So, yes, this is a marketing blog but bear with me…

Here’s the deal with trading stocks profitably:

1. You have to play by the RULES or you lose.
2. You do get to make up the RULES.
3. However, you don’t get to make them up as you go along.

What I mean here is that there are a million ways to make money trading. Even if you confine yourself to one asset class (ie. stocks) or even a segment (tech stocks), there are endless strategies or ’styles’ that will work.

Really.

There are also lots of things that won’t work, of course. But figuring out which is which doesn’t take a long time. Maybe a few months of being deeply in the game.

After I’d graduated into the top ranks at Broadway, like the other top guys I started ’sponsoring’ new traders. That is, I gave ‘em a chunk of cash - usually $50k - to trade with, sat ‘em nearby, and taught them to trade for a piece of the eventual profits. Some didn’t make it. Several of them are still going (very) strong.

Here’s how I taught: First, I’d let them flounder for a couple months to learn the basics, make their initial mistakes and get a feel for the game. Then, when it was time to get serious, I’d make them create a list of their own personal rules, more than 3 less than 10.

Everyone’s rules were different, reflecting the personal style that they’d developed over the previous several weeks. They’d write down their rules on the inside cover of a comp book, and bring them to me for approval.

I’d look over the list. To a successful trader it’s immediately obvious whether a particular set of rules, if followed, will lead to profits.

Some rules are just a recipe for disaster (”I’ll just keep doubling down ’till it bounces!”)

Others are not likely to get you very far (”I’ll sell every loser after a quarter point, and every winner after a half”).

Mostly, though, it’s really easy to create a good, solid list that’ll work well.

The hard part is not figuring out the game. The hard part is playing by the rules.

This isn’t the place to go into a long story about WHY it’s so hard to follow your rules, but a couple of thoughts:

1. Humans are very lazy animals. Not sure how we rank against other animals, but I bet it’s low.
2. We’re absolutely run by our short-term emotions.
3. When not succumbed to sloth, fear and greed are big motivators.
4. We don’t have much discipline at all, on the whole.
5. But, we are creatures of habit (which is useful).

All that, plus I think the stock market was probably created by the devil himself to perfectly match our human weaknesses with exactly what’s required to succeed.

Thing is, as I mentioned, business is a lot like trading.

Every day there’s something new. A new strategy, a new channel. A different product or another advertising media. A new piece of software or hardware that catches your eye.

There’s a new guru, a new book, or another conference. A new add-in for Outlook, a new cell phone. Twitter.

To a savvy business veteran, it’s quite simple to see what’s most likely to work and what’s a waste of time.

Because we’re fundamentally lazy, though, we mostly don’t want to buckle down and do the hard work required to succeed at ANY of the viable strategies available to us. Instead, we let ourselves believe that if we only had the right new piece of information or the perfect time-saving device it would all be different. So we look.

And we let ourselves be consumed by the each bright and shiny object.

To let ourselves off the hook even further, we choose the believe that the successful have something we don’t - connections, a pedigree, overwhelming charisma, money.

If not that, we assume, it’s luck. They didn’t earn it, they got lucky.

And we believe there’s something wrong with a world that would have that lame company succeed while delivering obviously inferior products or services to our own.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the reality is that you gotta earn it.

And earning it takes perseverance, consistency, commitment, practice, effort. It takes sticking tenaciously to the fundamentals. All things we hate.

I’ll leave this over-long post with two questions for you:

1. When our very human-nature urges us to do the opposite of what we know works, how do you persevere?
2. When it comes to marketing our businesses, at what should we persevere? What are the fundamentals of marketing?
   

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

And follow me on Twitter! It’ll be a hoot.

Last week, Seth wrote a post that was stupid.

So I wrote a post telling the world why he’s wrong, partly just to say so and partly to setup this post… a blog lesson wrapped in a touch of self-criticism. Here we go.

5 Reasons NOT to write a post like ‘Seth Godin Wiffs One”.

Reason Number 5: I ain’t getting any points for uniqueness.

I was pretty quick on the draw this time, so maybe I can be forgiven for not seeing this coming… but the chorus of dissent Seth got for his post shouldn’t have been any big surprise. All advertisers are going to write the same darn thing. Within a couple of days, there have been literally dozens of similar posts. Blogpulse reports 41. Yahoo reports 140.

The point is that wonking on about a mistake by Seth Godin is NOT going to have me(/you) stand out in the crowd.

Reason Number 4: Opinions are like arseholes… everybody’s got one.

Not to boast, but to make a point: Many people would consider me to be a pretty successful guy. I have a fantastic family that I love, and an amazing group of close friends that I see several times each week.

