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Introduction

Most mailing lists suck. They really do. They are built using weak content messaging which lead to weak squeeze pages. Weak squeeze pages produce weak lists. If you want to make money onlineyou need to fix this process. At the very least, you need to tighten up the series of messages that lead to your squeeze page. You also need to take full control of the message you're sending out with your squeeze page. Unfortunately, using standard squeeze pages or templates is not just going to cut it.

You have to set a consistent storyline from the beginning. This is crucial in forming the right expectations and getting the right kind of actions from your list members. Otherwise, you are just going tofall into the same trap that most list marketers fall into. They focus too much on numbers and not enough on quality. They feel entitled to success based solely on the fact that they have a “huge list”. Even with very low conversion percentages, they expect their huge numbers to result in a decent income from their list. Not surprisingly, these marketers make little, if any, money off their mailing lists. What gives? You have to focus on the right squeeze page and overall messaging you send out to your prospective list members. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use effective storytelling. Effective story telling involves a complete process: it deals with things you do before people get to your squeeze page, while they are on your squeeze page, and after they have entered their email information into your squeeze page.

Effective storytelling-based list building is the most effective way to succeed with email marketing. While you can still get some results using alternative approaches, you will be settling for cents on the dollar. You probably would have to spend a lot more dollars, to get the same amount of results than if you had taken the time to fully incorporate a storytelling-based strategy into your list marketing activities.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

This booksteps you through the psychological and practical dimensions of building a mailing list around storytelling. By appealing to your marketing materials' readers on a deeply personal level, you make the value proposition you're bringing to the table come to vivid life. Since most other marketers resort to dull, lifeless, or predictably generic marketing strategies in building their lists, your story-driven strategy can give you a powerful competitive advantage. Take the ideas I discuss in this book and let them help you build a powerful, unique, and customized list building strategy that can take your business to the next level.

To Your Success!

Chapter 1

Why Stories? Why Now?

Human beings navigate the world through stories. That is how we make sense of all the information that our bodies pick up. We can look at things, we can smell things, we can touch things, we can hear things -we can detect all sorts of things. However, our mind is quite selective as to which of these things impact how we feel, think, and act. In fact, we are so good at filtering out external stimuli that we are only conscious of a fraction of the things our bodies detect. Interestingly enough, of all the things that we allow ourselves to be conscious of, we choose to remember only a fraction of those. What gives? Very simple -we think in terms of stories.

We have this existing story in our mind of: who we are, our place in the world, and how we choose to look at the world. Stories enable us to have an identity. They enable us to explain ourselves, not just to other people, but to ourselves as well. If you were to just process information on a random and wholesale basis, you would go crazy. You would have to have a system for storing that information and making sense of that information. New information must fit the overriding story we have of ourselves.

Stories act as emotional gateways to new information. This is why they are crucial to online marketing. It doesn't matter whether you are marketing through banner ads, articles or other types of content, a squeeze page or a series of pages that lead to a squeeze page-you have to tell a story.

Keep the following in mind.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

What Does Storytelling Have to Do with Making Money Off a Mailing List?

You have to master the art of story-telling for you to effectively communicate your value proposition. If you want people to join your mailing list, they have to have a clear idea as to what you are offering. They also have to clearly see the need for them to join your mailing list.At the very least, they need to understand these two pieces of information for them to get what you are offering. These involve a lot of data points. These involve a lot of pieces of information. You can just tell people to sign up for your mailing list, but you probably won't go very far. Even if you use fancy fonts or great pictures, chances are your likelihood of success would be pretty mediocre. Why? You might be setting the wrong expectations. You might be sending a confusing message and end up attracting list members who have no intention of buying from you.

If you want to attract highly qualified prospects, you need to use stories. Don't get me wrong, very basic and straightforward squeeze pages can get people to sign up. The problem is, once they have signed up, how do you get them to convert?

Conversion is King

At the end of the day, it is all about conversion. It doesn't really make much sense to get one thousand people to sign up for your mailing list, when only one of them ends up converting.It is much better to get one hundred people to sign up for your mailing list and at the end of the day you have fifty of them convert to your offer. I hope you can see the simple mathematics here. Converting Subscribers Into Customers
Story-telling is a very powerful component of a competent mailing list strategy because it helps you filter your prospects. It helps you attract the right prospects. Most importantly, it helps you set the tone of the relationship.

