Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 Hour Workweek gave this presentation at WordCamp recently. His title - How to Build a High Traffic Blog without Killing Yourself.

Tim’s used his blog very successfully to promote his book and has a lot of wisdom to share - we spent some time together before Tim launched his book and it’s been great to watch him rise to the success he has now.

It’s not a short video so make sure you have 50 minutes to watch it (or at least listen while you do something else).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Build a Successful Blog

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How do you feel about people who are very successful? What’s your attitude toward the movers and shakers in your field?

Do you admire and respect them? Do you speak highly of them?

Or are you suspicious of them? Do you criticize or attack them?

What’s the true role of these people in your life? What do they represent?

Subjectively speaking, your relationship with the most successful people in your reality represents your relationship to success itself. Those people represent your potential and how you feel about it.

I use the term “relationship” to mean your general attitude toward people who are ultra-successful. It doesn’t matter if you know them personally because your relationships are all in your mind anyway.

If you don’t know any very successful people personally, but you still hold strong opinions about some of them, that is very telling as well. It indicates that you don’t have a close personal relationship with your own success potential.

On the other hand, if you count highly successful people among your closest and dearest friends and family, that’s equally telling. It suggests that you have a close personal connection to your own success potential.

Birds of a feather

Objectively speaking, successful people flock together. You really don’t see highly successful people all by themselves, surrounded by those who have a negative attitude towards success. The movers and shakers in any field tend to be friends and often hang out together.

Similarly, people who have a negative attitude toward success flock together as well.

If you want to get a better picture of your own relationship to success, look to the people you hang out with. Do you befriend a lot of successful people? Or do you hang out with those who resent them or who are envious of them? This will give you a good picture of your relationship to success itself.

It’s all too easy to say that you have a successful attitude, but if you keep company with those who shun success, you’re incongruent.

Successful and unsuccessful people tend to repel each other, at least in terms of forming close friendships. One reason is that unsuccessful people are constantly complaining. They’re veritable fountains of grievances. They do dozens of times per day, usually without being aware of it. If you ask them what they think of any random celebrity, it’s a virtual guarantee they’ll focus mainly on what they don’t like about that person.

Successful people, on the other hand, are constantly talking about their dreams, goals, and projects. This doesn’t mean they’re blindly optimistic about everything. They simply have a strong tendency to focus on what they want. They inspire and motivate themselves, and they inspire and motivate each other.

When you put the two different types of people together, you have the unsuccessful people talking about their grievances, which annoys and disturbs the highly successful people if overdone. Initially a successful person may try to help out by offering advice or mentoring. But when s/he observes that the unsuccessful person applies none of it and comes up with excuses to maintain the status quo, it’s an immediate turnoff. The successful person will usually bow out and go where his/her talents and skills are appreciated.

Similarly, you have the successful people constantly yabbering on about their goals and dreams. This annoys the unsuccessful people to no end. They can’t stand it. They’ll often try to “help” the successful people by cautioning them about negative outcomes. But successful people aren’t phased and continue to press on anyway. The unsuccessful person can’t keep up and ducks out.

Attitude

Being successful or unsuccessful isn’t about how much money or status you’ve achieved. It’s an internal quality. It’s your attitude.

I’ve met people who have a lot of money, but their attitude toward successful people is so negative, they repel such people everywhere they go. I’ve also met people who are dead broke, but they easily attract highly successful mentors to help them out, and it isn’t long before their external world begins to reflect their inner truth.

When you harbor negative feelings toward successful people, you push success away. When you harbor positive feelings toward them, your own success draws nearer.

I’ve seen a very basic form of this advice in many books on wealth and success. You’ve probably encountered it as well. It goes something like, “If you hate wealthy and successful people, you’ll never be one of them because you won’t allow yourself to become something you hate.”

There’s some truth to that, but I think it’s easier to see why it works when you view it through the lens of subjective reality. Since your relationships are all in your mind, your relationship towards any particular class of people is a reflection of your relationship with whatever those people represent to you.

This means that you can understand your relationship to success by exploring your relationships with the most successful people in your reality.

Are the most successful people in your life close to you? Do you count them among your dearest friends? Or are they way off in the distance somewhere?

Do you love successful people? Do you speak highly of them? Do you feel loved and appreciated by them? Or do you shun them? Do they shun you? Do you move in totally different circles?

Who do you think is responsible for that?

A simple exercise

Select a person you regard as very successful. It doesn’t matter if you’ve actually met the person.

Take a few minutes to write down your thoughts about this person, including what you like and don’t like. Then read back what you wrote as if you’ve been writing about your own relationship to success.

I think you’ll find this exercise very insightful.

What if you’ve never even met the other person? How can you possibly know what they’re like? Where is your attitude really coming from? Your own beliefs about success are filtering it.

