How To Turn Mistakes Into Profits …

“If we got you a life vest, will you get in the water?”
- Milo to Ferny at Lake Austin         

Whew! What a week!?!

Ray and I got back on Tuesday, exhausted from an awesome weekend in Austin, TX. for the Traffic Formula LIVE workshop. It was so great to be in the same room with 100 of the most dedicated network marketers I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

MS TEAM: Mike Dillard, Justin Christianson, Ray Fong, Tim Erway, Ferny Ceballos, Craig Allen

It was even more gratifying hearing their positive responses, watching the the dozens of video testimonials they left us, sharing a few margaritas with them, taking pictures, signing autographs and having them walk out of that weekend with a completed lead generation system for their business.

When we said “hands-on”, we meant it!

But as great as the weekend was, not everything went according to plan (nothing every does!) and there were things that happened, which provided us with some very valuable “lessons learned”.

Ray, Ferny & Mike talking about Email Marketing

Oddly enough, one of the lessons we gave during the workshop was on “mistakes” and how to handle them when their occur in your email marketing.

So I’m going to give you that lesson and expand on it a little, based on our experiences during that weekend… which includes my Lake Travis WetBike incident…

Traffic Formula LIVE Exclusive - Lessons Learned

As you start growing your business, something is going to go wrong at some point and maybe make some silly mistakes. We are all human right?.

You’re going to:

• Forget to insert a link into your email
• Your formatting may get screwed up
• You may forget to activate your autoresponder
• You may accidentally mis-name the URL of a webpage which you gave out to thousands of people
• etc, etc.

Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, so there are endless possibilities for mistakes and while you should always do your best to prevent them, if they do happen you can turn them to your advantage.

But first, you must acknowledge the mistake, correct it and make up for it by creating a lesson out of it or having some fun.

In the martial arts, soft-styles like Judo, Jiu-Jitsu, and Aikido are based on a system of techniques designed to use the momentum and aggression of your opponents to your advantage — in other words, using the situation to help you meet your objectives, instead of forcing things.

The same with life. “Jiu-Jitsu” your way through life - go with the flow and turn negatives into positives.

Or as Bruce Lee would say, “Be like whaataah”.

It’s much easier and more effective than resisting everything that doesn’t turn out the way you want it to.

Ok, so here are a few situations and how to make them better, starting with something that happened recently…

Oops #1 - “Where’s My Bootcamp?”

You may be one of the folks on this list who opted into the Attraction Marketing 10-Day Bootcamp, but never received what was promised…

Well, as I was auditing our autoresponder service yesterday, I noticed that our autoresponder sequence had been turned off in our icontact.com back-office. As a result, no new AMF bootcampers received their 10-day bootcamp. (Mistake acknowledged.)

Both Ray and I were mortified and immediately corrected the issue. (Mistake corrected.)

Now, here’s some advice for you to make sure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Subscribe to your own newsletters periodically to make sure your system is functioning the way it should.
• If you notice a dip in sales or inquiries from your subscribers, make sure people are getting your emails.
• If you are using iContact.com as your autoresponder, know that everytime you add a new email to your sequence, it’s going to pause your autoresponder and you’re going to need to re-enable it in the IContact.com back-office.

Moving on…

Oops #2 - China Outlawed Formatting

A few days ago, Ray had written up some awesome content and had sent it via email while he was traveling in China. Well, something weird happened in that when he hit the send button, it arrived in everyone’s inbox as a big glob of text, which was impossible to read.

Well, a couple of days later he wrote another piece on ‘beating up Chinese peddlers’, and I decided to have some fun with it.

So when I sent it the AMF list, I made up a story about the Chinese government having outlawed formatting, which is why the last message came out messed up and I had taken it upon myself to send the current one from AMERICA!

Along with the fact that it was about Ray punching a Chinese peddler, the message went over really well and even got a laughing response from Mike Dillard. (Yes, he does read our emails!)

Oops #3 - The WetBike Incident

Finally, you are really going to enjoy this one. It has nothing to do with marketing, but it is about me coming very close to being eaten up by the propeller of a large house boat.

After the event, the Magnetic Sponsoring team and a few friends went out on a day trip to Lake Travis and rented a house boat. We rode along the lake, then the house boat anchored and it was time for everyone to swim…. everyone except me that is.

You see, I’m not a very good swimmer at all and I haven’t been in a pool for about 4 years, so I probably wouldn’t do too well with my limited experience.

Well, after watching everyone else go down a water slide into Lake Travis I became a little envious and Mike’s friend, Milo, came up with the idea of putting a life jacket on me and having me jump in.

Seemed like a great idea and I agreed.

So we got the life jacket, I strapped it on and down I went on the water slide and into Lake Travis. It seemed to have worked great and I got to “swim” around and even took this cool picture of me and Ray in the water:

Well, you can say I got comfortable in the water pretty quickly and one of the other activities which was going on around us was the use of a Wet Bike by the Magnetic Sponsoring crew.

So when the opportunity presented itself, I hopped on the bike with someone else and off we went, racing around the lake at about 50 mph for about 20 minutes…. it was hella fun!

But then…. tragedy struck! Kinda…

We tipped over after hitting the wake of our own houseboat and into the water we went. The bike was upside down as well and we did manage to turn the bike over and the other person with me was able to get back on the Wet-Bike, but unfortanately I was not able to pull myself up.

Being stuck in the water quickly turned into a rescue operation, where I was being towed back to the boat by hanging on to the back of the WetBike.

As the boat and WetBike came closer together, I soon realized that I was in between the BIG house boat and the WetBike and my head was going to be crushed in between them.

As the boat and WetBike collided, I pushed myself under water, watched the two vessels bounce off each other, while I sucked in some tasty lake water. I came up after a few long seconds, coughed up some water and slowly pulled myself along the side of the boat.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Ray and Mike Dillard for pulling me out of the water and handing me a cold beer to calm my nerves.

Now what’s the moral of the story?

If you go swimming and riding on a JetBike out on a Lake, make sure you go with friends who have a vested financial interest in keeping you alive.

Mike even offered to buy me swimming lessons. (BTW Mike, when do they start?)

Anyway, going back to the whole ‘mistakes’ thing… know that whatever you do, it’s better to do something and learn from your mistakes, than to wait for everything to be perfect and never do it at all.

And for the record, I have no regrets about getting in the water. It was hella fun and I have some awesome friends looking out for me!

Oddly enough, in the Attraction Marketing Formula course, there’s an awesome chapter on how we turned our Martial Arts Master into a YouTube celebrity and got him over 500,000 video views in less than a year.

The exposure from the video marketing has transformed his business, but one of the most valuable parts of that chapter is what we would have done differently to have maximized our results — our lessons learned.

Learning from the mistakes of your mentors and leaders is some of the most valuable information you can gain and also spares you the grief, time and money of going through it yourself.

Then you can pass on that experience to others. The more you do and learn, the more wisdom you can offer others and the more people you will attract to your business.

To Falling Forward,

Ferny Ceballos