The Essence Of Freedom
Is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose? No, this is not the essence of freedom.
I took this line from a song of Janis Joplin, and it was one of my favorites. But later I struggled many years to liberate myself from the thought expressed by this song. Why?
Ability to Say No is Important
This song of Janis reduces the meaning of freedom to one aspect only: The ability to say no. But in truth, freedom is something else: It is the ability to make a choice. This means that you can do something, if you decide so, or you can leave it. Freedom means that you have the ability to determine the course of your live. Freedom is self determination.
If you have nothing, you are not free. If the essence of freedom is the ability to determine the course of your life, then you must have resources to be free. If you have nothing, and somebody offers you food, you must say yes to survive. And, having nothing, you must say no to many opportunities life has to offer because you cannot afford it. If you have nothing, you cannot help others. And if you have nothing, you cannot choose what to learn.
Master Your Things and Social Status
Janis Joplin misses the essence of freedom, when she said “nothing left to lose.” I do not say that anybody should be a slave of things, or of status. It is mostly status, talk of other people about somebody or something, and fear of that, what enslaves us. If we have useless things, we tend to forget them. Useless items will waste our resources, and slow us down, but they will not be able to control our mindset.
Fear Makes Slaves
Fear of gossip surely has the potential to kill off our ambition and make us say yes where we should say no. In postwar Germany, where I grew up, there were plenty of people who should have said no. And there was even more pressure on others, not to speak up and tell the upcoming generation what really happened. So, nothing left to lose said for me merely: “Do not provide others any leverage to force you to do anything.” This has some truth in itself, but it also smells like lost opportunity. It defines the essence of freedom in negative terms.
Positive Approach to Freedom
Let’s try it the positive way. If the essence of freedom means to have choices in life, and to choose what is right for me, how do I get there? This is not a trivial question, but one thing is sure: It involves learning. To identify the right choice, you need to anticipate the possible results. After making a choice, which means in this context setting a goal, you must learn how to reach there. This is done most effectively by looking for people who have done the same thing before. If you study them carefully, you will be able to follow their way.
Internet as a Game Changer
The beauty of the internet is that you can meet there people, who have achieved all kind of things. And many of them are more than willing to share, how they did it. Some provide
Others offer and programs showing you how they reached the degree of freedom they have achieved. They help you to learn their trade and show their tools. Iif you have access to the internet, you can certainly reach such people.
Accept Your Responsibility
But this puts the blame squarely on yourself, if you allow yourself still to pose as a victim. Make the right choice, decide to grow. Determination to grow is the final essence of freedom. This determination will not remove the consequences of past mistakes immediately. But it can improve life faster and more profoundly than you can imagine. Wake up! Every journey starts with a single step.
Powerful Free Adserver
Powerful Free Adserver
I paid hundreds of Dollars for link tracking and split testing software and services, before I heard about power of the OpenX ad serving software for managing all kind of advertisements and affiliate links on my websites.
Manage All Ads from a Single Interface
OpenX structures ad serving by defining ad spaces on a web page, and connecting the spaces to advertisers and banners. An ad can be a picture, html code, java script, flash object, or plain text. Now the adserver manages, which banner appears on which ad space how often.
Manage Ads by Viewer Location and Language
I can also display banners according to the browser language of my viewer or according to his geographical location. I do not want to bother a German visitor with an offer for a vitamin supplement out of his reach because of his government’s customs regulations. And I do not offer that Spanish language ebook to visitor, whose language preference is Russian. The better I target the ads the more conversions I will get.
Manage Campaigns by Time
If needed, I define a time frame for the display of an advertisement. A time limited offer will not show up after the end of the sale. If no ad is available for a zone, e.g. because the maximum number of impressions is exhausted for each ad, nothing will be shown. But I like to use my ad space. So I define a Google Adwords banner as a default ad for the zone, and display Google ads if no other banner is available.
Pick the Winners, Drop the Flops
But there is more: The adserver generates a set of statistics. I know now in detail each banner’s impressions, clicks and conversions. Using these stats, I can easily determine, which banner is profitable, and which one is a waste of time and space.
The statistics allows me to set up a formal banner management. I ad and remove banners and affiliate programs based on real information, not guesswork. This improves my negotiation position with the advertiser. I know how many visitors I sent to him. And I have a clear idea, what I can get, if replace his offer.
Hide Affiliate Links
The adserver has an additional advantage: My visitor cannot see the affiliate link. If he wants to see the offer behind the ad, he has to click on it. This means I will be credited for the lead or sale.