Seeing it from the other side

Have you ever been told that someone you’ve never met holds a certain attitude toward you. “Joe absolutely adores you; he talks about you all the time.” “Mary thinks you’re a loser; she talks about you behind your back.”

Does it strike you as odd that people could form such strong opinions about you without actually meeting you?

I get this all the time as a blogger. Lots of people hold strong opinions about me, but the ones with the strongest opinions have never even met me. To back up their opinions, they select a few clips to support their opinion from the nearly 2 million words I’ve written. Of course they’re really selecting to match their beliefs about whatever I represent to them, perhaps their own relationship to personal growth since that’s what I write about.

I’ve noticed that people who hold a low opinion of personal development will invariably hold similar thoughts toward me. I’m lame or stupid because of what I represent to them. Those who love personal development and have a strong relationship with their own growth tend to feel good about me. I’m helpful or brilliant because of what I represent.

I’m just using this as a general example. To a lot of people I represent growth and change because that’s what I write about, so this is the role people assign me in their reality. But of course it could be something entirely different. It’s your reality, so you assign the roles.

What do I represent in your reality? Can you see how your attitude toward me is a reflection of your attitude toward whatever I represent? Is it possible you’re assigning qualities to me that may be inaccurate and that your opinion might shift if we had a face-to-face conversation?

How to become more successful

If you wish to become more successful, then work on improving your relationship with the most successful people in your life.

Forgive them. Befriend them. Love them. Do whatever it takes.

Forgive, love, and befriend the part of yourself that wants to have a positive connection to success.

This doesn’t mean hanging out with people whose values and morals disgust you. Just loosen your grip on some of your criticisms. Realize that successful people are human.

Notice what blocks come up. What is it about highly successful people that really bugs you?

For example, if you get caught up in thinking about their character and personality flaws, what does that say about you? Does it mean that in order for you to have a close relationship with success, you must be perfect? Is that realistic? Can you see that you’re always going to repel success with that attitude because you’ll never be perfect?

I’ve seen this happen with some of my long-term readers. I write hundreds of articles they love, but as soon as I write about that one hot-button issue where we have a difference of opinion, they send me a nasty email and tell me I’ve lost them forever, despite numerous breakthroughs they previously thanked me profusely for helping them achieve. This often happens when they’re getting close to success in their own lives, but they aren’t ready for it.

Do you expect every teacher or mentor to be perfect? Do you expect to see eye-to-eye in every situation? Will you run away forever if someone challenges you in a way you don’t like?

Is this how you’d like to see other people deal with your success? Do you want them to put you on a pedestal, to analyze your every action, to expect perfection from you at all times?

Or would you prefer to be treated like a human being, accepted and loved as you are? Is this how you relate to the successful people in your life?

What if you believe that successful people are greedy? Do you ever complain that they should donate more to charity? What does that say about you? Are you more greedy than you realize but secretly resentful of your own selfishness? Do you feel you should be donating more than you are?

What do you think about enjoying the rewards of success? Can you feel good when some celebrity rewards themselves? Do you feel guilty about rewarding yourself with a treat now and then? Or do you feel good about it, knowing that rewarding yourself helps motivate you to create even more value for others?

Becoming congruent with success

We all have blocks that keep us out of harmony with our great potential. The people in our lives are always reflecting that inner attitude back to us.

To fix the inner attitude problem, you must at some point admit that you were wrong and forgive yourself for it.

“I was wrong about so-and-so. Perhaps he isn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe he’s just human. I will do my best to love and accept him as he is.”

You can extend what I’ve said about success to any quality or character trait. Your feelings toward sexy people reflects your relationship with your own sexiness. Your feelings toward healthy people reflects your relationship with health. Your feelings toward rich people reflects your relationship with wealth. Your feelings toward creative people reflects your relationship with your own creativity. Your feelings toward highly productive people reflects your relationship with productivity. Your feelings toward highly spiritual people reflects your relationship with spirituality.

How do you feel about psychics? Are you skeptical? Do you feel they’re all frauds and charlatans? Do you harbor serious doubts about their so-called gifts? If so, does it surprise you that your own psychic senses are virtually nonexistent? Do you wonder why your intuition is so cloudy that you can never trust it?

On the other hand, do you feel that psychics are loving people with a special gift to share? Do you accept their guidance with gratitude? Is it any wonder that you’re also able to gain much value from your own intuitive and psychic senses? Do other people comment on how gifted you are?

If you hate or distrust certain people, you’re pushing away that part of yourself. If you love and accept certain people, you’re in harmony with that part of yourself.

You can massively accelerate your personal growth by tweaking these relationships consciously and deliberately. It’s all in your mind anyway.

As within, so without

When you make the inner adjustment, your external world will shift to reflect the inner change.

