Claude Hopkins, in Scientific Advertising: A Rapid stream ran by the writer’s boyhood home. The stream turned a wooden wheel and the wheel ran a mill. Under that primitive method, all but a fraction of the streams’ potentiality went to waste. Then someone applied scientific methods to that stream – put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant.
Check out this talk from 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried at TEDx Midwest, specifically at 5:13 when he starts comparing sleep and work:
It got me thinking about other “phase-based” activities, like Tai Chi or Qigong practice. Most productive practice happens when you can allow yourself to move through several stages of settling in and keep a continuous practice thread going for an hour or more. Over the last 6 years of running 3 hour-long classes back-to-back-to-back, multiple times per week, I’ve gotten a pretty good feel for these phases.
You probably don’t realize it, but there is a good chance you are letting a lot of extra money in your business slip right out of your hands. In fact, if you don’t have good systems in place, I can almost guarantee it. In this post I’ll pull back the curtain and show you some of the systems I use to keep things running tighter. Specifically, I’m going to tell you about an end of year/new year’s marketing campaign, targeting my private clients from 2010.
For movement education professionals, understanding your marketing universe is so important. When I studied the history of astronomy and physics in college, it was fascinating to see how people had tried to better understand the natural world through conceptual models (by the way, the ancient Greeks knew the world was round because of the way their ships came into view on the horizon and Newton developed calculus to explain the motion of the planets).
In the process of building and launching Trainerfly, I’ve tried to keep the wisdom of Bruce Lee in mind:
Too many people are “looking at the finger” when they think of technology. What’s the point of lightning fast communication and access to an abundance of information? It has to come back to people communicating. Otherwise, it just doesn’t mean a thing. I hope that the proliferation of fast, ubiquitous communication technology accelerates so much, that people finally get beyond the finger-fascination and can start looking at the moon – in all its heavenly glory – again.
I keep learning and re-learning this lesson. Be very careful about calling someone, or even thinking about someone as a “former student”. Of course, at BTC, we tend to think that way all the time. We work hard to keep people in classes, and when students don’t come back, it’s very easy to see the enrollment numbers, not the people behind them. Why don’t people come back? See? Even asking the question that way makes it seem like a “
I spent a fair amount of time today migrating, connecting, and updating. Over the last month or so, I’ve been building out a wordpress front-end site for Trainerfly. My brother Sam has come through with some awesome illustration, including the logo and characters for the blog tutorials. We had a funny debate about the use of flies on the site and got pretty carried away at one point. It started to look like “
I’ve been working on this video, documenting an instructor training we recently hosted at Brookline Tai Chi:
Our director, Perry, selected music, but YouTube came back saying it was copyright infringement to use that track. Ok…so it gave me an alternative called AudioSwap. This is unbelievable. Basically, YouTube has a soundtrack generation engine, that you can browse by genre and artist and even filter per the length of your video.
