Picture this.
There are scores of small businesses in your area. Real businesses with real revenue, employees, and office space. And the owners of these businesses are scared.
They don’t know what’s going to happen with the economy. Will it get worse from here? No one knows for sure.
They’re laughing at us. Did you know that?
Right now, someone who refers to himself as an “Internet marketer” is sitting in his bedroom, dressed in nothing but his undies, laughing at how hard bloggers work for how little money we make.
We drive ourselves to creative exhaustion by expecting ourselves to pump out a never-ending stream of remarkable content — a stream that, even in the best of cases, only pulls in a couple hundred bucks a month in advertising revenue.
There are plenty of ways to succeed online, and plenty of advice for making it happen. But what’s the one thing that every successful entrepreneur can fall back on?
If I had to reduce my recipe for success to just three ingredients, this is what those three would be:
And if I had to give up two of those, I’d keep collaboration.
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
No, this is not going to be a post about what kind of bloggers Morpheus, Trinity and The Architect would be. That would be cute, but not terribly useful.
But I will use Neo, Agent Smith, Spoon Boy and Persephone as symbols of a different type of matrix. A matrix that allows you to see things for what they really are and become more effective.
Twitter Writing Contest 2 is now closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry, and winners will be announced Friday, November 21.
Back in May, I launched the first ever @copyblogger Twitter Writing Contest. People seemed to have a lot of fun participating and reading the hundreds of submitted entries, so I’ve been looking forward to doing another one.
If you missed the first one, the Los Angeles Times did a nice write-up of the event. In a nutshell, contestants had to tell a story in exactly 140 characters, which is the maximum allowed for any tweet on Twitter.
This time we’re doing something a bit different.
Let’s say you want to blow up a lab.
What do you do?
You take two explosive chemicals and mix them together, right?
But what if you took Na + Cl and mixed them together somehow.
What would you get? You’d get salt.
What’s worse is that the lab would not be “blown up.”
And you’d be a failure.
The more labs you tried to blow with Na + Cl, the more you’d fail.
And the more you fail, the more you’re going to fail.
And this slides us right into why most of us struggle to write.
You see we don’t struggle to write an email.
We don’t write, re-write, re-think and then write something boring.
