Your Brain, Your Business, Your Life

I like my brain.

It's been very good to me, despite those four-and-a-half years of intensive neuron slaughter, otherwise known as college.

So I really liked the book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.

Author John Medina, a molecular biologist with a gift for clear writing, shares the latest science and its implications for your brain, your business, your marketing, your family, and your life.

Here are three takeaways from the book, which can help you improve your business from the inside ...

1) Exercise boosts brain power

Your brain evolved to survive in jungles and prairies, after our early ancestors routinely walked an average of 12 miles a day in search of (and in avoidance of becoming) food. As a result, your brain is NOT meant to sit in a cubicle or a classroom for 8 hours a day.

Think about it: The smartest senior citizens you know are probably the most active. And most of history's greatest thinkers were physically active: Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, and Douglas MacArthur all had a habit of pacing as they thought or taught, for example.

If you do nothing more than aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at time, two or three times a week, your brain will benefit. But don't stop there. Break up your workday with physical activity, such as walking, biking, or stretching.

2) Sleep well, think well

A lack of sleep retards your ability to pay attention, remember, reason logically, solve problems, or do any other thinking. For best results, your work schedule should match your productive times, whether it be morning, evening, or someplace in between.

And -- here's the fun part -- your businesses should encourage a nap in mid-afternoon, when productivity sags for almost everyone. So, instead of a Red Bull at 3:00, try a 20-minute siesta.

3) Vision trumps all other senses

Our brains see and think in pictures. Visual processing dominates how we interpret the world, with about half your brain power devoted to vision. As a result, pictures are easier to remember than words.

This has vast implications for your marketing and presentation efforts. Here are two:

• Include pictures in your ads. Research shows that the eye is always drawn to pictures and  remembers them better than words alone. (A tough pill to swallow for a copywriter like me who loves words!)
  
• Delete your presentations and start over. The typical PowerPoint business presentation has almost 40 words per slide. More pictures and fewer words would capture and hold an audience's attention far better.

There are way too many more useful tidbits than I have time to share here. If you love your brain, you owe it to yourself to read this book soon :-)


Oh, and in the spirit of including pictures, here's one of the book ...

Accidental Guerrilla Marketing - The Apple Backpack

Instead of throwing it out, my wife (at left) turned her shopping bag from the Apple Store into a backpack.

She is now an unpaid human billboard for Apple.

Did Steve Jobs plan this? I wouldn't put it past him.

More likely, this is a case of accidental "guerrilla marketing" ... the kind that happens when your company has legions of raving fans.

If you own a business, how could you make it easier for customers to "guerrilla" market your products or services?

The best way, of course, is to create raving fans who wear your bags or tattoo your logo onto their bodies.

But that could take years and cost millions of dollars.

Instead, how about:

• Shipping your products wrapped in company T-shirts instead of bubble wrap?
• Offering $100 for the most-creative use of your product's package, like making it into a hat?
• Mailing refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, or other tchotchkes with your product (or invoices), then offering a $100 reward for the best customer photo posted on Flickr?

If you're good at what you do, customers will happily market your business in ways you never thought of. All you have to do is give them a chance ... and a little push.

(More ideas like these in my Free Report, Guaranteed Marketing for Service Business Owners.)

The Hidden Payback for Taking Notes - Worth $5,000

Mitch Joel makes excellent points in a blog posting about the value of taking notes:

Too many people think of taking notes... and they immediately think of school. They think of note taking as some kind of linear, clean and formulated process. It doesn't have to be. In fact, some of the best notes are the ones that would never make sense to anybody else, and they are the ones that you never look at again either. For years, I've taken notes in meetings. I hardly ever go back to them. In those instances, it's the act of writing them down that helps me to remember and focus. In other instances, I'll take notes to refer back to once (like ideas for a Blog post), but then there's no more need for them.

Taking notes at meetings or seminars has two obvious paybacks ...

1) Writing sharpens and reinforces your thoughts.

It's impossible to be muddle-headed on paper. Or, as writer Rob Long said, "How do I know what I think until I see what I've written?"

When you jot down notes on what speakers say at a seminar or conference, for example, you sharpen the meaning of those words and drive them deeper into your brain, where they can germinate and grow into future thoughts.

2) Writing is more reliable than memory.

Ever left a grocery list at home and returned from the store to a 150-decibel butt-chewing from the spouse, because you forgot to buy milk? Enough said. Memory is fine, but notes are better.

But wait ...

There's an additional, "hidden" payback to taking careful notes at seminars, especially if you secretly hate to network (like me).

You know you should network, but you can't or won't talk to strangers and swap business cards.

