The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the resistance game. ============= Resistance loves a loner Because loners have limited energy. They start out on a project, all excited about what’s about to unfold. Then, for some reason or the other, they lose their way. And that’s when resistance gangs up on the loner big time. It’s not much of a fight. The loner is already exhausted. One tiny tap on the head from resistance, and the loner falls into a heap on the floor. But this miserably one-sided bout could be avoided with the understanding of group work. In Africa there’s a saying: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. And resistance detests groups. And there are several reasons why a group helps you get a project done with far more efficiency and a lower failure rate. So how do groups help? 1) Release of Pressure 2) Exponential Learning 3) Support 1) Release of Pressure The toughest part of a project is dealing with the pressure. And a release of that pressure is needed to give you a breather.  When you rant and rave alone, it’s kinda depressing. When you’re suffering alone, you think it’s something to do with your talent, or your genes, or that you’re a loser (yes, everyone feels super-lousy often enough). And having someone to just listen to your rant is amazing therapy. You rant, you’ve been heard and now it’s time to get back to work, because you have a ton of mistakes to make, and learning to look forward to. 2) Exponential learning Mistake making is frowned in our society. We love to get things right the first time. And yet all of us know that it’s impossible to learn without making a ton of mistakes on any project, no matter how familiar we are with the project. The problem is that mistake-making, instructive as it is, is also terribly depressing. When you’re going round in concentric circles, your exhaustion builds up rapidly. However when you’re in a group, you learn from someone else’s mistakes, thus getting a bit of respite from the exhaustion factor. When a group shares its learning and mistakes, everyone learns and everyone gets a little samba in their steps because you’re not just learning, but it’s exponential learning. You’re learning from four-five mistakes every day, and guess what? Most of those mistakes aren’t yours. 3) The third factor is just one of support While resistance can take on a loner, it’s a lot harder to take on a group. If someone falls, there’s usually someone to pick you up. If someone is struggling, there’s someone to help. If someone has questions, there are answers that help you move along. Working by yourself, you not only miss the ongoing support, but the struggle wears you out. And inevitably you give up. Now this kind of group support doesn’t necessarily work for all kinds of projects Sometimes the project is just to clean your desk. You could do with ranting and group support, but it’s an overkill. Besides it probably takes under an hour to get even the messiest desk tidy. But if this seemingly mundane desk has to go on over a longer period of say, six to eight months, then you definitely need the power of the group. In fact at Psychotactics, groups form a critical part of the project experience If we take just the Copywriting Course for instance, the three months of learning and implementation are physically exhausting. If you were to try and replicate the same pace by yourself, you’d give up in a week or less. But with a group, 75-80% make it to the finish line. When you consider the sheer intensity of the Copywriting Course, you should have the figures the other way around (namely 75% should fail to make it to the end). And yet it’s the group that helps you through. But how do you work with projects where the group doesn’t have a common goal? Admittedly it’s harder to pull off a project where everyone is headed in different directions. When the African saying suggested you go a lot further with a group, they were indeed suggesting the group had a common goal. And if everyone in the group isn’t headed towards the same deadline, or using similar tools etc., then they have nothing in common. Then it’s relatively easier for the group to be counterproductive, as no one is learning from group-mistakes, and everyone has their own agenda. It’s important for the group to set out a common agenda and at least have some common guidelines. So even if you have ten different writers, writing ten different types of books, they should ‘meet’ online every day and post their learning for the day, as well as a minimum of 800 words. If they’re a group working on a gardening project, there needs to be the shared learning, the shared support moments, and shared implementation. But don’t you need the right group for things to work? Yes, having the right group is important. But how do you choose the right group? Groups need to be chosen primarily on the basis of attitude. Which is why for instance, at Psychotactics, we call our courses the World’s Toughest Courses. This weeds out the excuse-makers and ensures that you get the cream of the attitude crop. And just as you get a great group, you can also get a lousy group. Then whining, whingeing and depression will be constant, and progress will be impossible. So just having a group isn’t enough. You need to put in some filters to ensure that at least 75% (or more) of your group will make it to the finish line. And it’s a bit of work putting a group together, but hey it’s a lot less work than starting endless projects only to see them go up in flames. Resistance likes fires All this namby-pamby, touchy-feely stuff makes resistance look really bad. If prefers the loner. And most projects are done by loners. And resistance is happy. Now it can wield it’s little finger and push you over. And resistance laughs and walks away contentedly.

When it comes to feedback, almost of us hit a blank wall. Ask a client to "help you fix" your product or service and you get two or three small suggestions. So how about a 1500 word answer instead? What if you could get the client to go into every nook and cranny and give you feedback that would drive you crazy? Yes, of course it drives you crazy, because you have to go about fixing everything? Or do you? This episode on feedback goes deep into what you should ask, why and when you should ask for the feedback. And then how to cope with feedback when you can't fix things. It also talks about how feedback causes the clients to come back repeatedly to buy your products and services. Sounds exciting? Well go on, listen to the episode. And if you missed part one here is the link. Read and Listen: http://www.psychotactics.com/secret-feedback/ Listen: http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/86_Feedback-The_Secret_of_Returning_Clients-Part_2.mp3

Most of us are like crazy chickens, focused solely on attraction and conversion. They fail to see the biggest resource in our business—returning clients. If you're able to keep your existing clients and they buy everything in sight, you may never need new clients again. But what magic spell would cause them to buy everything in sight? Incredibly, the answer is "feedback". Wait, not testimonials—feedback. Feedback is that ugly sound of "complaint". It's screechy and seemingly yucky. But we're not just aiming for a bit of feedback, but feedback that's 1500 words or more. Yup, how do you get a mountain of the "yucky stuff?" Let's find out why you need to get deep into the world of feedback. And put your Teflon suit on. You're going to need it. Join us as we explore Part 1: How do you get feedback? And when do you get feedback? Part 2: Why safety plays a big role in feedback Part 3: How to copy with feedback =========== I’d been driving for about 5 years before I got to Auckland, New Zealand When we moved here, however, my Indian driving license wasn’t valid and I had to sit for both the written and driving test. And I failed the first driving test within minutes. We barely got on the road, and down a slope when the assessor failed me. Ten minutes later, we were back where we started. As you’d expect, I was perplexed and wanted to know what I’d done wrong. He wouldn’t tell me. “I’m not supposed to tell you what you’ve done wrong,” he said brusquely. “You’re supposed to drive correctly and when you make an error, I note the error and fail you, if necessary. And you’ve failed this test.” This is often how we feel when clients won’t give us feedback on our products, services or courses. But