johnvanzyl

This is a story about having a goal, determination and intestinal fortitude.(ok, guts ) When I was in grade 6 we lived in a small town called Barmera, on the edge of Lake Bonney in the Riverland. (famous for grapes and oranges) We had a dog called Shadow, a turtle called Speedy and my best friend was an Aboriginal kid called Brian.

Back in the late 50′s about 60% of the kids in the school were “foreigners” like me.

Because I was a compulsive talker the teacher made me sit next to a sheila with glasses called Fay Morritz. That didn’t worry me, I had a great time making her mad, asking if I could borrow pencils and stuff from her all the time.

After a while she’d go red in the face and with about a 1000 freckles her face used to look like the inside of a watermelon ready to blow up. Then through a strained, wafer thin voice and baring teeth any shark’d be proud of she’d say ” NNooooo ! nnnoooo! NO!, you’ve got boys bugs van Zyl, I’d rather sit next to a stink bean “. That was my cue to say “I love you Fay”. That was it, “there she blows”, no worries, another job well done! [click to continue…]

I’ve been a BIG Rolling Stones fan since I was a skinny 15 year old kid, now many years later I’m playing their songs again in my Stones tribute band.

Up until a few years ago I’d never given any thought to the title or the words of the song ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.  But more important though, I’d never considered the fact that a large majority of people DO actually believe that maybe you CAN’T always get what you want, everyone knows that, that’s what our parents and grand parents told us, so it must be true?.

So they just accept it, they expect NOT to have everything they want, and to a degree also accept mediocrity in certain areas as a part of  life.

After reading several books on personal growth stuff etc,(yes I know, we’ve all done that), watching the SECRET and listening to Abraham Hicks and others talking about how the law of attraction works, ……….I do believe without a doubt that We CAN Get Whatever We want.

All we have to do is have the right mindset and never, never, ever give up on our dreams and having the things we want.

Here’s an example of getting what I wanted.

Remember I was talking about having a Rolling Stones Tribute band at the beginning of this post, well it’s taken me THREE years to get the ‘right’ guys in the band to play all the characters.
Within the first two years I had most of the guys, but getting someone to do the Keith Richards role just wasn’t happening.

I’d had several guitar players that were ok but not ‘THE ONE’, then one day I got a call from the guy that plays Woody.
He said he was at a party when this guy walked in that looked like Keef’s twin brother, not only that but he was dressed like Keith, had the same mannerisms, talked the same and had played in a Stones Tribute before.
He got talking to ‘Woody’ and it turns out that after some years break from doing Keef he was looking for another  Stones Tribute band to join?.

It’s up to us, we’re the only ones stopping us from getting everything we want in life and, according to the law of attraction we get what we think about the most, good or bad.
Maybe it’s time someone wrote a song, You CAN Always Get What You Want.

all the best
John

As I mentioned in my last post we did our first mlm business offline with some success, but never felt comfortable with the approaching strangers anywhere, anytime concept.
Also after spending hours on the phone with the first company we were really determined to find something we could do online, globally.

Then luckily, we came across the lady I mentioned earlier, she was doing her business online, exactly what we wanted, so we sighned up with her in our next  company. Even though we knew she was working her business online we had no idea how much we would learn from her over the next few years.

Even though the majority of people in this new company were still building their business’s offline, this lady was pioneering something that was just plain radical at the time and it wouldn’t be used by the multitudes of online marketers for years to come.

Here are some REALLY IMPORTANT things we learned during this period,

Firstly, we were buying good quality leads and putting them into an autoresponder so we could follow up with an email after I called them on the  phone, yes that’s right, these people were actually asking for information about a businesss so I didn’t mind calling them.

This was working ok, but what we were shown made a big difference to the response we were getting, we started putting what was called a signature file at the end of all our emails.
All we did was put something like, ‘So Who Are John and Julieanne’ and underneath that we had a link to a web page which told people about us, like where we lived, what we liked doing etc, stuff about our family and most important lots of photos so people could put a face to the phone calls and emails.
Funnily enough the name of the web page was called a ‘Face Page’, which was really the very beginnig of all the online social media we have today, like FaceBook etc.

