Internet Marketer Michael Rasmussen has some holiday advice for me.
It’s not the many advice that we getting right now.
Therefore, I feel that it’s good that I share it with you…

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“I’m sure you’ve seen the typical advice that seems to crush your email inbox every year at about this time.

That advice usually starts with something like, “You need to buy this to succeed….”

Well, no.

I’m not saying you should ignore every great deal you come across this holiday season, but I am saying you should use your head.

And I strongly recommend keeping your wallet in your pocket for a little while.

Instead, give yourself a gift most people who are trying to make an income online never do.

The gift you should give yourself this holiday season is the gift of honesty.

This might make you uncomfortable, but it’s well worth feeling that way for a just a little while.
The results can be phenomenal.

When I say honesty, I mean you need to be honest with yourself about your Internet business.

It’s easy to fool ourselves.
I’ve done it, and I’m sure you have too.
It’s part of being human.

But if you ever want to succeed, you need to tell yourself the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in three areas…

First, review your business in the year that’s coming to a close.

Ask yourself how you did, whether you accomplished your goals or not and where you fell short.

Most people reach the end of each year and find themselves completely confused about why they’re where they are.
It’s almost like they weren’t paying attention for the past twelve months!

The easier explanation is that they’ve simply been busy, usually too busy to assess much of anything.

I can remember years ago being so distracted by the end of the year that I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing.
It was like I was running on autopilot.

That’s a common reality for Internet marketers.
It seems like there’s always a launch of this or that “vital” product, and time is always short.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from mentors in my business is that you just can’t succeed if you’re constantly busy.
You must take some time to work ON your business instead of working IN it all the time.

Take advantage of the traditional retail “lull” time between Christmas and New Years to take a serious look at what happened in the past year.

Second, assess WHY you got the results you did.

This is a little harder than simply reviewing what happened, but it’s even more important.

Ask yourself WHY you didn’t accomplish the things you failed to accomplish, and ask yourself why the stuff that succeeded actually worked.
It’s important to do both.

The first part helps you see what you still need to learn.
The second one helps you see what you already DID learn…
because it worked!

Let’s start with the things that didn’t work out like you had hoped they would.

This isn’t about judging yourself too harshly or tearing yourself down.
I’m not suggesting that you get extremely negative about yourself here.

What I’m saying is, pull no punches.

You have just reviewed the results for the year.
Now that you know the unvarnished truth about how things turned out, try to figure out why things went like they did.

You’ll probably find one of three causes:

1) You made a mistake of some kind.
Hey, we all do it.
Figure out what mistake you made, and what you should learn from it.

2) You didn’t follow through.
This is an easy trap to fall into.
You might see that you started the year with the idea that you were going to do a certain project…
and by the middle of the year, you had forgotten about it and dropped it.

3) Something stood in your way.
This could be an external factor, like a family crisis, or an internal one, like…
(this is where you’ll need some more honesty, in a very deep way).

If you started out with a good plan, but it seemed like you hit a brick wall for no good reason, it’s time to look inside yourself.

Maybe you feared failure.
That’s common, and it can be a killer.

Maybe you thought you actually didn’t deserve to succeed.
That’s also common, and it holds a lot of people back because they unconsciously sabotage their own
success (yes, it happens).

You need to dig into yourself and resist the urge to blame every failure or shortcoming on something else. Sometimes it’s YOU.

But what about the stuff that went well?
That’s the fun part, because it’s where you get to distill the lessons that helped you achieve REAL success during the year.

Analyze what worked and try to determine why it did.

Maybe you took a different approach than you had before, and it worked like a charm.

Maybe you got some help you didn’t get before, and it gave you extra boost you needed.

Maybe you learned a new skill that you didn’t have before, and it gave you a new advantage.

Once you have an idea about why the success happened (and guessing is fine, by the way), try to determine what lessons you can extract from it and apply to future projects.

Third, you need to be honest enough with yourself to realize that you might have some blind spots.

Recruit a trusted friend to help you see those!

Tell him or her that you want some help figuring out why the things that succeeded worked, and why the things that didn’t, didn’t.

Ask for real constructive feedback, even if it’s embarrassing or hurts a little.

Remember, your future success is riding on your ability to be honest with yourself, so be willing to take a risk when it comes to self-assessment.