whose fault is it? Is it the client’s fault or ours? In most cases, we’re at fault, and this is because of a primary reason. We fail to figure out the difference between testimonials and feedback. We use the words interchangeably, and it gives the client the feeling they’re supposed to praise you all the time. Praise is hard, because you want to reserve it for special occasions and anyway a constant stream of praise feels worthless. So the first task is to separate the concept of testimonials from feedback. The client should know clearly—and unequivocally—that they’re not praising you, but giving you feedback. Then, they should know that you’re going to do something with the feedback. So how do you get feedback? And when do you get feedback? Let’s take a look at three main areas of feedback and see how we can ensure we get the feedback that we need. The three areas are: 1) The safety issue—and reward issue 2) The implementation issue 3) The specificity of your questions 1) Let’s start off with the safety—and reward There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly”. It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art. Then something quite amazing happens. The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback. One by one they pipe up, with their critiques, so Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy. They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft. Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own. And yet this article isn’t about whether we can draw butterflies or not, is it? Instead it’s about safety. The reason why those kids walked Austin through every one of those five subsequent drafts, is because they felt safe. So what made them feel safe? And how do you get your clients to feel safe? Incredibly that safety didn’t start on the day of the Austin butterfly demonstration. It started long before the teacher walked into the room. Safety needs to be created miles before you get to your destination. So what do we do on Psychotactics? Notice the “What Bugs Me” on every page of the website? That “bug” is designed to create safety. Yet, you’ve seen organizations ask for feedback before. Why does that bug bring in over 200 clients writing to us every single year (that’s about 2500 bugs since we started). The answer lies in the statement that accompanies the bug. The statement says: We’ll give a reward of $50 for the best bug of the month. Have we been diligent about this reward? No, I can’t say that we’ve been super-diligent in doling out the reward. But at a primary level, 99% of the clients aren’t interested in the reward at all. They’re just interested in us fixing the problem. We have something similar in our membership site at 5000bc. The moment you get into the Cave (which is our forum) you are faced with a question thats says: What makes you unsafe in 5000bc? And even a casual glance at that post-—and it is a post in the forum—shows you that members have vented their feelings and there’s been an immediate response. When you get on an online course, like the information products course, you have an Ask Sean—again in the forum, as well as the ability to contact us at any point in time. But contacting us can be a little intimidating. It’s easier to ask the question in the Ask Sean post. When you examine the posts, you’ll find that clients aren’t always asking questions. They’re often giving a bit of feedback and mostly testing the waters. Is it safe to give feedback? When I answer the question, I’m always aware of everyone watching. When you treat one person with disdain (no matter what the issue) you create a factor of lack of safety. Without safety you’re not going to get feedback—not the feedback you’re looking for, at least. The clients aren’t exactly looking for rewards either. Those kids in the classroom weren’t getting any candy for their feedback. Their candy came in the form of change. Their opinions were valued and they were instantly rewarded with another draft. When they made suggestions, another draft showed up. They wanted to be heard, to see change. And this takes us to our second part: The implementation The Article Writing Course has been held since around the year 2006—and in the early years, we’d have three or four batches a year—now we have just one. This means we’ve had several hundred clients on this immersion course—and several hundred chunks of feedback. Why chunks? Because at the end of every course, we reserve a whole day—as part of the assignment—to get feedback. But why do clients give feedback? They do, because of the first reason: safety. They also want to make the course better—just like the kids in the classroom. The reward is the ability to be part of the change. It’s been almost 10 years. We should have stopped getting feedback by now, don’t you think? I mean how much feedback can you get on a course? And yet here is the highlight of last year’s feedback—in brief Action: Go over all the material and remove elements or testimonials that are confusing. Action: Go over the autoresponders and fix them. Action: Reconstruct the syllabus to move from learning components to actually writing complete articles. Action: The weeks that aren’t part of the main course need to be treated as “starters” or “dessert”. Action: Create Level 2 Course Action: Fix the notes. Action: I could, however, mention how the 55 minute club works—in the sales letter. Action: Be clear that the connectors are sub-heads and sign posting. Action: Review all instructions to make sure there’s no inconsistency. And consistent language. Action: Get writers to post their goals on the forum. Action: Syllabus goes first. Action: Feedback: What do they specifically look at? Action: Remove any connection to the 9-month course (Wiz Withers) Action: Tell participants in advance that there will be changes mid-stream. Action: Live call not needed. Action: Sean handles several projects at once. This is a perception and needs to be tackled. Action: No templates, checklists or worksheets (it would have been so helpful to have an article template in order to see the overall structure) Action: The materials we received weren’t linked to the weekly assignments Action: You’re not writing EVERY day. Action: There will be a 55-minute club at the end. And it will cost $87. Action: Have a day just for feedback. Action: Have reference material that sums up all of the different components of a great article Action: Show how to write shorter articles Action: Drop headlines from the course. Action: Put in all the elements that we don’t cover. Action: Make sure to ensure that there are only two methods I use to write articles. Action: Make sure there’s an introduction to the transcript and clients know it’s a transcript and not the notes. Action:The book by George Leonard titled Mastery: the Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (instead of Karate Kid) Action: For final feedback include a question about what was working, as well as improvements and what needed to be fixed Notice what you just read? It was an action list, based on a feedback list. The clients came up with this immense list of things to be fixed—and spelt it out in great detail. We then compiled the list, and put in the action plan to fix the elements that needed fixing. Almost as soon as the clients came up with the feedback, we demonstrated we were not just asking for feedback, but we were going to take action—and we wrote what action needs to be taken. The same applies to any feedback we get off the “what bugs me” You probably heard about Rosa, didn’t you? If you didn’t here’s the story. Rosa goes and buys a product off our website. It’s the “Dartboard Pricing” series and she loves it, but has something to say. She says I need to have the books in ePub. Now this is a tiny nightmare, isn’t it? Because while it’s relatively easy to transform books into ePub, our books are filled with cartoons and captions. Those cartoons and captions need specific coding and yes, the nightmare is revealing itself, isn’t it? But we got in touch with Rosa, said we’d work on it and then we posted Rosa’s feedback in the podcast. And shortly after, another podcast listener said he’d do the job (I’ll give you the link to this ePub genius at the end of this piece). So he set about the task of fixing the books—one by one—but first worked on Rosa’s request. This week, I wrote to Rosa and told her we had not only taken her seriously, but we were going to send out the PDFs and the ePub