Why Math is a religion?
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This will improve your skill in any area.
When I was 15, I learnt a skill which helped me gain tremendous advantage over all my peers. I learned how to Speed read. From reading at around 300 words per minute, my speed increase at around 500 word per minute.
With practice of 6–8 months, I was reading at comfortable 1000 words per minute. Later I stopped using speed reading strategies. But my speed still hovered around 700 words per minute.
That’s at least 450 words per minute more than average reader. Average reader don’t read faster than 250 words per minute. And this was my simple secret to getting a leg up on others.
If your speed is about average you can almost double your reading speed in one or two sessions. Provided you are serious about making a change in it.
There’s a lot of benefit of learning it.
You’ll read faster, get rid of your assignments and word load faster. Don’t forget, you’ll also improve on your concentration and comprehension skills.
And you’ll have lot of free time.
That’s why I am suggesting it to you to get into speed reading course. Spend next 30 days learning speed reading course and it’ll help you for long time.
How to Test your marketing campaigns in real world
Just yesterday, One of my marketing friend was asking my help about testing marketing campaigns in real world.
He is putting a print ad in few magazines. So I suggested this simple idea.
Code your every ad (and offer) with Monthly and magazine code. For example if your magazine is “men’s health n fitness” you can code it as “MHF” and For dec 2009. You can code it as “12–09” or “TW-09”.
So your overall code becomes MHF-TW-09 Which basically means the offer was from Men’s health and fitness, december 09. Simple Neat and easy.
Now you can either print it on the ad and have people send a copy of the ad or Suggest people to refer to this code for extra bonus or something. Either way, you’ll know which magazine generated what kind of response to your ads.
Testing TV ads become pain in the neck. Though I won’t be talking about it today, but understand you have to be little creative to use the above method for using TV or radio ads.
Accountability – The Success Secret
It’s frustrating that I forgot one of my best habit that I”ve had in my teenage years.
I had a habit of writing a journal which help me be accountable to the things I did. It was like a mirror which always showed me the truth.
I don’t know when I stopped writing into my journal but I know from experience that it was not in my best interest.
One of the things I had to learn while learning internet marketing (and building business) is to be accountable to my own success.
While writing down, I wrote my success, my failures and my learnings which all helped me gain much knowledge along with new experience to forge through in the world of business.
So far I’ve used journal successfully when
1. I wanted to lose weight and needed to write down what I was eating and what kind of workout I was following.
2. I wanted to know which of my blog were successful and which were failure
3. I wanted to know which of my advertising campaigns were doing good.
4. I wanted to make a commitment to learn a new skill like copywriting or Hypnosis.
5. I wanted to be accountable for my own success and failures.
Someone once said, “Own yourself, you own the world”. It can be understood in many ways. And this is one of the way you can start understanding yourself.
Use these strategies to Improve sales on your website.
Well, you have your website, and people are coming in hordes and buying stuff from your website. And..
What if I tell you, “You can easily increase your sales by 30–50% by doing few things differently”, are you going to be interested?
If the answer is yes, then keep reading as this is what I am going to talk about it here.
Which Do you Chose?
80 Unique Visitors = $3 income or 80 Unique Visitors $70 Income per day.
I once had a website, which had very little traffic and was making $3 a day. For some reason, I decided to work on my website design, offer to improve visitors to sales conversion. I spent lot of time working on every small detail I could think of and end result was $70/day Income from same numbers of visitors.
Can you believe with same amount of visitors I increased my income by 23 times?
Holy crap!!!. Yes, that was my response.
When I realized how much money I was leaving at the table, I instantly become convert to the idea of testing.
Test Your Headline, Offer, Price and dramatically Improve your sales.
Now when I started testing. I didn’t had any good software script that could help me. But you don’t have to worry about it.
If you have a google account (which you can create anytime), you can start experimenting with your website content and find out how to convert more visitors into sales.
Google Web Optimizer Script : You don’t have to worry about installing it to your webserver. You just have to create a web optimizer account and get started.
Try with an A/B Split Test experiment.
When you are testing, you should at least start with A/B split test experiment (Check Wikipedia for more info).
From Google Answers. An A/B experiment allows you to test the performance of two (or more!) entirely different versions of a page. Start with your original test page — the page whose content you want to test — then create alternate versions of that page. You can change the content of a page, alter the look and feel, or move around the layout of your alternate pages — whatever you choose. We’ll vary traffic to your original page and your alternate versions, to see what users respond to best.
