Select Page

Launch

by | 2019-04-28 7:42pm Asia/Tokyo

Launch

Launch is an online marketing guide written by Jeff Walker. In it, he describes his Product Launch Formula, a method for selling anything online.

Or is it?

Yes, Jeff talks about all of the elements of building and using a email mailing list to launch new products and businesses. However, what the book really describes is an application of the lessons learned from Dale Carnegie, Robert Cialdini, Norman Vincent Peale, and Mike Cernovich. It combines the positive, high-energy mindsets from Peale and Cernovich with the lessons on influence from Carnegie and Cialdini. Then Jeff tells you how to make money with those lessons. And after you’re done reading, you’ll feel prepared to begin making your first list and planning your first of many launches.

Jeff begins by giving his story of going from stay-at-home dad to making six-figures in a week. How? He had a list.

The key element to the formula is having an email subscriber list. Using the list, you will communicate directly with people who have already shown an interest in you and the products/services you provide. The communication will be a series of emails over a period of around a week to ten days. The communication is what Walker calls a Sideways Sales Letter. One of the best ways to get people to buy things is to create anticipation. The SSL builds anticipation prior to a product launch. The way it creates anticipation is by providing a story and high-value content, such as instructional videos or free tutorials, that provide real value to people before they’ve even bought your product.

That last sentence hides a secret. The secret is an abundance mindset and an understanding of one of the pillars of influence: reciprocacy. If you adopt an abundance mindset—a belief in the abundance of value all around and in us—then you are much more likely to give away high-value things away for free. Generosity is a defining feature of the Product Launch Formula. If you are generous to your potential customers, they are more likely to buy. People tend to reciprocate kindness with kindness, value with value.

Of course, it isn’t only the free goods that do all the heavy lifting. Jeff spends chapter five talking about what he calls “mental triggers”. If you’ve read other books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People, or Robert Cialdini’s Influence, then you are already acquainted with the contents of this chapter. He talks about authority, reciprocity, trust, etc.

In addition to telling the story of his first launch, he gives several other Case Studies that demonstrate other people using his methods to launch their first products, businesses, and gain financial freedom. After reading those stories, I really felt like the results he talked about were entirely achievable for me in the future, if I am willing to do the work to make it happen.

Jeff also provides details on how to get paid to create content, using that content either as free content for future launches, or as paid products in and of themselves. Essentially, Jeff has given the details of a system for continuous product development and launching that is organic and beautiful. Some of the marketing methods and devices you’ll learn about in Launch include:

  1. Opt-in subscription forms
  2. Squeeze pages
  3. A:B testing
  4. Using ads, social media, word of mouth, and affiliates to drive people to your squeeze page.
  5. Questions to get answers to before launching a new product.
  6. Outlines for pre-prelaunch, pre-launch, launch, and post launch emails.
  7. Seed launches (for those without a product to sell currently)
  8. JV (affiliate) launches
  9. Masterminds (business and product idea brainstorming communities)

On top of the pillars of influence, supported by the foundation of an abundance mindset, sits the Product Launch Formula. It is the actualization of that knowledge in the business world.

Do you have a business and want to give it a boost? Buy this book.
Do you have a product that you want to sell? Buy this book.
Do you want to be free? Buy this book.

For those that read until the end, in this video, I talk about what Jeff calls the Seed Launch.

The Power of Positive Thinking

by | 2019-04-14 4:27pm Asia/Tokyo

The Power of Positive Thinking

In Norman Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking, he says that we should do everything possible to push negative thoughts out of our mind and replace them with positive thoughts. He believes that positive thinking is the key to solving our many personal and professional problems. Such problems include a lack of energy, anxiety about the future, anger problems, addiction, and having problems making friends or keeping work. Pushing out our negative feelings and replacing them with positive ones is the key to solving all of those problems. Every chapter is filled with story after story of people that have used those methods to fix their problems.

If you’re wondering if the book is worth your time, consider this: Multi-billionaire and US President Donald Trump went to the church Peale ministered at. Peale was a famous minister in his time. His influence on Trump, and therefore the future of the US, is incalculable. What he taught continues to have real, lasting power. I look at results, and the results are clear: Listening to Peale is one method of becoming rich and powerful.

As you might expect from a Christian minister, he talks extensively about things like faith. Faith, or belief, is the core of his thesis. The first chapter is titled Believe in Yourself. Chapter eight is titled I Don’t Believe in Defeat. Belief, faith, is a key element of every bit of advice Peale gives. But, to the person that doesn’t believe in themselves or others, how do they learn to believe?

One of the main tools for developing belief is prayer or affirmations. Take some idea or ideal, write it down (if it isn’t already written down) and repeat it to yourself. For example, the first affirmation he mentions in the book is a quote from the Bible, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians 4:13) Many more passages are sprinkled around the rest of the book. Prayers are a form of, Peale writes, “sending out of vibrations from one person to another and to God.” He goes on to say,

All of the universe is in vibration…When you send out a prayer for another person…you transport from yourself to the other person a sense of love, helpfulness, support—a sympathetic, powerful understanding—and in this process you awaken vibrations in the universe.

Bible verses aren’t the only form of affirmation, however. He also advocates for personalized prayers. He often speaks of prayers in scientific terms, reflecting the rising popularity of turning everything scientific in his time, as he does when he describes the prayer “formula” he recommends. “The formula is”, he writes, “(1) PRAYERIZE, (2) PICTURIZE, (3) ACTUALIZE.” A friend of his, relating this formula to Peale, said that when he had a problem, “he talked it over with God very simply and directly in prayer”.

While reading TPPT, you see those elements of the formula come up in every chapter. In chapter 7, Expect the Best and Get It, he writes,

Learn to expect, not to doubt. In so doing you bring everything in to the realm of possibility… If you expect the best, you are given some strange kind of power to create conditions that produce the desired results.

In Christian terms, have faith.

He also writes,

Take the best into your mind and only that. Nurture it, concentrate on it, emphasize it, visualize it.

Once you have the best in mind and visualize it, Peale advocates that you act upon that visualization. Since actualizing requires a knowledge of the details of each problem, he has less to say on actualization. He occasionally gives handy lists of things to do during the prayer and visualization steps of his formula, such as at the end of chapter 9, How to Break the Worry Habit. Number six on that list: “Never participate in a worry conversation. Shoot an injection of faith into all your conversations.” And he does give actualization advice in a sense. In Chapter 16, Prescription for Heartache, one form of actualization he advises for overcoming heartache is physical activity. However, for the most part, Peale focuses on the first two steps of the above formula.

I found a lot of good advice in Peale’s book. In the following video, I will tell you the lessons that were most important to me. At the end, I tell you the next book I’ll be review.

By the way, Peale writes about a conversation he had with Thomas Edison’s wife! He knew Edison personally. It’s crazy to think that we are only a short time removed from that guy.