documents, so she could happily read on her tablet or phone. Do you think Rosa feels safe? Do you think she’s bound to give feedback again? Do you think she was rewarded, both by the initial response as well as the implementation? But what if you can’t implement something? Take for example, the courses we hold offline—at workshops such as the one in Amsterdam, or Vancouver or Nashville. The workshops are designed not t give you information, but to give you skill. Clients come up with all sorts of feedback, even during the workshop. At the storytelling workshop in Amsterdam, Ellen—one of the participants, suggested a walking group. “We walk in the Netherlands”, she said. Now, if you get to our workshop, you’ll notice you’re not in the room a lot. That’s because you learn the least in the room. We get groups to leave the room and sit by the pool, by the stair, in the lobby—just about anywhere they wish to sit and discuss the assignment they’ve been given. And yet, here was Ellen talking about “walking groups”. So we sent them off for a walk. And half of them took our advice, while half chose to sit instead. So yay, the feedback went like clockwork, but it’s not always so hunky-dory—this implementation bit—is it? And when you can’t change things, you head off the objections off at the pass. For instance, if you look at the feedback we got from the last course was “Sean is handling too many projects at once”. Now that’s like saying “fire is hot”. The reason you’re even reading this article is because I like to write articles, but I also like to paint, cook, take photos, dance, learn languages, mentor my niece—and take a nap in the afternoon (that’s a project too, you know). So what would you do with such feedback, especially when you know nothing is going to change? I mean I handle projects but then I know what to keep and what to drop. Yet, the perception may exist and a client that’s going through a rough patch may find an easy target—me—the guy with ten million projects. That client may not have any idea that I’m not dancing right now, or I’ve put my Japanese and photography on hold. They’re working off a supposition—their perception. And to make sure this problem doesn’t arise, we head it off at the pass. I bring it up early in the course, or the book, or the workshop. It’s on a slide, or in an introductory page, or somewhere it cannot be missed. And it needs to be repeated several times, so it sinks in, because not everyone sees or understands everything the first time around. If you cannot or will not implement something and you have your reasons for it, you need to be very clear why you’re avoiding that course of action. Rosa’s suggestions were doable, and we went ahead with the plan, but it’s also quite a task to convert every book on the site to ePub. If this were the case, and we couldn’t fix every PDF, we’d just have to head off the objection before the client bought the product. However, to get back on track—the implementation is what matters Implementation creates safety. Implementation tells your client that they matter. That their opinion is important. And if you can’t fix it, at least put out an action plan, so they can see that you’re hard at work. Then cross out the elements as we’re doing with this new Article Writing Course. Will we be 100% successful? No we won’t but we’ll keep at things until they get fixed. And then we’ll have another big list to go through. So we looked at safety and reward. Then we had a long dive into implementation and at least the need to communicate with the client; the importance of having an action plan. Which takes us to the third part: The specificity of your questions. Check back next week for Part 2 of The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/  

What’s one of the biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together? It’s the rookie, sitting down and writing the entire page at their desk. If you want a reasonably boring landing page, write it yourself. But what if you didn’t write it yourself? Who would write it for you?  Find out more in Part 2 of this series. ============== In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you find the ideal client? Part 2: What happens when you dig into a single problem? Part 3:  What do you do with all the other problems?  ============== There’s a reason why I moved from PC to the Mac. In 2008 I had to do a series of presentations for a radio station.  Since the clients of radio stations are always looking for ways to get the attention of their clients, the presentation of The Brain Audit seemed like the perfect match. If there’s one thing I’m very possessive about, it’s the slides for my presentation. I tend to make changes, simplifying the content and moving the slides around until the very last minute. Even if I have done the presentation dozens of times before, you can be sure I will be making changes at the very last minute. In this case, the terms of my contract prohibited me from making those changes at the last minute. The radio station was putting all their slides together in advance, so all slide decks had to be submitted the week before the presentation. This rattled me enough to show up three hours before I had to make my presentation. The technical crew was more than happy to let me go through a run through of my presentation on the big screen. As I clicked through the slides, I realised that something was wrong. The presentation I was seeing on the screen looked a bit like my presentation, but somehow it was different. The weird part was that it looked better than what I had done. After I had got over the shock of someone tampering with my presentation, I asked the crew how they had gone about changing the presentation. “We didn’t do anything with the presentation itself,” they said. “We just ran it through keynote — which is a presentation software for the Mac.” That one idea was enough to get me hooked onto the Mac, even though I had used the PC for close to 15 years. The Mac had solved a problem that I didn’t know existed. It had taken the best possible presentation I could muster, and made it far more beautiful than I could imagine. Since then, I have dumped all my PCs and stuck to the Mac. So does this make me the ideal client? It does not, because I wasn’t aware of the problem in advance To find the ideal client, you have to find someone is already deeply aware of the frustration they are facing. If you find someone like me—someone who’s surprised and delighted, you’re going to get a very shallow rendition of the set of problems the client faces—and most certainly never get to the depth of the biggest problem. You have to find someone who already has a problem And the best place to start could be a random place like Facebook. Since everyone already has an opinion on Facebook, you may shortlist your ideal client based on a friend that responds to your question. You may have a tiny list of subscribers on your e-mail list, and if you send out a request, there’s a good chance that at least a couple of responses will show up in your inbox. If you already have clients like we do, you’re often still like a newbie, especially when you want to launch a new product or service. Let’s say we want to launch a product on how to take outstanding photos with your iPhone In many cases it’s easy enough to locate a great client, and it’s more than likely that they would like to take great photos, but don’t know how. Once you interview them over the phone, or in person, you’ll quickly find a series of issues. – Taking great food pictures with an iPhone – How to improve your vacation photos – How to use manual controls with your software – How to shoot close up or macro photography – Great portrait photography with Your iPhone – How to dump the SLR at home and take outstanding photos with your iPhone. The problem is obvious, isn’t it? How do you choose? All of these problems seem headed in divergent directions. The answer is: You don’t choose. You get the client to choose.You focus on the problem at hand and dig deeper. The questions would hinge on the single problem: – Why do you want to take your iPhone instead of a Nikon? – What frustrates you when you take the Nikon? – Can you describe a day on your vacation? – What are the consequences of taking a heavy camera along? If you own a Nikon 7000 like I do, you’ll find yourself leaving the camera back in the hotel room a lot. The Nikon 7000 is a great camera, but it feels like you’re lugging a brick along—and