Why Swim Against The Stream?

As I read many post on the forum lately, and look at many of
the answers, I often find myself wondering why so many people
want to swim against the current, when it's so much easier to
just "go with the flow."

Human nature really hasn't changed much in thousands of years,
and if you just learn how we react and why, then growing a business
where you sell people "things" is easy.

The thing is that you need to sell them what they want... which
is not necessarily what they want. Our own professor, Paul Myers,once
taught me that the secret there is to slip a little medicine in with
the candy.

One of the challenges that I see is people unwilling to invest
in their businesses. Often the best traffic and the best
advertising is that which you can buy frmo those who already
have the attention of your ideal customers.

Many of us beat our heads against the wall, doing things very
inefficiently when there IS an easier way.

I'll give you an example from my own world...

I publish a daily email newsletter consisting of nothing but
recipes, and requests for recipes. Subscribers submit their
favorite recipes or ask for one that they need. Other subscribers
respond. The ezine has been sustained for 15 subscriber
contributed content

I monetize the ezine by running "sponsor ads"... often ads for
my own products, but I do sell ads, and I run ads for affiliates
products from time to time.

My weakness with the cooking list is that I often want to sell
them things that they are not really interested in. For example,
if I'm taking part in a big IM launch, with a contest, I'm
tempted to tell this cooking list about that product. The list
is so large that it's difficult for me NOT to ask how I can
leverage that asset to help with a promotion that I'm focused on.


When I do run IM-related ads to my cooking list, the response
rate is virtually non-existent. They only seem to want to buy
cooking-related stuff.

What's the solution to that challenge?

Sell them cooking-related stuff, and then if I want to leverge
that to help with the other promotion, then use the profits
from those sales to purchase ads in other places. It's simple
and it's playing to the specific strengths of given assets.

Why not sell them ONLY what they want, and use that profit to
advertise in other places? If you have a list that you can't
get to buy YOUR pet product, why not use the same thinking...
maybe with a slight twist, but we need to play to our
strengths rather than our weaknesses.

We seem to be too focused on making a given plan, or method,
work... in a situation where something else makes more sense!

Why not earn money in other ways and use that money to buy
advertising, traffic, coaching, tools to make our job easier, etc.?

Also, too many of us focus on just using free resources. There's
nothing wrong with free except..

Free is NOT really free, it has opportunity costs... namely what
you could have been doing with the time you spent implementing the
"free method."

Just a little food for thought

Now I just need to follow my own advice!
Willie