Looking Ahead to 2016

Ben,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on where you are heading in 2016. Seems you’ve put a lot of time and effort to come to the place where you know where your “productive” skills are and applying that throughout the process.

I noticed you used Thrive Themes for the onlinevisas.com site that you recently launched. Very good theme and I use it, almost exclusively for my own websites and client websites. But, I do agree that you still need to know HTML/CSS for customization. Of course, Thrive makes that pretty easy to do.

Looking forward to seeing the Web Pro v. 2.0 and the products you are launching through it. The price point is spot on and I know from experience you will deliver great information.

Certainly, the OSM & Ethical marketing are areas that are highly needed in the marketplace and I will be reading more on those to get up to speed. May you have a great new year ahead of you.

Patrick

Hi Ben,

The great thing for you when you make your goals and projects public like you’ve done in your video is that it commits you to getting them done.

And that’s not a bad thing at all because doing what you’ve done serves as a great model for all to emulate.

And there are a number of other good things for all to model re what you’ve said in your video.

For example;

There’s the zeroing in on what really matters most; stripping away all the time suck activities that have no impact on us or on the people we’re looking to serve or help. (In fact, the impact it DOES have is on the lost opportunity of us making a bigger and better contribution, elsewhere)

I’ve not seen anyone online with the guts to name and shame big marketing ‘gurus’ like you have Ben because of their unethical practices or outright lies; that’s why I’m sure your ethical marketing mission in 2016 will be a big hit and resonate with more people to follow your way of thinking.

You talked a lot about one’s own Genius and how you’re focusing your Genius on exploring and sharing ideas of how we can do things together.

And so what’s powerful about that is when we stand for something, when we declare what it is we’re up to and what our energies and our focus is going to be laser beamed on, it surely does simplify life.

Because now, we’re only working and focusing on what we intend to work and focus on. Everything else falls by the way side. And your passion and energy in how you described your own commitment to this, was evident (20.50 secs on the video). I was inspired just watching your energy, shift.

You talked about ideas – and, how you generated an idea (The Guru Trap) whilst at the hospital with your wife, Sally. What’s both informative and instructional about your time at the hospital is the fact that ideas can come from anywhere, at any moment, so we’ve got to be ready because unless we spear those ideas, they’ll fop back into the ocean of our mind and never ever really make an appearance in the same sequence and syntax as we heard it the first time.

However, an idea is just an idea unless followed by some demonstrable action which then takes the idea from thought, to a path of concrete reality. And that’s what you did, you took an action by sending your message out about it to your Facebook members.

I think what’s also important is to note that great ideas cannot exist inside a mind and brain that’s over-revving with multiple, conflicting thoughts and ideas – there’s no space for new fresh ideas to flourish. And so when you got out from your normal everyday environment, I think your mind had reset itself. It slowed down.It made space for fresh neurons to connect and create.

Backtracking a little to your coaching/book /project idea you had whilst in the hospital – the notion of giving up one’s personal responsibility and personal authority to a leader/guru bod, in order to then magically get the said leader’s wisdom… is an interesting notion, because some are magnetically drawn to that. They want that. They believe their thoughts (no matter how mismanaged or how misdirected those thoughts are)… and so are looking for that ‘enlightened’ one to lead them, lock, stock and smokin’ barrel.

Jay Abraham – (marketing and business genius) says that people are silently begging to be led, to be shown what to do, to be directed and be given clear instructions. From a marketing and client relationship point of view, that’s 100% accurate. As mentioned however, there are those of us who take that instruction and then walk the plank of doomdom, straight into a leader’s welcoming mind and thoughts… irrespective of how warped or damaging the resulting consequences may be.

I’ve invested over around 80-100k in my own personal development, coaching and marketing education and I can say that this star struck, ‘get closer to the guru’ mentality, is all over the place.

It’s like — give up your life to me and you’ll get instant nirvana – but please keep filling my coffers for that beautiful privilege.

Your Guru Trap project could be the very anti-dote to cure the ‘giving up our personal responsibility’ nuttiness. (In fact, tying a few little pieces together based on your post, I’ve stripped out my generic copywriting work and will only do this work for ethical players in the personal growth, coaching and leadership space. You can see something about it, here – http://rajahireker.com/edu.pdf )

I like the fact that you’ve mentioned that your web deign from scratch is all about going back to basics and building from the ground up. It’s so important for us to learn the fundamentals about anything. The problem happens when we cloudy up the clean water by jumping in with our muddy boots on. And I’ve done that many a time. It’s only fresh water and clean boots from now on!

And that’s a good framework to base a question on, when linking it to a new income stream – what fundamentals can I teach/create about my product or service that a certain number of people will pay me a monthly membership fee to belong to?

Thanks for your video message Ben and what about in your next video, you give your readers a peek at how you ‘calendar map’ all that you’ve got going on so they can see how you put into place all the various moving parts, how things get done in your world.

Cheers,

Raja

P.S Something to test on your online visas website project. For your headline – try this;
“With a 94% Success Rate, You Can Trust OnlineVisas With Your Visa Application”

Or…

“With a 94% Success Rate, No-one Better You Can Trust With Your US Visa Application Than OnlineVisas”

Also.. maybe something at the top of the website to say; “Come To The USA, We’ll Show You How, We’ve Been Helping Thousands of People Like You for Over 23 years”

Just took a look at http://www.onlinevisas.com which prompted me to come back and comment again.

That is, in my opinion, a great web-site. It is clean and appears, again to me, to be sharply focused on what the potential applicant is going to want to know. I ‘drilled down’ I note that again the focus on what the potential customer would be interested in was present with unnecessary clutter. BTW, the pages load quite fast.