when you take three months off every year, that’s like lugging a brick for 90 whole days. So unless I’m going on a trip—like the time we went to see orcas in Vancouver, or camels on the road in Australia, I keep the DSLR—that’s the Nikon—in the hotel room. And once you get me started, I can keep going on and on about the problems of a heavy camera. However, as the interviewer digs deeper, she may find that I like the iPhone for other reasons as well. I can use a slew of software, improve my photos, use filters, create depth of field (that’s a feeling of fuzziness for objects in the distance)—and do that all before I get back to the hotel. With the Nikon, I have to get back, download the photos into a program like Lightroom, and then I’m chained to my computer, instead of enjoying my vacation. When you dig deep into a single problem, you get the client to give you a ton of details. You get them to describe their frustration on that one problem. You also get a sense of what they experience with that one problem when you ask them to describe their day. And finally, you get the consequences—a truckload of consequences. You then take the biggest problem and put it in your headline and sub-head on your page The frustration and the sense of what the client experiences: that needs to go in the first couple of paragraphs, followed closely by the consequences. Which leaves us with a sort of dilemma, doesn’t it? What do we do with all the rest of the problems the client brought up? Do we just get rid of them? This takes us to the third part—what to do with the rest of the problems. Element 3: What do you do with the rest of the problems? The answer is simpler that you think. Remember the Portabooth—that portable recording booth that you could take on the road with you? Well, it didn’t have one benefit or feature, did it? It has a series of them. And yet, the client is most interested in the biggest problem. Once you’ve solved the biggest problem, the rest of the features are really a bonus for the client. They are a nice-to-have, but not a deal breaker. The way to use the rest of the problems brought up by the client is to see whether you want to tackle them in the first place With the Portabooth, we could bring up the rest of the features and benefits and explain why there was a problem and how the Portabooth solves that problem. Unlike the biggest problem, where you have to go into a lot of detail, you can just use a paragraph or so to explain the rest of the main features. You bring up the problem—for example: Assembles in seconds Just close two zippers—and describe the problem briefly, before bringing up the solution. Now you’ve taken every one of the remaining features, turned it into a problem, and brought up the solution. But what if the problems were incredibly divergent, like in the case of the iPhone photo book? Think about it for a second: Is the book going to show you how to shoot portraits, use manual controls, take pictures of butterflies—as well as show you how to take great food photos? If so, then hey, the product already solves the problem, so simply use the remaining features on the sales page itself. If the problems the client brought up, don’t fit in with your product or service, then you have to ask yourself: Am I going to include them in this product or service or do I simply focus on one thing? In Psychotactics land, we’ve focused on one thing Instead of writing a book of 200 pages, we may restrict ourselves to 59 pages. We’ve come to the conclusion that clients want to get a skill, not more information. But if you’re selling a product like a mixer, for instance, you have a ton of features and benefits. Even so, it’s better to restrict yourself to just four-five problems being solved. In today’s world it’s easy to get overwhelmed very quickly, and keeping the features and benefits to just a few is the best way to go. If, however, you still have a ton of features and benefits and would like to talk about them, then restrict them to bullet points. Bullet points are amazingly effective, because they form a quick summary of the product or service. And there you have it—the series of steps you need to give your product or service the limelight it needs. You focus on one. One plane landing on the tarmac at a time. It makes for a tidy airport and a very successful landing page! So what did we cover? 1 How to choose one problem. 2 Defining why the problem is important. 3 What to do with the rest of the problems. We looked at the racehorses—and how they bolt out all at once. It seems like a good idea to introduce all our benefits and features, but instead of benefits and features, we need to use a problem. We get to the problems, by inverting the features and benefits. And then once we have the list of problems, we get the client to choose one. Which is the client’s most pressing problem? – Trying to write this landing page all by yourself is usually a big waste of time. You struggle to write it and then the problems are not that which the client experiences. Plus, it’s hard to figure out the emotions the client feels. I’ll ignore my own advice only to come back later and realise what a fool I’ve been. It’s so much easier to call a client and record their experience. Or better still, take them out to lunch—because you’ll get to drink some wine too. And that’s always more fun. Take your recorder with you and make notes as well. Both are very important. – Finding a client is always daunting. The best kind of client is a client that’s already deeply frustrated. Someone who’s been going through a heck of a lot and can describe in great detail what they’re experiencing. I’ve lugged my camera around a lot to tell you what that feels like and why I leave the camera behind. You may think Facebook isn’t the best place, but you’ll be amazed at how much feedback you can get on Facebook. Are they the best clients ever? Of course not, but once you launch your product or service, you can always tweak your landing page. – Go deep into the problem. Ask the questions. – What frustrates you the most? Why does it frustrate you? – Can you describe a day on your life? – What are the consequences of postponing this decision? How does it make you feel? Finally, what do you do with the rest of the problems? If they fit in with your product or service, then simply put them in as features and benefits. Or as bullets. Talking about features and benefits, there’s a way to write them a lot better than just listing them, and here is where you can find out more about how to maximize the power of features and benefits. (https://www.psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors/)    

Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage? We’re all told to create landing pages.  So why do they fail? The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don’t land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That’s a mistake. And this episode tells you why it’s a mistake and how to fix it. ======= In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: How to choose one problem Element 2: Defining why the problem is important Element 3: What to do with the rest of the problems Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources Find out: Why clients buy and why they don’t. Listen: The biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together? Read or listen: How To Design A Sequential Landing Page—Part 2 ========== When you’re at a derby, you notice something interesting. Every single horse bolts out of the gate all at once. But wait, that is not interesting, is it? That’s what the horses are supposed to do. They are expected to race madly towards the finish line so that they can win the championship. Which is fine for horses, but terrible for landing pages. On a landing page, the first thing you present your client with is “the biggest problem”. If you were to treat the landing page like the horse derby, then all the problems would try to outdo each other in the very first paragraph. Like horses thundering towards the finish line, they would all attempt to get ahead of each other. And this causes a problem for the client looking at your landing page. Suddenly that client is faced with a ton of information hitting him all at once. It’s why clients leave your landing page; they become disoriented, but mostly overwhelmed. On any sales or landing page – your job is to present the client with the biggest problem. A client gets interested in your product or