The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Most of us are content to learn a great deal about what's happening in our industry, but is that causing a blockage when it comes to writing? When we go into the depths of writer's block, we find that you need cross pollination not only across industry, but across styles as well as media such as video, audio and text. Find out how a lack of cross pollination could be causing your writing to freeze up.

If you're already good at writing, do you need an outline? It might seem one more barrier and yet it's the first element that creates this so called Writer's Block. Find out why outlines are a map that quickly get you to your destination. Click here to read online: Writer's Block Series 1/4: Why the Lack of Outlines Even Stops Professional Writers In Their Tracks ________________________________________ If you give employees a bonus, will they work harder? This is the seemingly obvious question that Michael Sturman had to contend with. Sturman, a professor at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, decided to find just how much pay and performance mattered. And as you'd expect, he found the obvious. People who are paid above the market rate, do a much better job. As you'd imagine, he found that even a 1% raise, can tend to boost employee performance to about 2%. However, when the same 1% bonus was linked to a specific task, the job performance spiked as high as 19%. Turn that statistic around, and we can speculate that the employee had been working at 19% lower than their potential. When writing articles, it's easy to work way below your potential as well And most writers feel their potential is reached when they do fancy research or when they sit down for hours to write. However, a lot of potential is wasted long before you sit down to write a single word. A lot of the potential lies in the stages of preparation. Let's look at three critical elements that cause a fair bit of chaos: The Lack of Pre-Work The Scarcity of Input Understanding Energy Management When Writing 1) The Lack of Pre-Work The moment I sat down to write this article, I was a little lost. I'll tell you why. I hadn't done much pre-work. I fully intended to outline it, work out the story that was needed, and add a lot of notes. However, when it came to writing the article, I did what most writers do. I sat down at the computer and hoped I'd get lucky. And luck can be pretty fickle under the best of conditions, but it seems to take special pleasure in taunting the article writer. The problem with article writing is that we don't see it as several tasks Writing an article is more like an expedition than a casual walk in the park. To get a well-written article out, you need the story, or possibly more than one story (just like the pay-performance story above). Then you've got to have at least one point in that story that's exceedingly curious. The opening paragraph can cause enough grief for a writer, but it doesn't stop there. You need to know the points you're going to cover, have case studies and examples, need to understand at least one or two of the main objections, the headline, and yes, the list goes on and on. I've written about 50 articles a year for about 18 years That is roughly 900 articles, and this doesn't take into account course material, books and over 100,000 posts in forums. In short, it's a heck of a lot of writing. You'd think you'd get really good at writing with all of this experience, right? And you do. But we're not talking about writing at all. We're talking about preparation. Without the ingredients, an expert chef can make a dish relatively quickly, but there's a lot of fumbling and bumbling before that meal is ready. However, with the smallest amount of preparation, that dish, even in the hands of a newbie, can be so much better, so much tastier. Easily the most critical pre-work lies in three main areas The first is the outline. I didn't have any outlines to write in school, so I can't share the hatred of outlines. However, on the article writing course, most clients start off with resenting the very thought of outlining. They come around when they realise that the outlines they did at school were terrible and that outlines for article writing are more like a laundry list of what needs to go where. But even among the converted, the additional step of outlining seems like another 10-15 minutes of work that can be avoided. And it can't I did that this morning when I sat down at my computer. And like that expert chef, I can manage to write when I'm half asleep, but I still waste enough time that I could have simply spent with a quick outline on a Post-It. I did outline the points, of course, but failed to make any notes and had to work out what I was saying as I went through the article. And that's just one element we're talking about. The outline, the story, the objections, the headline—they're all work in progress. Yes, even the headline Though it's a spindly one or two lines, having a raggedy working headline in place keeps the article on track. In this very article, I went up to check the headline thrice, to make sure I wasn't wavering. And all of this back and forth is wasted time and wasted energy. If you're good at a task, you can wing your way through it, even on really rough days, but if you're prepared, it's a whole different ball game, isn't it? However, the preparation stage isn't confined to the outline alone. The second point we need to cover is the input. If there's one thing that will derail you every single time, it's the lack of input. When you have input, you have a regular source of information. It's a feed you can't ever do without. If you don't keep that input flow going, your article suffers. And this is long before you even get started. Next Up: The Scarcity of Input Next Step:  Writer’s Block 2/4: Why Cross Pollination of Ideas, Media and Styles Are Crucial (And Avoid Shutdowns When Writing)

