He’s going to give me and all other honorable foreign devils ¥12,000 a head - something like $150 - in cash, no questions asked. We even get to keep our heads attached to our shoulders, I believe. All in the cause of reinvigorating the ailing economy.

By the time we get our mula, early next year, it will probably be worth about $500 and some other fellow will be The Current Prime Minister Of Japan. Whether Mr Aso Taro will get to keep his head or not is another matter.

I heard, the other day, that a lot of immigrant labour is having to pack its bags and leave Japan as the recession has caused a shortage of demand for concrete mixing. Perhaps it is just a cunning plan on the part of the Japanese authorities to save a bit of cash now that Mr Aso Taro has opened the palm of friendship to foreign devils.

Does anybody have any suggestions as to what I should invest my honorable windfall in? I hear that oil is quite cheap these days…

Since I am at last to receive some tangible recognition of services rendered to the Glorious Sons of Nippon of the last decade and a half of Toil in the Orient, I feel it somewhat incumbent upon me that I return the favour and invest my loot in 30 cans of Japanese lager and large it during the plum blossom season…

Seems only right really, and almost rude not to…

Kampai!

Aso Taro, Good Egg, Manga Reader & PM of Japan

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Have you thought about quitting in frustration?

Before you do, consider the bamboo groves of the orient, how the trees thereof devote most of their energy to developing their roots. You cannot speed up the process; a bamboo tree needs TIME to establish it’s roots. To the casual observer, nothing seems to be happening, but all the work is going on underground…

Then, in the spring, new shoots emerge and grow at a rate that is faster than any other tree or plant species. The new growth that occurs in each successive spring is larger in diameter than the previous year’s growth until the bamboo has reached maturity. This is due to the increase in the underground system of roots.

So you see, if you are working diligently on your Internet marketing business (or any other project) and seem to be getting nowhere, consider the merits of the bamboo, which first establishes itself underground and hardly grows at all during this period, then enters into a rapid growth cycle and expands from year to year…

This is the method I recommend for putting down roots and accelerating the growth of your Internet marketing business.

David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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On weekends when the prize money has been racheted up you often see long queues of folk lining up to by tickets, while old geezers in blue uniforms bellow through megaphones to bring in more losers.

Losers! 

Harsh, but true, don’t you think? Would you spend a good part of a precious Saturday morning lining up to buy a few state lottery tickets? The odds on your winning the big prize are so poor, the likelihood so remote, that you really ought to be doing something better with your life.

But just suppose you did win… :mrgreen: What would you do?

Would you give up whatever it is you do for a living?

Why?

Probably because you are not following your passion… Here’s a quote from a fine blog post I just read, by Alister Cameron:

“If Bill Cosby won the state lottery, would he retire from show business? Would Barbra Streisand quit singing? Would Shaq O’Neil quit playing basketball? Not even if he won the biggest lottery in the world. And almost nothing could have kept George Forman out of the boxing ring.”

The blog is actually about goal setting, and why people who are following their passion don’t need to place so much emphasis on setting goals because their passion leads them on to achieve great things almost, as it were, on autopilot…

They certainly don’t need to spend their Saturday mornings lining up to buy lottery tickets - and neither do you, if you follow your passion!

Read the rest of Alister Cameron’s blog post.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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-
C. Wright Mills

Notes From Asia: Getting to the Bottom of Japanese Selling Strategies

By Michael Masterson

America is usually given credit for being the ultimate consumer society, but compared to the Japanese we are miserable plodders.

The first thing you notice is how perfect everything is: the polished floors, chrome-plated display cabinets, hand-painted signs, and hi-tech lighting are first rate. It’s the kind of atmosphere you would expect if you were shopping for $600 shoes at Gucci or a $6,000 watch at Cartier.

The employees are immaculately clean and beautifully dressed. And the food… the food. I promise you, you won’t believe your eyes.

I took Daniel, Allie, and K to one of these markets yesterday - and I was just as excited by the experience as I was the first time. We raved about how fresh all the produce was, how beautifully cut and arranged all the vegetables were, how pristinely packaged and well-presented the cakes and pastries were.

The sheer variety is awesome. I counted 32 bins of gourmet coffee, 98 varieties of tea, 22 types of Kobe beef, two dozen types of aged cheese, 16 types of French bread, and hundreds and hundreds of mouth-watering desserts.

But the most amazing thing is the pricing. Throughout this massive market, there are things selling for prices you just wouldn’t believe. For example:

• beef at $120 a pound

• French pastries at $180 a dozen

• German sponge cake at $21 a slice

• melons for $150

This is not tulipmania. In Japan, these are routine, everyday prices for top-quality produce.

Japanese marketers have succeeded in doing what might seem impossible to a Westerner: selling ordinary food products as high-priced, prestige items.

Western consumers are used to the idea that wristwatches can vary in price from $10 to $100,000, but they would have a hard time applying the same understanding to bell peppers and turnips.

It’s hard to imagine, yet it’s being done. The upper-middle-class Japanese consumer is not only willing to pay $800 for a Louis Vuitton wallet and $150,000 for a BMW 760 and $600 for a pair of Gucci loafers, he’s also happy to dish out $36 for a piece of the world’s best apple pie. (Yes, they sell gourmet apple pie!)

As I said at the beginning of this article, when it comes to being consumers, we don’t hold a candle to the Japanese.

Of course, the Japanese pay cash for their luxuries. We pay with credit.

But that’s another story.

My point today is that if you understand the psychology of marketing, you can sell anything at a much higher price than you might think. It’s all about what we refer to in the AWAI Copywriting Program as “deeper benefits.”

