These are some of the questions I asked myself this week after receiving an email from an internet marketing company. The email itself wasn’t offensive. It was what happened after I clicked on the email. Actually, it was what happened after I signed up for the FREE seminar that made my blood curdle.

The first email of the campaign was short, simple and enticing…

Debra,

Want a chance to win $30,000??

We’ve given away iPads, trips to Costa Rica, and all sorts of stuff.

Yes, I’m a bit CRAZY, but I guess you can say I’m in love with marketing.

To find out how you can win $30,000:

CLICK HERE!!!!

Of course, I’d love to win $30,000, who wouldn’t? So I click. The sales letter page then promises me the following:

three of the top marketing powerhouses from the Infusionsoft community (Ultimate Marketer: Bob Britton, SEO Expert: Grant James, and Internet Guru: Micah Mitchell) have now joined forces and developed the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT thing a business owner needs to triple their sales and profits in 12 months or less,

The landing page goes on to claim:

“We have decided to host a special “FREE Sneak Peak, Live Event“  for the first 100 people to register.”

“you can attend WITHOUT shelling out your hard earned cash for a plane ticket, a hotel room or ANYTHING else,”

“YES! I Want To Be One Of Only 100 People To Attend This FREE Live Sneak Peek Event Into How Your Guys Systems Can Stuff An EXTRA $100,000+ Dollars This Year Into My Wallet! YES! I Also Want To Learn How I Can Win The $30,000 Cash”

Notice the use of the word free everywhere.

There was also a line that said this:

“having a one in 50 chance of winning $30,000”

If they are accepting 100 registrations, how do your odds become 1 in 50? There are no contest terms listed. No legalese at all anywhere.

Here’s the worst part…

Once you type in your name and email, they send you to a new page that says this…

“Your registration request for the “Infusion Elite Mastermind Sneak Peek Live Event” has been received, but before I can register you I first need you to pay a seat deposit of $97.”

“IMPORTANT!!: If you DO NOT pay the seat deposit, you WILL NOT receive a link for this event and you’re spot WILL NOT be reserved.”

And there is a video of the Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketing Award Winner (he makes this claim in the video) telling everyone why they need to pay $97 and they only get it back if they actually attend the event.

So they entice people with a $30,000 prize. They offer no terms and conditions regarding the contest rules. They play upon their relationship with Infusionsoft and their authority as the Ultimate Marketer of the Year. They tell you its free to join. Then after you sign up they say that you can’t complete the registration until you pay them $97.

I found this to be the type of campaign that gives internet marketers a slimy reputation. I found it to be borderline ethical and legal (deceptive advertising).

I now ask you, my readers,

What would you do?

Do you find this to be ethical?

Is this the type of role model we should be emulating?

Here’s a link if you want to check it out. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY!

When you know what you are good at and what you are not good at, and then you know what you love and want your life to be like (which is often the opposite of what you don’t want it to be like), then look at what you like about where you are and what you don’t like and plot a course to get to your ideal lifestyle.

Once I knew that I wanted to work from home around the hours of my childrens’ school, and I didn’t want to deal with furniture suppliers, but I did love solving problems and marketing, I was able to move forward.

In my case continuing with the business model I had created was no longer viable. Could I have changed the model and brought it back to an internet only business? Yes, but then I would still have to deal with the manufacturing of custom furniture which would not be in line with my passions or strengths. In my case, there was only one decision.

You want to think about how you might get from where you are to where you want to go. Take some time to think about how you might “close the gap”. Don’t pressure yourself to have all the answers right away. Sometimes they are obvious and sometimes they are not. It may take time for the answers to reveal themselves. It may be expedited by having someone who is not so close to the situation, like a business adviser or coach, take a look and make suggestions.

Let me give you some examples of how you can “Close the Gap”.

Let’s say you are passionate about flowers. You are thinking about opening a florist. Can you get to a 6-figure income as a florist? Well, probably, but you may have to open multiple florist shops and you may have to supply weddings or businesses. A single retail floral shop will probably not get you to that 6-figure goal. You will need to achieve a large volume of sales to reach that income goal.

Now let’s say you want to get to 7-figures or more. Can you do it with a floral shop or chain of floral shops? It’s not likely. In order to achieve that goal, you are going to have to look at business models that affect the entire industry. Think of FTD. Remember how they linked all the independent florists together so that you can buy flowers from your local store and then a store located somewhere else would deliver those flowers for you?

Another example is 1-800-flowers.com. They were one of the first to take the floral business to the internet on a national basis. There are other examples. There are people who changed the way flowers were grown and shipped to florist at a wholesale level. This is another example of a company that improved inefficiencies in their industry and improved the economies of scale to reach huge income levels.

