Those Who Teach... A couple of weeks ago, I told you about my dislike for the saying "Those who can, do; those who can't teach." I asked what you thought of it. And we got many reader responses. I'd like to share a few of them with you today. First is one from Dr. Mardy Grothe, an expert on language. He starts with the origin of the saying, which I was unsure of... "In G. B. Shaw's Man and Superman, he includes a number of Maxims for Revolutionists in an appendix to the play that is titled 'The Revolutionist's Handbook.' One of the maxims is: 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.'
"There is no evidence that Mencken ever said anything of the sort.
"By the way, in Man and Superman (which is Shaw's re-telling of the Don Juan story) the hero of the play is John Tanner, a witty ideologue who in Shaw's fictional world is the author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook.' To add a touch of verisimilitude to the Tanner character, Shaw included the 'Handbook' in full as an appendix to the play. That appendix includes some of Shaw's most famous lines, including: 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
"I fully agree that the 'teachers cannot' remark is a stupid one. If someone said it to me at a party, I'd be tempted to reply: 'And my experience has been that people who quote that remark can neither do nor teach.'
"But, if I were in a less contentious frame of mind (and more of a coolly devastating one), I'd probably say: 'Yes, that is a clever line. It's from Shaw, as I'm sure you know, but even he didn't believe it. The words come from the lead character of his 1903 play Man and Superman, if memory serves. I've always held a different view of teachers (and one which I believe Shaw would have supported). It is best expressed by the American historian Henry Brooks Adams, who wrote: 'A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.'" Thanks to Dr. Grothe, author of five books, including the bestselling Oxymoronica and Viva la Repartee, a book celebrating clever comebacks, for shedding some light on this subject. You can find out more about him and his work at www.drmardy.com. (More reader feedback on the "those who can, do" saying below.) In today's issue, Bob Bly tells you about a number you should be tracking with your Web business... but probably aren't. And I talk about why a recession is a great time to start a business, and what to do when you're "stuck." ---------------------------------------------- Highly Recommended ---------------------------------------------------- World's Highest Paid "Bad Boy" Copywriter Discloses the Key to Boosting Income by 1000% in One Month - This "bad boy" has a secret. One that has pulled in as much as $3.6 million in sales over a weekend ... $5 million in a few weeks ... and $16 MILLION in a single month! He almost never speaks at events -- he's just too busy. But ETR has him for 3 days this November. And you better get in now -- the price is going up. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Giving yourself permission to lose guarantees a loss." Pat Riley The Web Metric Nobody Tracks ... and Everybody Should
By Bob Bly There is an important Web metric that you should be tracking in your Internet marketing business -- but probably aren't. It is the "evaporation rate." The evaporation rate measures how many names you lose from your subscriber list -- by the week, month, or year. How do names evaporate from your list? It's simple. Every time you send an e-newsletter -- or an e-mail marketing message -- some of your subscribers are going to decide they are no longer interested in hearing from you. And they will unsubscribe or "opt out" from your list. The percentage of subscribers who opt out per e-mail blast is your "opt-out" rate. My opt-out rate is typically a little less than 0.1 percent. I have more than 50,000 subscribers. That means every time I send an e-mail to my list, I lose around 50 of them. However, that loss is offset by the number of new subscribers who opt into my e-list. In my opt-in number, I exclude sign-ups from such things as joint ventures. I include only those who opt in "over the transom" -- people who stumbled across my website. They may have found it through organic search. They may have read an article by or about me on another site and clicked on my link in that article. Or perhaps they were reading one of my books and decided to check out my site. The number of over-the-transom new subscribers is your "organic opt-in rate." Evaporation rate is calculated as follows: Evaporation rate = organic opt-in rate minus opt-out rate Let's say you get 100 new subscribers each week who opt in organically. And let's say you send two e-mail marketing messages per week, which generate a total of 100 unsubscribe requests. Your evaporation rate would be: ER = 100 minus 100 = 0 A zero evaporation rate means you have no net gain or loss of subscribers. Your list did not grow that week. But neither did it shrink. Most online marketers have a negative evaporation rate. They lose more subscribers than they gain. And that's a big problem. Even if your weekly evaporation rate is small, it can add up to huge losses over the course of a year. In his special report "Taking Names," Ken Magill says the average business can expect to lose 30 percent of its e-mail file a year due to evaporation. For the entrepreneurial e-mail marketer, your revenues are directly proportional to the size of your list. So the smaller your list, the less money you make. If you are making $100,000 a year with your list and you lose 30 percent of your subscribers without replacing