Another thing we were advised to start doing was sending out a newsletter that people could opted in for on our emails.
These newsletters were about trips overseas we’d made or the different adventures we’d had travelling around Australia.

The reason this made a lot of sense and still does now is that it’s MOST important that possible future business partners are attracted to YOU first and your product/business opp SECOND.

This whole process is all part of branding yourself and, as you would probably agree it’s a lot more downstream than going upstream, convining, roping and dragging people into your business.

All the best
John

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for coming to my blog, I appreciate you being here and hope you find some of this stuff useful or just enjoyable to read.
I have to say that just up until a month ago you wouldn’t have found this blog because, I was still trying to build my business offline and wasn’t convinced that online was where it’s going ‘booom!!’.
 
I’m not saying people haven’t built huge business’s offline and that there is anything wrong with it, because probably 1,000′s of people have done just that and been very successful.

Back in 2000 my wife and I decided to ‘have a go’ at what was supposed to be a computer business and see if we could make some extra money.
We did have some succsess but I spent up to 4 hours a day on my ‘phone business’ convincing people to buy my product.

It was a great product no doubt about it, which did make us feel great, but, according to our upline we were supposed to sell it to anyone within a 5 foot radius, I even stood in the middle of a shopping centre one day giving out flyers and I gotta say I’ve never felt so much like a goose.
People were avoiding me like plague or at the least like I hadn’t had a shower for a month.

A lady we met at a Saturday meeting where we’d dance to rock music and get energized (which was fun) told us she’d wear a badge that said ‘lose weight now ask me how’ everywhere she went and talk to everyone within her ‘circle of influence.’
I was laughing to myself and thought ‘more like a circle from hell I reckon’, I just couldn’t do it, jumping on and hounding unsuspecting people with some speil about something they hadn’t shown the slightest interest in or even thought about.
For some insane reason I started thinking about John Cleese. (again having a chuckle to myself) and pictured him walking into a jewllery store and asking everyone in there if they wanted to buy a new car?

After 12 months we joined another company with an incredible lady named Marcy that introduced us to attraction marketing, which was at that time unheard of.

She was a pioneer without realising it and taught us all about attracting people rather than chasing them, because, as she used to say, ‘if you drag someone into your business you have to drag them around.’

I will write more about all the things we learned to do with attraction marketing in my next post, hope to see you then.

all the best
John 

Hi, this is John and I’ve got some great stuff to tell you about, can I hear you saying to yourself, ‘here we go, give me a break, I’ve heard all this stuff before bud’, but I promise you won’t go to sleep when you read it and, if you have heard it before that’s great, congratulations you’re probably doing this stuff already and like me you’ve read or heard some Jim Rohn.

Some of what I’m about to write is influenced by Jim Rohn but a lot of it is my own thoughts on leadership.

I’ve got a dvd that I got with a Success magazine and on it Jim Rohn talks about leadership and some tips for building a successful business, and the funny thing is this stuff never goes out of date, no matter what business you are in, or if it’s online or offline.

Firstly, there’s honesty, always tell the truth, don’t just go on about all the incredible benefits someone will get by joining your business, also tell them about any pitfalls or dangers they may face or need to look out for.

Don’t be the ‘shonky’ car salesman that says, ‘ this car has only been driven to the supermarket once a week by an elderly lady’ , and forget to mention it needs new disc brakes and a new radiator.

Remember, being a leader is being a role model, a ‘true beacon’ that new business builders can trust and follow and feel they are in safe hands, because with the opportunity of becoming a leader comes responsiblity.

Another thing, it’s important to keep sending useful informative stuff to your list, whether you’re building online or off, because your list is your ‘gold’, so keep building it because the bigger it is the sooner you will be uccessful.

Your list is really the foundation of your whole business and without it your business would sink into the ground.

all the best
John