Here’s a picture of my neighbor, Spencer, from a few weeks ago. I think he’s about 10, a cute kid and a good marketing case study for us.

If you notice in the picture – we live in a court. Translation = pretty much no car or foot traffic! While it’s great for letting kids play outside – it’s not so good for a budding lemonade tycoon. After buying 2 cups of lemonade from Spencer, I had to give the kid some ideas. I told him he needs to move the stand where he would get a lot more traffic. He should go on the corner of our street or at least put signs directing people to the court.

Did he do it? Nope. He just went on yelling, “Lemonade for sale!” on deaf ears into the court.

The sad part is so many people do the exact same thing with their sites. They’ve got one of the loneliest lemonade stands on the Internet. Why? Because they aren’t putting themselves in front of a stream of traffic.

It really is that simple.

Find where the traffic already is and plant yourself along the way offering up something these people want. Let’s compare Spencer’s lemonade stand to one I remember a few years back. It wasn’t in front of anyone’s house – but rather it was in front of a steady stream of joggers, walkers and strollers on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda. The budding entrepreneur went out of his comfort zone (beyond their front yard) and went to where the marketplace was already – and simply got in front of them.

Did it matter his lemonade was from concentrate and not made from real lemons? Nope – not one bit.

The late, Gary Halbert, had a famous bit of instruction he did in a seminar talking about going into the food business. He told the audience, “I’ll let you have any advantage you want. Name it.” People would mention “I want the only McDonalds” or “I want the best food”, etc. etc. After everyone had their turn, he’d say, “Okay, the only advantage I want is a hungry crowd.”

Hmmm….

Quite frankly, when you stand in front of a hungry crowd even the ‘roach coach’ gets business during lunch time. Same with your site. What are you doing to get out of your comfort zone (front yard) and place yourself in front of a stream of ‘hungry’ traffic? Here are just a few ideas:

•    Adding your offer to partners Thank You pages and Opt-in pages.
•    Buying ads on highly-trafficked sites.
•    Doing deals with other sites who show up high in search engine rankings for your keywords & phrases.
•    Piggybacking on hot trends? (How many iPod accessories are out there now?)
•    Putting package inserts into outgoing packages.
•    Finding out how to work with big sites in exchange for content and affiliate rev-share deals. Etc…

If you’re not selling enough products (or lemonade) – maybe it’s time to get in front of the right crowd!

* Update: I saw this comic from Jimmy D. Brown and asked him if I could reprint it here. Seems only fitting:

There’s an old story about a boy who wants a pony really badly for his birthday. When he wakes up to find a huge pile of crap at his house. He jumps around clapping and excited! Someone asks him, “Why are you so happy? You’ve got a mess of manure here?”

And to that the boy responds, “With that much shit – there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere!”

*
Well, that’s how I felt on Thursday with the supposed release of Maverick Business Insider.

It’s a *very* long story – but the short version is really buggy code to start with and one tech problem grew into another, etc. etc. Of course, after the initial frustration of the moment was gone – I took a step backwards and remained (mostly) calm. (Maybe surprisingly calm to a lot of people more directly involved.) I realized in the grand scheme of things a launch screwing up wasn’t that big a deal. I also used some of the principles my friend, John Harricharan, teaches in his PowerPause to create what I really wanted. (Plus at the same time feel grateful for what I already had in my life.)

Anyway – what I do want to point out is the good news. It’s an interesting notion that there’s good news somewhere in the pile of bad news. I’ve always believed things happen for a reason. And if the site wasn’t so screwed on Thursday I wouldn’t have shut it down and wouldn’t have searched for a new solution. I got a recommendation from Matt Bacak for an amazing guy named Mike Cline. If you ever need some serious tech work – not minor stuff – but serious stuff contact Mike. (Don’t even know if he’s taking new clients or wants more work since he doesn’t know I’m mentioning him here.)

Anyway in 24 hours we (he) rebuilt everything and we went live at 3pm yesterday. It’s hard to describe how impressive this is – I don’t know if I even grasp it. The bottom line is things are 5x better than what I originally intended and it’s a direct result of the first screw-up. If that didn’t happen we wouldn’t have used Mike or re-built the entire system.

Now there’s more good news (and it’s actually for you!)…

Because of the snafus and since we’re opening the doors on the weekend – I’ve decided to extend all the FAST-ACTION bonuses *way* beyond what we originally intended. (Fact is, they would have got snapped up in a few minutes during the intended Thursday release but now we’re going to open the doors wide to make sure you get it!)

You’re getting a special, $15k closed-door presentation entitled “Instant Leverage Points in Your Business That Bring You Surges of Cash”. It’s a presentation I did last January to 26 top-gun entrepreneurs and business leaders, who paid about $15k in membership fees and trip fees to come together in Baja, Mexico.

Plus, I’ve bundled up this DVD, the MindMap I handed out, my newest book called “34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs”, a 2 CD-Audio program and more – the only thing you pay for is s/h.

Truly a sweet deal for you to say “maybe” to trying the new ‘Maverick Business Insider’ newsletter. Get the whole scoop and find out about the special Fast-Mover Bonuses waiting for you.

* Come Say ‘Hi’ to me! *

As you know, I don’t speak that often so this is an unusual week. Monday, I’ll be at the ETR Bootcamp in Florida and then speaking on Thursday in Chevy Chase, MD at a local networking and business group for entrepreneurs called “The Entrepreneurs Group”.

* Forbes Adventurer Interview *

Also, something cool I didn’t post it up yet was an interview I did with Jim Clash from Forbes Adventurer. Jim talks to people who ‘push their lives to the limit’ so was excited to be interviewed. We talked about me being passenger #144 on Virgin Galactic.

