John Carrier

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

Today, I’m going to do a little mashup of ideas from two of my current living heroes, Timothy Ferriss and Keith Ferrazzi.

Keith’s new thing is sharing your goals with your friends to garner their support (and deepen your relationship with them), and in that spirit, he recently blogged his goals for the new year.

Tim’s book, the 4-Hour Workweek, teaches you to throw out your reasonable goals in exchange for unreasonable ones. His logic? Since (a) radical goals can be waaaay more motivating than humdrum ones, and (b) there’s less competition for the far-out stuff (more people dream of owning a dream house than a dream castle), then (c) you are more likely to reach your crazywild goals than your run-of-the-mill ones, if you take your crazywild goals seriously and actually take the first steps toward achieving them.

The mashup: here’s my list of the Top 10 Insane Goals I want to accomplish this year. I came up with this list after much thought over the recent holidays using the methodology Tim calls “Dreamlining.” Out of 30 or so things I would do if I had $100 million in the bank and there was no way I could fail, these 10 (in no particular order) would be the most life-changing.

1. Take a family trip to Israel.
2. Run a 50-mile race.
3. Take the BOSS 28-day wilderness survival course.
4. Purchase a dining table that seats 12 people.
5. Take a volunteering trip through AJWS.
6. Through-hike one Triple Crown long-distance trail.
7. Take sushi-making lessons. In Japan.
8. “Winter” (as a verb) someplace warmer than Minnesota.
9. Take a family trip to Europe.
10. Start a “virtual” brewery: Develop a tasty beer recipe, contract-brew it at an established brewery, and distribute it solely through the Internet.

Accomplishing any one of these goals would change my life for the better. Accomplishing 2 or 3 of them would make it the best year of my life (after the birth of my children, marrying my wife, blah blah blah). I’m going for all 10. Now, where’s the coffee?

Has anyone out there done any of these things? What’s the best way to start? Please use the comments below for tips and trips, or better yet, to list YOUR most outrageous goals for 2008.

Someone wrote to me last week to ask how search engine marketing could help improve his business online. He sells stuff via a website with lots of navigation buttons; to borrow from Seth Godin’s lexicon, bananas everywhere…which is, unfortunately, industry standard web design.

Here’s how I responded, with the hope that it can help you with your online pursuits as well.

I’d caution you not to focus your strategy on search engine optimization. It’s one tool in the toolbox, and a blunt and expensive tool at that.

If your goal is to increase traffic, then we can research the most popular and most effective keywords used by prospective buyers of [your product] and [your category], then help rewrite the text on your site to optimize the frequency of those keywords, while still making it readable. Finally, I’d work with a network of bloggers and other site owners (or develop my own sites) to link to your site, which will raise your position in Google and other search engine results, possibly bringing you more traffic. Over time. Probably.

If your goal is to increase SALES, then I would recommend a few other changes to your site before investing in higher traffic.

First, you give your visitors a lot of choices in your site navigation, and experienced advertisers will tell you that the more choice you give someone before the sale, the higher the chance he will walk away before making up his mind and handing you money.

Second, you have a great opportunity to develop what [Seth Godin and] I call a “permission asset”, or a collection of contact information from your site visitors along with explicit permission to communicate with them again in the future. This is substantially different from buying/renting mailing lists and sending spam. This is important because if you don’t have the means and permission to follow up with a visitor, it is probable that if they don’t buy from you on their first visit, you will never see them again.

Once those changes are in place, you should employ a combination of pay-per-click search engine advertising (for immediate increase in traffic) and search engine optimization for the slow, long-term climb in Google ranking. Both will cost you, if you want results, but with the proper measurement, you can maintain a positive ROI on both, and they will be a sound investment rather than a draining expense.

That’s how I would approach it. If you need help implementing it, let me know. If you’d prefer to implement it yourself, let me know that, and I can recommend some good books.

Warmest regards,

John Carrier

That goes for you, too.

What are your biggest frustrations when it comes to online marketing?

A friend of mine is starting a book club for fellow consultants, and she asked me to make a recommendation for our inaugural title and write a blurb about it.

I thought I’d share it with you…

*****

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazi and Tahl Raz

From consultant John Carrier:

This book was first recommended to me during a brief stint as a salesman…but please, keep reading!

Up to that point, I had been a heads-down consultant for about four years, focused on delivering great project results to whomever my client was at the time, but not taking an active role in networking or marketing myself for future projects. “Never Eat Alone” opened my eyes to a whole new dimension that my career (as well as my personal life) had been missing.

Often people who work in a highly technical field, such as finance and accounting, believe that their professional success depends far more on what they know than who they know — experience and competence rather than so-called “people” skills. They may even be turned off by the whole idea of intentional networking because it feels false or insincere. We all have an experience of meeting with someone who was clearly more interested in telling us about themselves that hearing about us. This gives relationship building a bad rap that it doesn’t deserve.

Ferrazzi addresses this negative perspective with his admonition to not be that “networking jerk.” On the contrary, taking a sincere interest in growing who you know, how well you know them, and how well they know you will have a dramatic impact on your success. This is especially true for consultants like us who are in the market for new and better employment more often than other professionals are.

Never Eat Alone isn’t just for salespeople, or for any one class of professional. It’s not about being the best schmoozer or collecting the most business cards at the next networking event. It is about working on your relationships — both business and personal — in a thoughtful, organized way to build a more successful and satisfying life. Reading it has changed my life, and I strongly recommend it to every colleague in the consulting business.

*****

…and your business, too.

If you have an opinion about how important relationships are (or aren’t) in your business, please leave a comment below.