I’ve started and built four or five businesses, depending on what you count. Have created a killer team in my present biz, OfficeAutopilot, and have developed a truly market-leading product with them (with more to come). Was a self-made millionaire by age 28. I live on 11 acres in paradise.. Santa Barbara, CA.

Not too shabby so far. Overall, I’d suggest that there are less credible opinions out there than mine on the subjects that I normally write about.

But one thing I’m NOT is a well-known authority. And since I’m not well-known (a la Godin, Kawasaki, Meerman Scott, etc etc) my opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Based on my scientific research, 99.92% of all blog posts are nothing but someone’s hot air.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’re blogging for fun about your opinion of the latest Poodle hairstyle, more power to you. Blog on.

But if you’re blogging for business, you (should) have a goal. For me, it’s to engage readers, build relationships, and cement my reputation as a thought-leader and provider of killer value… as someone worth paying attention to.

Yammering on about my random opinions doesn’t help. (Note to self: stop it.)

When you get to be a well-known authority, you then get to yammer on about your opinions. You can even write books full of them, and people will buy them.

Reason Number 3: No onpage SEO

If increasing readership is a goal, then thinking about SEO is important.

If someone’s searching for my subjects (marketing, automation, ROI tracking, lead generation, personal discipline, etc) they’re not going to find this post (no keywords, etc).

And if they’re search for Seth, they’re not going to find it either (because it’ll be buried among the millions of other posts on the subject of Seth.)

Also, the title of the post is hardly impossible to ignore, unless you happen to dislike him already: Seth Godin Wiffs One. You want to write titles with both keywords AND attractiveness to feed readers in mind.

Reason Number 2: No Linkability

Building traffic and readership is going to depend on good folks linking to me. But if the eminent spreader of link love, Chris Brogan, were to happen upon this post.. who would he tweet? My article, or Seth’s?

Truth is, I’ve noticed three blog posts by my readers on the same subject and only one pointed a link back.. and that one because he wanted to use the pic of Seth’s head on a baseball player that I stitched up. That’s not a complaint. It’s just what happens when you don’t think ahead.

Before you write a post consider how it’s going to be received, and whether it’s worth writing.

Reason Number 1: No Added Value

Huffing about my opinion of some famous guy’s mistake adds no value to readers.

You didn’t walk away enlightened. You didn’t walk away with anything actionable to better your business or your life.

Maybe you thought I was right or you thought I was wrong, but that was that. You didn’t say “DANG! I gotta make sure to add this guy to my reader so I don’t miss his next opinion!” (Actually 4 people did.)

You didn’t mention to a colleague that my blog might really interest them.

And you didn’t Digg or Stumble it, either.

The articles that get Dug, Stumbled, recommended to friends AND which support your position as a valuable thought-leader are the ones that provide actionable, useful content that teaches me something or changes my behavior in some way.

For Example

If you’re a blogger and you don’t know Chris Pearson, just try to go to his site and NOT learn something, add him to your reader, and wonder at the veritable candy-shop of informational goodness that he’s built there.

I’ll leave you to figure out who Chris is, but will point out that virtually every single article on his blog is value-packed. To his audience (particularly newer bloggers), every article there is a must-read and you won’t want to miss anything he puts out in the future.

Chris has done this very much on purpose. The 20 or so articles you see there aren’t the only that he’s written… far from it. The rest are just sort of buried.

Is it because they didn’t get a ton of comments? Nope. Is it because they’re no longer relevant? Don’t think so.

I can’t say for sure because I don’t know him personally, but I think it’s because Chris is smart enough to know that it doesn’t take quantity, it takes quality. What he’s now presenting there is, according to him, his best work - his very finest foot forward. And the experience that new visitors have is a power-packed one.

The Checklist

Before you write and before you publish, check in:

1. Is your subject worth writing about? Does it really add something to your reader’s business or life?
2. Will people link to it? Is there an angle you can take or something you can add that will make it worth mentioning to a friend?
3. Have you considered SEO for titles, descriptions, and <h1,2,3> tags?
4. Is your article credible? If not, how can you add credibility?
5. Most important of all, is this the best you can do? What would make it better? Will you be proud of it in a week? A month? A year?

What else should be on your pre-publish checklist?

In the meantime, read it and tell me what’s wrong with this post in the comments!

I’m as much of a Godin fan as the next guy. He’s a brilliant thinker and a prolific writer. What’s not to admire?

Today, though, he missed badly… something he rarely does.

In his post Ads Are the New Online Tip Jar, he suggests that readers should ‘pay’ for the free content they consume on blogs by clicking the ads displayed thereon. Also, that if we all started ‘tipping’ writers that way, it would immediately change the economics of the web.

