NAMS was a hair-brained scheme, and frankly I’m a little puzzled how the workshop came to be so popular.

But after watching this video I stumbled across on the web the other day, I finally realize what’s happening.

This is a pretty silly video with a really profound message. It’s only 3 minutes long. Watch it a couple of times and pay attention to the end with the people talking in the background.

The key elements are:

• Leaders
• Followers
• and the Movment

With any good, sustainable business with a life of its own, the Leader embraces the Followers in the Movement and is completely marginalized by the result.

I’d love to hear your opinion about this. Leave a comment below – what do you think?

Man, I was really frustrated this morning.

I had a great farm day planned at my house. My driveway was like a washboard even though we’d put nearly a 120 tons of gravel on it just 3 months ago. Yep, that’s a lot of gravel, but I’ve got a lot of driveway.

My truck – and more importantly, Charlsa’s Jeep – was bouncing all over the drive even though we practically crawl up to the house. And it was only getting worse.

So, I rented a tractor with a box blade and a bucket, and planned to level out the drive myself. How hard could this be, I thought. Just need a blade to drag the drive and all will be well again. And besides, this would be an opportunity to show Charlsa that I really need a tractor to maintain this 95 acre paradise and can justify the $20,000 price tag for my dream machine.

When I reserved the tractor, I had no idea what they would be bringing, but when they pulled in the drive this morning, there it was – The Kubota! The one I’ve been coveting.

So, I jumped in the saddle, cranked it up and began dragging the drive to even out the bumps. But as I made pass after pass, the bumps were becoming waves. The bigger the waves, the deeper the blade cut into the drive. It was getting worse not better. After three hours, driving around my 2500 foot U-drive felt like riding a ship in rough seas – up and down, up and down.

Popping some Dramamine for motion sickness crossed my mind.

And I was getting really upset. This machine cost me $250 to rent for the day. And I’m destroying my drive.

That’s where Mike comes in.

Mike and Daniel are two contractors that are working on screening in my basement patio. When it’s done, we’ll have an old-fashioned southern sleeping porch in the rear of the house overlooking the stream. Mosquitoes will no longer be an issue.

Mike and his partner returned from lunch. Mike walked over to the tractor. I shut it off and the conversation went like this:

Mike: You’re just playing around today, aren’t you?

Mike: I know. It seems wrong, but trust me. The blade is for finishing. The bucket is for fixing.

Within an hour, I had the driveway leveled out. And I was in reverse the rest of the day?

Who knew?

Well, that’s the point of this post. Somebody always knows. And yes, there ARE shortcuts, tips and tricks.

We always suspected there’s a shorter, simpler, faster, cheaper, more efficient way of doing things. Knowing who to ask is the key. That’s why Mark Hendricks is my coach and mentor. Every Monday morning he tells me when I need to go forward or put it in reverse. And sometimes, I didn’t even know there was a reverse. That’s why I need to talk to someone who’s been there and done that before me.

Mark’s my main mentor. Sometimes, I need a specialist. Today, Mike was my mentor – in how to drag a driveway.

At the Niche Affiliate Marketing System workshop, we bring together about 18 of the top mentors and coaches who will teach more than 150 students in a 3-day intensive. You should use the opportunity to shop for a main mentor.

You’ll find someone with whom you’ll click immediately. Hire them on the spot. Buy their products. Find out what they do and how they do it. The savings in time and money will be well worth it.

By the way, if you haven’t gotten your NAMS4 ticket yet, better hurry. The price jumps $100 Sunday night at 11:59 p.m. EST.

How can Scrabble lead to finding your niche?

Today, I’m going to prove to you that you have a money-making niche inside your head (and heart) that you’re probably ignoring.

And I’ll prove that you can get it out and have it working for you in almost no time by following a simple 3-step process that includes a fun game.

1) What’s your passion?

Make a list of all the things you love to do no matter how silly other people think it is. This is your passion list. You should have as many items on this list as possible. Mine was more than 100.

Here’s some ideas:

• Family
• Raising horses
• Helping others succeed
• Collecting stamps
• Hiking in the woods
• Watching TV

For me, I have a passion for riding motorcycles, travel and creating things.

2) What are you good at?

Create another list. This is your expertise list. Again, as many things as possible. If you can’t come up with many, ask your friends this question: What do you think I’m good at? This is really hard because you have to give yourself a little credit. Don’t be shy.

More examples:

• Organizing closets
• Training dogs
• Creating an exercise routine
• Painting pictures of birds
• Reviewing movies

In my case, I’m good at building systems, writing and photography.

3) Next, let’s play a game called Prosperity Scrabble.

Prosperity Consciousness

This is a game created by prosperity guru Fredric Lehrman. This program changed my mindset completely about 10 years ago and showed me that you can make money – a lot of it – by changing how you think about money and limitations.

Take your two lists and cut each item into a single piece of paper. Keep the list piles separate. Passion pile on the right; Expertise pile on the left.

So, to be clear…

You’ve got two piles of small slips of paper – probably an inch by inch.

Now, dig into each pile and pull out one slip of paper from each.

Here’s the game part of this process – ask yourself this question: How can I make money with my expertise and my passion.