A/B experiments are the simpler version of testing with Website Optimizer. If you have a low amount of traffic and want results fast, creating an A/B test may be the right place to start.
A/B experiment testings 2 different elements of your website.
For example. If you have a headline something like
“How to lose 10 pounds fast?”.
You can try testing another headline against this
“How to lose 10 pounds in 20 days with this secret calorie shifting technique”
All you need to do is create an A/B experiment in google web optimizer and copy and paste a simple script which will show different variation of your headline to your visitors.
And then it’ll generate a report on which version produce better results.
Video on how to do A/B Split Test experiment.
Now when you start with a testing your headline like this, you’ll be surprised to see the results. Often marketers don’t know which of their version of content will perform better. But as you start testing and keep records of these tests, you’ll start getting into the psyche of your visitors and perform better.
This is the reasoning behind split testing.
You should test these elements in the decreasing order.
1. Headline (MOST IMPORTANT)
2. Price
3. Offer
4. Audio/Video demo
5. Layout
Just This simple A/B split test will open the doors of wonder for you. You’ll start seeing the numbers complete differently. I hope this post at least get you started on the right track of testing.
Best Regards
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Fire in the belly, passion in the business
While surfing around I found this video about Soda Business by John Neese. When you watch this video, you’ll see how passionate he is about his business. He loves, enjoy and play with this business. With over 500 different types of sodas he can claim to be the only one with so many varieties.
Have you ever heard of cucumber soda? John has it, even if you haven’t heard of it.
My Way of Putting together a Website.
I have been working online since 2004 and I had my shares of up and downs when it came to internet marketing. One of the biggest headache or pain in the ass while starting online is putting together a website.
I don’t mean in technical terms. You can hire anyone to get a website in a week or less. No I meant in terms of Marketing, Producing, it’s like giving a birth to website.
1. What’s Your Goal? – When I am starting out, I ask myself a very simple question. What’s my goal? Now of course, your goal can be, saving the world, making money, just plain old vanilla putting your business offline.
But in this phase, you have to find out how you are going to achieve your end goal.
For example, this website http://www.varunpratap.com/ went through many phases (from a personal website to fitness blog to again a personal website to professional website to phew… tooo many). I ended up scraping all of these earlier versions just because I wasn’t satisfied.
I am a creative person and I need an outlet where I can speak, shout, rant or just be darn creative.
Currently my slogan “Desire. Commit. Succeed” is something I want others to experience. And to me, there’s nothing better using a blog to share your experience. With my experience in many diverse fields, I know I’ll end up talking about tons of different things on this blog.
So you have to decide what’s your ultimate goal? And how you are going to achieve it?
2. How are you going to create a connection? – Websites do not exists in solitude. In fact nothing exists in solitude. So when you are going to make a website, you have to find a way to create a connection with people who are going to visit your website.
There’s no other way. You cannot avoid this. No matter who you are. No matter what business you are in. No matter what your race is or where you live.
Your website cannot live without visitors and there has to be a way to connect with them.
2 Easiest way to connect with them are
1. Blog Like this one.
2. Newsletter
3. Forum (I am adding this one but it takes lots of efforts to maintain a forum).
You also have to understand about the media (Audio and Video). Because they ultimately create a connection. You have to check whether you can use it or not.
3. Potential to monetize or not – Third thing I think about potential to monetize a website. It’s very simple, If you are already making an effort to build and maintain a website, then why not monetize it?
There are many ways to monetize. The easiest to implement are :-
1. Sell advertisement space.
2. You can create a list and sell advertisement.
3. Create a product/s and sell it.
4. Promote affiliate products.
5. Sell your services.
Now this is how I start even before I order a website design to be done. I worry about my prospects. I prepare about how I am going to connect. I prepare about how to market. I prepare about how to sell.
Like I said, any one can put a website online. These days even toddlers and their pets have one. But all of this underestimates the real though that goes behind putting a website together.
It’s not that complicated. In fact it’s easiest the moment you decide “What’s my Ultimate goal with this website?”.
This is first of my 3 part formula “Decide. Commit. Succeed”. The moment you decide and decide to commit, things changes. Everything will work in your favor depending on your will. And Succeeding is just next step.