And don’t think this is only an annual thing.
You can do this kind of self-assessment multiple times during the year, ideally after every project wraps
up.
That can keep you locked onto your success targets.

Just last year I found myself feeling like I was drowning.
I was crushingly busy.
It felt like I couldn’t breathe.

Because I’ve spent years doing this, and I’ve regularly been honest with myself annually about my business, I recognized the danger signs.

At that point, I took a step back so I could see what was going on and why.

What I saw was that I had slipped into the “busyness” trap again in a serious way.
I was so distracted by short-term commitments that I had lost sight of my plans for building my business for the long term.

So I was brutally honest with myself, and then I was honest with my partners.
I told them I was scaling back to get center myself and get back on the right road.

I got LOTS of email from folks telling me how inspirational that was…
because they were making the same mistake.

Like I said, this kind of honesty isn’t something most people ever engage in.
I think it’s why lots of people never succeed at all, or don’t succeed to the level they could.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll boost your chances.

So take some time before this year ends to be honest with yourself.
And next time I’ll tell you what steps to take to make next year a blowout success for you.”
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Happy New Year and to your success!

Visit my new blog at www.videoforemail.net
Learn Video Marketing And Send Video For Your eMail.

Click on the hyperlink www.videoforemail.net above and I will see you on the other side.

Greetings,

Internet Marketing Expert Michael Rasmussen sent me this lengthy but inspiring email.
I am sure he does not mind that I share it with you:
The following text in quotations was what he received from one of his readers.

“I’ve tried everything I know of to try.
Nothing works.
I’ve been scammed more times that I can count.
People have stolen my money and given me nothing.
After a few years of this, I don’t have any hope anymore.
It’s all a big lie. I give up!”

Believe me, I know how that guy feels.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I felt exactly the same way myself.
To say that was awful would be an understatement.

There really IS a lot of bad stuff out there in the Internet marketing industry.
There really are junky products that promise you the world and end up leaving you frustrated, and poorer.

I won’t say I’ve seen it all, because nobody really has, but I’ve seen most of it.

But this person’s problem is deeper than that.
His problem is negativity.

I know it’s easy to be negative when you get disappointed, or cheated, or misled.
We’re emotional beings, so having some negative feelings when those things happen is natural.

If you want to succeed, though, you need to get past negativity in a big way, and you need to do it soon.

There’s a LOT of fluff out there about getting rid of negativity in your life.
There’s a lot of fancy sounding stuff about having a positive attitude, using positive self-talk to improve your results, and so on.

Just because some of that stuff is too fluffy to be practical doesn’t mean the idea is nuts.

The simple fact is that you have a choice in life.
You can be positive, or you can be negative.
I won’t claim that you always have to be happy.
That’s crazy.

I will say, based on my own experience, that if you want to succeed, you need to be more positive than negative.
But you know, a positive attitude, while it’s important, can only take you so far.

It’s vital to think positively, stay on the bright side, not overreact to problems and all the other stuff you’ve heard about having a positive mental attitude.

But here’s the big life lesson I learned about positive thinking as I’ve built my own business…

Progress trumps a sunny attitude.

That’s a critically important lesson to learn.
You can try to have the best attitude in the world, but if you’re just sitting there making no progress, you
won’t be able to keep smiling for long.

What I had to do was figure out how to keep up my positive attitude by actually DOING something.
Fortunately, it’s not as hard as you might think.

The first thing you need to do is to set small, relatively short-term, achievable goals.

Achievement helps you stay positive.
It’s easy to prove this to yourself by picking a very small project you need to do around the house, maybe cleaning out a coat closet or something like that.

Finish the job. It doesn’t have to take hours.
It might take just a few minutes.
When you’re done, I guarantee that your sense of accomplishment will go up, and you’ll feel a little bit better about yourself.
That helps you stay positive.

The next thing to do is to attack your goals with a certain mindset…
treat any setback as you work toward your goal as an opportunity to learn.

All of us fail sometimes. We don’t achieve a goal, or it’s harder than we thought, or it takes more time than we thought.
That’s life.

If you encounter a setback, recognize that they’re inevitable, they hurt…
and they’re one hundred percent necessary if you ever want to succeed at anything.

Don’t just settle for being disappointed, though.
Treat the setback as a learning opportunity.

I can tell you from my own business that I’ve learned a ton from the mistakes I’ve made, and from the road blocks I’ve run into.

