The Contrarian Entrepreneur Show

009 - Why Would Anyone Buy Anything From You?

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What’s the biggest single reason that anyone would want to buy anything from you?

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What’s the biggest single reason that anyone would want to buy anything from you? Get a piece of paper and write the reason down. Do it right now.

Wait a week or so and read it. Decide if it’s still true or not. If it’s not, then think some more and try to determine the real reason.

If you are unable to identify and describe the biggest reason why someone would buy something from you, then it’s obvious that you still need to create, or find, that reason.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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008 - Passion is Highly Overrated

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Find your passion! Follow your passion! Sorry, there's more to it than that.

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You Don't Need to Find Your Passion.

Too many people stop taking action because they're too caught up in finding their mission or meaning to gather any momentum.

Your ability to execute is the only thing you get rewarded for in business. Not your ideas, not being likable, not your passion or vision or mission or beliefs or dreams or attitudes or plans or intentions.

Execution -- getting it done -- is the thing that puts your product in front of your prospects, so they can decide to buy it.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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007 - Don't Go with the Flow

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Some people say, “Just go with the flow!” I say don’t go with the flow, because that’s where everybody else is going.

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Don't Go with the Flow

Some people say, “Just go with the flow!"

I say don’t go with the flow, because that’s where everybody else is going. Don’t get in that river. Make your own river, your own flow, and go with it. The process of making your own flow is called creativity, and we are all capable of some kind of creativity.

Creativity is taking “thought seeds” (ideas) that we have and turning them into reality. You have some thought seeds in you, though you may or may not be aware of them.

Many people sadly go through their entire lives without ever having had an original thought. That doesn’t mean there were no original thoughts in them; it just means that none of those seeds ever made it to the surface of consciousness and sprouted. Maybe no one ever told those people that they had seeds of original thoughts - the seeds of creativity - inside them, so they never bothered looking for them. They lived and died never having even thought about it.

Look for your seeds! They’re in there somewhere. Each of you has something inside of you that can create improvement - somehow, somewhere, for someone. Maybe the someone is yourself. Maybe it’s someone else. It’s probably both, because we’re all connected, and you cannot create improvement in someone else without realizing improvement in yourself. Likewise, you cannot improve yourself without having a positive effect and influence on those around you.

The creativity, the improvement, that you generate might not be world-changing. It might be kind of small. But small does not mean insignificant.

Don’t go with the flow, because that’s where everybody else is going. Don’t get in that river. Make your own river, your own flow, and go with it.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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006 - 4 Very Bad Website Fashion Trends

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We don't normally think of "fashion" when we think of website design. But over the years certain fashion trends have come and gone. Here are 4 new trends that really need to be gone. Soon.

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4 Very Bad Website Fashion Trends

We don't normally think of "fashion" when we think of website design. But over the years certain fashion trends have come and gone. Here are 4 new trends that really need to be gone. Soon.

1 – Huge Home page images with almost no information “above the fold”. This is a truly disturbing trend, and it’s become very popular. In fact, I believe that some developers would tell you that if you don’t use this design feature, your site will be considered “old-fashioned”. People visit business websites for one reason only, and that is to get information. They do not visit to view pretty pictures. Huge images that consume the entire screen are usually meaningless and contain very little actual information – maybe a single sentence or phrase. Thus the user has to scroll down to find any information about the business. It is critical to have meaningful information immediately visible upon the user’s arrival at the site, meaning that the information needs to be “above the fold”. Why would you want to make it difficult or inconvenient for users to find what they’re looking for?

2 – Too much wasted screen space. Some designers are very fond of having lots of “white space”, meaning that page content is presented in small pieces surrounded by… nothing. This accomplishes nothing other than requiring users to do a lot of scrolling. You should have the information on your web pages compacted so as to get the most information on the screen at one time. Yes, you need some amounts of white space to break things up and improve readability, but some designers are carrying white space to extremes. So-called “screen real estate” is valuable and its use should be maximized. Why would you want to give users a small amount of information and a large amount of nothing?

