When you enter into the deal making phase — from real estate to intellectual property, from gigs to partnerships, it’s like heading into a dark tunnel. The Deal Tunnel. It’s narrowing (and harrowing), it’s mysterious, and everyone’s opinions are echoing. It’s the light shining ahead that keeps you lucid and strong — and moving forward.

Once you get into the Deal Tunnel you need to get out of it as swiftly as possible. Seal it. “Will you marry me?” “Yes!”; “Do you want to build this thing together?” “Yes!” Ride the momentum of Yes! and nail down the details while everyone is in love and sharp.

8 TIPS FOR SEALING THE DEAL (AND THE WHOLE POINT IS TO SEAL THE DEAL.)

1. Do NOT enter the Deal Tunnel if you are unsure that you want to make a deal. Deliberation, doubt, enthusiasm, and overall assessment must happen before you enter into any kind of negotiation. Here it is: Do you want it or not? If the answer is yes, then proceed…
2. People’s true colors come up in the deal-making process. If you don’t like what you see in terms of behavior, back out of the Deal Tunnel quickly.
3. Do not mistineterpret legitimate restrictions that your deal partners may be dealing with as their behavior or personality traits. There are legalities and formalities that can be insurmountable in deals, do not take them personally. That said…
4. Legalities and formalities can often be surmounted. Exceptions happen when people choose to be exceptional.
5. TIME KILLS DEALS. If the people involved are dragging their feet or buying time, BEWARE. For me, the ol’ drag and slag is a red flag, and it’s likely wise to walk. Are you in or are you out?
6. Race the clock and love every minute of it. Set deadlines for deal closing and do whatever it takes to meet them. Make the call. Make the promise. Pay for the express rate. Tell the cab driver to hit it! and if you’re stuck in traffic, get out and run the final three blocks to get there on time.
7. At all times in the Deal Tunnel, keep this in your heart: I WANT THIS TO WORK OUT. When you’re in that place of pure desire, you’re empowered to get creative, and be flexible for the bigger vision.
8. At all times in the Deal Tunnel, keep this in mind: I won’t die if I don’t get this. When you’re in that place of expanded detachment, you will embody your values, speak clearly, and fly if the strings get cut.

It can be a long road to Yes.
When you arrive — really be there.
And put your Yes on the map.

. . . . . .

pssst…. next Wednesday, May 25 is my birthday. Why am I telling you this? (Other than the fact the I like orchids and gold?) Because, special things tend to happen on themanifestoofencouragement.com on my birthday. Don’t miss the party. Make sure you’re subscribed. Just sayin’. xo

If it looks good, you’ll see it.
If it sounds good, you’ll hear it.
If it’s marketed right, you’ll buy it.
But if it’s true, you’ll feel it.
- Kid Rock

Do you know KateCourageous? (real name: Kate Swoboda.) She’s smart, and courageous and she just asked me a terrific question. She was lunching with a CEO of a media company, and they got to talking about the sort of formulaic web pages where someone does the format of:

“Are you dealing with XYZ problem? Tired of such and such? Frustrated by blah blah! Then you need ______ ! You are not alone. I’ve helped (thousands) of people solve this problem. [insert testimonial] Sign up for my newsletter and get the 1-2-3 steps to lifelong happiness. Then, if you want, sign up for (bigger offering with a bigger financial investment).”

You know the kind.

Media CEO said that those sales pages personally “make him wince, but that they are really effective and that they work.” Wherein Kate is thinking of “media maven Danielle LaPorte, who has not gone this route and yet has still done well. I see aspects of selling, but she doesn’t have a formulaic page.” Here comes the question:

How and why have not gone that route, and how people can not go that route and still be financially successful (what critical components are needed?). Playing the “numbers game” with the pieces that are needed, without sounding like infomercial copy.

Told you she’s smart.

There is indeed plenty of how and why data on formulaic sale pages. I’d like to add some non-scientific input. Formulaic sales pages work because people are numbed out. That’s why. And when you’re numbed out, you make stupid choices. In terms of creativity, integrity, and style, formulaic sales pages suck, hard.

They work because we’re deluged by information, because we’re in a trance and need to be yelled at to press “click”, because we don’t trust ourselves. Because we think the answer is “out there” and if it’s only $99 TODAY (the price doubles if you hesitate to buy,) well then, we’ll take it! They work because they’re common and familiar, and therefore, strangely comforting.

Formulaic online sales tactics convert viewers into buyers. No question about it. And this how we end up with a lot of obnoxious sales pages and overpriced e-books–because everyone else is doing it. Which reminds me of what my lawyer buddy used to say when speaking of shysters and followers, (“A billion flies can’t be wrong, shit must taste good.”)