So, here's the hidden payback: You can meet any person you want to, at a seminar or conference, by offering your notes to them afterwards.

I do it all the time. It's as easy as tying your shoes. Here's how ...

1) Attend a seminar.

2) Take careful notes. Save them in a PDF document, along with your contact information.

3) Email them to the event organizer, or upload them to the event blog, or do something else to let attendees know you are offering your notes, to provide another perspective on what was said at the event.

If you do nothing more than this, you will make new contacts when people download your notes and contact you with their thanks.

To take it further, however, reach out to people you wanted to meet at the seminar. Email your notes to them and say, "We didn't get a chance to talk, but I thought you might like to look over my notes. I hope you find them helpful."

Now.

How about if I follow my own advice?

I'd like to give you my speaker notes from a three-day, $5,000 Jay Abraham seminar.

The speakers were phenomenal: Seth Godin, Stephen R. Covey, Stephen M.R. Covey, Marshall Thurber, John Assaraf, Donald Moine, Andy Miller, and others. If you can't find at least a dozen money-making ideas from these 25 pages of notes, you ought to move to Cuba ...

You can download the $5,000 notes here.

Auto Wrap Marketing: The Incredible ROI

Here's a great, low-cost, "guerrilla" way to market your small business: an auto wrap.

Kim Hutchens, co-owner (with her husband Rod) of The Musik Haus Studios in Maple Grove, Minnesota, says this marketing tactic paid for itself with the first student who signed up after seeing it, in 2001. "When we first got the car, we were getting calls like crazy," she told me.

All the new business since then has been pure gravy. That's a pretty incredible return on investment, eh?

Along with word-of-mouth, this creative car is the main form of advertising for The Musik Haus. "We get comments all the time, it's fun to drive, and people love it," she says.

It's been so effective that her husband Rod is talking about adding a second vehicle to the fleet. "He wants a big truck," says Hutchens.

Great marketing doesn't have to cost a lot. Creativity and fun go a long way -- and don't cost anything.

Think: How committed are you to making your business succeed? Enough to change what you wear or drive around town? If you're hesitating, what's that say about your commitment level?

You don't have to do a full wrap of the family minivan -- FedEx Kinko's can create a magnetic sign for your car for less than $100.

And don't forget t-shirts (pay 10 college students to wear them), bumper stickers (pay 10 local moms to adorn their baby buggies) ... even Segways can carry a message.

Thanks, fullblitzmedia.com

(Kevin M. Donlin is author of the Special Report, Guaranteed Marketing for Small Business Professionals.) 

Rare Copywriting Secrets from a Legend: Eugene Schwartz

If you're in business, you must sell to survive.

Much of that selling may be face-to-face with customers. But that puts a ceiling on your potential -- if your only way to sell is in person or by phone, you can only make so many sales a day.

To really expand your business, you must capture your best sales pitch and tell the world -- in print, on TV or radio, or online.

And how do you capture your best sales pitch in words? Copywriting.

If you've studied copywriting -- the art and science of selling with words -- you should know about Claude Hopkins, Victor Schwab, John Caples, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, and John Carlton, to name but six copywriting legends.

All but the last two wrote excellent books that you should buy from Amazon, then READ multiple times.

But there's a seventh "lost" master who many think was one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived.

His ideas are still "swiped" today by in-the-know marketers. His specialty was direct-mail advertising -- the most difficult and competitive form of copywriting.

His name was Eugene Schwartz.

Before dying in 1995, Eugene Schwartz wrote several books on copywriting, including the masterly "Breakthrough Advertising."

But today, I've got a special treat for you ...

You see, in addition to writing about it, Gene spoke and taught about copywriting to audiences of lucky marketers.

Such seminars were rare, however. Only one, from October 1993, was transcribed that I know of. Another, from May 1994, was recorded on video. You can buy neither the transcript nor the video any more.

But I've got both of them in my library.

And I'm going to share two copywriting secrets from Eugene Schwartz with you now, taken from those "lost" lectures. They will deliver insights about business and marketing that you won't find anywhere else ...

1) Talk Little, Listen Much

Idea: According to Gene Schwartz, "Speak to everyone you can. Be the best listener you ever met. That is your market talking. You don't have to have great ideas if you can hear great ideas."

Application: Just today, a copywriting client of mine wrote to tell me about a sale one of my sales letters had made for him, selling a very expensive service.

Because it's the early stage of the service rollout, we put his phone number prominently on the web page, to encourage phone calls. This lets his prospects ask their most-pressing questions. The more questions you answer in a sales letter, the more you can sell.

