|pros • per • ly|

I woke up this morning at 5:25am to go play basketball. I played for an hour and a half and then came home to get ready for the “work” day. As I was driving to work I was so tired that I literally fell asleep waiting for a stop light.

I thought to myself, “what can I do to give myself more energy?” I have to ask that question because I don’t consume anything with caffeine in it. Then I remembered reading somewhere that an apple had the same effect on your body as a cup of coffee in the morning.

I decided to put the apple to the test. Our office building is next to a gas station and so I went over and bought me an apple (which cost me $1.38, don’t buy apples at gas stations) and ate it on my way back to the office.

Before I was finished eating the apple I already felt 100% rejuvenated. I had morning energy like I had never known before. This truly is something revolutionary for me because I have a healthy way to get energized in the morning.

Just thought I would share it with you all.

Yesterday Adam and I decided to enjoy the nice weather (65 degrees!) and golf (well, first we went to put downpayments on some scooters).  On the way to the course, this being the first time playing for the season (second time for me since I played down in Phoenix while at Infusioncon), we made some score predictions for the front nine:

Adam predicted 55.

I predicted a 43.

I was jokingly optimistic, seeing as how a 42 is the best score I’ve ever shot.

At any rate, here are the results:

If you’re wondering what the other numbers are, bottom left is the tee shot, Y means the fairway was hit, N means it wasn’t.  The bottom right corner is where we record the number of putts.  You’ll also see if there were any OB penalty strokes, or if we had to deal with any bunkers.  (This is content for another post entirely — tracking your progress to stay motivated and promote smarter decision making).

Speaking of bunkers, Adam had to deal with three of the four on the ninth hole.  He had his best tee shot of the day, smashing it probably 290 yards, but the ball ends up in a fairway bunker.  He hits it out of that bunker and back into the next fairway bunker down.  Then he hits it out of that bunker and ends up in the next bunker further down.  Finally he escaped the sand completely only to land in some dirt next to a bulldozer (they’re renovating).  Once on the green, he one-putted for a triple.

Anyway, did you notice the final scores?

Adam: 55

Jesse: 43

Let’s set aside the fact that I beat Adam by 12 strokes in nine holes, and just think about the fact that the score we specifically targeted for ourselves was the one we reached.  Adam padded, knowing it was his first time playing in several months.  Don’t you find it terribly interesting that he dealt with all of those troubles on the final hole?  Maybe it was his subsconscious willing the 55 to happen.

No?

Alright, maybe that’s stretching it a bit.  But it did cause me to raise a curious eyebrow.

Adam and I have very specific goals when it comes to our overall portfolio of sites.  I won’t share our specific goals, but the key is in the specifics.  They are extremely specific.

If you want to start making money online, you’ll need to set some specific goals.

Bad Goal: I want to start making money online.

Good Goal: I want to make an extra $300 per month online within the next three months.

(I want to shoot a 43…today.)

You can’t be driven or motivated by the bad goal from above.  How will you reward yourself with the satisfaction of finally reaching an unreachable goal?  You can’t. You won’t.

Not all niches are profitable (measuring of course profit / time, not just profit absolutely).  Not all niches will work for you.

But when you have the choice of building out a site that is about clothing, my recommendation would be to focus on attractive female sweaters for large women.

Once you have a true niche, you can dive deep and be insanely profitable on a per visitor basis.

With your focus on a market that small, you won’t get a lot of traffic, but your traffic will be qualified and ready to spend.  Why?  They’ve found just what they’re looking for.

When you’re focusing on a niche, you have clarity.  It’s much easier to develop and execute on a strategy that’s all about female sweaters for large women.  Much easier than focusing on ‘clothing’ — or even ‘women’s clothing’.

That’s part of the upside of a niche.  Your clarity will be greater, so your execution will be better.

The other upside of your niche is the fact that you’re offering only one (or very few) things to your customers.  They have clarity.  They know exactly what you’re about.  You dive deep with them and tell them why you’re the absolute best when it comes to womens’ plus-size sweaters.  No, you don’t do shoes.  But you know sweaters and how they should be cut for plus-size women, and you’re a master at it.

That clarity converts.

I’d rather have 50 visitors out of 1000 convert, than 5 out of 5000.

Niche’s cost per visitor as far as traffic acquisition goes is much cheaper, even if you’re going the “free” organic search engine route.  Why?  You don’t deal with near the competition, and also you don’t deal with people that don’t really know what they’re looking for anyway.

Sales copy in a niche is simple because your audience is small enough, all you need to do is speak directly to them.

Niches rule.

And yes, there are still plenty of niches available where you can make money.

The invention of the ‘tab’ in Firefox (later to be copied by every other browser, though didn’t Opera have it first…?) was hailed as a great improvement in internet browsers.

I see it as one of the bains of any internet marketer’s existence.

Let me give you a little hint when it comes to your personal effectiveness:

Open only one tab — make small exceptions for a second.  Never open a third.

You are not doing more when you have 45 tabs open simultaneously.  You’re actually doing less and only thinking that something more is being accomplished.  Sure, there can be exceptions where you’re referencing something else, but as I’ve evaluated my own browsing/working habits I’ve discovered that’s rarely the case.

Multi-tasking (or in this case, multi-tabbing) is a time-waster.  It’s distracting.  Consider this:

As people divide their attention between two even seemingly simple tasks—reading their e-mail, for instance, while talking on the phone—comprehension, concentration and short-term memory suffer. Switching from one job to another doesn’t work any better. Research indicates that that eats up more time than waiting to finish one job before beginning the next—an inefficiency that increases as the tasks at hand become more complicated.

You may only have one browser window open at a time, but if it’s littered with tabs you were using two weeks ago, it’s time to clean up and get focused.  You’ll find you accomplish more as you focus on one task at a time.  Take a look at your to-do list and execute with laser-like focus.

As I have worked as an SEO consultant over the last few years it always amazes me how caught up people get with their competitors. It seems that some times they spend more time looking at their competition to see what they are doing than they do building their own business.

What is the benefit of knowing what your competition is doing? Do you just believe that everything they do is the right way to do things and you want to copy them? You have absolutely no control over what they are doing.

Spend time worrying about what YOU are doing. Look at your own site. Ask yourself, what can I be testing to increase conversion? How can I increase traffic? What new product can I create? What article can I write to add good content to my site?

Go back and read my guide to SEO and make sure you are doing everything you need to be doing on your site to increase your rankings.

The focus needs to be on what YOU are doing to YOUR site. Don’t worry about your competitors. Do the right things and you will eventually beat out your competitors, or at least steal a large piece of the pie. Don’t worry, there is enough to go around.