One of the most mind numbing tasks is to get a client to pay for the job you've completed Clients tend to be slow with payments or just default. But is there a way to avoid such a mess? There's not just one, but three separate ways to go about it. Let's find out how you can get paid without all the bother—and well in advance, too. Click here to read online:  Want to get paid a lot in advance? 3 Methods to get paid earlier than ever before ________________________________________ What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs, And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. Wouldn't it be a bit of shame that we have no time to look at sheep and cows because we're trying to get paid on time? There's no foolproof system to get paid every time, but if you pay attention to how other industries work, you might never have to chase payments again. There are three core methods to use: – The Construction Company Method – The 100% Payment in Advance Method – A Downpayment in Advance Method Let's look at all three to see which one works for you. 1) The Construction Company Method When we were building our office—which is next door to our house—the builders followed a slab system of payment. Every stage of the construction had a pre-payment attached, and it looked a bit like this: Foundation: Pre-payment 1 Rough framing: Pre-payment 2. Rough plumbing and electrical: Payment 3 On and on it went through the insulation, exterior, interior, carpeting and exterior driveways. If we wanted the next stage to proceed, we needed to make the payment to keep our builders “motivated”. This slab system of payment is one of the finest both for the client and the person doing the job. It makes sure that both parties are incredibly motivated to go ahead with the process. As a service provider, this is often an excellent system to follow because it ensures both parties move ahead systematically However, there's also a bit of a downside if one of the parties decides to walk away. Let's say you start working on a client's website and the payments are going well when the client suddenly runs into some sort of difficulty. Maybe she's had a personal problem and can't pay the rest of the sum, or perhaps she's just really slow with sending her text and images across. No matter what the problem, you're stuck because you can't proceed with the job. The happy news is that if you've worked out your payment structure well, you'll won't run into a loss because you've covered what you've done. By no means is this a foolproof system because your project might need to do a lot of core work at the start, and then not a lot in the middle and at the end. It means you'll have put in a lot of effort and not been paid for it. But wait, no one said the slabs had to be equal, right? If the first slab requires about 45% of the work, then that's the first payment the client needs to make before you get started. If the second slab is just 10% of the work, then you get the client to pay accordingly. However you decide to break up the slabs, it's important you get paid for the proportion of work you're putting in, which means you've got to do some groundwork and estimation in advance. However, that's just the first method of getting paid. The second seems harder because it's 100% in advance. But is it really harder? 2) The 100% Payment in Advance Method My father ran a secretarial college for over 25 years and it wasn't an easy life. He'd leave for work before 7 am, to make sure he opened all the doors and windows, turned on all the lights, and had his first cup of masala tea long before the first student showed up an hour later. All day he'd be at work, returning home about 8:30 at night. It was a time-consuming job, but the one thing he didn't spend much time on was collecting money. He'd always get the student's money in advance If you wanted to be on a course, or learn a skill such as typing, you had to pay before you got started. This simple act of payment in advance is incredibly common for schools, colleges and not surprisingly with a lot of the things we buy like electronics and petrol. But will it work for you as a business? It depends on two factors. Your confidence and the demand for your product or service. We may assume, for instance, that a restaurant will charge you once you show up and finish your meal. That's not the case with David Patterson, at San Francisco's restaurant which goes by the name of Coi. If you cancel 48 hours in advance, you won't be charged However, should you tip over into the last 48 hours, your credit card is charged the late cancellation fee of $275 per guest, and that's just for the tasting menu and doesn't include wine. There's also a 