Let me give a short recap:
An adserver allows me to
- rotate ads from different vendors
- limit the time frame of campaigns
- limit the number of impressions for an ad
- measure the performance of each ad
- if Ihave access to the sale page, measure conversions for each ad
- manage ad impressions by location of my visitor
- manage ad impressions by language of my visitor
- hide the url of the landing page of the ad.
Easy Instrallation
I need just a hosting account with php and mysql to run my OpenX server. Installation of OpenX is about as simple as installing WordPress. Basic installation without plug ins does not even take 30 minutes. You can get the server for free at http://www.openx.org
Bestseller Blueprint by Mark Joyner
Hi, today I keep it short.
Did you ever dream about writing your own book? If not, you should! An own book is a perfect tool to increase your credibility. And since credibility and branding is everything in marketing, even if you did not think a second about your own book, you should consider it now.
Mark Joyner writes to me in his latest email:
“I think that 2010 may be the last year that calling yourself a ‘bestselling author’ will have much weight. I may be off by a year or two, but this reality is likely coming…. I don’t have space in this email to explain all the logic behind this, but it’s all pretty well spelled out in an ebook I wrote called ‘The Rise of the Author.’ I could have, but I never put it in print – even though it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written.”
Here is the (affiliate) link for a free download:
But if you know Mark Joyner, you will expect that he has more to offer than e free ebook. And you are right!
What about a step by step multimedia blueprint, showing you exactely how he got four of his books into the bestseller lists?
But if you know Mark Joyner, you will expect that he has more to offer than e free ebook. And you are right!
What about a step by step multimedia blueprint, showing you exactly how he got four of his books into the bestseller lists?
Did I catch your imagination? If yes, Here is the next affiliate link:
Just take a short moment to check it out.
The Aim is Personal Growth
Why to bother with personal growth ?
It seems that we are already grown up persons, who have already achieved many things in our lives?
I ask this question at the change of the year, which is usually a time to evaluate our success, review our goals and refocus our actions and energy.
Usually on the list of our goals we find earning money, paying down debt, maybe a new home, furthering education, helping our children, nurturing the relationship with our spouse. But to what end? What do we really want from life?
Personal Growth Means Taking and Giving
You may already have noticed, that on my list of goals are both, getting and giving. Improving financial metrics, getting the means for an enjoyable and convenient life, like a nice home, and taking care of others, giving to our family, but also to others in need.
To grow means in way to increase our ability to get and to give. This is like a cycle, taking better care of our customers or clients, getting more money for it, improving lifestyle, thus getting better energy, give more to those in need, close to us and not so close, learn by giving.
Now there needs to be a balance between giving and taking. Without this balance, personal growth can easily change into personal decline.
Giving Without Getting Leads to Decline
He, who gives more than he has, runs into a debt problem, ending up at a point where he cannot give anymore. And he, who takes without giving, will inevitably disconnect himself from other people, end up in an emotional vacuum, and personal growth will again make space for personal decline.
Taking Without Providing Leads to Decline
Why giving without taking does not work for a long time, is self explanatory. But why is it not possible to grow if somebody takes and takes, without giving? Think about it: If you see people suffer, and you know that you could help them out with ease, you will have to close your mind and hard, if you want to avoid giving. While closing mind and heart, you will not be able see, hear and feel other information. You have blocked the entrance door for it. This forces a person into decline.
Get More so You Can Give More
This means, the trick is: Getting more, to be able to give a bit more. This will lead again to get more, this will allow again to give more. In the process you will grow in spirit, in knowledge, and in happiness.
Obviously, you cannot help everybody, and you cannot help somebody forever. If Bill Gates would give only one Dollar per day to every hungry person in the world, it would not take a week until he for himself would have to beg, and then he would not be able to help anybody else.
You Can Change Only Your Own Life
Another example is a drug addict. Nobody can help him, before he makes a serious decision to change his life. And that is not only true for drug addicts, but for almost everybody. This is, because the ultimate help is not a material gift, but support in personal growth.
This is perfectly expressed in the old adage: “It is good to give to a hungry a fish. But it is much better teaching him fishing“.
In Customer’s Shoes
Test with Adwords, Then Make Money with Twitter? Wrong!
I used to think: Write a sales page, drive Google Adwords traffic, test it. With a decent conversion rate, start to drive serious traffic from social media, banner ads, etc. This is, what happened:
- Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
- Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
- Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%
I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.
Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.
Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.
Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.
What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.