Building a 7, 8 or 9-figure business isn’t for everyone.

You will notice in none of the floral business models I just mentioned will the founder be hands-on dealing with flowers on a day-to-day basis. You will be a business person running a business and will need to have or develop the skills to do that.

If you can combine your passion with your business skills to achieve the dream, GREAT! Most of the rest of us might have to make adjusts to our business model, learn new skills, or pick a different industry altogether. It just depends on where you are starting and where you want to go.

Exercise: Close the gap

Here are some questions you will want to ask yourself to help you close the gap.

• Does your current business allow you to utilize your strengths and reduce your weaknesses (perhaps even outsourcing the work you don’t like or do well)?

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• Does your business model support your lifestyle goals? If not, are you familiar with one that will?

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• Are their changes you can make to your current business that will bring you inline with your passion and lifestyle goals?

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In the previous posts we addressed how to identify your entrepreneurial passion and your desired lifestyle. We also took a look at the things which you are not good at and don’t want to to.

The next step is for you as the entrepreneur to identify the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. To do that you need to identify your starting point.

Let’s take an inventory of where you are now. And then we will discuss how to close that gap altogether.

• What does your lifestyle look like today?

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• What is not working for you in your current lifestyle?

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• What do you love about your current lifestyle?

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• What does your business look like today?

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• What is not working for you in your business?

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• What do love about your business?

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What I found in doing this analysis is that I loved being a business owner and I loved marketing including all tasks and strategic thinking associated with it. I did not love the hours and schedule required in a retail store. I did not like shipping furniture, working with manufacturers of custom furniture, and some of the customer service issues that came along with the previous challenges. I love design and strategy. I love solving problems. I loved owning my choices.

What’s working for you? What’s not working for you?

The next step is “Closing the Gap”.

Visualize Your Lifestyle

As an entrepreneur, you have the ability to create any lifestyle you want. Are you living that life now? Most people just start doing and don’t think about where they want to go.

Do you know what your dream day looks like in perfect detail?

Have you spent time really thinking about it?

If you could choose to spend your time any way you wish, how would it be spent?

Here is an exercise that can put you in the space where you can allow your dream lifestyle to come to you.

Exercise: Lifestyle Visualization

EMC-Perfect-Day
LISTEN to this VISUALIZATION exercise now.

Exercise: Define the Lifestyle of Your Dreams

Now think about your perfect day.

• Would you like everyday to be like that?

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• What would you like to have the same?

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• What would you like to be different?

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I want you to think about how you can incorporate elements of this dream day into your daily life.

• How does this impact your current lifestyle?

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• What changes do you need to make in your business to make your daily life accommodate your dream lifestyle?

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• Write down your dream lifestyle?

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In doing these exercises I realized that my perfect day was waking up and taking care of my kids, sending them off to school, then coming back home and working on something I was passionate about that helped others. I wanted something to stimulate my brain that would enable me to transform the lives of the people I cared about.

I also wanted to be free to pick my kids up from school and spend afternoons and evenings with them and my husband. I wanted relaxed weekends with the family. I wanted the time and money to travel for vacations. I wanted to live in a friendly environment with loving supportive neighbors who had children for my kids to play with. I want my kids getting the best education available and I want them to learn to pursue their dreams. I want not to think about money. I want to make a difference in the world and use my unique abilities as best I can. And this is what I want for others.

While this was my dream lifestyle, this is not where I was 18 months ago. I owned a retail store that was open 6 days a week from 10am to 6pm. And this was reduced hours. Before that we had been open 7 days a week, from 10am to 8pm.

Because of this schedule, I needed a live-in childcare to help care for my children (who were not school age). My husband and I tag-teamed the remaining childcare hours, were balancing that with work at the store. While one was home with the kids, the other was working.

Weekends away were not existent. Actually, we went a year without a weekend together as a family.

Exhaustion and stress ruled our lives. We were miserable.

I’d say that’s a pretty obvious difference between where we were and where we wanted to be. Needless to say, the store had to go.

Not all situations are as obvious as that. Though, as obvious as it was, it still took us nearly a year to close out that business and get back on track to fulfilling our life vision.

What is your vision? Please share it with me below. I’d love to hear what your dreams are.

After you identify your skills, you then need to identify what you want to avoid doing. You need to know what you are NOT good at and should NOT be spending your time on. These are things you either don’t want in your business or elements that you can outsource. When I worked at Microsoft we tended to outsource anything that was not a core business function. If the need for the service may be short-lived, it was outsourced.

How does this translate to your dream lifestyle? You want to build a business that utilizes your passions while minimizing your weaknesses and gives you the lifestyle of your dreams.

So, what is your ideal lifestyle?