Notice, there’s no where I talked about SEO (search engine optimization) or any other new internet technologies. Because we don’t have to worry about them.
First build a website in mind, then on paper and only then come online.
Best Regards,
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Appreciation
Last week, I got quite a few emails on gratitude and what not. People, Marketers were throwing this term around.
It made me think about quite a few moments of my life and made me realize very simple things.
We, as a human have deep rooted desire to be appreciated. And we know instinctively when someone really appreciates it or whenever someone does it because their sales manual says so.
Appreciation.
If you remember one of my old post about “Just a Thank You”. How the day-to-day boring and monotone situation changed immediately just because my “Thank You” was really heart felt.
I also remember the name of one of the Fast food chain attendant who just gave me paper napkins and said a few things which connected with me.
I also remember when I once helped a friend and he was really grateful. How his simple thanks stood out and I understood it.
And then there was situation where one of my friends jaw dropped when she saw me after a few months. I had lost over 45 pounds and gotten stronger. I still remember her comments.
Appreciation.
It’s just a simple term, but we don’t get it enough. And we don’t give others enough.
Life is so darn simple. Look around you and appreciate the things in your life. Just like how a 2 letter words “thank you” can be so powerful, I realize how this simple concept of appreciate can brighten your day, change your outlook and create your character.
Remember, the more you give, the more you get.
What do you appreciate about yourself today?
Varun Pratap
Decide. Commit. Succeed.
My Top 2 tips to Time Management.
If you are in business or in a leading role, then I can bet you are spending (rather wasting) tons of your time which can be used far more efficiently. These time management tips I am sharing here will help you a lot.
1. Close your Email Client – First thing you should do is Close your email client. I have noticed this trend in offices, employees (and their bosses) have their email client open 24/7.
Call me rude, but in the office you get paid for doing the work, not check your emails.
I know many people might get angry and protest saying that “our clients are open so that we can get business related emails”.
And my counter argument against it is very simple. Every time You get email, you get distracted from whatever you are doing. Whenever you’ll get distracted, it’ll take you at least few minutes to be able to concentrate on your work. By then, you’ll receive another email and again the process goes on and on and on.
Why I am telling you this? Because I’ve seen one of my friend in the office. His email clients goes off “Ding” every 5 minutes and I checked few of his so called “Office” emails and they are nothing but useless stuff (I am not calling it junk just for the respect of my buddy).
So, now you know, you are wasting tons of time with these distractions. You can close off the client and then get more productive.
2. Improving efficiency by creating better workload – Another big issue people do is they do not organize their work load for the day. If you organize what you are going to do for the day the moment you sit on your desk, you’ll save lots of time, improve efficiency and work better.
Again, one of the hidden problem organizing is “distraction”. If you just club up same kind of work in a huge chunk and finish it, you’ll be far more efficient and you don’t have to re-new your concentration.
So if you are going to call up few people during the day, Find a time slot when you can call all of them and do it in one go. Your concentration will be 100%. You’ll be more focussed on the task at hand (there’s no “Oh Shit I had to call Mr John at 3:00pm”).
Now I suggest try these out for few days and take notice of the changes around you. You’ll notice How efficient you’re after doing this?
Curiosity or Success?
Seth Godin Today wrote something very interesting in his blog post titled “Thirsty”.
Quote from the Blog Post
I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.
I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?
Another blogger found a missing element between curiosity and success “Implementation”.
My first thought was both of them are only half right.
What do you do when you are thirsty? you go and drink water…
And guess what do you do when you have a thirst for knowledge? you go and find the source to quench your thirst. That’s reading.
And this is where process stops.
Internet is such a shining example of this. With so many Keyboard warriors (Like my mentor used to call intellectual masturbators), you can see what happens for intellectually curious.
Strategic Internet Marketing- Why You should Ignore Search Engines?
- Affiliate Marketers – Can You reduce Your Time/Money expenditure by 70%?
- How Not To Suck at making Money?
- Internet Marketing Strategy – Why Do Some Affiliate Marketers Fail?
- My Secret Behind High Speed Writing.
- Market Positioning – 4 Tips to Position Yourself As an Expert in Any Market
- SEO Writing – Will you get slapped around silly by Search engines with this seo technique?
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