I remember back when I was just starting out, I made so many mistakes with an “opportunity” I came across that I was about ready to give up on my dream to make a living online.

When I look back on it, though, I learned a TON from that.
I dug into why it didn’t work.
I reached out to others to try to figure out what I did wrong.
That one experience taught me a huge amount about running my own business, and some great
relationships came out of it as well.

The next thing to do while you’re pursuing your goals is to surround yourself with positivity.

I know that sounds corny, but you need to know something…
negativity is like a disease.
If you expose yourself to it too much, you’ll probably get sick.

You need to fight that. Here are some simple ways to do it:

* Read positive stuff.
Read books about success by Brian Tracy and others.
Look at what successful people did, and how they handled failure and disappointment.

* Surround yourself with positive people.
One of the things that guy I told you about earlier probably did NOT do is surround himself with people who would encourage him not to give up.
You NEED to do that.
And sometimes (not all the time) that might even mean not spending as much time with a particular family member in your life who drags you down.

* Keep a record of the goals you achieve.
I told you to have small, achievable goal.
Make sure they’re measurable, too.
Keep track of what goals you achieved and when.
Whenever you get discouraged, pull out that list and see how much you’ve done!

None of those things is that hard to do, but if you don’t actively do it, you can find yourself spiraling down into negativity in no time.

And the final thing you need to do is find your own ways to stay positive.

This is different for everybody.
It’s highly personal.
Some people are naturally more positive than others, so it might be easier for them.
But here are some simple ways you might consider:

* Get an inspirational quotes calendar and keep it in front of you all day.
When you get down, read the quote and it can perk you up.

* Record affirming messages to yourself when you’re feeling very positive, then listen to them when you’re feeling negative.
That will feel a little awkward, but nobody knows you like you do.
You’ll tend to listen to yourself more than anyone else.

* Find somebody to hold you accountable.
This could be a friend, a family member, a religious leader…
anybody who will agree to do it.
When you’re feeling down, let that person encourage you to start thinking positively again.

Those are pretty easy to do, and they really do work.

That said, remember that positive thinking only works if you’re telling yourself the truth.
If you’re lying to yourself, it won’t help.

If you’re telling yourself that you succeed all the time, your brain knows that’s not true (it’s definitely not true for me!) so don’t lie to yourself.

In the end, I believe positive thinking is really about failing fast and learning from your failures.

Failure is part of life.
You’ll make mistakes, you’ll be disappointed and not everything will work out great all the time.

The mistake you can avoid is giving up hope too soon, because you’ve let yourself slip into negative thinking almost out of habit.

Focusing on the positive in the ways I’ve suggested will help you stick to your plans, achieve your goals and create the online success you’ve been after for so long.

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Great email, don’t you think?

Best regards,
Marcus

One of the Internet Marketing Experts by the name of Michael Rasmussen sent me this email, and I feel that I must share it with you.
Even though it is very lengthy, I feel motivated after reading it, and hope you will find it useful.

“It’s Michael Rasmussen here, and I want to tell you about something that lots of people completely ignore when they’re trying to make an income online.

Listen, I know what it’s like when you’re trying to start your own online business.

There’s no shortage of people out there screaming at you to “buy this!” or telling you “here’s the HOT thing!”
It’s very easy to get distracted by all of that, and find yourself chasing after every fad.

Here’s where you need to use your head as a business owner.

Motivational author Stephen Covey wrote in “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” that winners in life balance production and production capacity.
People aren’t really factories, but in a way, we are.

When you run your own Internet business, you’re producing something.
Specifically, you’re producing the products you sell.
Now, here’s the lesson…

If you spend all of your time producing, and none of your time making sure you can KEEP producing, pretty soon you’ll grind to a halt.

Your production capacity is your ability to do what you need to do keep your business going.

To put it more familiar terms, your production capacity boils down to your skills.

If you’ve been trying to make your income online for a while, you know that it doesn’t happen by accident.
You DO need some skills.

The list of skills you might think you need is huge.
I’m talking about everything from making graphics to shooting your own videos.
When most people think about how much they need to know how to do, they get overwhelmed.

I’ve been there, and I know how it feels.
So let me simplify things for you.
I’ll tell you the four major skills you need to be successful.