Affluent customers will spend more for a product or service - even if it’s only slightly better than a similar product or service - just to own the best. This is not because they need the quality. No one needs a Rolls Royce to get from Point A to Point B. You could drive a Toyota Camry and, rest assured, it will get you there safely, comfortably, and reliably.

But people are willing to shell out exorbitant amounts of money because they want the prestige that comes with being the owner of that Rolls Royce.

When I came into the investment-newsletter business about 25 years ago, the most expensive stock market advisory cost $195. About five years after I started, I came up with an idea that notched the mark up to $695. Ten years after that, the first $995 service was launched. And today, there are dozens of services selling for between $1,000 and $5,000.

The same thing has happened in the self-improvement and home-study industry. The top prices for these programs used to range from $300 to $600. In the early 1990s, the $1,000 mark was broken - and thereafter, it seemed, the benchmark was raised about $1,000 a year. Today, I know of at least a half-dozen programs that sell for in excess of $10,000.

Bottom line: It doesn’t really matter what you are selling - watches, stock advice, or melons. If you understand that (a) people buy things for emotional reasons and (b) the more money someone has the more he needs to spend it, you’ll be able to create high-margin, high-profit products at all times in any business.

====

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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Despite my advancing years and creaking joints, I still play football in Japan, along with a couple of other British players. The three of us play alongside a fine bunch of Hiroshima University Medical School students, i.e. trainee doctors, who are all young, fit and skillful.

I am the oldest player in our team, now in my mid-forties, while the other two Brits are in their 30s and the Japanese members are barely out of their teens!

Our team is battling for the top spot in the Hiroshima City League “B” Division and on Sunday we were up against the third-placed team, who turned up with just ten men.

However, our boys performance seemed a bit lack-lustre. It was still 0-0 at half time. I was brought on for 20 minutes in the second half and felt that I had contributed somewhat to livening our team up… Perhaps it was just that they had to make an extra effort now that “the old man” had come on. I got a round of applause when I was called off - or perhaps the team were applauding the manager’s decision! :lol:

Anyway, now that the two contributing foreigners were off the pitch we were free to observe our team’s performance, cheer them on and make a few salty observations as the game continued without a goal.

One thing you notice in Japan at all levels of the game is the tendency of many players to touch the ball just once too often when attacking up the wing. This extra-careful approach (so typically Japanese in many ways) gives the defenders an extra split second to cover the cross when it FINALLY comes in and the result is that an opportunity to win has been missed.

APPLICATION

If you are struggling to win with your home based Internet business it might be that you are spending too much time and effort on your ball skills and not enough on whipping the ball into the box. You need to prioritize marketing over design.

Too many newbies think they are working on their business by fiddling with the design and layout of their website, when in fact what they should be doing is building targeted traffic. Something like 70-90% marketing, 30%-10% website and product design might be a good proportion to work with, depending on your circumstances.

Every time you promote your website it is a bit like crossing the ball into the penalty box in football.

Of course, when you do put in a good cross, you want your striker to be there to shoot and score. When it comes to Internet marketing, you need to think like a striker and work on converting visitors into subscribers and customers.

So you must prioritize what to do with that 10%-30% of time you allocate to website and product design. Concentrate on delivering a clear action-inducing message to your visitors. Give them clear directions so that they know what to do next. Give them a good reason to do it and offer them a free incentive to get them to do it now!

We Score! :lol:

Just after the Brits had agreed that Japanese players spend too long on the ball, our sweeping generalization was, well, swept away when our team scored with just five minutes remaining!

They Score!

1-0 up, against 10 players with 5 minutes to go. You would have thought victory was in the bag, but we were up against a well organized and determined group of players. They didn’t give up, whereas our boys went to sleep.

Our central defender gave away the ball in a lazy pass, our left back recovered the ball and made a dreadful back pass to another of their attackers, our goalkeeper saved the shot but did not hold on to the ball, which went round the block again and eventually found its way into the net. 1-1.

APPLICATION

You might have made a sale, but you haven’t won your customer’s loyalty! All the gains you make in your initial sale will be lost if you alienate your customer through complacency or incompetence. Winning a customer is like scoring a goal, but losing a customer is like conceding one.

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That happened to me between my last post and this one! :oops:

I was unable to recover my password from the system because it assumes that you at least remember your user name!

I was flummoxed until I remembered that Google knows everything! I found this excellent tutorial on how to recover your Wordpress password on Youtube. The method also allows you to change your username. It is very easy to do. I gave myself a new username and password in five minutes flat as I watched the video.

Once I had found my way into MySQL I discovered that the username I had forgotten was… “admin” :roll:David HurleyBest Internet Marketing Strategies

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It all happened during his resignation interview when a reporter from the Chugoku Shimbun suggested that he had often seemed rather detached from the job. Fukuda, not noted for emotional outbursts, told the reporter that he (Fukuda) was able to view things objectively, unlike him (the benighted reporter). Fukuda said:

 Anata to wa chigaun desu!

I am different from you! 

This statement passes in Japan for a “strongly worded declaration” that reveals deep emotional agitation (as can be seen from the video clip)… The quotation has won Fukuda nationwide notoriety and has perhaps made him more popular now, despite his surprise resignation, than at any time during his brief premiership…

Suddenly, Fukuda has found his Unique Selling Proposition, a vital component of any marketing campaign… yet it seems as if he found it by accident, at the one split second in his life when he pulled back the curtain and showed a bit of real emotion… just a few minutes after announcing that he was throwing in the towel…

Moral: Find your Unique Selling Proposition and use it to brand your product and yourself from Day 1 of your campaign (e.g. like Prime Minister Koizumi).

On second thoughts, maybe Fukuda was doing just that; selling us his USP on Day 1 of his new job as Non-PM!

David H

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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