them, next year you will be on target to make only $70,000. Therefore, you need to reduce your evaporation rate to zero. Or, even better, turn it into a positive number... so your list gets bigger all the time rather than smaller. You can build your list in two ways, and you should do both. The first is with specific list-building initiatives that can add hundreds or thousands of new names to your list in a very short period of time. These can include cross promotions with other Internet marketers in your niche, pay-per-click ad campaigns, co-registration deals, and affiliate marketing. The second thing you can do is boost your organic opt-in rate. And there are two steps involved in that. Step one is to optimize your main website for search engines. A search engine optimized (SEO) site will almost always generate much more organic traffic than a site that is not optimized. Step two is to have mechanisms for converting a greater percentage of your site visitors to new subscribers. At minimum, you should move the sign-up box for your free e-newsletter to the upper right-hand corner of the home page. The upper right corner is prime real estate. Whatever appears there gets the most attention. Building your list is a huge topic. There's so much to say about it that I can't begin to adequately address it in this ETR column. However, you can find much more information in my ETR "Internet Cash Generator" home-study program: [Ed. Note: Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books. To subscribe to his free e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and claim your free gift worth $116, click here now: www.bly.com/reports.] ----------------------------------------------Highly Recommended --------------------------------------------------- What Would You Do With Financial Freedom? - The "dream" of many new Internet entrepreneurs is to sleep late, jet off to tropical destinations, work from the beach, etc. But I know one guy whose dream lifestyle means spending most of his time feeding chickens. And he still helps bring in millions for his clients every year. Find out all about this "off the grid" marketing genius here... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More wealth, health, and wisdom from Masterson... Some see the start of economic recovery just over the next hill. It doesn't look that way to me. Still, I'm certain that now is the best time ever to build wealth. Why? Because now is always the best time. Now is always the best time to start something good. Good things take time, and time is the one thing that is definitely limited. The sooner you begin, the faster you'll get where you want to be. This is universally true, but it's especially true when the goal is to build wealth. You can't control the economy. You can't predict the markets. You can't ultimately protect yourself from disaster. But you can make yourself richer tomorrow than you are today. You get richer by making a little more and spending a little less. You can do that -- and you can do it today, can't you? There's always a way. Work an extra hour. Sell an extra widget. Start a partnership. Cook up a moneymaking idea. I have a friend who is very good at coming up with reasons why he should put off starting any new venture. Lately, he's been telling me that he needs to wait for the economy to recover, for his visiting relatives to go back north, for his house to get more organized, etc. He can find an unlimited number of reasons. But, like you, he has a diminishing amount of time. Every day that passes is 24 hours of opportunity you won't have again. Why not put a bit of that time to work for you right now? When you agreed to do it, it seemed like an exciting challenge. Now, your deadline is fast approaching and you haven't even started. You made it a priority to get the job done, yet it hasn't happened. It stays there on your daily task list -- highlighted for attention but never attended to. Why does a great opportunity turn into an overwhelming chore that threatens to remain forever undone? There are all sorts of causes -- but only one solution that consistently works for me. Here it is: 1. If you have been stuck for more than three days, admit it. Stand in front of the mirror and repeat: "I shot my mouth off. I'm stuck." You have been waiting for inspiration to save you, but it hasn't appeared. Stop waiting. 2. Don't even think of attacking the whole mess at once. Break it up into small pieces. If it's a 40-page report you have to write, work on it page by page. If it's a bunch of people you have to talk to, approach each conversation as a separate task. 3. Make a commitment to spend 15 minutes a day on it -- doing one mini-task at a time. It is such a small amount of work that you won't have any trouble doing it. This will get the ball rolling, even if it doesn't seem to be rolling in the right direction. 4. Keep at it until you break through the psychological barrier you've been up against. Sooner or later -- and this is guaranteed -- you will get the inspiration you had been waiting for while you were stuck. And when that happens, you'll whiz through to the end. ---------------------------------------------- Highly Recommended --------------------------------------------------- A Perfect Day at the Beach (Floppy Hats and Umbrellas NOT Required) I always feel fantastic after a day at the beach. My skin looks radiant, my mood is alive, and I'm content, knowing I'm going to sleep like a baby. But for years I felt guilty about my time in the sun. I would hide the fact that I didn't use sun screen, because "everyone knows the sun causes cancer."