For example, let’s say that you pulled:

Passion: Love to write poetry
Expertise: Good at working with animals

How can you make money with that? (We’re not going into the whole market research piece of this until later, so don’t worry about keywords, market size, etc. Now, it’s about thinking creatively.)

The strict version of this game says that you don’t move to another combination until you make $1 from it, but I’m more interested in stimulating your thinking. Lehrman’s point was that you can make money from anything, so why not choose your passion and your expertise.

So, poetry and animals. That’s a niche. How do you make money with that niche?

Here’s just one example:

People who love animals love animals passionately, so they are a motivated group.

And poetry is a great form of inspiration.

The first thought off the top of my head is that you could use pictures of animals that you get from free resources and the $1 stock houses to create cards or motivational “business cards” with poetry snippets. Include a link to an affiliate product in that niche such as Send Out Cards or Amazon pet supplies and you’ve got a money making venture.

And if you make a little money from it, figure out how to scale it up to make a lot of money from it.

See how easy that is?

I’ve created a forum specifically for discussing niches. Talk about the niche you’re in if you’re having problems or success. But also, play this game and discuss your results. It really works well when you form a mini-mastermind group (in the forum) to brainstorm ideas.

I’ve also included a couple of handouts to get you started. Pick them up in the forum.

Remember the Gorilla-Gram business a few years back – like the singing telegrams, messages were delivered by people in gorilla costumes… That business was started using this technique originally. Lehrman talks about this and others in Prosperity Consciousness.

What the heck is a twub?

Look to your right.

Introducing twubs – ta-da!

This is one of my favorite new twitter tools. Someone is finally organizing hashtags on twitter and doing something very powerful with them. And it’s so simple.

Twitter provides an RSS feed for any hashtag that you search. For example, here’s the hashtag RSS feed for #NAMS.

Pretty ugly, huh?

But the smart folks at twubs have taken that feed and built a social site around it. You can join the twubs #NAMS feed by clicking on the “Go to Twub” link in the upper right corner.

There, an entire world focused on the #NAMS hashtag awaits you.

What can you do with Twubs?

Here’s four really powerful features – all from the twubs widget on my page (or yours):

1. Click on the Tweets tab to follow all the Twitter traffic for #Nams
2. Click on the Media tab to send a blast to the entire twitterverse with the hashtag automatically embedded or only the members of the #NAMS twub group
3. Click on the Members tab to see all the images of the members who have joined the twub social group – but don’t stop there – hover your mouse over one of the member’s pictures and a little box filled with information about that member will pop up
4. Click on the Info tab and you’ll see the RSS feeds I’ve included in the twub group including the latest posts from the NAMS members blog and the forums so you can click those links to go to the site when you see something interesting
5. And this is the really cool part…If you love the #NAMS group – all the great folks who attend the NAMS workshops and participate in the forums here, you can embed this widget on your blog or website with the click of a button

Here’s how:

• Click on “Get This” in the lower left corner and the twubs.com site opens up with the widget in its default state. I customized the colors for the header and footer of mine and you can do the same to match your site.
• Copy the code in the box and add it to a text widget in your WordPress template or to your website. And Voila! You have the NAMS group with you where ever you go.

This is so cool.

And by the way, I set up this social site in about 45 minutes. That’s even cooler.

This was triggered by a simple suggestion in the NAMS forum by one of our moderators: Lisa Roberson. Thanks so much!

The secret to success in online marketing is not what you think…

Before we get get to my personal secret of online success, I want to talk to you about the Niche Affiliate Marketing System pre-workshop training.

It’s ever evolving.

As we learn more about the needs of our members, we deliver more focused training. And as we get more great content from our previous workshops, the training library becomes deeper and more complete.

But it also becomes more overwhelming as the thud factor gets greater and we build quite a library of valuable content.

With that in mind, each workshop will have pre-training that focuses our members towards achieving their goals. And often that training comes with bonuses. Sometimes, it will come with introductions to outstanding (but not free) training by some of our faculty, NAMS members, or trusted colleagues.

Bob (the Teacher) Jenkins’ outstanding Freemind Mindmapping video training is a good example of that. Freemind is my tool of choice for brainstorming and Bob opened my eyes to all kinds of new possibilities with that tool.

NAMS 1 and 2 pre-workshop training was conducted before the workshops were sold out. NAMS 3 pre-workshop training is conducted after the workshop sold out.

This is a better approach for members obviously.

You are in it for the training, not the pitching. In out continuing effort to avoid the pitch and bring you real value, we’ll focus training that supports our primary themes of the NAMS workshops.

We’ll always be focused on:

• Affiliate Marketing, and
• Driving Traffic

They fit hand-in-glove. If you can’t drive traffic, you can’t make sales. And making sales is what affiliate marketing is all about.

So, you can always expect to find the pre-workshop training heavily focused on those two factors.

Beginners especially will get significant doses of that medicine.

After a strong base there, we’ll branch out into other more specific areas such as social marketing, press releases, short reports, SEO, building landing pages, video traffic, ezine advertising, keyword research, getting the right mindset and more specific aspects of building a business.

A topic near and dear to my heart is…