Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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Have you been working flat out trying to build an Internet based business and seen no sign of growth yet?

Have you thought about quitting in frustration?

Before you do, consider the bamboo groves of the orient, how the trees thereof devote most of their energy to developing their roots. You cannot speed up the process; a bamboo tree needs TIME to establish it’s roots. To the casual observer, nothing seems to be happening, but all the work is going on underground…

Then, in the spring, new shoots emerge and grow at a rate that is faster than any other tree or plant species. The new growth that occurs in each successive spring is larger in diameter than the previous year’s growth until the bamboo has reached maturity. This is due to the increase in the underground system of roots.

So you see, if you are working diligently on your Internet marketing business (or any other project) and seem to be getting nowhere, consider the merits of the bamboo, which first establishes itself underground and hardly grows at all during this period, then enters into a rapid growth cycle and expands from year to year…

This is the method I recommend for putting down roots and accelerating the growth of your Internet marketing business.

David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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There is a street close to the centre of Hiroshima where there are two competing takurakuji booths that sell Japanese state lottery tickets with prizes amounting to several oku yen (ichi oku, or 1 oku = 100,000,000).

On weekends when the prize money has been racheted up you often see long queues of folk lining up to by tickets, while old geezers in blue uniforms bellow through megaphones to bring in more losers.

Losers! 

Harsh, but true, don’t you think? Would you spend a good part of a precious Saturday morning lining up to buy a few state lottery tickets? The odds on your winning the big prize are so poor, the likelihood so remote, that you really ought to be doing something better with your life.

But just suppose you did win… :mrgreen: What would you do?

Would you give up whatever it is you do for a living?

Why?

Probably because you are not following your passion… Here’s a quote from a fine blog post I just read, by Alister Cameron:

“If Bill Cosby won the state lottery, would he retire from show business? Would Barbra Streisand quit singing? Would Shaq O’Neil quit playing basketball? Not even if he won the biggest lottery in the world. And almost nothing could have kept George Forman out of the boxing ring.”

The blog is actually about goal setting, and why people who are following their passion don’t need to place so much emphasis on setting goals because their passion leads them on to achieve great things almost, as it were, on autopilot…

They certainly don’t need to spend their Saturday mornings lining up to buy lottery tickets - and neither do you, if you follow your passion!

Read the rest of Alister Cameron’s blog post.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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“Prestige
is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there
it is.”

-
C. Wright Mills

Notes From Asia: Getting to the Bottom of Japanese Selling Strategies

By Michael Masterson

America is usually given credit for being the ultimate consumer society, but compared to the Japanese we are miserable plodders.

The first thing you notice is how perfect everything is: the polished floors, chrome-plated display cabinets, hand-painted signs, and hi-tech lighting are first rate. It’s the kind of atmosphere you would expect if you were shopping for $600 shoes at Gucci or a $6,000 watch at Cartier.

The employees are immaculately clean and beautifully dressed. And the food… the food. I promise you, you won’t believe your eyes.

I took Daniel, Allie, and K to one of these markets yesterday - and I was just as excited by the experience as I was the first time. We raved about how fresh all the produce was, how beautifully cut and arranged all the vegetables were, how pristinely packaged and well-presented the cakes and pastries were.

The sheer variety is awesome. I counted 32 bins of gourmet coffee, 98 varieties of tea, 22 types of Kobe beef, two dozen types of aged cheese, 16 types of French bread, and hundreds and hundreds of mouth-watering desserts.

But the most amazing thing is the pricing. Throughout this massive market, there are things selling for prices you just wouldn’t believe. For example:

• beef at $120 a pound

• French pastries at $180 a dozen

• German sponge cake at $21 a slice

• melons for $150

This is not tulipmania. In Japan, these are routine, everyday prices for top-quality produce.

Japanese marketers have succeeded in doing what might seem impossible to a Westerner: selling ordinary food products as high-priced, prestige items.

Western consumers are used to the idea that wristwatches can vary in price from $10 to $100,000, but they would have a hard time applying the same understanding to bell peppers and turnips.

It’s hard to imagine, yet it’s being done. The upper-middle-class Japanese consumer is not only willing to pay $800 for a Louis Vuitton wallet and $150,000 for a BMW 760 and $600 for a pair of Gucci loafers, he’s also happy to dish out $36 for a piece of the world’s best apple pie. (Yes, they sell gourmet apple pie!)

As I said at the beginning of this article, when it comes to being consumers, we don’t hold a candle to the Japanese.

Of course, the Japanese pay cash for their luxuries. We pay with credit.

But that’s another story.