20% service charge. Will you be charged the service charge if you don't show up? It's not clear, but what's more than clear is that they treat all sales as final, just like a sporting event or concert. If you think they're alone, they're not! Lazy Bear, another San Francisco restaurant sells each month’s tickets all at once, usually on a Wednesday in the middle of the previous month. They announce ticket sales via Twitter and send an email to their mailing list. Tickets are not refundable and can’t be switched to a different date or time, but they are transferable to other people. The list of restaurants that have this policy in place is growing. In short, it's payment in advance in an industry that has traditionally brought the bill to the table after you've downed your last espresso and Porto. With Psychotactics we take almost all payments in advance If you buy almost any book, any course or workshop, you have to pay in advance. Even if it's consulting, you pay in advance. In several cases, this payment is made by the client several months in advance. The Article Writing Course, for instance, started in August, but clients paid about five months in advance. The Sales Page workshop which is in late October was also sold out four-five months in advance. And you may wonder if this is linked with the demand for Psychotactics workshop and courses and yes, to some extent it's true because the courses, workshops and even self-study products are all sold out quickly. There's a demand factor in place, but there's also the second point, which is confidence. At Psychotactics we always confidently charged in advance Even going back to the earliest days of consulting, we charged in advance. We might not have been 100% confident that the client would be so very co-operative with a 100% payment, but we'd ask anyway. Sometimes we'd have to do a little back and forth discussion, but once we removed the risk, they'd pay. When we sold our products online, we had no choice but to charge in advance, and with every sale that confidence grew stronger. It takes a bit of bravado when you're offline and standing in front of a client. That client might be hiring you as a speaker, buying a product from you or hiring you for your services. You have to bite your lower lip, whistle a happy tune and ask for the amount upfront. You may hear the sound of butterflies whooshing in your tummy, but you need to ask anyway. You'll be surprised how many clients will give in if you just ask. Asking put you in a great position as well Even if you don't get paid 100% in advance, it sets you up nicely for at least 50%. And that's the next possible option to get paid in advance. 3) A Downpayment in Advance Method Is there a big advantage of getting only 50% in advance? It may sound like a negative, seeing how you could have easily been paid in one go. However, there's a definite psychological advantage not to have all the money in your pocket right away. The 50% that's not been paid is a definite form of motivation. You want to make sure the job is done because the remaining 50% is still pending. It's often hard to be motivated when you're paid everything in one lump sum. The 50% motivates you, but it also motivates the client Now they're not just shooting the breeze but have a stake in the process. They know that they've put their money down and they have to do their part as well. You're still going to run into clients that won't give you the information you need, or create needless delays in the project, but this confusion can be reduced if you have clear instructions and deadlines for the client. Either way, you've got three core ways to get paid in advance and what you finally do, depends on your level of confidence and the demand for your product or service. Either way, the worst possible method is to get paid after everything is done. When I moved to New Zealand, I stepped away from that system However, when I lived in India, I didn't set up the right expectations with clients, and I'd spend close to 30% of my time merely chasing payments. At one point I was so upset with the backlog of payments that I had to see a doctor because I had high blood pressure from all the worry. I did have great clients too, who paid on time, but also terrible clients who wouldn't pay and even decided to pay me just half the sum I was owed. All of the payment in advance systems arose from years of frustration, so much so that I vowed that one of the things I'd do when I got to New Zealand was get paid in advance. Summary: How you get payments is up to you. You might have a client who pays promptly on time. In which case this entire article is just advice for something in the future. However, if you've been struggling with payments or expect some struggle, use one of the three ways outlined above. You might still have a life full of care. And may still have not much time to stand and stare. But at least it won't be because you're chasing up payments. Next Step: How To Get Better, Higher-Paying Clients With Testimonials

Most of us are quite obsessed with stashing away case studies, examples and stories. However, it's not enough to simply put it away. You have to be reasonably familiar with the story. And how you get to be familiar? You focus on one point in the story. Why does that one point matter? Let's find out.