Maybe he ran too quickly to the keyboard after having that thought, because he’s way off base… and I can’t help but imagine he’d have realized it himself with just a moment of reflection.

First, telling folks to click on ads that are paid by the click is to ask them to commit click fraud which is, according to wikipedia, ‘a felony in several jurisdictions‘ including California and the UK.

Second, a large percent of ads displayed on blogs aren’t pay-per-click. They’re paid by ‘impression’ (that is, the number of times they’re viewed, not the number of times they’re clicked.) In those cases, you’ve already dropped your change by visiting the site.

Third, even if you ignored the first two points, the fact is that the economy of the internet wouldn’t change a bit… at least not for long.

That’s because advertisers (PPC or CPM) decide how much they’re willing to pay for a traffic source (in this case a blogger) based on the results they get from that source. If millions of folks started clicking ads they had no interest in, the advertiser’s results would plummet on a per-click basis. That is, if they used to get one sale per 100 clicks, now they’d be getting 1 sale per 1000 clicks.

So, all advertisers would quickly adjust what they’d be willing to pay per click or impression. Ad prices would go down right with the results achieved, and bloggers (and advertisers) would soon be in the exact same boat they were in before.

If you want ‘tip’ a blogger, you’re going to have to buy something. You could do it by buying from an ad on the site, which would increase the blog’s value in the eyes (er, wallet) of that sponsor.

Burning their sponsors with a fraudulent click ain’t going to cut it.

That said, I think most bloggers who’d like to elbow their way into the limelight would agree that if you wanna tip, a thoughtful comment would be lovely.

Got another dime? A Digg, Delicious, Technorati, StumbleUpon vote all are we ask.

After all, that’s why we leave our hats out with handy links and comment boxes (see below).

BTW, Seth apologized and elaborated.

Follow me on Twitter! It’ll be a hoot.

As some of you may know, my first ‘real’ career was as a securities trader on Wall Street.

At age 25, before the dot-com bubble began in earnest, I could see that something big was afoot. I’d read about the ’soaring’ Cisco stock price in the SF Chronicle… and Yahoo, which had just gone through IPO. I hadn’t been ‘online’ yet (apart from BBS’s when i was a kid - remember those?), and didn’t yet have an email address. But I remember feeling that a renaissance was beginning and that I wanted to be a part of it.

Unfortunately for me, I had no MBA. I didn’t even graduate from college. I’d been more interested in traveling the world with my beautiful new girlfriend.

But I needed a way to get involved in what I was reading about each day. Soon, my dad discovered - in Inc. magazine - what would soon become known as ‘day trading’. Over the next couple months, I did my research and packed my bags. I moved to New York and got a seat at Broadway Trading.

Small Town Boy Heads for Gotham

At that time, Broadway was tiny. I was probably the 20th trader there. But this was Wall Street (actually Broad Street, around the corner) and I knew that I’d arrived at the center of the action. Guys were making money - sometimes $1000 a day or more. It seemed incredible.

The way it works when you start is you watch from the sidelines for awhile. Then you get an account and trade ’small lots’, 100 shares at a time. Usually, a beginniner would spend a good two to four weeks watching before they got to touch a loaded keyboard.

During my watching time, a young Russian kid named Serge made $4000 in one day. On the same day, Yahoo! traded up to $12. I thought these lofty numbers had to be the froth at the end of a crazy run. I was late to the party, I figured.

It turned out, of course, to be just the beginning…

Through the Pain

Over the next 10 months, I went through the most personally grueling battle I’d ever experienced. Most days, I went home hating myself for having been unable, once again, to control myself in the heat of the moment.

Eventually, though, I achieved a level of success far beyond what I ever imagined possible, and certainly in the top small fraction of 1% of all traders in the world.

I’m writing about this today because over the last several months, I’ve realized that what I learned as a top-performer on Wall Street is the same kind of thing that’s required to succeed in business.

The Missing Ingredient

In fact, I’ve come to believe that what’s at the root of top-performer’s success in ANY area is something that we - businesspeople, marketers - need to be looking at and studying and working on.

And I believe there’s a vacuum of information and attention here. We hear motivational speakers at our conferences, and we may walk away inspired but those experiences rarely change our behavior, let alone our results.

Somehow, the top performers are always eating the breakfast, lunch, and dinner of the folks who aren’t playing at their best.

But, what is is that separates the best from the rest?

The Secret Sauce

Well, I’m sure I don’t have the whole answer. For me, the fundamental difference between being a losing trader and achieving wild success was one thing: discipline.