My point today is that if you understand the psychology of marketing, you can sell anything at a much higher price than you might think. It’s all about what we refer to in the AWAI Copywriting Program as “deeper benefits.”

Affluent customers will spend more for a product or service - even if it’s only slightly better than a similar product or service - just to own the best. This is not because they need the quality. No one needs a Rolls Royce to get from Point A to Point B. You could drive a Toyota Camry and, rest assured, it will get you there safely, comfortably, and reliably.

But people are willing to shell out exorbitant amounts of money because they want the prestige that comes with being the owner of that Rolls Royce.

When I came into the investment-newsletter business about 25 years ago, the most expensive stock market advisory cost $195. About five years after I started, I came up with an idea that notched the mark up to $695. Ten years after that, the first $995 service was launched. And today, there are dozens of services selling for between $1,000 and $5,000.

The same thing has happened in the self-improvement and home-study industry. The top prices for these programs used to range from $300 to $600. In the early 1990s, the $1,000 mark was broken - and thereafter, it seemed, the benchmark was raised about $1,000 a year. Today, I know of at least a half-dozen programs that sell for in excess of $10,000.

Bottom line: It doesn’t really matter what you are selling - watches, stock advice, or melons. If you understand that (a) people buy things for emotional reasons and (b) the more money someone has the more he needs to spend it, you’ll be able to create high-margin, high-profit products at all times in any business.

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This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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My antique body is aching all over after playing football on Sunday. (Note to my American friends: Yes, I mean FOOTBALL, which you call “soccer”, but since the game was invented by the British, forgive us if we happen to think that it is our prerogative to call it what we like, i.e. FOOTBALL! :razz:)

Despite my advancing years and creaking joints, I still play football in Japan, along with a couple of other British players. The three of us play alongside a fine bunch of Hiroshima University Medical School students, i.e. trainee doctors, who are all young, fit and skillful.

I am the oldest player in our team, now in my mid-forties, while the other two Brits are in their 30s and the Japanese members are barely out of their teens!

Our team is battling for the top spot in the Hiroshima City League “B” Division and on Sunday we were up against the third-placed team, who turned up with just ten men.

However, our boys performance seemed a bit lack-lustre. It was still 0-0 at half time. I was brought on for 20 minutes in the second half and felt that I had contributed somewhat to livening our team up… Perhaps it was just that they had to make an extra effort now that “the old man” had come on. I got a round of applause when I was called off - or perhaps the team were applauding the manager’s decision! :lol:

Anyway, now that the two contributing foreigners were off the pitch we were free to observe our team’s performance, cheer them on and make a few salty observations as the game continued without a goal.

One thing you notice in Japan at all levels of the game is the tendency of many players to touch the ball just once too often when attacking up the wing. This extra-careful approach (so typically Japanese in many ways) gives the defenders an extra split second to cover the cross when it FINALLY comes in and the result is that an opportunity to win has been missed.

APPLICATION

If you are struggling to win with your home based Internet business it might be that you are spending too much time and effort on your ball skills and not enough on whipping the ball into the box. You need to prioritize marketing over design.

Too many newbies think they are working on their business by fiddling with the design and layout of their website, when in fact what they should be doing is building targeted traffic. Something like 70-90% marketing, 30%-10% website and product design might be a good proportion to work with, depending on your circumstances.

Every time you promote your website it is a bit like crossing the ball into the penalty box in football.

Of course, when you do put in a good cross, you want your striker to be there to shoot and score. When it comes to Internet marketing, you need to think like a striker and work on converting visitors into subscribers and customers.

So you must prioritize what to do with that 10%-30% of time you allocate to website and product design. Concentrate on delivering a clear action-inducing message to your visitors. Give them clear directions so that they know what to do next. Give them a good reason to do it and offer them a free incentive to get them to do it now!

We Score! :lol:

Just after the Brits had agreed that Japanese players spend too long on the ball, our sweeping generalization was, well, swept away when our team scored with just five minutes remaining!

They Score!

1-0 up, against 10 players with 5 minutes to go. You would have thought victory was in the bag, but we were up against a well organized and determined group of players. They didn’t give up, whereas our boys went to sleep.

Our central defender gave away the ball in a lazy pass, our left back recovered the ball and made a dreadful back pass to another of their attackers, our goalkeeper saved the shot but did not hold on to the ball, which went round the block again and eventually found its way into the net. 1-1.

APPLICATION

You might have made a sale, but you haven’t won your customer’s loyalty! All the gains you make in your initial sale will be lost if you alienate your customer through complacency or incompetence. Winning a customer is like scoring a goal, but losing a customer is like conceding one.

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What do you do when you have forgotten both your Wordpress password AND username??