This is not a regular podcast episode but a quick announcement about Fritoon... Your chance to receive a funny cartoon direct to your inbox every Friday. Visit psychotactics.com/fritoon , to sign up! Enjoy

Researching an article is so frustrating because it's time-consuming But there are ways to beat the pressure—and the pain. Believe it or not, there are ways to be productive with zero last minute research. This episode shows you how to make advance research work for you, as well as in situations where you have no research at all. Sounds too good to be true? Well, listen to the episode. Click here to read online: How to research an article (without killing your productivity)  

Readers often get lost in an article and hence abandon it. However, there are pretty simple, yet powerful methods to let the reader know exactly where they are in the article at all times. Plus when you use these techniques, you push the reader forward as well. Here's how you go about using these "Transition Techniques". Read on the website: Transition Techniques  

Websites are daunting projects but even the casual listener is astounded to learn that a website took three years to complete. Of course there's a story, so here we go with the tale. Read on the website:  New Psychotactics Website Story ==== Back when I was in university, my friend, Shelly Brown sent me a recording of a rap band called Run DMC I listened to the music patiently, then decided rap had no future. As you can see, I'm a lot worse than most people at predicting the future. Even back in 2008, I had friends in the industry, who were talking about mobile as being the next big thing. But there we were in the middle of 2015 with no intention of creating a mobile-friendly site. I figured mobile had no future, so why bother with a new website when the existing website was doing just fine? However, what prompted me into action was a little chat with a client This client was into some sort of search engine optimisation, and he suggested it would be a good idea to create a new site as well. While we'd designed all the earlier sites, I was clearly out of depth when it came to mobile, which is why I left the entire task of design to the client. The design he produced was so horrific, so hard to describe, that there was no choice but to abandon the project. But now we'd been bitten by the redesign bug. And so, on July 27, 2015, the first website sketch was done. It would be another three years and ten days before the website went live. Planning is priceless but plans are useless I don't think we'd ever decided a fixed date for the release of the website, but shortly after a burst of initial designs, we ran into a whole bunch of barriers. The first was the Headlines Course, that started up in August. In 2015, I decided to add headline trainers to the course as well, which complicated my life a bit. When the course was done, we got an unexpected invitation to go to Nashville. There was no point in making such a long trip just to attend a seminar Which is why we decided to have a workshop of our own on the topic of storytelling. This meant notes needed to be written, slides had to be created, zillions of cartoons needed to be drawn for those slides. And yes, the website went into the first session of deep freeze as we conducted our workshops in Nashville and then Amsterdam. Which brought us right into 2016 and the promise of a renewed resolution to get the website going. However, remember how I wasn't clued into mobile? It had been over six months, but I was still working out how mobile designs worked differently from earlier websites. Which meant that the very pretty looking Photoshop designs looked gorgeous in the program, yet terrible on the site itself. Plus we were so much in love with our sidebars that we wanted them on the new website as well until we saw how messy it all looked on mobile. While I was spending inordinate amounts of time on websites like Squarespace, March came along, which brought about the biggest challenge of 2016. As you're probably aware, we tend to treat our courses like software Every now and then we'll do a major update even if a course is selling extremely well. I'd grown tired of the Article Writing Course and Version 1.0 had to somehow move to Version 2. In theory, this rewrite shouldn't have been a problem. I'm pretty adept at writing, as well as at creating course material. But there's also a factor of laziness. If I can procrastinate, I will, and the only way to get going is to announce that we're rolling out Version 2.0. The challenge was to write the course material while the course was in progress We tend to send course material at least a month in advance, and clients got Version 1 of the audio and notes. While they were working their way through the new course, I moved everything around. And by everything, I really mean everything. Assignments that were in Week 8, were moved to Week 3. Whole sections of the course were chipped away, while others were completely discarded. It may not sound like a lot, but every assignment takes over 3 hours to write because it includes complete step by step instructions as well as detailed examples. Then to add to that workload was the notes and the re-recording of the audio series. All of this was happening while the course was in progress. To say I was fried after all of this activity was putting it mildly I remember a whole week of headaches. My sleep wasn't so good either, and my head felt like Neil Armstrong could take a walk on it. By the time we headed to India in July, on vacation, my blood pressure was up, and so was my cholesterol. To talk about or think about the website was not much