So should you write formulaic BUY THIS…BUY THIS…THIS WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE…NOW! sales pages?

Maybe. Because they work. They’ll make you money.

But you have options….

how to be a (profiting) truth o’mmercial, rather than a slickster

1. Assume intelligence. Operate on this fundamental principle: people are reachable. And there are still a lot of awake and discerning humans, with credit cards, who need what you’ve got. I believe that my folks/tribe/audience are smart and savvy, and they’d be annoyed if I treated them like autotrons.
2. Assume that everyone else’s time is as precious as yours. Get to the point, and don’t tease us with click thru’s.
3. Speak very directly about the benefits. I say, 80% simple language and 20% poetry and flash lingo. Sass and personality are beautiful, but you do need to speak plainly about the benefits of what you’re offering. And the benefits to most people usually get down to: more happiness, more money, or more love (or getting thinner, richer, or laid.)
4. Be transparent about why you created the product. Of course, this is how you make a living and you want to earn lotsa bucks with it. But tell us the story behind it. When we know your motivation, it’s much easier to trust you.
5. Test out your product. Focus groups, labs, critical editors, guinea pigs, beta users — work a customer trial period into your launch plan. This is an often-skipped phase in a lot of information products, proof reading is not the same as testing.
6. Test out your sales copy. Have at least five people give you their reactions.
7. Give us the details. Table of Contents, sneak peaks with substance, juicy overviews, visuals. Don’t be afraid of giving away so much that people won’t feel the need to buy. Show us under the hood and we’re more likely to want to go for a drive.
8. Trust people. Trust that they’ll make the right decisions for themselves and buy what they truly need. Selling someone something they don’t need is of no service to them, and it could back fire on you.
9. Feel good about your guarantees. Money back or no go? Your policies need to feel as fair to you as they do to your customers.
10. Prove it! Testimonials and endorsements are the single most powerful tool for promoting your goods. Get them. Get lot’s of them. Share them in detail, and share them generously, even repeatedly.
11. Don’t try to incite fear or panic. Pretty basic, right? Consider this the Hippocratic Oath of conscious marketing. That said:
12. Do create a sense of excitement and exclusivity — because launching is exciting, and because the people who invest in you do deserve special treatment.

. . . . . . . .

RECENT INTERVIEW
Quick clip: Watch Kate Courageous + me talking about feminine power and doing business.

SAVE THE DATE
MAY 12, NEW YORK CITY
Marie Forleo will be offering a one day event for entrepreneurs and creatives that is going to be…just…AMAZING! Announcements on the way. (We can barely contain ourselves we’re so excited about this!)

go forth and shine,

xo

$150 for the full-tilt love.

And! $5 from every copy goes to the charity you choose:
The Acumen Fund or Women for Women International

Click here to view the Table of Contents!
Click here to watch the video!

“Danielle LaPorte’s passion for her mission leaps off the page, and reading a few chapters of this book will ignite you into action.”
– Gretchen Rubin | Author, The Happiness Project

“Please fasten your seat belts because The Fire Starter Sessions is the revolution you’ve been waiting for. It will shake-up and wake-up every aspect of your life. Danielle LaPorte combines soulful wisdom with razor sharp business advice to create a blue print for moguls, spiritual rockstars, and lovers of life. Skinny dip head first into this hot and fabulous book. I dare you.”
– Kris Carr | Award-winning Author and Documentarian, Crazy, Sexy, Cancer

“Danielle’s work is jam-packed with keen insights and a force of energy that pushes you in invaluable ways. The content is practical and ignites the mind in ways that could change your career and life.“
– Scott Belsky | Founder and CEO of Behance, Author of the national bestseller Making Ideas Happen

“The Fire Starter Sessions is the new, bad-ass Artist’s Way.”
– Linda Sivertsen | Co-Author, Harmonic Wealth and Generation Green

Debates are wrenching for absolutists and purists; thrilling for the open-minded questers; and neither here nor there for what Lao Tzu calls, those “with no preferences…for whom the way is fluid and light.” I’m an open-minded, strongly particular, highly tolerant, purist. I love and hate debates. I have a tendency to break the Rules of Debate. (That’s a foreshadowing. Read on…)

I am deeply digging the current discussion about social media conversation, specifically whether to have comments on or off on blogs. When I turned off the commenting function on WhiteHotTruth last month, here’s what happened:

Quick measurables:
: 3 blogger friends with large sites each told me that week that they would love to do the same thing, but it wasn’t quite right for their business model, or they were too chicken shit. But it’s tempting…
: 30+ people emailed me to say, “respect, love, way!” No one emailed me directly to call me bad names – I expected a few nasty emails, not one.
: 8 people unsubscribed. 20 more subscribed.
: A bunch of The Fire Starter Sessions programs sold.