Identify your desired lifestyle.

You need to take some time to define the lifestyle you want for yourself. As an entrepreneur you can choose how many hours you want to work or how many days of the week. You can choose what income level you want. You can choose who you want to work with. You can work alone or you can have employees. It’s all up to you.

I have some friends that take one weekend a year alone without the kids to get away, reconnect and set their goals as a couple for the following year. It is at this time that they reevaluate where they are and where they want to go. Then every month they take one afternoon to check in and evaluate where they are. And every week, they share their goals for that week.

How’s it working?

Well, they are on their 3^rd million in income and they aren’t even 40 yet. They have 2 very successful businesses and they work from home. They have 3 young children and they have the time they want to spend with them.

Unlike my friends, I don’t have the opportunity to leave my kids with family for the weekend while I escape for some goal setting time. However, I was able to book a weekend at my brother-in-law’s cabin in the mountains where my kids could run around in the fields while my husband and I reconnected on our vision and life’s purpose, both alone and together.

The point is to make the time to connect with your life vision and make corrections to your course to keep you on the right track.

Exercise: Identify what you don’t want.

Part of living your passion and fulfilling your life’s purpose is to know what you do NOT like doing and are NOT good at. You want to identify your weaknesses, things you avoid and things you dislike so as to prevent you from draining your energy.

Let me give you an example. I discovered that I really did love the process of marketing. Now how do I turn that into a business that fulfills my life purpose? Well, I knew I didn’t want to ship products anymore, at least not durable goods. I didn’t want a lot of logistics. I didn’t want shipping damage, manufacturing delays and extensive customer service. I just wanted to focus on marketing and idea creation. Knowing what I didn’t want to do helped me to focus in on a business model that fit me best.

Now’s the time to make a list of everything you don’t like to do and are not good at. This next exercise is going to be the opposite of the last one you did. Again, don’t analyze, just dump out your thoughts and keep moving.

The answers to these questions will give you a clear idea of what areas of your business you will want to outsource or automate so as to minimize your involvement with them. Remember, our goal is to keep you focused on your passion. In order to do this you need to know what activities zap your energy.

• Think about the activities that you are NOT good at. Write them down.

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• What skills do you NOT have?

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• What are your weaknesses?

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• What tasks do you avoid?

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• What characteristics would your friends, family and colleagues use to describe your faults or weaknesses?

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• What do you hate to do? What makes you sad or frustrated? What causes you stress?

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• What do NOT like to do for play or leisure? What about that do you NOT enjoy?

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• What do you NOT like to read about?

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• What have you secretly hoped would never happen?

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• If you could avoid one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

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• What would you never do, even if you got paid millions of dollars for it?

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• When you have spare time, what do you avoid?

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• What do you not like to talk about?

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• What do you hate doing for others?

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• At the end of your life, what would be the one thing you never want to have done?

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• Who do you NOT want to help, enable, or reach?

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• What five life experiences have given you the least sense of fulfillment or growth?

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Now that you know what you are good at and what you want to avoid, how can you use those passions to fulfill your life purpose as an entrepreneur? What is the business that utilizes your passions while minimizing your weaknesses? Are you able to outsource these items to someone else, like a virtual assistant?

You went into business for yourself so you could do what you love and live in your passion. Have you found the demands of running a business take you away from that? Are you spending all your time searching for customers?

I know, because I followed mine, or did I?

While my business career was in marketing, my passion and escape from the world was interior design. I was obsessed. I had every magazine and book I could get a hold of. You know how they say go back to your childhood and think about what you dreamed about?

Well, when I was a kid I would rearrange my room incessantly. I was the only kids I knew with wallpaper on the ceiling (thanks mom for supporting my creative side).  It was lime-green and blue patchwork. We made a quilt for my bed to match.

In high school, I studied architectural drawing with the hopes of becoming an architect. I loved designing the floor plans of buildings, and picking out the finishes. What I didn’t like was calculating the size and number of beams required to hold up the roof.

The next thing I know I was in college studying optical engineering. In my junior and senior year, when things got tough I used to dream about dropping out and being a fashion designer.

When I bought my first house, I could not stop remodeling, decorating and landscaping. I was an addict. I enrolled in Interior Design classes and eventually, decided to follow my obsession.

I decided to merge my passion for interior design with my experience in Internet marketing. Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Wrong!

You see, other than the occasional trip to shop for inventory, I rarely got to do any “design”. All my time was spent running the business and getting customers.

So what was my passion?

When I closed my home furnishings business I once again reevaluated my true passion. I knew I didn’t love all aspects of running the business. I loved designing the interiors, the creativity of solving the customer’s problem in a visual way.

I asked my self how interior design related to marketing. Why was I so convinced that interior design was my life purpose?