service because you’re taking on a specific problem. And it’s that problem that needs to rise to the surface. A landing page is more like a layered cake than horses at the horse derby. There needs to be a sequence of ideas presented one after another based on their importance. And yet, this restriction causes a real headache, because most products and services solve multiple problems, don’t they? How do you choose which problem to use? And what do you do with the rest of the problems? Do you just drop them or do use them elsewhere? That’s what we are about to find out as we go on this journey on isolating the problem. However, it’s not a very long journey. We got three simple steps that will enable us to create a more precise landing page — and one that will get and keep the customers attention. We will find out where the customer gets confused and how to eliminate that confusion. The three elements we will cover, are: Element 1: How to choose one problem Element 2: Defining why the problem is important Element 3: What to do with the rest of the problems When I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a pilot. In fact, I can’t remember anyone at school who didn’t want to be a pilot. However, for most of us growing up in India, a trip to the airport was out of the question. This is because air travel was not as frequent or inexpensive as it is at this point in time. However, on the rare occasions that I did get to the airport, it was fascinating to watch the planes land and take off. But what was most interesting of all, was how the planes circled the airport. Planes circle for a reason; Air-traffic controllers exists for a reason. You too are an air-traffic controller when it comes to your landing page. In fact, it’s pretty ironic that it’s called a landing page in the first place, isn’t it? Ironic, because so many of us are more than keen on making sure all those planes land at the very same time. Circling planes don’t run out of fuel in a hurry, so why not let them circle a bit while you get the most one plane safely on the tarmac! So what are the “planes”, anyway? The “planes” are simply the problems you’re presenting to the client. When we say problems, a negative connotation pops to mind, doesn’t it? But that’s what you’re doing on your landing—you’re bringing to light the biggest problem so that you get the attention of the client. For instance, Let’s take the headline from the product on pricing – called “dartboard pricing”. The headline reads like this: How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers? Did you notice the “problem” in the headline? You can feel the pain of not raising prices, can’t you? You know that you would like to raise your prices, but are holding back because you are not sure how your clients will react. It’s possible that you will lose some of them, or maybe the entire clientele will walk out in droves. What we have done in the headline — and that little bit of explanation — is define the main “problem”. When you read that headline, it seems pretty straightforward, and you can feel the emotion and get the point. However, you can only get the point when you look at it from the air traffic control system tower. When you sit down to write your headline, you are suddenly faced with all these circling “planes”, and feel the need to land all of them together. An inexperienced writer will try and bring out all the problems within the first few lines — or within the first paragraph itself. As you can tell from “an air traffic controller point of view,” this is a recipe for disaster. Element 1: The first thing we have to do is to decide which “problem” is the most powerful of them all. It’s only the most evocative problem that will get the attention of the customer. But how do we know what is interesting to the customer? The way we go about this exercise, is to list all the solutions — or the bullet points together. We now have a bunch of bullet points or feature is that we can work through. Let’s take an example of a product that I use for recording the podcast. If you decide to do any recording, you’re going to get a sort of echo When you sit in a restaurant and find it extremely noisy, what you’re experiencing is the amazing ability of sound to bounce off surfaces. And to reduce the noise factor, you have to have some elements that absorb sound. A tall shelf of books behind you helps. The uneven nature of the books seems to absorb a fair amount of bounced sound. To avoid sounding like you’re recording in the bathtub, you have to either put foam tiles on your walls (like they do in professional studios) or have some noise reduction system. My Google search led me to Harlan Hogan’s Porta-Booth-Pro Yes, it costs a whopping $350 to buy the Porta-Booth, but hey, I would rather cook a six-course meal for two weeks in a row than put a nail in the wall. To get some foam tiles, put them up, worry about disfiguring the wall—and getting random results—that didn’t sound like my idea of fun. So I got the Porta Booth. But wait, this isn’t a story of why I bought the Porta-Booth. What we’re looking at is how the benefits and features can be turned around to help you create your headline—and your first few paragraphs of text. When we look at the Porta-Booth-Pro on Amazon, it reads like a lot of Amazon pages There are a few bullet points and you have to make a decision to buy a $350 product based on these bullet points. And like horses at the derby, all four (or five) bullet points seem to dart out simultaneously. Let’s take a look at the Amazon page and see what we find. – Rugged 600 denier fabric / Only 7 pounds / Air travels as checked or carry-on luggage – 120% larger than the Porta-Booth Plus / Unique sonic stage “Auditorium” design. – All interior surfaces treated with Auralex Acoustics Studiofoam #1 choice recording pros worldwide – 2 way zippered bottom and rear slots for shot-gun mics cables boom arms. Corner straps add rigidity – Anti-sway strap & Booth Lifter for boom arm mounting. Assembles in seconds Just close two zippers. Notice the derby syndrome? What are you going to choose as a prospective client? If you’ve already decided the problem that needs solving, it’s still hard to figure out which of the bullet points remotely get your attention. If you look closely, it’s part of the third bullet point—and slinking at the back of the sentence. So let me light up the importance of the third point for you. It says #1 choice of recording pros worldwide. That’s it? That’s all that’s required to get the attention of the customer? When you look closely, you realise what is happening when that specific solution or benefit is turned into a problem. As a solution or bullet point, the fact that it’s a number one choice of recording professionals worldwide doesn’t stand out. But when you turn it into a problem, it immediately gets the attention of the prospective client. The problem would read like this: when you’re on the road, do you end up in the closet trying to get a great recording? The subhead would be: when you’re a voice-over artist, only the best sound will do for a recording studio. We’ve all tried to reduce the noise by propping up pillows, searching desperately for rooms with thick curtains and occasionally even clambering into the closet. All of these techniques work, but there are terribly inconvenient when you are a professional. Instead, the Porta-booth Is like the equivalent of a mobile recording studio, reducing all those unwanted sounds and annoyances. However, even a very quiet room—and this applies to homes and apartments, too—can sound like a “big, boomy box” to your microphone, instead of the tight sound booth quality we are used to in purpose-built studios. That’s because in addition to picking up the sound of your voice directly, the microphone also “hears” the ambient sound of the entire space. And this becomes the room from “hell”. Instead of battling with pillows and getting stuck in dark closets, here’s what many professionals do on the road—they take their studio as carry-on luggage—no matter where they go. See how different you feel about that very same bullet? The Problem—the biggest problem is the key to getting the client’s attention. Yet, how do you choose the biggest problem? Most of us are too close to our product or service and in many cases, can’t see why clients choose us. We think we know—and that’s what we put on our sales page, but often (more often than not) we’re hopelessly wrong. For