Good Email Lists are Built on Relationships

Getting people to sign up to your mailing list is the beginning of a relationship. When somebody signs up to your mailing list, they are telling you to keep sending them information. Put simply, they are telling you to keep talking to them. They want to have a relationship with your brand.

Using effective story-telling can ensure that you are getting into the right kind of relationship. If you use the typical squeeze page design, you wouldn't have a problem signing up people, but these may be the wrong people. These might be people who are expecting a different kind of relationship. Regardless of how it plays out, at the end of the day, you probably won't make much money. Weaving in effective story-telling elements increases your likelihood of making money off your list. It is crucial for you to understand how stories work, and incorporate as much of storytelling's power of persuasion into your squeeze page as well as the pages that precede your squeeze page. Stories also help boost the effectiveness of information pages.

Human Beings MakeSense of the World through Stories

I have said this already above, but I cannot emphasize this enough: human beings make sense of the world through stories. You may not be aware of it. You might even think this is some crazy talk, but it is true. You have a story. You look at the world as a story. In fact, it happens automatically that you are not aware of it.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

Think of it this way. To prove my point, try to think in such a way that there is no beginning, middle, or end. Take chronology out of your memory. Give up? Of course you will. If not, you are going crazy.
Time and memory are interlinked. They define each other, and this is really important because it is at the core of stories. Stories help you make sense of the world because it reduces the world into a sequence of relationships. Moreover, just as time is related to memory, time also help us make sense of the relationships between concepts. There are also relationships between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive the world and your place in the world.

Great stories help you connect the dots

A great story resonates with you on a deep personal level. A lot of emotion is involved in this. This is precisely why effective stories drive people to do things. They see themselves in the story. They see their personal narratives at play. They become open and susceptible to being influenced by what would otherwise be a 'foreign' idea. People subconsciously connect the dots between the idea presented to them which trigger emotional hot buttons and their own existing needs and desires.

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Introduction: The Goals That Never Happen

How many incomplete goals do you currently have on your agenda? If you’re anything like the vast majority of us, then chances are that you have hundreds of projects that you started and never completed, countless goals that you told your friends but never saw through and all kinds of dreams that seem to be getting less and less likely to come to fruition.

And it’s for this reason, that you may find people roll their eyes when you tell them your ‘next big project’. When you start a new training program to lose weight and everyone – including you – knows that you’re likely to have lost interest by month two.

Or when you talk about the app you intend to make, the website, or the business project.

Or when you talk about that dream trip to Japan…

This is the way of things for many of us. We work incredibly hard at things we don’t feel passionately about just to put food on the table but when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, we are remarkably ineffective.
It’s time to change all that and to start making those goals happen. But how can you turn it all around?

How We’re Going to Fix Your Goal Setting and Help You to Start Living the Life of Your Dreams

Accomplishing goals is about strategy, it is about making a cognitive shift to change the way you’re thinking and it’s about being smart about how you approach each goal. It’s also about knowing how to choose your goals and even how to phrase them.

This book is going to show you how to make those changes then. You’ll learn how to choose and write goals effectively, how to write effective action plans and how to make sure you stick with your goals and never give up.

But this book is going to be a little different than most goal-setting tomes, too. After we’ve given you the broad tools you need to start setting and accomplishing your goals, we’re then going to take a look at how you can begin to put them into practice.

Because while a goal can be pretty much anything, for many of us they are going to fall into one of a few different categories. Most of us have goals for our relationships, goals for our fitness, goals for our careers and goals for travel. We’re going to provide not only the abstract strategies you need to start making effective goals then, but also the step-to-step processes that will let you apply these strategies in each of these areas. By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at setting and accomplishing any goal. And at the same time, you’ll have powerful strategies for improving your relationships, your fitness, your career and more.

Ready to change your life?

Chapter 1: The Most Powerful Skill You Can Learn: Goal Setting

Learning how toset goals properly is arguably the most powerful skill that you can possibly learn. Why? Because it will allow you to then accomplish a huge range of other goals. When you know how to set goals, it allows you to effectively work toward anything. This is the key to unlocking pretty much everything you could want from life.

