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Posted on July 19, 2009 - by Kent Verge
Today’s the Day!
Are you frustrated at how long it’s taking to find success? It’s easy to feel that way when you’ve tried what others say work but don’t seem to find the key. The easy answer is to quit and try something else, but the easy path isn’t always the right one.
Let me tell you a little story about a man named Mel.
Mel was a scuba diver in the 50’s and 60’s back when the sport was very young. In fact, he opened the first dive shop in the world in California and had some huge success. Over the course of several recreational dive trips to the Caribbean, Mel became intrigued with the idea of finding treasure in the many shipwrecks in the area.
In 1962, Mel joined forces with another treasure hunter to search for a group of ships that wrecked off of the coast of Florida way back in 1715. Since his partner was funding the operation, Mel agreed to work, along with a small team of divers, for a year without pay for 50% of whatever they found. Every morning before making their dives, Mel would tell the crew, “Today’s the day!” Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go as planned. Days turned into months and they didn’t find anything.
On the 360th day of the year, Mel once again said, “Today’s the day!”
That day they were trying out a new contraption that used the ship’s propellers to push clear ocean water from the surface down to the bottom where the divers where working. The idea was that the clear water would push away the murky water from caused by their digging. As an unintended side effect, the blast of water dug a hole in the ocean floor that revealed 1,033 gold coins! Today was in fact the day! Mel later said of the event, “Once you have seen the ocean bottom paved with gold, you’ll never forget it!”
After almost a year of searching, Mel and his team found the 1715 fleet which they continued to salvage over the next ten years. But that’s not the end of Mel’s story.
In 1969, winter storms off of the east coast of Florida prompted Mel and his team to shift their efforts to searching for a new wreck in the waters off of the Florida Keys. This ship was the holy grail of treasure ships: the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The Atocha sank off of the coast of Florida in 1622 with a cargo of 40 tons of gold and silver. This was a prize worthy of a real treasure hunt!
So Mel and his team began their search, and again, Mel would begin each day by saying, “Today’s the day!”
And they searched…
For eleven years…
Then, in 1980, Mel found another staggering treasure in the Keys. Although it wasn’t the Atocha, he found one of her sister ships — the Santa Margarita — that was sunk in the same storm. This find netted Mel and the team more than $40 million in gold and treasures. Although this was a find of historic proportions, Mel wasn’t satisfied. He’d been searching for the Atocha for years and felt like it was just outside of his grasp. So they continued searching.
Five years later, July 20, 1985 started like any one of the previous 5,400: “Today’s the day!”
Indeed it was.
That day Mel and his team found what his son called “the Mother Lode.” After fifteen years of searching, Mel Fisher found a shipwreck containing stacks of silver bars, chests of silver coins, gold, jewels, and thousands of other unique artifacts. One of the divers described it as a reef twenty-five to thirty feet long and five to six feet wide, made up of silver bars. They had finally found the resting place of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. This find was the richest treasure find since the opening of King Tut’s tomb. They continue to dig up emeralds and other artifacts from the wreck to this day. The total value is over $450 million and continues to grow.
After fifteen years of searching and frustration, Mel Fisher finally found the success he knew was there all along. What made Mel different from all of the others who searched before him?
He never gave up.
So when you find yourself getting frustrated, remember the story of Mel Fisher. Maybe the next article you write won’t be a home run. Maybe your Squidoo lens won’t make any sales. Perhaps that PPC ad is just a waste of money after all.
Or, perhaps today’s the day…
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Posted on October 5, 2008 - by Kent Verge
How to Get Fifty Times More Visitors to Your Blog Overnight
Using posts on social media sites to get traffic to your blog isn’t anything new. However, most who try it never get the thousands of visitors they hope for when they make their posts. To hit traffic paydirt from sites like Digg or Stumble Upon, you need both great content and a compelling headline.
John Wesley did a case study over on Pick the Brain where he tested a new headline on an existing article to find out if he could increase the traffic to the post. His original headline, “The Two Types of Cognition,” got 100 visitors from the social sites. When he changed the title to “Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence“ and reposted it to the social sites, he received almost 5,000 visitors. This was almost fifty times more visitors to the same article!
John gives credit for the idea to a couple sites, but you can see more examples of compelling changes to headlines on the post he mentions from Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. Here Brian shows a before and after of five different headlines and explains why he changed them. You can really see the difference a few changes make in some real examples.
Although you really need great content to increase the social ratings of your post, your content just won’t get read without a compelling headline. With both, you can get lots of visitors to your site in a matter of hours.
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