In this video, Kelly and Pace jam about peaceful entrepreneurship, just because it’s fun. And what do you know, useful and helpful topics come up! Topics like:

• What happens when you tell your customers that they are an afterthought
• Doing what you love — when does it make you money, and when doesn’t it?
• What we thought “marketing” meant three years ago, and what we think it means now
• How courageous authenticity is a business advantage
• Why The Way is paved with tools, not rules
• The catch: Why The Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur is not a free lunch
• What Kelly learned from Pace

Click the image to download immediately.

In 1993, some guys by the name of Ries and Trout released a now-classic book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Pace began reading it to see what insights it could offer, but its target audience is corporate marketers, not small business content marketers like her and Kyeli.

Here are Ries & Trout’s first 5 laws:

1. The Law of Leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
2. The Law of the Category: If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
3. The Law of the Mind: It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
4. The Law of Perception: Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.
5. The Law of Focus: The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.

After these five, she and Kyeli decided to come up with their own laws, The 22 Wildly Mutable Laws of the New Marketing.

We’ve put them into a short ebook, you can download it immediately by clicking here.

Our very own Pace Smith takes on the notorious Johnny B. Truant in a PEACEFUL CAGE MATCH: a live debate, free for all to attend!

Time: Monday, January 9th at 5:00pm Eastern
Recording: Click here to listen to the recording, or right-click and select “Save as…” to download it for later!

Pace Smith (doesn’t she look peaceful?)		Johnny B. Truant (doesn’t he look… not so peaceful?)

 

Johnny, in the “crush it” corner, will be representing the philosophy of You are dying, and your world is a lie.

In this live debate, they’ll enter a teleconference, and they won’t leave until Pace is crushed or Johnny is subdued with peacefulness. After all, they couldn’t both be right… could they?

Jennifer Louden has taught a lot about comfort, savoring, and serving. So I (Pace) wanted to talk to her about The Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur.

In this conversation, Jen and I talk about:

• All the people saying “crush it” and “kick your own ass”, and what effect that has on would-be entrepreneurs.
• Being an empowering teacher without being an annoying authority: The middle ground between “You must do it my way” and “You could do it whatever way you want.”
• The difference between true comfort and shadow comfort.
• Why Jen is no longer the Comfort Queen
• Is there ever a time when it’s appropriate to force yourself to do something?
• Pace and Kyeli’s vow of peacefulness
• The importance of choosing a path wholeheartedly
• Accepting the consequences of your choices. If I choose the peaceful path, others may rocket past me to their version of success, but I will not burn out.

Click here to listen now, or right-click and select “Save as…” to save it as an MP3 that you can listen to later. Our conversation is about 40 minutes long.

Jen gave me a new perspective on comfort and peace. I hope this conversation changes you, too.

When I started my business, I struggled to get my mind around how people were making money online — and it was even more difficult to explain to my friends and family. When you’re starting out, online business models can blur together because you’re drowning in advice. Too often, everything gets lumped into the category of “blogging,” simply because most websites also function as blogs. Blogging is one business model among many options that are open to you.

The drawback to blogging as a beginning business model is that it’s what I call a high traffic strategy — the amount of money you make is directly connected to how many people visit your site. For new entrepreneurs who can’t wait two years to make money, it’s far more effective to start with a service based-business, because it’s a low traffic strategy. You need far fewer individual clients than blog visitors in order to make a living.

Three years later, I am offering a course on starting an Internet-based business. I still use mostly low traffic business models. When you are consistently drawing lots of visitors, it makes sense to add high traffic business models like selling ads or recommending products as an affiliate. There’s nothing wrong with doing those things right out of the gate, but your paycheck will be really unpredictable.

A Map of the Two Types

A glossary defining of all these terms follows below.

High Traffic

The reason blogging as a stand-alone business (as opposed to blogging as a marketing activity) isn’t a good idea for the beginner is it requires a lot of up front investment for a very unreliable amount of return. Blogs are great platforms for all kinds of business models, but it often takes years to build up a subscriber base large enough to pay the mortgage with so-called “passive revenue” from advertising income, affiliate commissions or low-priced products. These business models rely on volume to be viable.

