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The Disciplined Mind Video Course

Why Discipline?

Let me tell you, success normally doesn't happen overnight. In fact, the people who seem to be able to pull off any kind of success in a very short period of time have actually paid their dues.

That's right. They weren't born that way. They had to go through a long process of disappointment, failure, and yes, pain. If you see a lot of winners around you, it's because they put in the time. The good news is, you can do the same.

Discipline is not just about achieving your goals. It's also about becoming a better person. Because let's face it, if given a choice, we'd rather do things that are pleasurable, quick and easy right here, right now.

Unfortunately, life reserves the biggest rewards to people who would rather wait until they eat their cookie. If you develop that skill as a little child, you will be able to become a very successful person indeed.

In fact, in a long term study conducted in the United States, children who were able to delay gratification by foregoing eating a cookie now, in exchange for a promise of eating two cookies in the future, turned out to achieve higher levels of career, personal and health success.

Discipline is closely related to how well you do in life. This is not something that you pick up to solve some sort of problem, and then promptly drop. Instead, this is a key part of you that you need to invest a proper amount of time, effort and energy in, which will continue to pay dividends long into the future.

Many Levels of Discipline

There are many levels to discipline. There is no one-size-fits-all set of features to discipline. In many cases, it requires adaptability, depending on the particular set of circumstances you're dealing with.

With certain people, you need more discipline than others. In certain aspects of your life, like education, you will need a certain type of discipline, whereas you would need different levels of self control when it comes to avoiding drugs, alcoholism or sexual addiction. This is also true when it comes to emotional self control.

Let me tell you, it's the easiest thing in the world to tell people what you're thinking. But let me tell you, that's also the easiest way to burn your bridges. If you want to become part of the solution, you have to know how to control your emotions and channel them in a productive way. All of this requires discipline.

Discipline is Something YOU DO

There are many misconceptions regarding discipline. A lot of people confuse it with other personal traits. What is discipline anyway? I have given you an earlier definition, but we're going to drill deeper in this section.

Discipline involves action. It really boils down to what you do and what you choose not to do. This is the most practical way to frame discipline based on how people actually perform.

Discipline is the ability to do things that you'd rather avoid. These are necessary things. These are things that can take your life to the next level. These are things that can set you up for greater success in life. These are the things that would resolve a lot of personally difficult issues, but most people would rather avoid them.

Let's face it, if given a choice between emotional confrontation and just letting sleeping dogs lie, most people would take the latter. That's just human nature. Discipline gives you the ability to attack these things head on.

Discipline also gives you the ability to do what you have committed to doing no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable. If you have given your word to somebody and you have promised to do something, discipline enables you to follow through. You may not feel like it, it may not be all that convenient, in fact, it might even be a major hassle, but if you are a disciplined person, you will come through each and every time.

How come? You have given your word. You have committed to that person. As you can well imagine, this can help build a reputation.

Let's face it, most people would rather flake. Most people would get wobbly and eventually just drop out. It doesn't really matter if they have given you their word. It doesn't really matter if they made all sorts of promises. At the end of the day, it all boils down to whether they are willing to stick to their promises, regardless of how inconvenient it is, or whether they just take the path of least resistance.

Which brings me to the next point. Discipline also involves the ability to stick to a course of action, even if you're busy or you don't feel like it. You would be able to stick to something that you have committed to, even if you feel like you don't have the time.

Discipline also involves patience in relationships. Let's get one thing clear, the person that you're with is in your life for a reason. Of the 100 different traits that make up that person, you probably love 90 to 95 of them, but there are 5 traits that you really hate. This requires patience.

Everybody is a work in progress. None of us are perfect. If you want your relationship to blossom and survive, you have to be disciplined.

Finally, most people have principles, but not everybody is willing to stick to them. Not everybody is willing to sacrifice for them. When you have discipline, you find the strength to stick to principles. It may not be popular, it definitely may not be convenient, but you will stick to it anyway.

This builds character. This also builds reputation because you stick out like a sore thumb. Most people would rather abandon their principles at the most convenient or most opportune period. Few and far between are people who are willing to stick to something because of personal principle. This requires discipline.

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The 80/20 Rule Of Classic Marketing

Classic marketing is mostly geared towards the idea that 80% of sales come from 20% of top customers. That's called the 80/20 rule. That's why when you walk into two different stores in a mall, they may have slightly different merchandise, but often it is very similar. They are trying to market to the mass of people whose tastes are mainstream and easy to predict, leaving less room for variety and innovation.

In a recession, the 80/20 rule becomes so overwhelming that stores reduce their inventory into very narrow niches in order to market to the customers who are going to buy the more popular items and trends. Anything other than that is seen as a waste of display footage and an increase in rental space costs. This works well for them to keep costs down and sales up. However, that strategy also leaves a very big opportunity for online marketers to exploit the lack of diversity and novelty in mainstream retail stores by just doing the opposite: marketing to the “long tail.”

The Long Tail

The long tail is the other 80% of customers who aren't going to buy the most popular or mainstream taste items. They might need a little extra coaxing and whole lot more variety to make up their minds to part with their dollars. In a retail store, marketing to these people can take far more time, space, and money than it is worth. However, online, it is a perfect area to exploit without incurring inventory costs or having to hire additional staff.

Marketing to the long tail means that you are going to offer a much wider selection online than anyone can possibly do offline. How are you going to do that and not have to warehouse everything that may or may not sell? The answer is simple. Online, one can represent a product via an image or virtual representation that doesn't necessarily have to be directly in your inventory to sell. Instead, you just have to know where to locate it and how to get it shipped to the customer in a reasonable amount of time. That way, you can manage a very large inventory of products without having to buy them ahead of time to place them in a real, physical, inventory.