of an option, yet that's exactly what we did when we got back from our break. And the website might have still been ready to go by end 2016, but we had two painful technical problems One of those was our broadband connection. The broadband connection and other issues. If you drive around parts of Auckland, you're likely to see signs that say, “fibre connection coming in 2019”. And back in 2016, if there was one thing I wanted more than anything else, it was that fibre connection. All around us, everyone seemed to have broadband. Plus our home, it seemed, was the furthest away from the Phone junction. This meant that like a water pipe, everyone got their water, and we got just a tiny trickle. It was so bad that it would take 4 to 5 minutes to upload 5 MB of data. And just as a matter of comparison, in order to upload the podcast I had to go to the café down the road and stand there for 10 to 12 minutes. If I was brave enough to upload a file from the office, it would take anywhere between 12 to 16 hours. It wasn't until 8th August 2017 that we got a fibre connection Suddenly we were 500% faster and we could actually get around to the website. That didn't mean that our work process improved dramatically. Because of some technical difficulties we had hosted the sandbox website on another server. That server was extremely slow and it took ages to get any of the pages updated. When it's a single problem that you're dealing with, it doesn't seem much more than a bother, but these problems were cumulative. The software, the Internet connection, the server — they all piled upon each other to create a perfect headache. Still, when you're faced with barriers there is no way but to go forward. Anyway, by August 2017 we had our modem, did a little modern dance and got on with the job of completing the website. It was late in the year, and we were a bit exhausted The membership site at 5000 BC had been upgraded and there were the usual pieces of the puzzle that didn't fit in. When all of that had subsided, it was time to head to Australia. I had a speaking engagement in October, but we decided to take a couple of weeks off in Bryon Bay. That was October, and before we knew it December had rolled along and it was time for another New Year's resolution. But it's really 2017 where things got going However, we had this start, stop, start, stop for so long that any progress was frustrating. At times I just wanted to give up, but there was no way of going back. We had to go forward. Here's a note from as late as August 2017. Part of the problem was my own doing I didn't want the website to be a rehash of the earlier one. If we were going to create a new website, we needed a new look, and this included dozens of cartoons. But luck does play a role from time to time. Without putting much thought into it, I bought an iPad Pro. I'd owned iPads before and they were mostly glorified book readers, but this one was different. The software, Procreate, combined with the Apple Pencil, allowed me to do a lot more sketching. Before the iPad Pro, I was chained to my computer and Photoshop. But once I got the iPad Pro, I could go anywhere and draw. In fact, I would lie on the sofa and generate quite a few cartoons. It got to the point where I was creating about a dozen cartoons a week. This was a critical component of the new website and the new look. To have all those fresh cartoons with a style that represented where we were in 2017 was pretty important. In the iPad, Pro played that role in getting me to draw at a furious pace. It's August 2018 as I write this note If you were to ask me what was the most challenging part of the website, I could cite the broadband, the server, the software—lots of little things. What took me by surprise, however, was the testimonials. Of all the elements on the website, the testimonials took the most time to put together. A single testimonial would involve four different sections to be updated. Then there was the size of the photographs. The photos on the previous site were tiny, some weighing in as small as 8 KB. That would not do for the new site, but we had hundreds of testimonials and many of them need photos. That's when my great Facebook and LinkedIn scavenger hunt began. I'd look for the clients first on Facebook, then if I couldn't find them, I'd go to LinkedIn. Some of the testimonials go back in time, so clients had updated their photos. I couldn't tell if they were the same people, so I had to read through the bios just to make sure I wasn't putting the wrong photo alongside the name. The only reason why the website got completed in 2018, was because there was no choice We work for about 12 weeks and then we take a break. This means that any sort of project which is ongoing, like the website, gets put on hold. But not only does it get put on hold, but everything else takes priority. We have to queue the newsletters for when we are gone, and also the podcasts. And then we have to queue a whole bunch of newsletters and podcasts for when we get back. However, looking at my calendar I knew that if we postponed it past August, it would never get done in 2018. This is because the article writing course was due to start in August, and that is extremely demanding. After the course, I knew I had a speaking engagement in Australia, and then a vacation coming up. That would mean we would be tossed straight into 2019. It had to be launched before August rolled out. However, all of this frenetic activity had taken its toll I was pretty exhausted and so was Renuka. We decided to take a week off in Fiji even though the website was ready to go. The web developers, Audrey and Mangesh, from Stresslessweb.com