That happened to me between my last post and this one! :oops:

I was unable to recover my password from the system because it assumes that you at least remember your user name!

I was flummoxed until I remembered that Google knows everything! I found this excellent tutorial on how to recover your Wordpress password on Youtube. The method also allows you to change your username. It is very easy to do. I gave myself a new username and password in five minutes flat as I watched the video.

Once I had found my way into MySQL I discovered that the username I had forgotten was… “admin” :roll:David HurleyBest Internet Marketing Strategies

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“I cannot stress enough that in my experience the martial arts are not about rituals, belts, hierarchies, and kata (which look like dance routines), though these may all be paths that lead to effective skills. They’re about releasing your inner motor skill and awareness ability in a practical way.” Brendan Reen, inventor of boxerballs

Some people find the most difficult thing about setting up a home-based Internet business is coping with numerous different tasks and sources of information. One newbie Internet marketer recently emailed me to say that he felt like a lump of raw meat in a shark infested ocean…

I know what he means!

The key, however, is to train yourself and improve your skills. Like a good boxer or martial artist, you will need to dedicate yourself everyday to learning and applying your skills. You do not have to be a genius or a techno-geek to succeed.

One common error that newbies fall into is spending too much time and effort building the perfect website. The second error is, once it is built, to spend far too much time tweaking it and fiddling with it.

Instead, you need to be working on traffic building and on converting that traffic to sales. There are several key traffic building techniques you will need to master: blogging, article writing and distributing, social networking, forum participation, pay-per-click, traffic exchanges, classified ads, to name some of the main methods.

At the same time you will need to learn how to optimize your website, fill it with useful content that pre-sells your visitors on your product or service. You will need to learn how to build a list and market to it via a good autoresponder service.

Those are some of the key skills you will need to target and master in order to succeed online. None of the skills require anything more than average intelligence. They do require you to apply yourself, just like a martial artist or boxer in training, you will need to focus on the targets and get better at hitting them!

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

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Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda’s sudden resignation has unexpectedly turned him into a potential super hero…

It all happened during his resignation interview when a reporter from the Chugoku Shimbun suggested that he had often seemed rather detached from the job. Fukuda, not noted for emotional outbursts, told the reporter that he (Fukuda) was able to view things objectively, unlike him (the benighted reporter). Fukuda said:

 Anata to wa chigaun desu!

I am different from you! 

This statement passes in Japan for a “strongly worded declaration” that reveals deep emotional agitation (as can be seen from the video clip)… The quotation has won Fukuda nationwide notoriety and has perhaps made him more popular now, despite his surprise resignation, than at any time during his brief premiership…

Suddenly, Fukuda has found his Unique Selling Proposition, a vital component of any marketing campaign… yet it seems as if he found it by accident, at the one split second in his life when he pulled back the curtain and showed a bit of real emotion… just a few minutes after announcing that he was throwing in the towel…

Moral: Find your Unique Selling Proposition and use it to brand your product and yourself from Day 1 of your campaign (e.g. like Prime Minister Koizumi).

On second thoughts, maybe Fukuda was doing just that; selling us his USP on Day 1 of his new job as Non-PM!

David H

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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Today’s blog post comes to you courtesy of health and diet expert Kelley Herring, who writes about the health benefits of some key ingredients that are used in Japanese sushi dishes, such as wakame seaweed, ginger, wasabi (Japanese green horseradish), and wild salmon.

Over to you, Kelley!

Looking to power up your plate with antioxidants? Look to rolls. Sushi rolls, that is.
These small bites are big on age-defying antioxidants from several traditional Asian ingredients. Here are the top four:

Wasabi. True wasabi - Wasabia japonica - is a member of the cruciferous family of vegetables (which also includes broccoli and watercress). Packed with powerful cancer-fighting nutrients called isothiocyanates, wasabi helps to stimulate the detoxification enzymes in your liver that disarm free radicals and carcinogens.

Pickled ginger. Ginger ranks an amazing 14,840 on the ORAC scale. That’s more than double the antioxidant capacity of blueberries. Ginger is also a potent anti-inflammatory agent, thanks to gingerols - natural COX-2 inhibitors.

Wakame. Addicted to seaweed salad? That’s a good thing. It’s loaded with a pigment called fucoxanthin, a strong free-radical fighter and metabolism booster.

Wild salmon. Expect to pay about $1 more per roll when you request wild salmon for your sushi or sashimi. With its rich, buttery taste, this is a must. Not only will you avoid harmful contaminants found in farmed salmon, you’ll get a healthy dose of the “carotenoid king”: astaxanthin. This nutrient gives wild salmon its brilliant color, and is considered one of the most effective antioxidants known.