I discovered that interior design followed the same mechanics of marketing. With both you have a customer and you need to assess their needs. Then you need to find a way to meet their needs, solve their problems and transform their lives. The difference is that interior design is done in a three-dimensional visual way.

The discovery of this correlation gave me the permission I needed to delve back into marketing with no regrets. It shares similar tasks to interior design. You have a customer who has a need. You have constraints. You need to solve a problem. (Actually, its very similar to engineering as well). I’ve started to do it in a visual way as I can now map out visually for each customer what is and what is not working for them and where the holes are.

What I’m suggesting is that have you looked at your passion from the perspective of the tasks involved? How does it relate to other things you are very good at?

I know marketing is my passion because I can sit for hours all day, everyday without leaving my desk, and still feel energized when I get up. Can you say that?

If not, then what is your passion? Do you know? Do you know how to find out?

The reason I felt compelled to even mentioned it here is that the article states that,

Hassan, 45, is charged with one count of second-degree murder in the Feb. 12 death of 37-year-old Aasiya Hassan at the offices of Bridges TV, the station the Pakistan-born couple established in 2004 to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims.

Does anyone else see the irony?

Hassan establishes a TV station in NY to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims and then proceeds to chop off the head of his wife. Hello? What are you thinking Hassan? If you weren’t going to jail for the rest of your life I’d say you need a new PR strategy!

You can read more about the situation at MSNBC.

I recently began attending church. I’m not gonna get all religious on anyone. But it’s taken me about 20 years to WANT to go to church. Why? Because I finally found one that relates to me as a customer. I am the ideal customer for this church. Why do I say that? Because they talk to my needs, wants and desires. They have me down to a “t”.

It’s only taken me 45 years to understand why other people go to church…because it makes them feel good. That’s it. It’s that simple. It just took me that long to get my butt to the right church.

But there something more I want to talk about. It’s about that “Feel Good” feeling. This church isn’t the only place I’ve felt it. People get that same “Feel Good” feeling from Oprah. She just makes us all feel good about ourselves. She makes the mediocrity of our lives somehow become special. She transforms us and our lives with that “Feel Good” feeling, if only for the moment.

Recently, a friend of mine went to a business conference and shared her experience with me. What fascinated me most was how impressed she was that one of the billionaire speakers treated her with respect, consideration and sincerity. That billionaire made my friend feel good, important and respected. She transferred the “Feel Good” feeling to her.

The overriding take away I got from her experience, was how much time and detail was spent on making her and the other attendees feel good. And now my friend was spreading that “Feel Good” feeling to me.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if we all spent our time giving each other sincere consideration, respect and that “Feel Good” feeling?

What makes an ordinary business stand out from the pack? I bet if you spread some of that “Feel Good” feeling around you’ll see a meteoric rise in business. Isn’t this what the Law of Attraction is about anyway? Send that “Feel Good” feeling out to others and they will send it back. And, isn’t that what the bible says? Do unto others as you want them to do unto you. OK, I’m a little rusty on my bible quotes, by I still “got that loving feeling”.  Sorry, I couldn’t resist

Do you ever feel like marketing and entrepreneurship is a leap of faith? Many people think entrepreneurs are risk takers. But today, I’m really feeling like an eternal optimist. The keyword there is eternal. You can plan and plan and research and analyze and in the end, you just have to go for it and enjoy the ride, for better or worse. It’s kinda what I image skydiving to be. Of course, I see no sane reason to jump our of a perfectly good airplane, so I can just imagine the ride. As a skydiver, you plan, you take a course, you get trained, you test your equipment, and in the end, you have to jump. And then you free-fall down for a while and pray that the equipment is going to work, that you land in the correct spot, you don’t hit anything along the way, and oh, yeah, you pray you don’t crash. And some how through all that fear of failure (or praying for success) you enjoy the ecstasy of the moment, the wind blowing through your hair, the beauty of the earth beneath you.

If something goes wrong after the leap, you can sometimes self correct, change your course, or make changes to salvage the trip. However, in Skydiving, if you crash, odds are that you won’t get a chance to get back up again. That’s why I’m an entrepreneurial marketer and an eternal optimist. I take that leap of faith over-and-over-and-over again. And no matter what the results (win or lose), I get back up and do it again. And that’s what I call entrepreneurship.

In 30 minutes, a new internet company will launch to the world. I am grateful to have been in the right place at the right time more than once in my life. And it doesn’t matter whether we crash and burn or rise to the top. Lessons will be learned and it sure will be a wild ride! Actually, it will be a BLAST!

Oh, you can jump with me and enjoy the ride at…

http://my.blastoffnetwork.com/debzimmer