After ten months of pain, one day everything was different. I’ll write more about that in the next installment here, but for now I’ll just say that - for me - between success and failure was one week. And in that week I didn’t learn anything new or take any mood altering drugs or find God.

What happened was that I just started ACTUALLY DOING what I already knew I had to do (but previously hadn’t been able to).

The Disciplined Marketer

While I probably should be making this blog about marketing automation software and best practices, I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to use this space to talk about peak performance specifically as it applies to running our businesses. The reason is that I think most of us already know what to do. Our biggest problem isn’t about what to say, who to say it to, how to do market research, how to use social networking. Our challenge is to execute.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to learn. They’re always a vast and ever expanding universe of new knowledge to deal with. But it’s my contention that getting the knowledge isn’t the hard part. If we’re already entrepreneurs or sales people or marketers with any small level of success, we already know how to figure out what to do.

Our challenge, more often, is to STOP learning, focus on a few critical activities, and to get into disciplined action.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ve got more Wall Street stories to tell. But more importantly, we’ll explore the huge body of knowledge on the subjects of self-discipline, high-performance, and getting things done.

Of course, I’ll always relate back to how we business-folk can actually put this stuff to use in our own daily lives.

I invite you to participate and begin to kick more butt everyday.

More comments on this post can be found in it’s original location

Follow me on Twitter. It’ll be a hoot.

I’ve had a blackberry for a couple years, but just hooked up my email the other day.

I’ve had a Facebook account, but no photo up and no friends ’till just two weeks ago. And despite being hammered from every direction about my dire need to be blogging, I’ve been dragging my heels.

Why so (relatively) slow on the uptake?

Well, it’s because of a lot of things. Let me tell you about some:

• I don’t have the time for social media. Who the hell does?
• I’m not as clever as some people I know.
• I don’t already have a giant group of friends with nothing better to do than follow my tweets all day long.
• I don’t have great design skills, but I like things just so.
• Did I mention I don’t have the time?
• Also, I tell myself that blog consumers aren’t my market. That’s why all the blogs about blogging and blogs about technology are so popular. It’s just an incestuous scene that works for other niches than mine.
• So, even if I could generate an audience, I probably couldn’t turn that into real business results.
• And it’s just a giant Hoover time vacuum, isn’t it?

And my little list of reasons/excuses goes on. The bottom line, though, is that I don’t believe my investment into social media will return nearly as much as other things I could be doing with my time and money.

I’m not saying I’m right about that. I’m just saying that’s what I notice I believe.

Your Proof Isn’t Enough

Funny that I believe it despite quite a mass of evidence that the stuff works. It takes just a second to find a whole slew of bloggers with massive followings that don’t seem a whit brighter or more deserving than myself.

I personally know several people who have quickly built serious businesses starting with nothing but a blog and a niche market.

But my skepticism runs deep.

If social marketing were selling, I wouldn’t be buying. Even though I kind of know I should be.

How are your prospects similar? What skepticism do they secretly harbor? What fears aren’t they telling you about?

Dig this, because solving your prospect’s unspoken reservation is the key. They won’t come out and tell you what they’re afraid of, because it’s probably about you. They probably don’t trust you.

To really get someone like me to make a ‘buying decision’, I’ve got to buy several things about what you’re selling:

A. What your selling works, at least in theory. (If it’s an iPod, that it really holds 1000 songs, etc.)

B. It’s actually worked for others. (That lots of people are really having better music experiences.)

C. It’s better than what I’m currently doing, or could be doing. (Not only is it better than my diskman, but it’s better than all other MP3 players.)

D. It will work for ME. (I’ll actually install the software, download the music, remember to bring it with me, and ultimately reap the benefit that seems to be available.)

Interestingly, D is the tough nut.

It’s easy for me to see that social media should work, and that it has over and over… for other people.

And an argument could certainly be made that there’s no better place to spend my marketing dollars than on the exploding world of social media.

But…

Just look at all the (formerly) internal concerns that I’ve been harboring… that stop me from taking a risk on social media!

Your prospects harbor internal objections that you’re neglecting, too.

What are they? And how are you answering them?

(And, what about this social media marketing thing? You think it flies?)

Follow me on Twitter! You know you want to…

I got fed up with the ExpressionEngine blog software that I was using - more on that later - so, I’ve jumped ship. This Wordpress situation is going to be much better all around, but there a little work to do to get it up and looking good, so I apologize for the ‘under-construction’ look here for a little bit.

This is a new feed, so please re-subscribe via RSS or email!
Do it now.

You’ll find all the old blog posts in their original location at www.OfficeAutopilot.com/blog

More soon!