Low Traffic

When you first begin building a presence on the World Wide Web, you have no traffic. You have not been sending people to your newsletter signup or asking them to read and comment on your posts. You’re on the outer fringes of your little web galaxy, no one knows you’re there (and it can suck). But this is why the Internet is great, because there are plenty of businesses that thrive despite low traffic. These are businesses rely on relationships — word of mouth aided by social media, customer referral and being at the center of important conversations. It’s like opening up an office where you perform valuable services for people, but instead of being far away anyone can be there in an instant. The key to a low traffic business is networking with your right people.

Start Low, Add High

Now those of you who have heard me talk about virtual products know that I’m a fan of launching them before you get a lot of traffic to your site, and that’s because they can be a great way to market yourself to your right people. It’s more of a marketing strategy than a core business activity. It’s also great to have something you can sell many times over as your audience grows. Once you’ve got your bottom line covered with some low traffic sources of income, it’s great to start figuring out how to grow your subscribers, and start adding some of the other business models to your mix.

Low traffic models are more “high touch,” they require more of your personal time and attention. You need to be on the phone with someone, coaching them, or actually doing the work they’ve contracted you to do. You may be creating proposals for individual projects. It’s work. But think of it this way — spending two years getting your blog to rank #1 in Google so you can retire to a tropical island at 40 may sound great, but if Google tweaks their search algorithm, you’re starting from scratch. Best to diversify.

The Online Business Model Glossary

Subscriptions: Recurring (often monthly) payments for access to something.

• community memberships: Charging for access to an online community, often including a forum.
• retainers: Charging for access to your services when needed.
• newsletter / eZine: An online magazine, usually delivered via email

Services: Charging for your time.

• coaching / consulting: Helping people in some way by talking to them, either one-on-one or in a small group.
• freelancing / subcontracting: Someone else hires you to do their work for them.
• teaching / training: Helping people, either individually or in groups, to learn information or a new skill.
• speaking: Being paid to do public speaking.

Joint Ventures: Any of the above where you collaborate with someone else, sharing the effort, the profits, and possibly your audiences.

Indirect: Using your online presence for some offline benefit that does not make money online.

• attracting job opportunities: Using your online presence to generate leads or increase your chances of being hired for a desirable position.
• growing offline business: Using your online presence to generate leads or send customers to your brick-and-mortar business.

Affiliate Marketing: Recommending other people’s products and collecting a commission for referring leads or customers.

• blog: Writing blog posts, some or all of which recommend products for which you are an affiliate.
• niche site: A website about a narrow topic that recommends products for which you are an affiliate.

Advertising: Making money from website visitors clicking on your website’s ads.

• blog: Writing blog posts to get visitors to your website, where they then click on ads.
• niche site: A website about a narrow topic. The website contains ads for visitors to click on.

Licensing / Franchising: You create a system for other people to use your intellectual property or build their own businesses, and they pay you to use your system.

Ready to get started?

The Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur is open for enrollment! It’s 7-weeks of making friends, figuring out what to do and taking reasonable steps that make sense. It’s about beginnings, and about peace, passion and profit. It’s $197, and there’s a 2-payment option available. Let’s plant the seeds of your great new business together.

When you think “motivation,” what kind
of images come to your mind?

Do you think of fire?
Passion, desire?
A burning hot drive
to accomplish, to strive?

Or do you think of water, of flow?
The rain that can coax plants to grow?
The river that turns the mill wheel,
With its own soft and slow kind of zeal?
Do you see the sustainable rain?
Do you think of the wax and the wane?
The unstoppable waves of the sea
That smooth mountains into debris?

Fire, impressive and bright
Radiates much heat and light.
But if you go far down that route,
You can’t help but burn yourself out.
For fire needs fuel to burn,
And if you’re not nourished in turn,
The next thing your fire will do
Is turn around to consume you.

The way to sustain and deliver
Is to be not the flame but the river.
The way to accomplish with peace
Is not to control, but release.
The way to thine own self be true
Is to water the garden of you.
The way to all of the above
Is to move not from fear, but toward love.

Inspired by Passion is water, not fire

So don’t freak out; what you’re feeling is natural. Start by finding a few friends you can trust, then grow your circle from there.”

Part 2 has far more robots than Part 1, and the distracting kitten makes a repeat performance!

Why this video rocks: When Pace and Kyeli started their business, they made a vow. They vowed that they would rather fail and be happy rather than succeed if it meant being miserable. In this video, Pace explains how they put that into practice.