Inner status:
I felt deep peace and artsy-honouring. The vibe in my live-work space shifted. I had three sizzlin’ creative ideas the next day that were keepers.

Rumbles in the jungle:
Charlie Gilkey, who is dependably thoughtful, wrote, “Why I Leave Comments Open” and generated plenty of convo:

… Why even have a blog if you don’t want to interact with your readers?
… A blogger refusing to take comments would be like an artist refusing to take part in a critique.
… It just seems to me that an artist’s existence is entirely based on audience… without an audience we are nothing.
… Although I logically understand, there’s an emotional disconnect to bloggers that disable comments. To me, it’s a very subtle way to say, “Your thoughts are not worth my time.”

Mark Silver (another high-minded dude,) wrote:
… In making risky choices, one often tries to find comfort by moving in packs. But sometimes that’s not possible, and making the risky choice means going it alone- or nearly alone. The risky choice can be completely right for the person making it, and completely not right for anyone else.

InformationJunkies posited, “Why close comments when they can provide an insight into what our reading community is talking about?”

Not related to my announcement:

Everett Bogue turned off blog comments while he was on vacation, and decided to leave them off.

Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation wrote a piece called, The End of Conversation in Social Media.

He dug up this music-to-my-ears, from Dave Winer, who PC World calls the “The father of modern-day content distribution” and The NY Times deemed the “The protoblogger.”

I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don’t. I think they’re publications. (You can read Winer’s full article here.)

I’m with Winer.

re-Conclusion:

PRIMARY INTENTIONS…are EVERYTHING

4 righteous bits on art + interactivity

1. Don’t be glamoured by the medium.

“Blogs beg to be interactive,” someone said in this no-comment debate. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon. In the years to come, technology is going to wire us together in so many seamless and sweeping ways that the novelty of interactivity will no longer eclipse what’s most important, which is the content.

Imagine six+ billion people having their own holographic “micro-blog” (Twitter, anyone?) When we are all uploading our thoughts and wares into the space, we won’t be talking about who’s got “comments” open or not. We just ALL be opinionat-ing and publishing EVERYWHERE. Like we do on Twitter and Facebook and…and…

“Blogs” are nodes in The Global Brain. Blog as a term (shortened from web-log,) is limiting in and of itself. When you’re clear on your primary intent, this medium becomes a powerful tool, instead of the tool working you over.

I want this space to feel like a temple, a publication, and a prayer, not a town hall meeting. I hope you’ll feel a bit secluded and protected here. Spacious. Intimate. Mindful.

2. You can serve the collective without being community-centric.

… just ask any eccentric painter, or reclusive writer, or monk.

My primary intention is to inspire individuals to be conscious individuals so that they can…serve the whole. Community is a positive, unintentional consequence of publishing in this globally-wired medium. If my primary intention was to create community and forum, I would invert my whole business model and take a back seat to watch the system self-organize, and I’d respond to what was emerging “out there.” It’s a beautiful way to foster change, but it doesn’t fit with with my true strengths, or the fire in my heart.

3. Pure art is not about pleasing your audience.

It’s about getting the art out in it’s true form, which is no small undertaking. And therein lies the service.

When you do what you do solely to be loved, or buzzed about, your rudder will start to crack. If your esteem depends on being liked for your beliefs or opinions…whoa.

Respect…I want it, of course, of course. I want love, connection, and the joy of admiration, but the art has to come first, or I’m just not that interested in the commerce. If I start writing philosophy “for” an audience, I’m fucked. This ain’t no fiction novel. This is my life.

Anticipation can be deadly to art:

Why I Don’t Have Comments, by Seth Godin:

… I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.

4. Everything is energy.

Comments. Links. Thoughts thunk or tweeted or sent in bytes. Data files. Crowded in-boxes. It’s all energy being moved around. Call it society, culture, universal consciousness, intelligence, or the morphogenic field, we are constantly depositing and withdrawing and otherwise distributing stuff from the cosmic space.

So I can’t, as some have suggested, leave comments on and “just not pay that much attention to them…let people talk amongst themselves.” That’s like having people over for dinner and hiding out in your bedroom. I hear stuff. I’m “compelled.”

But more than that…I’m devoted, primarily, to keeping it real ’round here.
That’s the best I can do.

Intention
is
everything
is
energy.
Real
is
virtual
is
real.

Honour the intent. Master the tool.

Respect.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

psst…Bindu Wiles’ SHED PROJECT starts September 14.
Check it. Shed.