were keen to get going in late July, but Renuka was adamant that the break came first. That meant another ten days or so of waiting. But it was a good move. In Fiji, we did almost nothing. No swimming, or snorkelling—zero activity. It wasn't so much a vacation as a change of scene. We'd have breakfast and Renuka would head back to the room, check e-mail and fall asleep. We'd have lunch and we would nap for another few hours. This was pretty much the routine for a week before getting back and setting the launch date for the 6th of August. Even at that point, there were a few hiccoughs I can't remember what we were waiting for, but the cartoon I drew seemed to reflect my mood. And then on the 7th of August 2018, at 10 am, New Zealand time, we were not quite live. There was a “site soon to be back again” sign on the website and we were told to do a sanity check. But sanity was the last thing on our mind. Renuka wasn't in the mood to go through hundreds of pages, or even the most important pages. If things didn't work, we'd fix it later. An hour later, at 11:17 am, the site was live. Three Years and about a month—that's what it took And this is just Version 1. I'm still working on the pages I really want to do. But first, I need another vacation. Those changes will need to wait until next year. Footnote: Now that the website is live, I have to thank the dozens of volunteers from 5000bc.com who have combed through several pages and Renuka's inbox is flooded with suggestions. Some of these suggestions are simple typos, but others reflect the sophisticated nature of our clientele. It's going to take several months of work to get through all the suggestions, but that's what needs to be done. we are extremely grateful to all of those who volunteered in 5000bc.com, and especially grateful to Audrey and Mangesh, who put up with a lot of stop and start activity over the years. Their business, StresslessWeb.com is really what kept our stress at bay. Without their technical expertise and without 5000bc, this task would have been infinitely harder and we'd still be working on the website in 2020. Next Step: The Psychotactics Story: The Craziness of The Very First US Workshop

It sounds bizarre to make your own products, courses and services redundant, but it's a very sound strategy that's been used by companies such as General Motors, Apple—and oh, we've done it for almost as long as Psychotactics has existed. What's it about? Let's find out in this episode. Read on the website: The Cannibalisation Strategy ======= In 1923, Alfred P. Sloan took over a company that was far behind its closest competitor The company in the first place was the Ford Motor Company with a monstrous 60% of the market. General Motors, in comparison, was lagging far in the distance at just 20%. Part of the reason was Ford's Model T, which was far more affordable than what GM was offering. Sloan decided General Motors could never win a price war and so he rolled out a completely different strategy GM rolled out not one, but five different brands. Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac—these were all from the same company but had their own identity and were pitched at different economic brackets of US clients. When we look at what he did, we see a cannibalisation strategy Let's see: how would we describe a cannibalisation strategy? The concept seems more straightforward to understand when we think of software or a specific software like Photoshop. For the past 25 years or more, Photoshop has been through thousands of changes and had about 27 versions. Each version cannibalises the earlier version. Today the program works through a subscription model and upgrades without fanfare, but until quite recently, a new version of Photoshop would effectively be the death knell for an earlier version. It meant that Version 8, would cannibalise Version 7, which in turn cannibalised Version 6, and so on. What Sara is referring to is a concept called cannibalising your product When we brought out The Brain Audit, it wasn't designed to be a version—as in Version 1.0. We were so new to the business that we were happy just to have a book that clients were buying. Nonetheless, the earliest version of the book needed an update, but we called it an upgrade (just like they do with Photoshop). The Brain Audit went from Version 1 to Version 2. And then to Version 3 and finally sits at Version 3.2. With every iteration or upgrade, existing as well as new clients bought into the product. The Brain Audit was cannibalising the previous versions, and all the time, we were getting newer clients and earning revenue. Which is General Motors did very effectively The strategy to overcome Ford was built around how the client would operate. At least in the case of their cars, they'd come back to buy a higher priced brand as soon as they could afford it. What we'd call the upgrade is essentially a concept of cannibalisation. When Sloan took over as president of GM in 1923, Ford was the dominant player in the U.S. auto market Ford's Model T cost just $260 ($3,700 in today's dollars), and Ford held 60% of the U.S. car market. General Motors had 20%. Sloan realised that GM couldn't compete on price, so GM created multiple brands of cars, each with its own identity targeted at a specific economic bracket of American customers. The company set the prices for each of these brands from lowest to highest (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac). Within each brand, there were several models at different price points. By 1931, a mere eight years after Sloan took over; he combined some excellent financial management and cannibalisation strategy to