Yes, just four.
You might think you need a hundred skills, and I can understand why you think that, but most successful
Internet business owners have four big ones that count more than all the others.
Here are the big four:

* Being able to write, even just a little bit
(this means website copy AND things like articles or ebooks)

* Knowing how to set up and use an autoresponder

* Being able to set up and/or tweak a simple website

* Being able to keep your business organized

You don’t have to be the world’s biggest expert at any of those, but you DO need to be good at them.
You might call these the ‘core skills.’

Other things, like making your own graphics or shooting cool videos, might be helpful, but those four I just told you are the big ones that will make or break your business.

Take that first one, being able to write a little bit.

Way back when I was first starting out, I tried to sell an information product online.
I had almost no money, and I knew that I needed good sales copy to sell my product.

Since I couldn’t write sales copy to save my life, I had to hire a copywriter.
I was lucky to find a relatively cheap one that only cost me a few hundred bucks.

Fortunately, the copy I got was pretty good, and my product sold well.
It was one of my very first successes, and the profits really set me up nicely.

Here’s where I could have made a huge mistake.

You see, the money I made gave me a nice budget for creating my next product, including the sales copy.
I could have kept up that approach forever, if I had wanted to.

But I wrote my next sales letter MYSELF.

You might think that’s nuts, but I realized that if I never learned how to write sales copy on my own, at least a little bit, I would be in a tight spot again if I ever hit hard times and had no money.

Hey, life happens, and sometimes things don’t go like we want them to.
And at that point, I might not be able to afford to hire a copywriter at all, or I might try to hire a cheap one again and end up with awful copy.
Then I would be stuck.

If I hadn’t written that next sales letter myself, my production capacity wouldn’t have gone up at all.
That’s the key…

My production would have been good, because I could hire somebody to give me what I needed.
But my ability to produce would have stayed the same (low) because I hadn’t added to my skill set.

You don’t want to get yourself in a tight spot like that.
So you constantly have to focus on growing your skill set, especially when it comes to those four
core skills.

That takes some discipline, obviously, and some willingness to put in some extra work when you might just as easily hire somebody to do it.
But the payoff can be massive.

Not only will you maintain your production capacity, but you’ll also be able to save yourself some cash.

Think about that copywriting example again.
Copywriting is expensive.
If you can’t write any copy with any confidence at all, you’ll have to pay a copywriter for every single little change you need to anything.

That can add up.
I’ve paid over $500 to have somebody write a single paragraph before, just because I didn’t have the
time to do it myself.

Okay, assuming I’ve convinced you to keep building your four core skills, I bet you’re wondering how exactly to do it.

This isn’t hard, but it does take a little effort.
It also (usually) takes a little expense. Here’s the simple plan:

1) Read about the skill first.
This won’t cost you anything.
Google the skill you’re looking to expand, and read what others say.
You might find a blog that offers tips about it, or maybe even a free ebook on the topic.

2) Take a short course about the skill.
This might cost you something, but you don’t have to pay thousands.
I’m talking about a relatively basic course that might cost you tens or hundreds of dollars.
There’s no substitute for learning from an expert.

3) Use the skill on a real project.
Actually DO the skill, and implement what you’ve learned.
For example, if the skill is copywriting, write some real copy you’ll actually use, just like I did.

4) Assess the results.
Figure out how well you did!
You’ll be guessing a little bit, but really critique yourself to see if you did a good job, what you need to improve, and so on.

5) Apply the skill again.
This is where you get to actually improve the things you said you needed to improve.

That’s not rocket science.
I think it’s the only way to learn anything, honestly.

Think about when you learned to tie your own shoes.
Somebody probably told you how to do it first.
Then somebody showed you how to do it, maybe guiding your hands.
Then you had to try it yourself.
Then…
your shoes probably fell off.
But you learned from your mistakes, and you tried again.

Now you can tie your own shoes like a pro.

The same is true for the core skills you need to succeed online.

When you first start, you don’t know anything.
That’s when learning is hardest.
You can feel like you’re drowning.
Everybody goes through that, and you should expect it.

But if you stick with it, you’ll end up being pretty decent at it very soon.
Then it’s just a matter of learning how to do it better.

I hope you’ve learned something important here.

You don’t ever have to be a professional copywriter, or business manager, or website designer.
But you do need to have solid skills in those areas so you can be more self-sufficient in your business.

That will keep your production capacity high, and set you up for success.

I hope this helps.

All the best,

Michael Rasmussen
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