So ironically, the first goal you should focus on is the goal of setting goals!

And until now, you’ve probably been doing it all wrong…

The Problem With Your Current Goals

How can a goal be wrong?

Sure, any objective is a worthwhile one, but the way that you phrase your goals and structure them, is going to massively change your likelihood of finding success.

Let’s take weight loss as an example because it’s one of the more straightforward goals that is easiest to implement.

When you set out to lose weight, you should start with a concrete goal. And for most people this will look something like this:

“Lose 2 stone by next year”

This is a terrible goal.

Why? First of all, it is far too vague. How are you losing weight? Weight from where? Why do you want to lose the weight? What do you actually want to look like?

At the same time, it’s out of your control. Even if you are completely committed to your goal, you may find that outside forces prevent you from being successful. Maybe you get ill, maybe you accidentally follow the wrong program, maybe it turns out you have a bad metabolism!

Finally, the goal is too far in the future. If your goal is to lose weight by next year, that then essentially gives you a license to procrastinate. The target is so far away, that you indulge yourself in a little overeating or put off exercise for a while and not worry about it until next month.

6 months pass and you realize you’re actually further from your goal.

And because it’s too late, you’re likely to just give up at this point.

Not a good goal!

What Good Goals Look Like

So, what does a good goal look like? How might you phrase this same objective in a manner that will increase your chances of success?

The first thing to do, is to focus on things that are immediately within your control and that are not influenced by outside factors at all. These goals should be things that you can accomplish in a guaranteed manner and that you will be immediately graded on on a pass-fail basis.

So for instance, instead of aiming to lose 2 stone by next year, you would use this goal:

“I will work out three times a week, every week, for at least 15 minutes”

Now that is a goal that you can aim for. Regardless of your metabolism, or of injury, or of any other outside factor, this is a goal that you can accomplish. It also means you can’t ‘put off’ the goal and it means you’ll never reach that disappointing point where you can no longer stand any chance of completing it. At any point in your life, there is no reason that you can’t set out to accomplish this goal and expect to be successful.

But by focussing on this small short term goal, you will then find that the long-term goal of losing the weight takes care of itself.

How to Formulate Your Goals

But that doesn’t mean that any short-term goal that is binary in nature is going to cut it.

First of all, you need to know what you want and make sure that the goal you are setting for yourself is going to help you get there. You need your goals to be intrinsically motivating and that means that you have to feel truly passionate about them. It’s only be following a goal you really feel excited about, that you will find you have the energy and motivation to keep going.

Working out for 15 minutes a day is an effective goal because it is sure to take you closer to your broader goal of losing weight. By keeping that end goal in mind, you should stand a better chance of staying motivated to work out even when you’re feeling tired, or when you’re feeling low on will-power.

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Introduction

People go through their lives continuously taking on different challenges each day. Whether it is in school, at work, or at home, there are many things that always come up and cause too much stress on a person. He might simply have too much to do and not have an opportunity to get enough rest. There are instances when a person handles a task on a tight schedule, feeling that time is never on his side.

In both situations, it can get scary to think about what can happen, and it can be even harder to think about failure. There is no need to feel this way anymore. Sometimes, things happen, and there is no choice but to wait until the last minute.

Whether this is because an assignment is due in the morning or if there is too much to do in one day, learning how to work faster for your own benefit is the best way to go.

Procrastination is a harsh term that gets thrown around and disrespected. The truth is that everyone does it, and everyone wishes that they could figure out how to complete their work faster while still providing the highest quality. This book will guide you through all the positive and negative results that come from procrastination. It will also show you better ways on how to complete an assignment after postponing it for so long.

Either way, you should be able to find success by reading this book. Read through the chapters and take down some notes. After you read through the final chapter, you will have a full understanding of what procrastination does to a person, why it happens, how it can benefit you in the long run, and how to help yourself to work quickly and efficiently.

Chapter 1: The Science Behind

Procrastination

People will always say how bad procrastination is before ever truly realizing why it happens. It is a natural approach which people rely on at the last minute. It is about how they will continually agree to take on another assignment before finishing the previous one. This is not about responsibility and whether the person can complete tasks or not. It is about wanting to take on a challenge and finish more assignments than the person next to them.