Don’t spend it before you have it.

- Melody Biringer, self-proclaimed start up junkie, founder of over twenty businesses, most currently: The CRAVE Company

This is such a difficult course to stay when the money finally starts coming in, or you get some serious interest from your biggie client on your biggie proposal, or you finally convince the loan officer at the bank that you’re a worthy human being. Hard fact: before you earn it, you don’t have it. Projections and ideals do not equal money in the bank.

Don’t spend it when you get it.

- Robert Kent, wildly successful photographer and philanthropist

My last business partner and I were expecting mid-six figures for a book advance. Dreams were ballooning. Family was swooning. Our ship was coming in! The deal wasn’t even sealed and we had picked out a new house and the custom-made sofa to go with it.

“That wave of money is going to come in,” Rob said to me over Souvlaki, “and it’s going to take you right out with it.” My dreams of a Dwell pre-fab house started to crumble.

“Listen,” Rob continued. “You need to feel the power of sitting on it, of letting it actually feed your creativity. If you spend it when you get it, you’ll have to catch up with it, and that will sap your energy.”

We didn’t listen. We sank most of our advance money into the book and needless company growth. We didn’t need to expand. We needed to deepen, to stay lean and focused. Not long after, we were developing bigger projects to keep up with ourselves. I should have listened to this…

Grow organically.

- Rikia Saddy, marketing strategist

Rikia declined to invest in one of my companies because she thought it was the kind of business that should “grow organically…one step leading to the next. Your work needs to build on itself.” Those words would echo in my mind when it all fell apart. And when I started my solo, biggest venture ever.

Fuck your so-called principles.

- Mr. A., lawyer

Some young TV producers and I were very tangled in a very good-for-them but bad-for-me contract. “It’s not about the money grab they’re going for,” I ranted to my lawyer. “I don’t care about the money. It’s about the principle of the matter. What they’re doing is so wrong and they bloody well know it.”

“So you want to drag this out for months because of your principles?” he said. “You want to sink a few more grand into this because of your principles? I’ve had a lot of clients over the years that have made themselves sick, wrecked their marriages, or drained their finances to protect their so-called principles.

Of course the Producer Girls are wrong. They’re greedy twits. You could counter sue and probably crush them. But fuck your principles and get on with your life.”

And so I did.

Only do it if it’s fun. If it’s not fun, make it fun. If you can’t make it fun, don’t do it.

- Peter Russell, physicist/philosopher

Ah, sweet Peter. If only I took this jesterly sagacity to heart way back when, I’d have avoided so much agony. This has become my most impassioned mantra. I do only what I want to now, and that’s crazy fun.

Don’t burn bridges.

-John Petersen, Futurist

At the time I thought this was staid and stodgy convention. Yawn – heard it a hundred times. And how could I possibly stomach being nice to General So & So for being such a such n’ such – I was outta there, wasn’t gonna look back. But John went on to philosophize a bit, and it touched me. “The world is a small town, and you never know when you’re going to circle back and need someone. Besides, it’s rarely worth telling someone off, there’s always something better to do with your time.”

Of course, I have burned some bridges. TNT kaboom and obliterated. In fact, I said to one client who accused me of shopping out his proprietary slogans to another client, “You best consider this bridge burned. To a crisp.” But generally, bridge preservation in work relationships is about basic kindness and dignity to all parties. And that’s always a good thing.

TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR PART 2.

Love,

. . . . . . .

“If you haven’t heard, or you’ve been on the fence about pre-ordering Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starter Sessions for Entrepreneurs, run, don’t walk. You will not be sorry. The first chapter is brilliant and I am sure the rest to come will be. just. as. amazing.”
- Nona Jordan, business & life coach

. . . . . . .

INTERVIEWS

Tammy at Rowdy Kitten asked me:
“What are your thoughts on self-imposed limitations?”
Me: Self-imposed limitations can be a major act of creativity, I’m talking more about discipline and the boundaries that come with being focused on your art. It’s what Twyla Tharp called “The Bubble”. You enter a zone for a period time to get the art out, to get the job done by letting yourself be consumed. You can’t live in that bubble always, but it’s a sweet, productive place to be… READ MORE.

Jennifer Hritz asked me about the importance of “play” for adults!
Me: Work without play is death. Life without play is work. READ MORE.

. . . . . .

POST THE POST

I’ve sent dozens of clients to web designer, Sarah Bray over the last year and a half. Happiness abounds. Sarah is doing a Gold-Digging Excursion starting April 1 to help you “dig up your website’s hidden profit-opportunities.” I recommend it with all my digital love, and I bet it’s going to sell out fast. Click here to visit Sarah Bray.