instance, let’s look at the page on ‘Black Belt Presentations’. That’s an extremely powerful product because it shows you why you fall asleep when most presenters get on stage. It shows you how to design your slides, how to control the audience, how to structure your presentation—and yet, look at the headline. The biggest problem says: When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off? Then the subhead says: (It’s rough enough to have to speak to an audience, but aren’t you always in awe of presenters who can bring the room to life? How do you create presentations that enthrall, hold and move an audience to action)? Notice how excited you were by that headline and sub-head? It’s not exciting, is it? Because instead of doing a target profile interview; instead of going out there and understanding what clients want, we’ve continued to sell the product as if everyone is doing predestinations on stage. And yes, for years since its release, the product has been bought by people doing presentations. But the world has changed in the sense that many of us do webinars. We do podcasts, don’t we? And ‘Black Belt Presentations‘ is perfect for both—but more so for webinars. A reliable webinar software like GotoMeeting costs over $250 a year, and yet if your presentation isn’t amazing, what have you lost? You’ve lost the money you pay for the software, the time, the effort—and all because your presentation isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. Now webinars aren’t news They’ve been around for ages. Many of our clients could tell me right off that they rarely, if ever, get on stage. Yet, they’re likely to give a webinar to a client or be part of a webinar series. And guess what? The lack of focus in that headline and sub-head—it’s not only causing us to sell less product but also depriving you—the client—of increasing your sales, improving your credibility. And how did I figure out that the headline needs to be changed? I got an e-mail from a client. He told me how he used it for his webinar and how it got the audience to respond amazingly well. And there I am, trying to procrastinate. I know I should get to changing that headline; that sub-heads; the first paragraph—and I’m betting you have the same affliction. You want to put off talking to your client and then making those quick changes. But we’re circling the airport, aren’t we? We still haven’t got to the point where you know how to pick the biggest problem. So how do you do that? How do you pick the biggest problem, the sub-head and the first few paragraphs of your text? The answer as we know—doesn’t lie with you It lies with the client—your best client—or possibly any random person. How on earth does this make sense? It makes sense to approach a great client, but why approach a random person? What would you expect to find with any random person? This takes us to our second part and: What’s one of the biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together? 

Why do we struggle to write? The ONE word? What’s that? And why does it play such an incredibly important part in article writing? That’s what we explore in this second part of what I’ve learned in article writing. We also look at why we struggle to write—Yes, we seem to get in our own way most of the time. How do we get others to help us? Find out more here. ========= In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness Part 2: Why when we sit down to write, we often get into a state of randomness Part 3: How can you be sure you have the right ‘One Word’ ? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resource 5000bc: If you suspect that your business could be bringing in a lot more revenue but you don’t have a clue how to make that happen without hype or hassle, 5000bc is a must-have resource. Listen or read: Part 1 of Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing ============== Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness ALMOST half of the goals scored in football—or soccer—are virtually random! So says Martin Lames of the Technical University of Munich. Raphael Honigstein’s new book, “Das Reboot” talks about the non-random side of football. It talks about how a well-prepared team can rise from the depths and win the match, even the tournament. And especially if that team is Germany—which is considered to be a world-class team, but was at the bottom of the football heap in 2000. Germany’s randomness arose from complacency In the European Championships in 2000, they failed to win a single game—and even lost to the English team (which was considered pretty terrible in the first place). And yet, 14 years later, Germany would rout Brazil 7-1 and make its way to the ultimate prize defeating Argentina in the World Cup final. What Germany did—and did effectively—was reduce the randomness. Right after the 2000 Euro disaster, Germany’s top professional clubs were ordered to set up academies—and this was a considerable cost to the clubs, so they actively resisted the directive. Ten years later, this move proved to be a boon saving the clubs millions of dollars in transfer fees, because more than half the players in the top division were academy graduates. In short, the moment they got rid of their randomness, the German team started to see results. A similar concept applies to article writing. When we sit down to write, we often get into a state of randomness And you know it’s random because you can’t sum up the article in one word or one idea. The moment you have one idea—it becomes that wall around your article. You know exactly what you’re going to write about, what are the sub-topics under that main topic—and how to get the stories and case studies to support the piece. For instance, this section is about why the article can’t be random. Instead of starting the article with a boring line that says: “The worst thing you can do is write a random article”, the article starts with a story of disaster—well, a disaster for the German football team, anyway. Yet, most writers never sit down and write down their one word because they’re not sure if it’s the right word There is no right word. The word is what you want to communicate. In the introduction, the story was about the journey. Well, that’s where the story of Isambard Brunel came to light. The second part was about the coach—and we ran right into Wolfgang Amadeus’ father—Johann Leopold Mozart. The third part was about why writing for yourself is so very hard, and the two female conductors told their story. And finally, we have the story of randomness—and the German football team. When you have a single word to focus on—or a single idea—it’s not hard to get stories But it also forces you to stay within the parameters of that single word. I have to stay within the walls of randomness as this part of the article unfolds. It becomes my binding agent. And ironically, the one word can be picked randomly. The one word in this piece could have been completely different. It could have been about “binding”—and the story would be different; the angle different. It could have been about “boundaries” and yet again we’d see different stories and a different angle? But isn’t it cheating to decide one word and then write an article? No, it’s not. Put yourself in the shoes of noted author and TV personality, David Attenborough. Do you think the TV crew goes into the jungle, finds whatever footage they can find, before returning to write the script? That would be a nightmare because you’d have to go through hundreds of mismatched shots to build a coherent documentary. As radio personality Ira Glass describes: “You write the story, and then you go out and ask the questions. You have the idea in your mind; the questions down on paper long before you get to the person you’re interviewing. That way you get a coherent structure. And the same concept applies to article writing. If you simply sit down to write an article, you’re doing what a lot of crummy writers do Sure, you can pick the one word or one idea randomly, but that becomes your binding agent; your wall; your barrier. Now you have focus. The direction of your article is no longer random. You follow the lead of the one word, and your article isn’t a mish-mash of ideas thrown randomly on paper. You become like the German football association-focused and getting results every single time! ===== So let’s summarise what we’ve learned. Article writing is a journey. And you can limp into the harbour or arrive in great shape. To