Jim’s got a pretty interesting list of adventures to his own credit including driving an Indy car 200mph+ around the oval (it’s a lot harder than a straight line). He has a book called “To the Limits” on adventure and business that’s a little harder to find – but it still on Amazon.

Well today was *supposed* to be unvieling of the ‘Maverick Business Insider‘ newsletter and intro package. I guess someone forgot to clear it with the Internets. I’m not a techie but it had to do with our database and integration with fulfillment and operations. So instead of getting a whole bunch of annoyed customers in and not being able to fulfill in a timely manner – we pulled the site & put it on ‘hold’.

I figured we’d have it up earlier – but we made a decision to wait until tomorrow to open it back up.

I put up a video on the main site explaining it a bit more and giving some good news. Hopefully a silver lining in this for you. (Hint: It has to do with the ‘First-Mover’ Bonuses!)

* Contest Winners *

From our video comments contest – you guys made it really hard to pick the best ones. Some incredible, insightful comments. So I bumped it up to 8 winners instead of 5…
Drum roll…please….

Here’s who will be getting their own copy of the new Maverick Business Insider package with everyone else who grabs it (when we get the doors open). It looks like this -

Here are the lucky 8. Congratulations To:

·  Bob Beckman:
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm

·  Suzanne:
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:56 pm

·  Jini Patel Thompson:
November 4th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

·  Jeremy Reeves:
November 5th, 2008 at 10:19 am

·  Matthew Detrick:
November 5th, 2008 at 10:49 pm

· Rob:
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm

· Robertas Says:
November 4th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

· Chris Brisson Says:
November 5th, 2008 at 10:54 pm

We’ll have customer support contact you to get your address to send you the entire Maverick Business Insider package.

What started off as a quick 15-minute Saturday project turned into a 1 hr+ of new material on how to make more, have more fun and give more back! I asked you guys a few days ago for questions and some of the answers were quite eye-opening in each of the 3 areas.

With the elections going on in the U.S. tomorrow – the big idea behind the Maverick Manifesto is FREEDOM!

Freedom to write your own ticket regardless of what’s going on with the crazy economy, the next person in the White House or any external factor!

Here are a few things I covered:

• How to truly really create a Work/Life balance that actually works!
• Figuring out the right questions to ask so you get back the answers you need.
• What you really need to know in order to work once and get paid over and over and over again.
• Why you’ll never say “I can’t afford this” ever again…write your own rules for paying for what you want.
• How to make sure you turn up the ‘FUN quotient’ in your life and not get burnt out! (Plus: Exactly how to shatter the biggest excuse to waiting for more money to have fun!)
• Easy ways to bring fun into other people’s lives who you care about – and create real meaningful experiences.
• The painless rule to “automatically” giving back now instead of waiting & lots more!

Check it out and I would love to hear your comments.

I’m looking for some thoughtful insights and you don’t even need to agree with me – but I’m interested in the conversation that arises here. 

Happy post Halloween…

Hope you enjoyed your little ghouls and goblins ransacking your house for sweets. We literally (no exaggeration) had probably 250 kids hit our house. I swear they bus them into our neighborhood. I was really worried we were going to run out of candy at some point and raided the pantry for anything we could give out.

Zak had a great time with his first ‘real’ Halloween. He was Thomas the Tank Engine and loved it! Last year, he went to 3 houses and just walked right in. He didn’t get the concept. This year – he got it in a big way!

Hmmm…..knock on door, say a few words, people give me candy.

Rinse. Repeat.

Here are a couple quick pic of Zak at the neighbors place:

Poor Zoe, she was too pooped to even make it out. She stayed in her Giraffe costume for about 8 minutes before crawling up to bed.

Across the street from us, our neighbors are totally into Halloween with an entire graveyard scene, a big inflatable pumpkin coach, you name it. (Those are where I took Zak’s pics above.)

Now I love Halloween too and I had to get into the act. I bought this big archway with the words ‘Cemetery’ on top of it. It looked really cool online but when I put together – it took a slight breeze to knock it over. I secured it every which way from Sunday but it still wasn’t enough. Finally, the last time it fell over – I just left it there like an ancient ruin. Don’t know it seemed cool enough. Then I took the cemetery sign and stuck in my shrubs (you can just make it out to the left of the house).

The kids did go crazy for a fog machine I had on porch. (That’s right street cred with the 13-year olds!)

Next year we’ll have to have more fun with the kids and maybe get people in the yard scaring them. Who knows? Or my neighbor across the street, Deb, and I might form an alliance and build a huge archway spanning the street and have a makeshift haunted house in there. Something fun….

And that brings me to another point – where I need your help…

I just mentioned having fun…that’s definitely something I strive to do in a big way from jumping out of airplanes at cruising altitude to little silly ways like being “Count Yanik” for Halloween promos. (Yes, I know he didn’t make an appearance this year. I know you’ve been sobbing for hours about it.)

Having fun is one part of my Maverick philosophy for ‘Making more, having more fun and giving back more’.

Sounds good, right?

To me that’s the quintessentially ‘holy grail’. But not everyone thinks that’s possible – or maybe you’re struggling in one (or more of those areas). I want to help. I’m working on new content including videos and a free webinar for the release of the new Maverick Business Insider newsletter on Nov 6th. I got lots of stuff to share…but I need your help.

What’s your biggest questions or things holding you back in these 3 areas?

Give me your thoughtful answers and you’ll get a chance to win the ’34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs’ book and 2 CD Audio Set.

Here’s the quick survey

It’ll only take a few minutes and it’ll help me make sure I’m covering what you want. Thanks!