[Ed. Note: Eating healthy doesn’t have to be boring. Nor does it mean avoiding your favorite foods - like sushi. Just make good choices when it comes to what you eat, and you can live a long and healthy life. Find more simple ideas about how to feel better and live longer here.
And talk about a healthy food that tastes fantastic… nutrition expert Kelley Herring has developed a chocolate cake so rich and delicious that you won’t believe it’s good for you. Learn more here.]

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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With Japanese obesity regulations coming into effect, how much more can the poor, benighted Japanese salaryman take?

As if it were not enough that a common or garden salaryman had to endure a sexless marriage, a two hour commute on a packed train, ten hours of kow-towing to superiors, a couple of hours of unpaid overtime spent going through the motions of working because the boss is still in the office, an enforced drinking session with colleagues, a two hour commute back home on a train full of fellow drunkards, a wife who prepares supper with a chilly outward show of dutifulness while he smokes a cigarette, watches t.v. and falls asleep on the floor, as if, as I say, all that were not enough, things have just got worse for the Japanese salaryman…

Hey Mr salaryman, the Japanese government has just introduced an intrusive new law that requires you to get your belly fat under control! If the total expanse of your waist cannot be encompassed by 84 cm of the measuring tape you have just three months to get your fat lard butt into shape! Fail again and you will have to go through SIX MONTHS of “health re-education“…

On these measurements, more than half of Japanese salarymen will be considered “overweight”.

And you, Miss Office Lady, don’t think you are exempt, with all your lunchtime restaurant and postprandial coffee and cake binges with your chums! If your belly fat causes the government tape measure to spread around your corpulence to the extent of 88cm, you too will be rounded up and sent to the slimming gulag for a dose of re-education.

Hidoi desu ne!

It seems that the Japanese government has jumped on the latest slimming fad and is putting its credibility on the line by passing an incredibly intrusive piece of legislation even as NEW EVIDENCE published in the British medical journal, The Lancet (huzzah!), suggests that large waistlines are NOT a key predictor of MS, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes or late night cravings…:shock:

The question is, though, what causes someone like a Japanese salaryman to put up with so many intrusions into and claims upon his private life? Surely he would be better off setting up a home based business of his own?

A couple of problems arise here… One is TIME. Having committed himself to the salaryman way of life, finding time away from the company to develop his own projects is exceptionally difficult. The other problem is that, even if a salaryman could discipline himself to focus on building a home based business, he would be faced with the prospect of working in his wife’s domain… Even if the salaryman himself were keen to become a work from home Internet marketer, his wife may thoroughly dislike the idea of having her husband at home all day, intruding into her private domain and social life…

For the office lady, the prospects may be brighter when it comes to working at home on the Internet because she is almost always single, and often lives alone in a rented apartment. If she can be self-motivated, she might well find the time to succeed with an online business while holding down her company job.In Japan today there are plenty of examples of women working at home on the Internet and enjoying an independent, financially healthy life.

The great advantage of working from home on the Internet in Japan is that you are far less bothered by intrusive government legislation that seeks to control the way that people live, usually by taking away or regulating their pleasures.

David Hurley

Internet marketing strategies

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Now that September has arrived, summer holidays (natsu yasumi) are over, the kids are back at school, and summer is pretty much at an end here in Japan, at least in the minds of the people.

No matter that I have had to turn the air conditioner back on today, after a brief lull in the heat during late August… In Japan the march of the seasons is dictated by the calendar and if the calendar says that summer has finished then summer has jolly well finished and you can put on your winter uniforms and grin and bear it… (not that the Japanese are a race of grinners) …

This is a bit late, I know, seeing as how summer has finished (despite the fact that the heat and humidity continues…), but I just came across an article that offers a good insight into what Japan is like in the summer months for the Japanese. If you imagine it is all beaches, barbecues and beer, you really have not quite “got” the Japanese summer at all!

Here is an extract from the article, by Kaori Shoji, which was first published in the Japan Times, and which emphasizes that Japanese summer is NOT all fun and games! Far from it!

“Japanese summers are tinged with a shadow of darkness and from a very early age we learn that natsuyasumi (summer vacation time) is not simply about fun and games in the sun.

“In addition to the frequent o-soshiki (funerals) there’s o-shusenkinenbi (the anniversary that marks Japan’s surrender in WWII) on August 15, preceded by the genbaku kinenbi (the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) on August 6 and 9, respectively. Shusenkinenbi is also a day when many schools have the tokobi (going to school day), when schools demand that the students drop whatever they may be doing elsewhere, grab their schoolbags and come to school.”

The rest of the article can be read on this blog by Howard W. French.

David Hurley
Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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