sail into the harbour in glory, I’ve learned three things over the years. The first is you need a coach—this can be a course, a book, a workshop—but you need that coach. And that coach needs to be a teacher, not a preacher. Then you need an editor. Everyone needs an editor. I have five or six—but even a single editor makes a world of a difference. The second element is one of writing for yourself. It’s a head banging, frustrating process. The best way out of this mess is to get questions. I get questions from clients in 5000bc, from e-mails, from consulting, from almost everywhere. But they’re not random questions on the Internet. They’re from a person—a person I know—and this makes all the difference. I don’t have a cocktail party in my brain because I’m focused on answering the questions of the client. My entire mood, mode and method changes when I’m focused on them, instead of myself. And finally, we have the one word. Without the one word, you’re in random land. Define what you want to say in a word, and then look for examples that fit that word. The only thing that’s random is the choice of the one word itself. You can choose any word or idea, but once you do, everything in the article must align to that one word or idea. And that’s what I’ve learned—three things I know about article writing. That it’s a journey—and Isambard Brunel would have been proud to be on this crazy, exhilarating journey! You can also listen to or read this episode: Part 1 of Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing. (http://www.psychotactics.com/three-writing-strategies/)

Writing isn't easy-but it isn't hard either The key to writing is to know what strategy to follow, so the road isn't bumpy all year long. This episode isn't about going down memory lane. Instead, it's practical advice I wish I'd had—Like how to choose the right coach or the right editor. Writing isn't all about you. Writing depends on the coach, the editor and the client. This podcast is about a strategy that's not commonly expressed and approaches writing in a more philosophical, yet practical way. In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. www.5000bc.com -------------------------- Hi, this is Sean D’Souza and you are listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. Who is considered the second greatest British person of all time? When the BBC did a poll in 2002, they expected somehow that Winston Churchill would be in that top ten list. But there in the second position was someone whose name was reasonably unfamiliar. A name that didn’t belong in this century, nor from the previous century. A man who was born in 1806, somewhat mysteriously found his way to the second spot. His name? Isambard Kingdom Brunel—one of the most famous engineering minds of all time. And Brunel built a magnificent ship—and it was called the Great Western At the time of its construction, the Great Western was the longest ship in the world. There she sat at 236 feet, with one stunning goal in mind—to cross the Atlantic. The trip was to start from Bristol, in the UK, and terminate in New York city in the United States. The goal was audacious because no one believed in the commercial viability of such a long journey. In 1838, despite many technological developments, shipbuilders presumed that a ship had limited capability. They believed that no ship could carry both—commercial cargo as well as enough fuel—and make the long journey across the Atlantic. Brunel was a person who thought differently about long journeys For one, his heart was set on engineering. He developed a theory—a sort of formula that involved the amount a ship could carry and how a ship could be built so that it faced a lot less resistance from the ocean. Armed with his formula he set about building the Great Western, but then added more technological improvements.Instead of a ship, made mostly of wood. Brunel added bolts; he added diagonal iron reinforcements. He increased the strength of the keel and carried four masts for sails. And so the ship—the Great Western—embarked on her maiden voyage from Bristol with 610,000 kilos of coal, cargo and seven passengers. The Great Western on her maiden voyage to New York—powered by steam. A feat never achieved before! Despite all the plans and engineering, Brunel’s ship hadn’t got off to a great start In the 1830’s there was a competition to be the first to cross the Atlantic powered by steam alone. The Great Westernshould have been well on its way, but ran into difficulties before leaving Bristol. There was a fire on the ship, a minor fire, but Brunel was hurt in the fire and wasn’t able to make the journey. As a result of the fire, 50 paying passengers cancelled their trip. Finally, the ship made it out of Bristol’s harbour with just seven people on board. What was worse is that it was four whole days behind it’s competitor—another steam ship called the Sirius. The Sirius left as scheduled, leaving the fire-stricken Great Western still in dock. Now, the Great Western and her crew were well and truly behind—and Sirius would get all the glory. But Sirius’ trip was anything but glorious Along the way to New York, Sirius ran into serious trouble. They started to run out of fuel. Her crew was forced to burn cabin furniture, spare yards—even an entire mast because they ran out of fuel. And they took 19 days to get across the Atlantic. The Great Western, in comparison, arrived like the queen of the seas. She took just 15 days and five hours and with a third—that’s almost 200,000 tons of coal to spare. This is a story about journeys—a writing journey, in particular. I didn’t want to write. My story is one of being nudged and pushed into writing. When we started out Millionbucks.co.nz (yes, that was our pathetic first shot at a brand name), I was writing for a fledging portal called MarketingProfs.com. Back in 2000, everyone was a fledging—and there wasn’t as much content online, as there is at this moment in time. Which is why the founder of MarketingProfs, Allen Weiss, would e-mail me and ask me for an article. This meant I had to write. I didn’t want to write, but I didn’t have much of an option. We were new in the business—and had just moved to New Zealand. The only way I could get any credibility in the marketplace was to get better known. And how you can have two sets of people—one battling almost vainly against the headwinds, while the other reaches its destination with amazing grace. When you embark on the task of writing, the headwinds start almost immediately. I know because I ran smack into trouble when I started writing articles. Every article was a chore; something I detested and yet I persisted. Over the years, I’ve learned that sheer determination and persistence is not enough. That engineering and planning make a big difference to the journey. And on that journey, there are three elements that stand out… Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Whenever the topic of a child-genius is brought up, one name rises above them all: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This kid, we are told, was a prodigy. Before the age of six, he was already composing music. Most kids barely are barely finding their way around school at this age. And yet, we are told, Mozart was already competent at playing the piano and the violin. He’s also rumoured to have transcribed entire scores of music on a single hearing. How much of this is true, and how much was stage-craft, we’ll never know. But one thing we know for certain—Mozart had a coach. You don’t think of a coach when you hear the name of Mozart, do you? Yet, Mozart’s coach was his dad—Johann Georg Leopold Mozart. And Leopold Mozart wasn’t your average-let’s-play-music-dad. He was already a famous author on violin playing and celebrated enough to be the deputy director of music to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Plus there was Nannerl, Mozart’s sister. When Nannerl was just seven, her father decided to give her piano lessons because he believed she was gifted. So there was Mozart—baby Mozart—surrounded by all these incredible musicians—but primarily—coaches. Without coaching, you can go far—but it takes a lot of time When you read studies that quote the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery, what fails to emerge is the factor of mistakes. As a beginner, you’re expected to make mistakes. You aren’t aware when or where you’re making the mistakes. All you feel is this frustration—this resistance