Now that ain’t working, that’s the way you do it
Let me tell you them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
Money For Nothing, Dire Straits, 1985
By now you should have finished your book and be well on your way down Success Road. You can start to allow your Fountain of Wisdom to flow.
Start to think about ways to get yourself noticed. Unless you have become an expert in being invisible you will need to make sure that people know about you in order to make money. If you have designed a cloak of invisibility please let me know.
There are lots of different techniques to getting noticed. At one extreme you can do nothing and wait for the world to find you. This is unlikely to have much effect, with a few notable exceptions.
Take Carlos Antlers, the world famous body builder. He became world famous after waking up one day to discover he had a perfect body. Apart from writing a weight training programme did he have to do anything? No.
Carlos Antlers stood on the beach in Miami for six months, wearing a pair of speedo swimming trunks, without twitching a muscle. One day, a little old lady walked past and gave him a ‘wedgie’. Carlos Antlers got very cross and kicked sand at her. The little old lady whipped a Magnum .44 out of her handbag and shot him in the leg.
When Carlos Antlers went to hospital, the other beach users and dog walkers wanted to know where he had gone. A huge campaign was launched by a local newspaper to bring back the ‘living statue’. People all over the USA started to learn of a man who had the perfect body (excluding the bullet hole in his leg) and Carlos Antlers managed to sell millions of fitness exercise plans by mail order.
Coincidence or sheer hard work? Standing on the beach all day, every day for 6 months is probably a more challenging technique for ‘getting noticed’, but it worked for Carlos.
At the other extreme you can deliberately go out of your way to do something dramatic that gets you into the media and the news reports. Extreme examples include jumping off a cliff holding a large banner with your website address on, or leaping stark naked into the lion enclosure at the zoo shouting your brand name through a megaphone.
Do something dramatic, but do it safely.
Keith David is a businessman from a small village in North Wales. He is the author of “The Fat Man’s Guide to Not Being Fat”, “How to Get Rich” and a couple of other self-help books. Best known for his dramatic rise to fame after inventing a dietary plan to lose 7 stone in a week, he is similarly fairly well known for his subsequent fall back into penury. His wife, Anwen David regularly hacks his blog entries and adds factual corrections. You can read Keith’s book on How To Get Rich by visiting Amazon here
Personally, I don’t think this is a very good quote to include in a book on how to get rich. I believe Mark Knopfler was intending to be ironic.
And apologies to the estate of Carlos Antlers, whom I understand are fairly litigious when it comes to stories concerning the great man. I wish to point out that the above information is clearly the ramblings of a madman who ought to be sectioned. It is also total bollocks. Keith got one of our children to write the bit about the little old lady because he was suffering from writers’ block.