Recently I did some inner work on my attitude towards certain people. My block had to do with people who spend money on nonessentials, sometimes as a way of rewarding themselves. Spending money on nonessential items would usually make me feel uncomfortable, even if I could easily afford it.

Erin and I had a 13-year old couch in our home that was ripped in a couple places and pretty ratty looking. One of the built-in recliners was broken. She’d been talking about getting a new couch for at least a couple years, probably longer, but I always blocked her. “This couch is fine. We don’t need to spend money on a new one.” We had plenty of money though, and a new couch wouldn’t make a serious dent in our finances. She tried to get us to go couch shopping a few times, but I rejected her choices. There was always something wrong with them.

After doing some inner work on my attitude toward spending money and enjoying the rewards of success, I was able to get past this block. We went couch shopping and were helped by an exceedingly gregarious and non-pushy salesman. We shopped with an attitude of positive expectancy and soon found the perfect couch for our space. We also found some great recliner chairs and small tables for one of our upstairs rooms, and we bought those too.

When we got home, Erin posted an ad on Craigslist to offer our old couch for free to anyone who was willing to pick it up. We would have donated it to charity, but most charities wouldn’t take it. Erin got about 40 replies to her ad in 24 hours, and we gave the old couch to some people who were grateful to squeeze more life out of it.

I’m very much enjoying the new couch and chairs. In retrospect it seems like such a silly block to have. The solution was that I had to reassess my attitude toward people who use their money to reward themselves. I went from “What a waste of money; do they really need a new X?” to “Great to see people enjoying the rewards of success; they certainly deserve it!” Once I shifted my attitude toward others, my inner relationship with that aspect of abundance also changed. And soon my external reality came into harmony with the new attitude.

Even working through small blocks can bring more success into your life, sometimes in unexpected ways. Around the same time I was working through this block, some new interview requests came in. Later this month Deepak Chopra will be interviewing me for his radio show, and next month Jack Canfield is scheduled to interview me as well. Did they appear on my radar as a result of my inner shift?

Who are the people you hate most in your life? Who are the people you love most? Can you admit that your attitude toward those people is going to have to change if you want to change your relationship with what they represent?

Can you see that if you harbor ill feelings toward the top performers in your field, you’ll never become a top performer yourself?

Before posting this article, I asked Erin to give it a quick read. When she was done, she asked me, “How do you feel about people who have decent patio furniture?”

What, those losers???

Use the 7 universal growth principles to achieve major breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Get the book Personal Development for Smart People today.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

At the bottom of this post is a coupon code to give you a $50 credit at MyAds - this is not an affiliate promotion, just a take it or leave it offer from MyAds.

Over the last week or so I’ve had the opportunity to see inside the MyAds from MySpace.

MyAds have been an advertiser here on ProBlogger for a month or two now (consider that a disclaimer) so I wanted to see for myself how it worked. What I found was a very easy to use and pretty affordable way to advertise a product, service or even your blog.

In short - MyAds is a pay per click banner advertising system where you can advertise on MySpace and get your message in front of potentially millions upon millions of MySpace users.

You can use it with an advertising budget of as little as $5 a day and have a pretty good looking ad set up to run within just a few minutes using their ad building tool (or you can upload your own using an uploader).

Worth noting before we go any further is that to run a campaign you need a US address and credit card. As someone without either of these I could only go as far as designing an ad and testing out the targeting features. I did however talk to a number of MyAds advertisers to get their feedback (see below).

Setting up an ad is easy. Even me as a design challenged guy got one set up in a few minutes. I put a mock ad together for my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. Here’s a screenshot of the page where you set up the ads (click to enlarge):

As you’ll see there are three ad size options and it’s as simple as typing in your ad copy, adding an image, choosing a background color and adding in a destination URL.

You can then preview your and move on to working out who you want to see it as well as setting a budget.

On the following screenshot you’ll see the section to choose your target audience:

As you make your choices about who you want to see the ad the grey area the bottom of the screen changes. It shows you how many users on MySpace will potentially see your ad as well as giving you a suggested bid price for how much the ad might cost per click to run.

The targeting options look pretty good - not only can you target by demographics (gender, age, education, relationships, parental status and location within the US) but you can also choose categories of interests and occupations of the type of person you want to reach with your ad. I tried a number of options and got the target number of people to reach quite focused and the suggested cost per click quite a bit lower than what you see in the above screenshot.

This enables you to increase the chances of conversion with your ad quite considerably.

All in all from where I stand MyAds seems like something that I’d like to use if I were running an ad campaign for a product, service or even to launch a new blog. I’ve previously used similar ad systems on other social networks with some success and the easy of use of MyAds plus what looks like great targeting make it an attractive option.

How Does it Perform? Testimony from a Heavy User of MyAds

As I was unable to go much further in the process (as a non US resident) I approached a number of people to get their feedback on the ads. One of those I talked with was Joe Frevola from Globalizer who uses MyAds quite extensively. I asked Joe a number of questions to get his insight on the why and how of MyAds:

How have you used MyAds and How has it performed?