turn the tables on, Ford. GM had a 43% stake vs Ford's 20%. What do we learn from this seemingly simple concept? When most of us create a program—whether it is a service, a product or course, we're super happy for a while. Then we tend to get bored and want to create something entirely new. And I do this as well. I'll create an Article Writing Course, and then I'll be itching to create a storytelling course, with the fancy name of “Traffic light storytelling”. No one is suggesting you stick to one product endlessly. However, when you go back and cannibalise your product, you create two markets—new buyers and existing clients. The Article Writing Course is no longer on Version 1.0 And clients have not only bought the new version home study, but they may also come back to do the new course online, as alumni. Take the copywriting course as well. That's going through a metamorphosis as we speak and later this year, Version 2.0 will be available. The storytelling course we talked about earlier? That's been done live in Nashville and Amsterdam, but guess who's keen when I announce a newer version? It doesn't mean we don't create new products, courses or products. But it does mean that the existing products and courses are given a significant upgrade. When you get down to writing your course or even offering a service look at it as Version 1.0 And when Version 2.0 is on its way, offer it to clients. And you'll experience what Apple does with its phones every year, or what Photoshop did for years, and certainly what catapulted GM over Ford. Cannibalisation may sound weird to you. Well, then just call it an upgrade. Next Step: Here are a few marketing strategies that work extremely well for small business.

It seems natural to keep an eye, even get obsessive about your competitors. However, it's a poor strategy for many reasons. In this episode we make the case for why the competition doesn't really matter as much as you think. And why focusing on them could possibly cause clients to desert you, instead. Here is the website link: Ignore Competition === There is a story about an author who wrote a book The book was incredibly cheap, and as a result, he was able to sell several thousands of them. The competition looked at the increasing volume of sales and decided they could do the same. However, to their frustration they found themselves losing money. The reason why they had such significant losses, was because the book production cost more than the price that it was being sold for. And in this little tale is the story of competition. Most of us are reasonably obsessed with our competition We don't start out that way. When we start out, we are in awe of the people who have already made it. We don't consider them to be “competition” at all. They seem so far ahead of us that they are more like people we admire. We don't feel we need to compete against them. However, in time we make more significant progress, and we see that we are on par with them in several respects. That's when we decide that they are officially competition. It also makes perfect sense to watch what the competition is doing, so that we are not left behind. Which is precisely the point where things can start to go wrong Let's say you're a competitor of Psychotactics. And you notice that we are selling home study versions of the Article Writing Course, the Sales page course etc. And you decide, “Well, I have the same courses, and let me create some home study sales for myself as well”. All good so far, and let's assume you sell a few home study versions, but your sales are crappy. You're possibly selling 2-3 copies a month, and that's it. You are convinced something is wrong with your system and you keep trying to copy what we're doing. You spend hours trying to tweak your website, trying to track down where we're posting and copying what we're doing. You probably did your due diligence in every area, except one. You possibly forgot to ask: What is our goal? Simply trying to monitor the competition is fine for inspiration, but if you don't know why the competition is doing what they're doing, you are simply creating a nasty scenario for yourself. Remember the author who wrote the book? What was his goal? His competitors assumed it was the profit margin from the book. In reality, the author was also losing money, but his goal was not to earn from the sales but to build a client list. That client list then bought other products and services from the author, which is how he made his real fortune. When it came to the home study versions, we too had a strategy Back in 2016, I decided to write a brand new version of the Article Writing Course. That was Version 2.0, and it was built from the ground up. I didn't refer to the earlier notes or audio. I took what I knew (based on the knowledge we'd gained in the last ten years) and put it in the course. By the time I'd completed creating the new version, I was exhausted. So tired, in fact, that I didn't want to do any courses until 2017 Courses form at least a fourth of our income, and not doing the live courses online meant that we'd have to forego that income. It's at this point, that my wife, Renuka, came up with a strategy to sell home study courses instead. Remember, we were already selling home study courses, but they weren't doing so well. The primary reason for the not-so-great sales was that we were promoting the live courses and had no bandwidth on the newsletter to also promote the home study versions. However, once I got super-tired in 2016, there was little choice. It's at this point, that we also made a radical choice We decided to sell only 35 copies of the course even though it was digital. It