I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

He understood the universal constant in life that you get what you pay for. In entrepreneurship this is especially true. The harder you work, the more you are likely to accomplish. But it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that aimless busy work is productive work. The fact is that if you don’t have an objective (aka, A GOAL) then you might easily keep yourself busy, but never really make any progress.

I have to confess that for most of my life I HATED Goals. For example, consider a sales goal. If I make a goal to sell X dollars worth of some product, that’s nice, but I really don’t have control over whether I meet my goal or not.

I have no control over whether I reach a goal

Before you head off to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am, hear me out. What I mean is that my ability to reach the goal is dependent on someone else making a decision to give me their money in exchange for my product or service. It’s his decision to buy, regardless of how persuasive I might be. I simply cannot make that decision for him.

So in reality, I don’t have any control over whether someone makes the decision to purchase from me or not. The same is true for getting optins on a website, visitors to a web page, donations for a cause, etc. Most goals worth setting depend on external factors, and those are always out of our hands.

I think that’s why goals always depressed me. I could make any goal in the world, but I felt so powerless to reach it. In my twenties I had an epiphany on the subject of goals that was really empowering. Even though I didn’t find a way to hypnotize my prospects to buy something from me or control those pesky external factors, I did discover a way to reassign my personal accountability away from the goal by splitting the goal setting process into two categories: Goals and Commitments.

How a Commitment is different than a Goal?

The epiphany came when I realized how goals differ from commitments. A commitment is something that I have absolute control over (at least relatively). For example, If I decide to do publish 20 comments on my facebook page, that’s not a goal, it’s a commitment. It’s completely within my power to accomplish it and doesn’t rely on anyone else making a decision. Sure there are external factors, but they aren’t related to human decision. They’re things like internet connectivity or my car starting. If I’ve really made a commitment I can find an internet connection at a starbucks and take the bus if my car breaks down.

The same decision independence is true for creating 20 backlinks, dialing 20 phone numbers, knocking 20 doors, etc. It’s key to understand that following through with these commitments doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll speak with 20 people, since I can’t force someone to pickup the phone or answer the door.

The point is that a commitment is something I can say that I will do and the only person that can prevent me from doing it is myself. I think you’ll see in just a minute why this is so powerful…

More than a semantic argument. It’s empowering

I promise that I’m not trying to make some coy play on a semantic difference between two words (goal and commitment). Quite the opposite is true. I’m trying to provide a separation between two very distinct mental states. Splitting goal setting into two parts, one over which I have complete control and another over which I have very little control, empowers me to make a plan with specific action items that I know I can get done. Have a look at this diagram to see what I mean.

You might have noticed that I actually put a third component as a precursor to a Goal. The Object of Desire is a slippery devil. In many cases it can be hidden, forgotten and even deceptive. Think about it this way: What value is there in Green paper or small metal discs? None really. You see, it’s not the money we value. It’s the stuff that we can get with the money that we value.

We don’t really want $1,000, or even $1,000,000. What we want is the car, or the house or the freedom from debt or the once in a lifetime vacation… I think you get the idea. So when you set a goal to make X dollars in sales, it’s important to allow your mind to travel in two directions at once. You want to make sure that you know why you want to reach that goal (your object of desire) and what steps are most likely to help you reach it (the commitments you make).

Example: get 200 unique visits per day for keyword “xyz”

Let’s say you wanted to get 200 unique visitors per day from organic search results to a page on your website each day. There are some things over which you have complete control. These include getting a specific number of backlinks to your website every day, choosing a keyword that gives you a plausible chance of success, creating optimized content for the target page, etc.

There are also many things you can’t control, such as whether those backlinks stick, whether the search engines find and index those links, whether the search engines give you improved SERP results for those keywords. While you can increase your chances of getting clickthroughs by writing a good page title and including appropriate meta description details, you really don’t even have control over whether people click on your site even if you get the search engines to put it in the top spot.

So to reach the goal of getting 200 unique visitors a day to a web page, you make commitments to create backlinks and produce the best optimized content you can on the target page.

Now, going back upstream, it’s just as important to make sure you understand what your Object of Desire is. For example, you might be stroking your ego (think “coolest guy on the planet” wars) or you might be interested in saving someone’s life (think “donate children’s hospital”). The better you understand and the more you can shape your Object of Desire, the better prioritized your Goals will be and the more motivated you’ll be to follow through with your commitments!

Your game plan and the Feedback Loop

The strategy then is to identify a goal, followed immediately by creating a specific list of commitments that you have power to act on independently. The commitments you make should have a direct correlation to your goal. Now hold yourself accountable for completing your commitments, which you have power over, not whether you reach your goal, which you don’t have power over.

As time passes you end up with data that will either confirm or invalidate the usefulness of the tasks you’ve committed to do in terms of how they relate to your goal. If the data is positive, then you stay the course and continue on with your daily commitments. If the data is negative, you don’t have to change your goal, but you can instead change your commitments to see if another approach will work. There’s a chance that you’ll end up changing your goal, but it will be based on data, not whim.

This is called a feedback loop. As you change the input (your commitments), you observe the output (realization (or not) of your goal). Depending on the output, you may change the input. You might also adjust the desired output if a set of inputs is unable to help you achieve the desired output.

Throughout all of this, try your hardest to be honest with yourself about your real object of desire and let that understanding guide you to set the goals most consistent with what you want most. You might snicker when I say “be honest with yourself”, but the deeper you look to figure out what your real object of desire is, the more likely you are to be surprised by it.

Free Yourself!

Stop living as a hostage to Goals that you don’t have any power over. Instead get scientific and separate your goal setting process into two parts: Goals and Commitments. Then follow through with your commitments to reach your goals! Best of luck.

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

Engineering vs. Programming

By the time I was ready to head to the University and go through the rigors of of getting an “education” I didn’t really want to study programming.  I decided to go much deeper, in fact, and study the atoms inside the processor of the computer.

My degree from the University of Utah is in Electrical Engineering.  During my last year I focused almost exclusively on graduate level courses and lab research in optoelectronics and semiconductor device physics.  Optoelectronics is the study of how semiconductors absorb and emit light.

Microfabrication at the University of Utah

Since the labs at the UofU didn’t have the right equipment to fabricate many optoelectronic devices, I worked on a theoretical device which we called a spinFET.  It’s a type of transistor, which differs from contemporary transistors in one significant way.  Instead of just  manipulating the charge of the electrons that carry current through the device, it would manipulate their spin too.

This opens the door to ultra low power devices that could even be manipulated to exhibit super conductive properties at room temperature.  It could also enable quantum computing and other novel applications of technology that currently aren’t possible.

The Power of Mentors

As with many things in life, success in my research and my passion to succeed in what I studied had everything to do with the talented and willing mentors around me.  My advisor Mark Miller and fellow graduate students Justin Jackson and Divesh Kapoor were awesome!

If none of that made any sense, don’t sweat it.  If you’re curious to know more about it, here’s my senior thesis which provides some of the highlights of my research.

Since you are so into the good old USA, I wanted to sing you the National Anthem. I really hope you like it. I’m looking forward to talking with you on the phone soon.

Daniel