the sarcasm, but it’s really not that easy. Ask anyone who has rushed blindly into PPC and lost their shirt in the process, paying for a truckload of clicks but generating nary a sale. I have a little more sympathy for these types than the freeloaders; after all, they have accepted that they need to spend money to make money, but unless you do your homework, it’s likely to prove costly. Even if you do your research beforehand, there are no guarantees that PPC campaigns will work for your business. Having said all that, PPC can be a very profitable tool, just don’t believe overly hyped claims from the totally inexperienced.

5) Start a blog and you will soon be collecting checks on a regular basis. Don’t believe this one either. There is a lot to be said for blogs as a marketing tool, don’t get me wrong. Blogs can and do increase your exposure tremendously, but apart from an elite few, blogs are usually not their direct revenue generators. A blog is a tool, and used wisely it will help an online business to grow, but it’s unlikely to pay the bills all by itself.

6) Article marketing – another area where a lot of ill informed and overly hyped prose is written. As a long term strategy, carried out correctly, article marketing can be hugely beneficial to a business of any kind, but it takes time to see results and there is a learning curve to go through.

I actually saw someone advocating the tactic of blanket bombing article directories with PLR articles and slapping affiliate links into the resource box. This was in an article submitted to one of my directories. They even went as far as to claim that this would guarantee a huge number of hits and sales. This is just one piece of foolish nonsense from a clueless fool, who, no doubt is wondering why article marketing is so useless, whilst trying to tell others how rich it will make them. It is a fact that most article directories do not permit linking directly to affiliate programs in the resource box! It follows that this is hardly the way to proceed.

7) Work from home opportunities have become a breeding ground for scams and hucksters the world over. Global opportunities for peddlers of schemes and tricks to make themselves rich have never been more plentiful.

There are several “opportunities” circulating at the moment that are borderline illegal and when they disappear into the ether there will no doubt be plenty to replace them.

Promises of overnight riches rarely hold much water if you examine them even superficially. Just because you see a video of someone opening envelopes full of cash does not make it so. One “gifting” program of this nature has obviously sucked in a fair number of gullible souls who really believe that people will be queuing up to send them three thousand dollars just because they show them a poor quality video on a traffic exchange.

Have you ever managed to sell a product online for three thousand dollars or more? I’m guessing the answer in most cases is – probably not. If you fall for this kind of scam, you probably deserve to get rooked – after all, how difficult is it for someone to get three thousand in cash (there are plenty of ways), go to FedEx, mail it to themselves and then film it’s arrival and subsequent opening on a webcam. If that’s all the proof it takes to convince you, you have some painful lessons to learn.

Whenever you read outlandish claims offering boatloads of money and retirement before you’ve even started working, in conjunction with proclamations that you don’t have to sell anything, don’t have to advertise, don’t have to do anything at all really, other than sit back and watch the money roll in…..and you find yourself believing it – my advice is to seek professional help.

8) Making money with sites that pay you to read ads, emails, visit sites, sign up for free offers, etc. I’m not saying that none of them work but in terms of time expended set against financial reward, they are usually a dismal prospect. Would you go and do a job for $20 a month?

There you have just eight of countless things that you should not believe. Trust me there are plenty more.

If you are serious about making money online, you are going to need a plan. You are going to have to spend some money to get yourself set up to do business. You will need a website of your own for starters (unless you intend to buy a hundred ebooks and courses telling you how to succeed without even this most basic of needs). This means hosting fees. If you are starting from a position of very little technical knowledge, you will have to dedicate a lot of time to learning the ropes or you will have to pay for the services of others. With most things online, the sooner you bow to the inevitability of having to lay out a little cash as you go along, the sooner you will start to open up some real possibilities.

There are countless ways to make money online, there are many people who are living proof of this, but try not to get caught up in the rubbish.

I have not mentioned things like stock or currency trading simply because they are not scams. Trading online can be lucrative and you won’t need a website of your own for this kind of venture but you will need capital, and you need to understand the risks, which are not insignificant.

However, that’s all a subject for another day. As grandpa said, free advice is often pretty much worth what you pay for it. Just be careful what you believe in your quest for online wealth and you’ll avoid a lot of wasted time and disappointments.

There IS plenty of free information on the internet and there are also plenty of free tools and software and services that may help you – but – you are starting a business and business means you will need some business capital to get off the ground. If you think otherwise and persist in looking for the elusive, no cost magic bullet, you are destined to fail and I don’t care what any rehashed nonsense some self help book tells you about irrefutable laws of nature or anything else. You need to do a lot more than just dream about online success if you wish to achieve it.