Globalizer uses Myspace MyAds to buy media for our GlobalizerNetwork advertisers. We have had tremendous success with several campaigns on MySpace and have been impressed with its powerful targeting tools, which we have utilized to target the demographics and interests of our audience.

In comparison with Facebook, it’s hard to pick a clear cut winner and both should be a part of your media buy in most cases. Each has advantages and disadvantages and the best choice of the two will vary based on the type of campaign you are running.

While MySpace’s targeting tool is more organized and allows you to select keywords sorted by categories and sub categories, Facebook’s keyword search tool allows you to access a more robust database of target interest. MySpace does have useful demographic targeting that you can’t get with Facebook, such as the ability to specifically target mothers or recently married individuals.

Both MySpace and Facebook have solid targeting tools that should allow you to push positive ROI. While the Facebook ad platform is global, you can only target US users on MySpace currently, however word is MySpace is adding new countries later in the year. I would highly recommend the use of both ad networks to just about any advertiser.

Do you have any tips for using MyAds to share with ProBlogger readers?

There are some tricks to getting the most out of MySpace MyAds. Globalizer runs a lot of lead generation campaigns that drive a very high response, but don’t pay high bounties per conversion and therefore don’t allow us to pay very high CPC’s.

Often, when you start a campaign with a very low CPC, the ads delivers very little or no volume at all. We find that in order to kick start this sort of campaign, we overpay on CPC in the beginning and fully expect to take a short term loss as MySpace’s optimization system values the quality of our offers.

In the end, the system just wants to back into the highest eCPM, so the fact that our ads are driving very high click through rates more than compensates for the lower CPC. Once the campaign starts getting significant delivery, we are able to adjust our rate down to a profitable number and continue to experience a great a volume of traffic.

Also, when you first start running a new campaign on MySpace, definitely go with your gut and select targets that you feel will have the best chance of success with your offer. However, don’t neglect to test various demographics that you might not think would typically perform with your ads. You will often be surprised at the demos that respond to your offers.

Get $50 Credit with This Code

If you’d like to test MyAds for yourself (IF you’re in the US) they’ve given me a coupon code for ProBlogger readers to try it out and get $50 credit to use in doing so. You need to be new to MyAds to redeem it (ie if you’ve already used MyAds it’s not redeemable).

To use it - just design an ad and at the end of the process use the coupon code of Pro50. Of course this is only for those who are residents of the US and have US address and credit card details.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

MyAds: Promote Your Blog, Product or Service on MySpace

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One month ago I wrote an open letter to Google/Feedburner suggesting that it might be time to add some more features to Feedburner - particularly the ability to customize subject lines of those subscribing to a feed via RSS.

It seems that they’ve been hard at work on that very feature.

Today I logged into my Feedburner account and noticed this in the ‘Email Branding’ area.

Yep - it’s the feature we’ve been waiting for! All you need to do now is add the tag ${latestItemTitle} into the subject line and it looks like you’re set to have new subject lines on each email sent.

There’s no official word on this new feature yet from Feedburner.

Ironically it was only a few hours ago that I emailed a few questions to Feedburner who have agreed to an interview here on ProBlogger. Expect to hear more from Feedburner in the coming few days - hopefully this is a sign of things to come as they take Feedburner to the next level!

Thanks for listening Feedburner.

A hat tip to Carrie who emailed me about this new feature - nice pick up!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions

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Update: Congratulations to @GemmaWent who has won this competition. Thanks to SumoLounge again for sponsoring this - check out their bean bag chairs here.

Today’s ProBlogger Deal is simply - follow @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter and you’ll automatically go into the running to win the ultimate blogger’s chair - the Omni Bean Bag Chair from SumoLounge.

You’ve got 48 hours to enter!

Valued at $149 USD the Omni Bean Bag Chair comes in a range of 10 great colors, measures 4.5’ X 5.5, is made from rip-proof and easy to clean nylon and is filled with high quality beads which will stay fluffy for ages!

Can’t you just picture yourself lazing around with your laptop on your knee in this baby?

To win the Omni chair - simply head to our @ProBloggerDeals twitter page and hit ‘follow’. On that account we promote discounts for bloggers, competitions and special offers exclusive to ProBlogger Deals followers (there are already a few up in the last few tweets on the account).

I’ll draw the winner of the Omni chair 48 hours after I first announce this on Twitter and will update this page and @ProBloggerDeals with the winner’s Twitter handle once I do.

PS: check out the reviews of SumoLounge products. They’ve certainly impressed some pretty cool bloggers over the last year or two!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Win an Omni Bean Bag Worth $149 in the Next 48 Hours at @ProBloggerDeals

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