His customer asked these two questions by phone:

1. What is an XYZ service?
2. How can you guarantee it?

I wrote back to my client: "Guess what I'm writing for you tomorrow? A P.P.S. in the sales letter to answer those two questions." And we're going to sell a lot more of his expensive service. Because we're listening to his market.

Are you listening to your customers? Your market? What are they trying to tell you?

2) The Creativity is Not in You. Never Mistake That

Idea: According to Gene Schwartz, "... the absolutely most talented copywriter in the world, who doesn't work very much, will be beaten by the copy cub who puts in four times as much work, because the creativity is not in you. Never mistake that. The creativity is in your market and in your product, and all you are doing is joining the two together. And the only way you can get the creativity out of your product and your market is to dig it out."

Application: Before you can sell it to anyone, you've got to know your product or service better than anyone. That requires many hours of painstaking research, to "dig out" every last benefit.

You can still see bullet points in sales letters today that are direct descendants of such Schwartz gems as these, unearthed after many hours of patient digging:

• Eat this one delicious food, and it will probably kill your "uncontrollable" craving for sweets, right on the spot! See page 122.
• Do you want to develop total concentration? Then turn to page 31 ... read the four simple questions taught to you there ... and see how those questions automatically rivet your attention to the other person's words ... keep your mind from wandering ... lets you store up his thoughts as though they were engraved on your memory
• The one fatal TIMING mistake that makes most people fat (90% of all overweight people do it). Not in this case, what you eat, but how you eat it. See page 19.

I've spent entire weekends combing through hundreds of pages of research, reports, books, and customer emails to dig out features and then turn them into benefits for a sales letter.

How many hours do you spend digging for gems in your products and services? If you're not willing to put in the effort, don't complain if the sales don't follow.

(For more ideas like these, download Guaranteed Marketing for Service Business Owners.)

You Can Laugh at Recession Worries, if Your Business Does This

You can laugh at recession worries if you ... increase your revenues with new ideas that your competitors can't match.

What's the easiest way to find new ideas to beat your competitors?

By borrowing them from non-competitors -- businesses in completely different industries.

Like McDonald's, which borrowed the idea of a drive-through window from ... banking.

Or Robert Stevens, founder of the Geek Squad, who borrowed part of the idea for their logo from ...

According to Rupert Hart, author of "Recession Storming," ideas are all around you, waiting to be borrowed.

He offers these two examples:

• How could you become the McDonald's of your industry, by offering a simple, limited menu of unparalleled consistency?
• How could you emulate H&R Block, by providing seasonal, personalized service at a reasonable price?

Think: How could you become the Apple of your industry, by borrowing from their product design? (Hint: take about 3-5 links off your home page, for a start -- Apple's design is as much about what they don't include in their products as what they do include.)

Or how could you become the Zappos of your industry, by borrowing from their customer service? (Hint: pick up the phone and call your customers. Zappos builds relationships, one customer at a time, often when their employees answer customer questions by phone.)

(Kevin M. Donlin is author of the Special Report, Guaranteed Marketing for Small Business Professionals.)

Work to Live or Live to Work?

Take a look at this gorgeous autumn photo of the Biosphere, in Montreal.

Now a question: On a day like this, would you rather drop everything and take your family for a walk along the river, or work?

If you'd rather walk than work, then you, like me, work to live.

You see success in business as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Here's my take on this age-old question of life balance ...

Since July 1 of this year, I've kept a special journal, in which I jot down 3-4 things I savored each day.

And here's what I found analyzing more than 270 journal entries over the past 90 days: Less than 5% of the best things in my life are things money can buy.

Examples of this 5%:

• "stack of books in mail from Amazon"
• "a big check for $____"
• "our newly redecorated basement room"

By contrast, about 95% of the best things in my life are free. They include:

• "morning coffee on the deck"
• "the Tigers in first place"
• "chicken dinner with laughter"
• "swimming in the lake"
• "watching the sunset from a bridge"
• "walking Ginger (my dog)"

The best things in life are free. Duh. You knew that, right?

But there's more ...

Most of the best things in life -- things that money can't buy -- are experiences, not things.

Yes, I had to buy the coffee and pay the contractors to build the deck, for example. But you can't buy the 30 minutes I woke up early and spent, coffee in hand, watching the sunrise sparkle on the creek out back.

Yes, you can buy a chicken dinner at a restaurant, but not the laughter -- that's priceless. Literally.

And so on.

So, don't let earning a living keep you from living. Money's nice, but the experiences are what count. And you need to unchain your butt from your desk to make those happen.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's Friday and the fall colors are peaking. It's time for a long lunch and a longer walk outside with my wife and dog ...

Meanwhile, if you want to put an end to "feast-or-famine" syndrome in your business, grab your free Client Cloning Kit here.