may not make sense to restrict a sale of a digital product, but we wanted to create urgency and scarcity (something you should do too). In essence, I got taken off the live course schedule for a whole year, and that was our first move. The second move was to create the waiting lists with the urgency and scarcity Two quick moves that from an outsider point of view are almost impossible to decipher. How are you supposed to know that all these micro decisions were taken along the way? How would you know if we got results or not unless I were to reveal the results to you? But if you're a competitor, how can you know all of this detail? It's impossible to know, and so you copy, but it's a blind copy. You're spending so much time and energy trying to work out what we're doing when in reality you should be working on your own product or services. If you really want to monitor the competition, you have a full-time job Sure you can find gaps in their products and services. And yes, you can find out where they're advertising and who are writing about their offerings. You can also track which podcasts or sites they appear on, thus saving time with your own research. You can also maybe, possibly, work out the threats that are headed your way. However, by and large, all these activities suck up a humungous amount of time. In reality, the best form of defence is attack—or co-operation. When you think about it, every restaurant is almost automatically a competitor for another restaurant, even if it doesn't serve the same food. However, at least at the top level, restaurants will vie for awards, rather than go around poking into the kitchens of other restaurants. To get that Michelin star, they have to up their own game. There's often not much time, let alone any point in trying to worry about other restaurants when you have your hands already full. Which is why your efforts are much better used trying to create your own uniqueness, than worrying about what others are doing in your own space. And if you can't beat them, you join them Almost all of our business over the years hasn't been as a result of an attack, but instead from cooperation. All the websites that we've guest-blogged on, all the podcasts we've appeared on, and every event that we've spoken at—they're all that you'd traditionally called “competition”. We don't see them as competition and instead we've worked with them very successfully. Even two of the biggest rivals—Windows and Apple worked together In 1997, Bill Gates invested $150 million in Apple, for shares of Apple non-voting preferred stock. Microsoft was going to support Microsoft Office for the Mac for five years while Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default web browser on the Mac. Apple was desperate for cash that the time and Microsoft was able to shoo away the concern that it was getting to be too much of a monopoly. They just shook hands and worked side by side with each other. Does this mean you never have to look at the competition? In reality, you never do. You just have to focus on your clients, instead. Clients have a problem they want you to solve. If you can solve that problem extremely well, there's more than a chance that clients will choose you. All the information you have about the competition isn't going to change the fact that clients will make their own decision based on the information in front of them. Plus the client sees the world differently than we do as business owners. For example, if you were to run a restaurant, you'd likely see other restaurants as competition. Clients don't see the world the same way as we do. They see the marketplace as a choice. A place where they can pick and choose what they like. In terms of the restaurant analogy, they will eat Japanese food today, Indian food tomorrow and gorge on fish and chips on Friday. And it's the same sort of decision making they do when dealing with us at Psychotactics. They will buy a marketing product from us and buy it from some other marketing company next month. Even if you and I have worked at becoming a unique product or service, in the client's eyes, you're mostly just a commodity. If they don't buy it from you, they just go elsewhere. They may find the competition to be inferior and hence come back, which is what most of our clients do. And that's one of the reasons why we encourage them to go to the competition, instead. And yes, I get it. It does take a lot of guts to send your clients to competition but think about it for a second. Aren't they doing it anyway? For instance, Renuka and I drink coffee at five different cafes. Is it because the coffee isn't good at Cafe No.1 or Cafe No.2? Clients are going to buy from the competition anyway, with or without our help. The more time you spend trying to figure out what the competition is doing, the more likely you are to stay a commodity. In my opinion, trying to pay close attention to the competition is a waste of time Too much changes too quickly and by the time you figure out what the competition is doing, they're well down the track. By the time those wannabe authors figured out the profit-making backend strategy, they'd already lost too much time and money. ˇˇNo one is saying you should stick your head into the ground and not pay attention to what's going on around you. However, other than the cursory knowledge of what's happening in the market, it's really a complete waste of energy and time to bother with the competition. Or as the popular comic, Mad Magazine used to write in their slogan: No.1 in a field of one. That's something worth aspiring for. Next Step: Why selling your secrets to competition is a sound business strategy