What are we here to do? Should 40 hours a week and a steady paycheck be what I’m focusing my life on?

No, I don’t think it is.

Consider your own life. Are you taking the time away from work to be with those you love? Are you experiencing all that you can? If you’re like me, you probably aren’t.

I’ll be honest, I don’t work 40 hours a week. Once I got out on my own, I vowed never to work that much in a week again. However, I also don’t spend enough time doing the things I love.

My mind is constantly on things related to my work, which isn’t bad per-se, but it keeps me from focusing fully on the moment.

What are you living your life for? Is it just a paycheck or is it to fully live and enjoy your time on this planet?

You do this by creating what Joe Sugarman calls “A Slippery Slide”. How do you do that? Let’s go.

Step 1
Start out with a powerful headline. Joe is known for using EXTREMELY short headlines. Usually two to five words. When writing ads for the internet, they’re most likely going to be a bit longer.

The idea of the headline is to grab attention. You can do this by using ‘power words’, metaphors, and comparisons. Take a look at some of the world’s most successful headlines to see if you can spot why they worked so well.

• A Little Mistake That Cost A Farmer $3,000 A Year
• How To Win Friends And Influence People
• You Can Laugh At Money Worries – If You Follow This Simple Plan
• How I Made A Fortune With A “Fool Idea”

Can you spot the power words and metaphors in those headlines?

Step 2
Be short, punchy, and conversational. The beginning of your ad always needs to be written in very short (often incomplete) sentences. Grammar isn’t important here. Being conversational is.

This is where you really catch the readers imagination. Pose a question to them. Relate a funny story to your product. Do something out of the ordinary.

Step 3
Use cliffhangers. The end of paragraphs should almost always leave the reader with a question. What’s going to come next? Don’t overuse this, but sprinkle these through your copy and the reader will be drawn through your text like a fat kid to cake.

Step 4
Use subheadlines. Every now and again you should have another headline. Especially if you’re running your ad online. This gives the scanners something that’s very easy to read. A good objective is to plant the benefits and questions the readers might have into the subheadlines. This will make sure the scanners know what your product is and why they should be aware of it.

These are just a few of the ways that you can create a slippery slide. Take the time to impliment these and anything else you find in your swipes and you’ll be well on your way to creating copy that makes you rich.

Can you come up with any more? Share them with your fellow business owners and marketers by posting them in the comment box below.

Recently, a badger came across a patch of over-ripe and fermented berries in the UK. He gorged himself on this delicious find, only to realize later that the berries turned to alcohol in his stomach… getting him completely wasted.

The badger ended up wandering into traffic, where he passed out. A driver stopped and called the local authorities to have (what he thought was) a dead badger removed from the road. The man stopped his car in the lane and caused quite a jam in the two lane road.

Once the police got there, they tried to remove the badger, only to realize he was passed out drunk, not dead.

So, what does this have to do with the ads that you’re running? Not to mention, it’s Money Monday, how can a drunk animal help you make more green stuff?

Is your ad stopping traffic like a drunk badger can? If you’re like most business owners, probably not. Because of a lack of training, business owners tend to throw together ads that barely pull any money in. It’s nothing new and there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s just the way it is.

If you really want to make extra money this week, you’re going to need to redo those old stinky ads. Make sure they are STOPPING people in their tracks.

Use something off-the-wall, like a story about a drunk badger. (It actually happened by the way)

The key to stopping traffic is to do something unusual. Whether that’s a massive promise, an insult, or a wacky photo, you need to grab attention in order to sell more product or service.

Having trouble coming up with ways to do that? Shoot me an email through the “Contact” button above, and I’ll give you a couple ideas., gratis.

Starting today, every Monday I’ll be posting a technique that you can use TODAY to increase the money coming into your business.

These will all be tried-and-tested by yours truly, so you can be assured that they can create real cash-flow for you.

Today’s tip: Repurposing content

If you’re in the service business, this will be especially useful to you.

What content do you have laying around? Maybe you did a seminar a year or two ago. Perhaps it’s an ebook that you wrote.

As service professionals, we do a LOT of teaching to our clients. Put the information that you give them to good use. You can very easily sell that information in many formats.

You can take an ebook and turn it into a thousand dollar a head seminar. Put on a free tele-seminar. Turn the seminar into an audio series and give it away to your newsletter subscribers.

Do you see the potential here? The same content can be used over and over again in all sorts of ways.

How can you take the content you currently have and turn it into something profitable?

Let me answer that for you.

1. Provide quality content – Believe it or not, you CAN give useful tips in 140 characters or less. I do it all the time. Take a look through my Twitter account and see what sort of posts I make.Now, you can become a broadcaster and only give tips on your specific niche, but Twitter is more of an ongoing conversation than anything else. Plug into conversations with other people. Answer their questions and help them out. The more you do this, the more popular you’re going to get on Twitter. The more popular you get, the more traffic you’re going to have to your website.
2. Be a conversationalist – Don’t just post content. Talk about what you’re doing throughout the day. What project are you working on right now? What did you eat for breakfast and why did it help you make a million bucks today? Important things like that.
3. Research, research, research – A good reason why Twitter is so valuable to us as business owners is because of it’s market research potential. By doing a simple search on a product name or person, you can see instantly what people think about the subject. Not just what they talk about – but literally what they are thinking about it. Take advantage of this as often as you can to see what people are saying about your competition, and leverage it!
4. ReTweet other’s content – By reposting content that you like, people are going to thank you publicly. This gets your username spread around further. People who respect the original author will then click through to see who you are. If they like your page and the content that you provide, you’ve just gained another follower.
5. Create a Twitter background – NEVER – and I mean NEVER use a default background on Twitter. Twitter’s ability to have custom backgrounds gives you extremely valuable real estate that you’re wasting if you don’t have a custom background. You can find people online to create these for you for $10, so it’s not a waste of money. Take a look at my Twitter account to see how I use this space. This is very important, so do it right away!

There’s a lot more to using Twitter effectively, but start off by using these simple tips, and you can’t go wrong.

Are you already using Twitter and making money doing it? Why not post a tip or two in the comment section below! We’d all appreciate it!