3 – Nearly unreadable text. I’m talking here about the color of the text being very close to the color of the background, providing too little contrast and making the text difficult to read. A common example is a white background with light gray text. Dark gray text on a white background is fine; in fact, it might be preferable to black, where there is arguably too much contrast.

Another aspect of this issue is the size of the text. It seems to have become fashionable to have very small font sizes. Too small, therefore hard to read. Why would you bother to put text on a page, then make it difficult for users to read?

4 – Hamburger menus. This refers to the three little horizontal bars that represent a menu, and actually display that menu when you click on the bars. This design technique is necessary on smartphone screens where there is very little available space, but it has now made its way to desktop screens. Maybe some designers consider it to be “cool” or “fashionable”. Sorry, it is ridiculous. Why would you want to have the main menu of your site hidden?

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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005 - Why People Believe What They Believe

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Why do people believe things that others believe just because others believe it?

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People have certain beliefs because:

They read something in a book or other publication and believed it.
Someone they trusted told them that something was true and they believed it.
A person who was a perceived authority or expert said something and they believed it.
A complete stranger told them that something was true, and they believed it.
People close to them believe something, so it must be true.
Nearly everyone they know believes something, so it must be true.
Millions or billions of people believe something, so it must be true.
Something has been believed for a very long time, so it must be true.
They came up with a belief on their own; they don’t know where the idea came from, but it made sense and therefore became a belief.

When a group of people who have the same values and beliefs get together to form an institution or organization:

They feed on the strength of the shared values and beliefs.
They also become slaves to the shared values and beliefs.

Humans are capable of believing anything, and if they are capable of believing anything, then unfortunately they are also capable of justifying anything.

I leave it to you to digest what I've said here, and to believe it or not believe it. And to determine its usefulness to you.

But I must ask you this question: Would it not be better for you to think for yourself rather than accepting, by default, others' beliefs?

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
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004 - What is an Entrepreneur?

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There is not a single definition of the term entrepreneur. There are as many different definitions as there are individual human beings.

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There is not a single definition of the term entrepreneur.

There are as many different definitions as there are individual human beings.

With respect to business ventures, there are different kinds of entrepreneurs.

People are entrepreneurial to different degrees, and in different ways.

So what’s the definition of the term “entrepreneur”?

If you look it up, you might find something like this:

“An entrepreneur is a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

This sounds like an entrepreneur is just about anyone who owns and runs a business.

Until we get to these two words:

• Initiative

• Risk

To me, initiative has something to do with creating something.

Someone can own and operate a business without taking much initiative.

If it’s an established business, and things are just humming along, and every day is pretty much like the day before, then not much initiative is needed on an ongoing basis.

But that’s not very exciting.

And then the word Risk.

Scary word.

Associated with other scary words like endanger, imperil, jeopardize, hazard, gamble, chance.

If such words make you really nervous, then maybe you’re just not entrepreneur material.

Taking risks does not mean rushing headlong into the unknown.

Risk needs to be treated with due respect.

Smart entrepreneurs try their best to measure potential risk against potential rewards, not necessarily an easy thing to do.

Smart entrepreneurs do try to mitigate risk, but not to the point of not taking any risks.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
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003 - Your Journey Must Begin with These 4 Questions

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There are four key questions that everyone, regardless of their life or business circumstances, should attempt to answer.

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Your Journey Must Begin with These 4 Questions

There are four key questions that everyone, regardless of their life or business circumstances, should attempt to answer. These are questions that you shouldn't just answer and be done with it, and never look at them again. You need to constantly revisit them, because the answers to these questions will change over time, and they will change based on things that you do and don't do which you have control over, and they will change on the basis of external factors that you do not have control over.

Where am I?

This doesn't mean, where am I in the physical universe. It means, what is my status? What are my conditions and circumstances? How are things going and am I happy or unhappy with the way things are going, and in what way and to what degree?

How did I get here?