But I don't hide anymore, because I learned a secret that changed everything for me. Thanks to Dr. Herbert M. Shelton, I found out that everything I'd been told about the "dangers of the sun" is a LIE. And thousands (yes, thousands!) of peer-reviewed medical studies prove it's a lie. Click here to discover the truth about sunlight - information most doctors don't know… and the drug companies wish you didn't. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More reader feedback on "Those who can, do"... "I have met a many college professor who ended up in academia because they were unable to carve out a niche for themselves in the world of business, writing, or film/theater.
"On the other hand there are a tremendous amount of professors who are highly skilled and have been successful, who see it as their opportunity to give back." ** "I'd ask that man where he'd be today if he'd had no teachers. Teachers open us up to the world and good ones inspire us to continue learning. You can't put a price on a great teacher. Too bad the good ones don't get compensated enough for what they do." ** "Without education, each new generation would be limited to whatever it could learn in its lifetime and the next generation would have to begin learning everything all over from scratch. Without education we would all be ignorant, unprotected, hungry and sick." **
"'Those who can, do: and if they're lucky they also get to teach.' "I spent many a year in the Steam and Power Plant business. Along the way I was involved in some fascinating projects that turned out very well. "Fifteen years ago I started traveling the country conducting training seminars. It was after one of those sessions that I received the most moving compliment of my life. A young fellow said 'I wish you had been my teacher all of my life.' "At that moment, the student became the teacher. My first response, of course, was to swell up with pride. (Ah, Vanity -- my favorite vice!) But then what he said really sank in. I knew that what I had done was to simply pass on to him that which I had received from my teachers, and that he was going to pass it on down the line. The sense of being part of this immortal chain was at once humbling and spiritually gratifying. Now that's a kick in the pants!" ---------------------------------------------- Highly Recommended --------------------------------------------------- How to Get Some Cash Flowing INTO Your Bank Account Instead of Out of It Instead of spending money 4, 5, even 10 times a day... imagine if you could start collecting cash that often. I know a way for you to... - Pick up as much as $75,000 to buy a home or make home improvements...
- Snag $1,200 a month to get a higher paying job (This is not a loan!)...
- Get $1,000+ every time you go on vacation (at the world's top resorts)
Can you say, "Ka-Ching!"??? It is ETR's newest publication -- and every month it will give you dozens of practical ways to bring cash into your life, hour after hour after hour. Get all the cash-generating details right here. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today's Words That Work: Ideologue An ideologue (AYE-dee-uh-lawg) -- from the French -- is a zealous supporter of a particular system of beliefs and values. Example (as used by Dr. Mardy Grothe and quoted by Michael Masterson today): "In Man and Superman (which is [George Bernard] Shaw's re-telling of the Don Juan story) the hero of the play is John Tanner, a witty ideologue who in Shaw's fictional world is the author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook.'" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We want your feedback! Let us know your thoughts on today's issue. Email us at: AskETR@ETRFeedback.com | 
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