Hello again and welcome to another Own Your Life Club Newsletter!

Well, the skies have finally opened up over Adelaide during August.  We're enjoying the best rainfall we've seen in years.  It's been very cold, grumble, grumble, but worth it for the rain which is filling our reservoirs.  Not only that, but it has made such a difference to our own back yard!  This was our view in Summer:

And this is Winter!  Lush and green...

And just when we thought it was safe to get some sleep again after the Tour de France, along comes the 2008 Olympics!  While we freeze, Beijing sizzles.  At this stage, it's 2 Gold and 3 Bronze Medals for Australia with hopefully many more to come.  Go girls!

The Opening Ceremony for the Games was spectacular and the images coming out of Beijing are simply amazing.

Our Success Tip this fortnight comes from Seth Godin, writer of the most popular marketing blog in the world and author of the bestselling marketing books of the last decade.  He is also the founder of Squidoo.com, a fast-growing  recommendation website.

In this excerpt from Seth's eBook Unleashing the Ideavirus you will discover what an Ideas Virus is and how to unleash it in your workplace:

"A recent McKinsey and Co. study found that the vast majority of online retailers are not only unprofitable, they’re actually losing money on every sale. Without even computing the cost of advertising and clicks, these sites have discounted their prices so significantly that the contribution margin from each sale is negative. The average online drugstore, for example, loses $16.42 on each and every sale, before computing the cost of traffic.

Why? Many of these sites are confusing low prices with an effective customer acquisition tool. There’s probably no way that’s less effective and more costly than cutting your prices to the point where you lose money on each sale (for Amazon naysayers—they actually make a profit of about $5 on the average book order).

Add to this mess the obscene cost of customer acquisition—estimated by the Boston Consulting Group to be more than $80 a visitor (that’s for visitors, not even customers) for most online merchants. Now you can see the huge hurdle these sites are going to have to cross in order to be profitable.

This problem isn’t unique to the online world, of course. When I was enrolled at Tufts University in 1980, there were two homemade ice cream stores within two miles of campus. One was Joey’s, which made a terrific product (they used Hydrox cookies instead of Oreos, by the way, so you could avoid the animal fat if you wanted) and there was never, ever a line.

In the other direction was the now famous Steve’s Ice Cream. His prices were a bit higher than Joey’s, but his profits were clearly much higher. Why? Because there was always a line at Steve’s. A long line. Sometimes you’d wait an hour to get an ice cream cone. What happened? Why did one ice cream shop go viral and the other languished at the edge of profitability? It certainly wasn’t about advertising, because neither shop did any. The reason Steve Herrell’s shop did so well is that it was famous for having a line!

People brought folks from out of town to have the experience. Locals came back because they’d convinced themselves that if the hive liked it enough to wait an hour for an ice cream cone, well, it must be worth it. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the ice cream. It was about the experience.

Most online merchants, being risk averse copycats afraid to innovate, are guaranteeing that there will be no ideavirus created around their businesses. By paying millions to AOL and Yahoo! for “traffic,” they’re investing in exactly the wrong sort of buzz. The alternative—focusing on people who can promote your site, affiliate programs, unique promotions and building wow, zing and magic into the site—is just too much work for most sites.

1. Create a noteworthy online experience that’s either totally new or makes the user’s life much better. Or make an offline experience better/faster/cheaper so that switching is worth the hassle.
2. Have the idea behind your online experience go viral, bringing you a large chunk of the group you’re targeting WITHOUT having to spend a fortune advertising the new service.
3. Fill the vacuum in the marketplace with YOUR version of the idea, so that competitors now have a very difficult time of unteaching your virus and starting their own.
4. Achieve “lock in” by creating larger and larger costs to switching from your service to someone else’s.
5. Get permission from users to maintain an ongoing dialogue so you can turn the original attention into a beneficial experience for users and an ongoing profit stream for you.
6. Continue creating noteworthy online experiences to further spread new viruses, starting with your core audience of raving fans.

Remember, people are more connected now than ever. Not only are we more aware that our friends have friends but we can connect with them faster and more frequently."

To read Seth Godin's complete eBook, click here:

Unleashing The IdeaVirus

From our experience, nowhere near enough good quality educational and wealth creation Seminars find their way to Adelaide.  We usually have to go interstate so we really want to support Stuart Zadel's Think and Grow Rich Seminar at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 30 and 31 August.  We hope it's a huge success that will encourage other entrepreneurs to visit Adelaide!

The following amazing speakers will be on stage at the event:

Stuart Zadel - Sales and Marketing
Carly Crutchfield - Property Development
Mark Rolton - Property Options
Michael Rowland - Self Development and Personal Growth
Aussie Rob - Share Trading
Paul Blackburn - Personal Development

Dale Beaumont is listed on the website as a guest speaker but unfortunately Dale is not able to make it and has had to withdraw from the event.

For venue details, including Perth and Brisbane, and to register for the event, go to:

http://www.ThinkandGrowRich.net.au/yourlife

Our Affiliate program is now up and running!  This is a wonderful addition to our site and along with the Members Profile section is one of the great features of the Club.

Click on the Affiliate tab on the Home Page to find out how much you could earn by recommending your Club to others! 

If you introduce only four new Club Members, your own Membership is effectively free.  After that, you begin to make money. 

So, go to the Affiliate section and read the FAQs which will give you all the information you'll need to get started.  Then click on Promo Tools to set up your Affiliate account.  We've even provided the text and banners for you to use to promote the Club to others.

And we'd like to remind you to go into the Members Profile section and introduce yourself!

Until next time, here's to your Success,

Richard and Julie

Creators of *Own Your Life Club*