What were the causes that brought me to this state of affairs that I'm in right now? What were the factors, both on my part and externally, that created my current circumstances and situation? What things did I experience, and what decisions and actions did I take (or not take), that brought me to the present moment.

Where do I want to go?

Am I perfectly happy where I'm at and I don't want to go anywhere else, or am I looking for change and improvement, and what do I want that to look like? What are the new conditions and circumstances that I would like to experience?

How do I get there?

How do I get to this place, this set of circumstances and conditions that I want to be in? What do I need to do?

Again:

Number 1, where am I? What is my status? What is my state? What are my current circumstances?

Number 2, how did I get here? That one's pretty easy to answer if you're honest with yourself. You know what caused what. You know what things you did and didn't do to create your current circumstances and conditions, and you know what things happened that were external to you, what things that other people did that you had no control over, what external events took place that you had no control over, so you can pretty well, pretty easily, describe how you got to where you are.

Number 3, where do I want to go? Surprisingly, and perhaps sadly, most people can't answer that question, or if they do answer it, they have to think about it first because they don't have answer on the tip of their tongue. They don't really know on a high-awareness level where they want to go. They just want things to be "better", or perhaps "not as bad". So figure this out. Where do you want to go? What is it that you want? And if you just don't know, then make something up. And write it down.

Number 4, how do I get there? This is the tough one, the one that most people spend most of their time on. What do I need to do to create the new circumstances and conditions and status that I want to experience?

You can't just answer these questions in a flippant fashion. Well, you can, but you shouldn't. Don't just answer them once and then forget about it. Work on them. Think about them. Write down your answers and then revisit the questions later. Look at your answers two weeks from now, a month from now. Do that on a regular basis, because this is the thing that's going to create awareness, that's going to help you understand where you are, how you got there and define where you want to go, and hopefully lead you to come up with a plan for getting there.

WATCH and/or LISTEN to the Contrarian Entrepreneur Show >

If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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002 - The Things You Don't Love Doing

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The sooner you can identify the things you don't love doing, the sooner you can...

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The sooner you can identify the things you don’t love doing and the things you’re not good at, the sooner you can set those things aside and begin to focus on the things you love doing and are good at. Don't spend any time doing things you're not good at.

For example, if you don't have adequate experience in web development, it will be a poor use of your time to try to build your own website, no matter how "easy" others tell you it will be.

Whenever you're tempted to Do-It-Yourself to save money, ask yourself, Is this the best possible use of my time? Chances are, it's not.

If you don’t love doing whatever it is, and/or you don’t have the necessary skills, hire a professional to do it for you.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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001 - We're All Unique (surprise!)

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Sorry, you'll have to find your own answers and solutions, and every other person will have to find theirs.

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There are no two people alive, or who have ever been alive, or will ever be alive, that are identical. This should not comprise "new information" for you, but it needs to be re-stated.

Maybe it's just that I'm on too many infomarketers' email lists that I'm so sensitive about this, and spend so much time ranting against "canned answers" to questions and "one-size-fits-all solutions" to problems, and continually tell people to stop accepting answers and solutions from "experts", no matter what their credentials or claims may be.

Don't buy into the notion that "they did it, and if they can do it, anybody can do it", because that's simply not true. The fact that "they did it" has nothing whatsoever to do with you. You are unique. You have your own unique set of circumstances, your own unique thoughts and ideas, your own unique collection of experiences. Your timing is unique, your knowledge is unique, your goals are unique. Everything about your business is different in some way, great or small, from "their" business.

Yes, there are patterns and techniques and methodologies that work more often than not; you're not starting completely from scratch. But the precise combination, the precise recipe, that works well for you will be unique to you.

You'll have to create your own model that works for you. And in order to do that, you'll have to experiment. Someone else's model will probably not work for you. It might, but it's doubtful. You have to find your own answers, your own solutions, because those are the answers and solutions that will ultimately work best for you.

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If you:

Are a solopreneur (a one-person business)
Are a provider of professional services to individuals and/or businesses
Have a unique business plan, or would like to develop one...

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