This makes it easy to offer products with a wide range of features from color choices to sizes. Now, that person that wanted that raincoat in hot pink and has searched far and wide in retail stores can hop online and instantly find it in your store. When you offer that type of variety that an offline retail store will find hard to duplicate, you gain loyal customers who will think to come to your online store first before looking elsewhere.

How Salesmanship Differs Online

Even so, you may have to coax that 80% a little more to buy your stuff. They are a picky lot who may decide to research other online stores before they buy. In classic marketing, you would have a staff person attending to that customer to find out what they need and then matching his/her need to some product or service the company sells. Online, there are no virtual sales attendants, so how are you going to guide people without having to hire someone to man a phone line?

Use Search Engine Techniques

Luckily, search engines are a major strength of the Internet and can be used in your Internet marketing techniques to not only draw people to your site, but to help them make a selection. First, put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. If you are the lady looking for the pink raincoat, wouldn't you go to a major search engine first and put in the words “pink raincoat”? Or, if you had a specific designer in mind, you would add that word too to your search engine query. That's why it's important to use descriptive keywords and know what people are searching for to get the most hits to your sales pages from larger search engines.

This way, even if someone had no idea what your website name was and that it sold pink raincoats, you would still pop up in a search engine result page as a place to go online to find one. If you want to find out what other synonyms or terms are entered online so that you can use them within the copy of your sales page and draw eyeballs from Google, you can look up their keyword tool and look at the terms being searched online. Find a few that have low competition and are highly searchable to include in your copy, within 1 to 2% of the content of the page, and you will place higher in the search engine result pages when people go to search for those terms.

Index your pages with as many descriptive keywords as you can think of that someone might search. This is not only for the major search engines, but also to help people find things through your own search function that you’ll want to make available to customers who visit your website. The search box is going to be like your friendly salesperson. It's going to allow customers to go straight to what they want to buy and to find a listing of similar products that they might be interested in. Always include a search box as a basic strategy that markets to the long tail. Remember that these people are going to have very definite tastes and will want to have a large selection to choose from. If you don't put in a search box, they will have to first find the right product category, then the right product, and then search through them to find one in the right color, size, style, or anything else that they want. If you want to see examples of search boxes that offer just the right way to search, take a look at any major appliance manufacturer. They will normally try to take into account numerous features a person might be searching for and make it easy to find via a search box or via very well defined categories.

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SECRETS TO RESPONSIVE LISTS

Every online marketer understands that the best way to generate sales is to have a large email list of subscribers. After they build that list, however, many marketers begin to recognize that the list is large, but it doesn't function to create sales. That's because it wasn't built with the idea of creating a responsive list, and instead focused on quantity instead of quality.

The time to start building the right type of list is just as you get started, but even if you've already got a list, you can still tweak your business processes to get a better response after the fact.

PAY ATTENTION TO HOWYOU CREATE THAT LIST

The biggest secret isn't that you need a huge number of people on the list, but that you want a better conversion of subscribers to customers. You can do this by paying attention to how you are creating the list, how you are marketing it, and what is actually happening when you send out an offer. Here are some basic things you should know about a responsive mailing list.

- Buying email addresses doesn't work For the most part, you can buy thousands of emails on another person's contact list and still generate very poor sales. The secret to creating a good list is to build one up naturally and organically so that people have a good relationship with you and your business.

- Single opt-ins can be fooled You may put out an opt-in list and be congratulating yourself on the number of sign-ups, that is, until you find out many are fakes or generated by online bots. Learn how to use a double opt-in strategy to build a better list.

- Targeted demographics are better than niches Demographics tell you the reasons why people buy, while niches just assume everyone on your list is interested. You will have better luck by understanding the psychology of your list, rather than just relying on categorical niches, for email marketing.

- Automate what you can There are plenty of products and services to help streamline your online business. There's no reason why you should be struggling
with responding to each and every email, unless there is some reason for personally responding. Learning about the technologies and tools available can save you valuable time and increase your bottom line.

- People do have a price It's up to you to figure out what that price is. It may be that they are willing to subscribe if you give them a free short report. It might be that they will do it to enter a contest. It might be that they will reply to an email when they see a savings in a product they like or when they get your personal attention. Pay attention and do what works for you.

ORGANIC IS BETTER

Organic, or naturally occurring lists, generally are quite a bit more responsive than lists created by buying email addresses from other marketers. The reasons for this are that bought lists can contain a number of bad email addresses or contain people on them who are getting so much email from other marketers, that they ignore everything as spam. One last reason, and the biggest reason, to use organic lists is that you can be liable for sending email to an address that hasn't opted in to having their email published.

When you build your own organic lists, you know that the person has specifically requested to subscribe to your list and are genuinely interested in either you or your business.

WAYS TO CREATE ORGANIC LISTS

In this age of social networking, you will find that it isn't as hard as it used to be to create an organic list. People are networking more and more online, and all you need to figure out is how to put the power of the Internet at your fingertips. Don't just put an opt-in form on your website and expect that using that simple action will generate a large organic list for you. People will still have to find your site, and if your traffic is low, this can be a major stumbling block. The solution is to not just advertise your opt-in on your site, but to do it elsewhere where traffic that is interested in your niche congregates. That's where social networking comes into play.

Get in the habit of building an online presence on various social networking sites. You will have to post a profile and start networking with people on these sites to hook into potential customers. Once you have them interested in either who you are or some common interests (related to what you market), you can start posting updates or links to things that you want to promote to get traffic from these sites back to your opt-in offers.