This is a common scenario especially in the workplace where employees will compete to keep their jobs. Sometimes, the only way to do this is to take on more assignments and finish them faster. Whether they were turned in at the last minute or not, they take on more assignments just to impress their managers. People question themselves whenever they push back an assignment another day or even another week. Sometimes, an assignment that is due the next day will continuously be pushed back because people keep switching their focus throughout the day.

The Brain of a Procrastinator

This happens because a battle between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex occurs in the brain. The limbic system controls the amount of pleasure and relaxation that a person will naturally feel. The prefrontal cortex controls the amount of planning that the mind must go through. Simply put, when a person chooses to push back an assignment by either an hour or a day, the limbic system is taking over the prefrontal cortex. This situation often happens as people like going through the constant cycle of waiting until the last minute.

The reason the limbic system continues to be more in control and overpower the prefrontal cortex is because it is one of the older and more dominant parts of the brain. This system automatically runs through the process of strengthening itself more often than any other part of the brain. It is one of the first systems which develop inside the brain, responsible for keeping a person away from carrying out unpleasant actions.

For example, when a child looks at a flame, he might get curious and want to touch it. The limbic system tells his brain not to touch the flame because it will hurt him. This system does not focus on the damage that would be inflicted but the amount of pain that would be felt.

Compared to the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex is developed at a later stage. In science, this system is also known to be one of the weaker parts of the brain. The main feature of this part of the brain is that it runs through stimulus than an automatic process. People think that thoughts develop automatically in the prefrontal cortex, but it is quite the opposite. It sits right behind the forehead and has to be made to function for it to work. The moment a person sits down to work on an assignment and consumes time in continuing it, he is telling his brain to keep working on the task instead of lingering off.

This is a difficult thing to do especially when the limbic system continues to bribe the brain to relax right at that moment. Even though relaxing for a bit sounds good, the prefrontal cortex understands that the assignment must be completed by a certain time and if not, the person will go through a certain punishment that will make life less relaxed. The closer the due date of an assignment, the quicker these two parts of the brain will negotiate to understand which action should be taken.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

The truth is, the action which leads to more relaxation tends to win each time. The closer a person approaches a due date, the more he begins to panic since he feels that he cannot relax as much. The moment this is felt, it is easier to keep the prefrontal cortex engaged. It is easier to continue each assignment since it is understood that there will be more pain the longer the person waits. This is one of the few times where both sides of the brain win. The prefrontal cortex gets to complete the assignment while the limbic system feels less pain.

Another reason a person procrastinates is because he feels a certain rush the longer he waits for an assignment to be completed. He is able to take on the challenge of finishing everything at the very last minute and feels rewarded by doing so. It is all about the idea of cutting it close but still being victorious at the end. When a person waits until the last minute to finish an assignment, he sees a challenge and feels what he thinks is an adrenaline rush. What he is actually feeling is a small dose of dopamine moving quickly through the brain. It is a good feeling that comes with the expectation of getting a reward every time an assignment is completed. This boost gives enough reason for a person to continue coming back to the idea of waiting for as long as he can before completing any type of assignment.

The Inner Struggle In Getting Things Done

Since the hormone dopamine continues to run through the brain during these situations, it causes a person to lose his sense of control. He starts to form a battle within himself to see how much self-control he truly has. While he knows that an assignment is due soon, he also knows that the intense feeling of waiting until the last minute is just right around the corner. He could choose to finish the assignment ahead of time to gain more time to relax later, or he could choose to relax first and push the assignment back to challenge himself to finish the assignment at the last minute. Having self-control means that the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system are equally functioning. There are no boundaries to try and cross to have one side win over the other. Instead, they seem to work together to ensure the highest amount of efficiency within a person. While a person is in control of his mind and what he is doing at the moment, his reaction to the hormones is quite difficult to overcome. It is all about the feelings that would rather be felt – the victory at the last moment to feel the rush of dopamine in the mind or a calming sense of being ahead to strengthen the prefrontal cortex.

While dopamine is the main factor which contributes to the reasons behind procrastination, adrenaline can still exist in this situation. The part of the brain that produces adrenaline is called the amygdala. It is associated with an automatic emotional reaction which is triggered whenever a situation that is difficult for the mind to process arises. This happens when a situation is outside of the boundaries of everyday life.