I'll never forget attending a conference in Jamaica during our long-gone network marketing days.

The biz opp shall remain nameless, but the founder was doing an impressive job at getting the audience all riled up.

Music was blaring, people were on their feet clapping - all because of one question that he challenged us to answer:

"What are you passionate about?"

The reaction he was shooting for in his choreographed frenzy was, of course, for everyone in the room to yell out in unison that their single bliss in life was to sell more biz opps to unsuspecting wantrepreneurs.

At that moment, I thought...

The average self-made millionaire in America works 59 hours per week - many work 70 or 80.

The average self-made millionaire in America works six days per week rather than the usual five.

So how does Tim Ferriss's #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week fit into your 5-year plan to hit an annual goal of 6 or 7 figures?

It doesn't! It can't!

And any small business owner/entrepreneur who believes the 4-hour workweek is possible has bought into yet another version of the "easy is the new norm" fallacy which I've ranted about before.

Hold on...play along with me.

When [...]

Dudley Moore starred in the 1990 comedy film Crazy People about a burnt-out ad exec who gets fed up with the typical phony ad campaigns and all their hype.

So he decides to create ads that tell the brutally honest truth.

The offensive ads don’t go over well with his boss, and Moore’s character is committed to an asylum to “recover.”

While in therapy, his ads get printed by mistake and are a colossal success. In the wake of their success, he's hailed as a marketing genius along with his band of asylum mates who he enlists in the creative chaos.

Not unlike Dudley’s [...]

Anyone in business who claims they never want to quit is either not doing a whole lot...is clueless...or is just flat out lying.

As small business owners, we are presented with too-numerous-to-count opportunities to quit.

We enthusiastically sign on for things that soon make us feel like we are WAY in over our head.

The new email campaign you were sure you could finish by Friday...

The e-book some expert told you could be knocked out in a week...

The WordPress website you thought you could create yourself.

Dan Kennedy, one of the highest paid direct-response copywriters in America, tells this story:

"My father told me that [...]

When you're in your teens and 20's, nobody thinks about the effects of tanning.

I remember in college... it was the week before finals and it was nothing to see tons of kids outside dorms trying to catch those early summer rays while cramming for tests.

In the 80's baby oil with iodine was the quickest way to get that coveted tan... and even better if you covered a piece of thick cardboard with foil to better target the sun's ray on your face. So essentially you were frying yourself!

And even now, it's nothing for kids to hit the tanning booths regularly. [...]

You know you're a dyed-in-the-wool marketer when you leave the local bagel shop with more than pastrami on a sesame seed, spicy mustard and pickles.

Some of the best marketing lessons come when I'm away from the computer...and this past week didn’t disappoint.

So I’m sitting with a cup of coffee at Georgie Bagels before heading to the office, reading my latest copy of GKIC’s marketing newsletter - and sorta listening to the chatter between the regulars and Georgie the owner.

Now George is about 5’ 5”, early thirties, born and raised along with two brothers in New Jersey by a single mother [...]

Behind every great entrepreneurial success story is an untold story - and it's usually more interesting and a lot more inspiring. They all tend to have a few common elements, though.

One of which is ugly grunt work.

Take Bob Stupak, for example. A true renegade marketer. He took a one-floor, slots-only dump at the downtown end of the Strip and built it into the big, tall, flashy Vegas World Hotel & Casino, now called The Stratosphere...all without taking on any debt and building it one floor at a time as he had the cash to do it.

He generated cash by selling [...]

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone refer to Infusionsoft as “Confusionsoft,” I’d be richer than Tiger Woods even after he lost GM’s and Gatorade’s endorsements.

Tags, campaigns, decision nodes, reports. ARGGH!

Yes, using Infusionsoft is hard, frustrating, and overwhelming.

So let's simplify it. Ask yourself:

I'm talking about a plan that systematically does these seven things:

You may know Joe Sugarman from his infomercials or his QVC appearances for Blu-Blockers.

But he was also a mail-order pioneer hawking the world's 1st pocket calculator, cordless phones, and digital watches to the public via his direct sales  and marketing genius.

I was listening to a recording one of Joe's speeches the other day and he said, "One good path to success is to learn all the proven rules and meticulously follow them. Another path is to occasionally break all the rules, because breakthroughs come only from breaking rules."

Resonates with me - I've always been more maverick than not. On the [...]

Walter Bergeron, Dan Kennedy's 2012 Marketer of the Year, tells the story about speaking to a crowd of over 1,000 well-dressed entrepreneurs in big old Texas.

He was describing his "shock and awe" campaign that resulted in an unheard of 70% conversion rate.

When he got to the end of his presentation and unveiled the grand finale, there was a mob of questions about the cool techy toy that capped off a brilliant multi-step, multi-media campaign that took him months to put together.

They were all obsessed with the shiny object - not the research and work that went into finding the perfect [...]