A closing thought – money may well make the world go round. If nobody spends any, nobody receives any. If you can find me something that disproves that 100%, tell me where to sign up.

A hermit lived high on a mountain top above a township, and every day as the people below him scurried around, doing their daily tasks, the old hermit would watch.

He had everything that he needed on his mountain, there was plenty of food and supplies, he had a small vegetable garden near his cabin, and he kept a few animals to supply his needs, near a rock pool filled with water that flowed down from further up the mountain.

His life was quiet and content, after breakfast and his morning chores, he would make his lunch and take it to the rocky outcrop where he could sit and watch the activity in the town below.

The town was a long way down, the people running around performing their daily deeds seemed like ants to him, but even through all the bustle and busyness it seemed so peaceful. It looked to him like a great ballet or dance.

He watched the activities in the town every day, finally he decided that he would go down to the town and experience this beautiful ballet for himself. He took his coat and started down the mountain. As he descended, he started to hear strange noises, the closer he got to the town, the louder they became.

Finally, he reached the foot of the mountain. The noise here was almost deafening, everywhere he turned there were people rushing around doing tasks he couldn’t even begin to understand, as he tried to walk through the streets, he was getting pushed and jostled by the crowds of people.

He could not understand where the peaceful and beautiful ballet had gone.

Unable to take it anymore, the hermit fled from the town, back to the safety of his mountaintop. Arriving home, he went to the outcrop and looked down again upon the town, to his amazement the beauty and silence had returned. He could still see all the ants rushing around below, but there was no noise anymore, all the screaming sounds and mixture of voices were gone, replaced with the serene silence he had always heard before.

He sat down and stared in amazement, asking himself how could such peaceful beauty come from such noisy chaos?

In our lives and businesses, we’ll often feel overwhelmed by what’s going on around us, but is it really the stressful pressure-cooker we believe it to be? When we feel overwhelmed, our natural response is to give up, to break down. But instead whenever you feel those times approaching, try to step away from the daily issues and look back at them from afar.

Often, you’ll find that the situation or decision that you have lost control of, that is stressing you out, when you step away from it and see it without all the other clutter, it’s not half as bad as you think, and often when you view it from the outside (looking inwards) you can see the solution clearer than you would when you’re right inside the problem.

Each day, take a moment out, step outside of your business, your problems, find your ‘mountaintop’ and look down on your life from there.

It’s all about your perspective, when the one you have isn’t serving you, simply get up and go to another side of it.

If you look at the wealthiest people in America today – Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Dell, Paul Allen – you’ll notice they’re all first generation multi-billionaires.

And here’s the wonderful thing: If you do what other successful people do, you’ll eventually get a similar result to what they got, depending on things like timing and market, of course.

But let’s say you only do 1/10th as good. Or even 1/100th or 1/1000th. That’s still better than if you did nothing.

So look at what successful people do. Copy them in your own way. Expect it to take work. And time. And lots of effort.

And then be proud of your results, whatever they might be.

This is the ONE thing you must have that makes everything else fall into place.

Here’s a riddle for you:

What one thing MUST you have that gives everything in your life purpose and makes your life far more exciting? And when you don’t have it, everything is dull, boring and monotonous?

Let me put it another way – are you leaping out of bed in the morning, eager to get going?

Are you excited to work 12 hours in a day?

Do you look forward to your future so much, you almost can’t sleep at night?

If not, then you don’t have a big, fat, hairy goal – that one thing you want more than anything else in this world.

This should be a goal that gets you so revved up, you cannot stop thinking about it and working on it. You want to put in long hours and do whatever it takes – no matter how scary or new – to make it happen because it means so much to you.

This goal is your reason for living and because of it you look forward with eager anticipation towards the future.

You’ve heard plenty of stories about overnight successes.

Someone starts a company and BAM! They sell that company for 10 million or maybe 100 million dollars.

And all you can think is, “Wow, I wish I could do that!”

You can. All it takes is several years of working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week on your big hairy goal.

That – believe it or not – is how you become an overnight success.

When you hear about the 7 or 8 figure sale of a new company, what you don’t hear about is the long hours the founder put in to make that company work.

So how can you possibly put in such crazy hours? It’s easy, when it’s your big goal. When it’s what you want to do more than anything else, then it becomes as pleasurable to you as hobbies are to other people.

Find your big fat hairy goal, whatever it might be. And then don’t let anything stop you from achieving that goal.