that ships often felt back in the day of Isambard Brunel. Something is wrong with the engineering, but you’re not sure what to fix. And if you can’t figure out where the mistake lies, the journey ends up with furniture and masts being burnt up—so that you can complete some sort of journey Coaching is valuable—that we already know—what’s hard is knowing how to find a great coach For me, this process of finding a coach has been streamlined to a single factor: skill vs. information. I call it “preacher vs. teacher”. Is the coach going to give you more information, or is he/she going to give you a skill? Alex Blumberg, ex-Planet Money, now co-founder of Gimlet Media is a coach. How do I know? Because in the world of telling radio stories, Alex doesn’t pound you with needless information. Instead, he has a method, even a formula of sorts. For example, when telling a story, he shows you how to evaluate the story. Let’s say you’re writing a story about homeless people—how would you use the formula? The formula runs like this: The story is about X, and it’s interesting because of Y. So the story is about “homeless people” and it’s interesting because “20% of them are college graduates”. Immediately that stands out from a line that goes like this: The story is about homeless people, and it’s interesting because “many have mental problems”. What Blumberg teaches us is how to eliminate the vagueness and lack of interest in the story. In his courses, he goes about things systematically, taking about editing, music, etc., in the world of podcasting. And you end up not full of information, but with specific skills. When you look at Mozarts, the Phelps, the Brunels of the world—they all had coaches. Coaches that enabled them to find their mistakes and move forward. And in article writing, going it your own way is the slowest boat to anywhere. I know because I took that boat. I took that boat in the field of cartooning; in the field of article writing too. And it took me ages to figure out the connectors, the “First 50 Words,” the endings, the beginnings, the structure—all of that misery could have been reduced if I had a coach. A coach that had a system; who would point out the errors—and get me quickly down the road. To me, of all the skills you have to learn as an entrepreneur, article writing stands out because you have to have a precise structure when writing. You have to be interesting; you have to tell stories; you have to stand out in a sea of content. Which is why, even today, I will go to workshops, buy a course, read books—because that’s how you get better at what you do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that without a coach, you’re floundering even when you’re pretty good. To get outstanding at what you do, you have to find Johann Georg Leopold Mozart to help you along. And you’re going to need not just a coach, but an editor as well You can be the best writer in the world, and you’re going to need an editor. I have five or six, at the very least; sometimes more. There’s David, Pamela, Teresa, Renuka, Alia, Philip—and Zack (I can hear Zack’s voice here). And every one of these editors come from a different angle; they have a different perspective. They force me to relook at what I’ve written so that I fit their needs. I remember the time I was writing a book, and I’d written more than ¾ of the book when I showed it to Philip. But Philip wasn’t impressed “All your books, they show me how to do things,” he said. This one is all information. Nice information, but not a lot I can implement.” There’s no use fighting these editors. And I’ve tried. There was a time when I went “hand-to-hand” in a battle with Pamela. She wanted me to chop out two whole pages from my pre-sell book. Those two pages were about how crummy marketers use pre-sell. Pamela wasn’t interested in reading about the other marketers—even though no names were mentioned. I fought back. I kept it down to a page. She came back and told me to get rid of it. I kept half a page. No dice. I tried a paragraph—and then finally buckled in. Pamela was right all the time, but I couldn’t see it at the start. I was too busy and too in love with what I’d written. But we’re talking about articles, not books. So would I do this for every article? Going back in time, yes, it’s what I did for every article. One of our earliest clients, Chris Ellington, would pore through all my work and shred it a bit more than I liked. It made me a better writer. But even now, I’ll post a series in 5000bc.com, and there are questions; lots of questions. The questions are a form of edit. They show what’s missing from the series and what needs a repair job. Plus, alongside every article we have a “what bugs me” on the website. So years after an article is written, you can have retrospective feedback. This is my first learning in article writing That at all times you need a coach, finding structural mistakes, helping you to get better at the core skill of writing. And then once you’ve written, you need someone to pick out the holes and make the work get to the level it deserves. Yet, to get to complete the article, you have to write it. And there’s a big barrier in the way. It’s you. You are the barrier. Why are you the barrier? This takes us to Element 2. Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Simone Young is a world-renowned conductor from Australia. Alondra de la Parra is also a world-class conductor—from the other part of the planet—Mexico. In a BBC podcast interview featuring the two conductors, there is a moment when they describe fear—Fear and anxiety. Young pipes in first. “I’m always anxious before I get on stage,” she says. “And that’s because I’m thinking about myself. The moment I get on stage, I start thinking about the audience, and my fear goes away.” At which point, de la Parra chimes in. She talks about the “cocktail party” in your brain. About how everyone is seemingly talking about you, and they’re not saying good things. The “cocktail party” chatter never seems to end, or so it seems. This is what you’d call “writing for yourself”—or at least what I call “writing for myself.” When I write an article, my first act is to ask a client for a question. If they ask more than one question, I’m a lot happier. If they have a list, I’m the happiest. Why? Because now I can stop the silly “cocktail party” in my brain. This cocktail party pops up every single time, no matter how good you get at the craft of article writing. Most times, I’m just writing an article, but sometimes that article becomes a book. Like the time I wrote the book on “Dartboard Pricing”, for instance I couldn’t figure out whether it was good enough. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy the book when I’d written so many articles and done so many podcasts on the topic. Of course, I knew—I knew it’s an entirely different experience reading a structured book vs. random articles. But even so, you think about the “cocktail party” a lot. I had no such trouble when coming up with answers for a future book on “The Three Prong System.” A client and friend, Paul Wolfe, decided to do a series of three interviews with me on the topic of how I take breaks; how I manage to take a three-month vacation; how we handle vocation and vacation. And Wolfe had a series of questions—some prepared in advance, and some that organically sprouted from the discussion in progress. It’s not like I haven’t tried to write the book before. I’ve created an outline, started on the project and then abandoned it repeatedly. And it’s not because of a lack of skill, either. I can easily write the book—possibly in under a week. The problem is that I’d have to clamber into my brain to write that book. When Wolfe asks me the questions, I’m not trying to think about me. I’m thinking about the person asking the question—and occasionally other clients too. And the interview brings up a wealth of information—practical information too! When a client (or interviewer in this case) asks the questions, the cocktail party syndrome disappears, and it’s replaced with a focus on the audience. To write quickly and write a lot, I need questions—a lot of questions. But where do we get the questions? I get most of my questions in 5000bc. Clients ask a ton of questions and get articles in response (yes, I know, it’s a mad system). However, I also get a lot of questions through the podcast, e-mail, through consulting (I rarely consult, but every time I do, it’s amazing). Questions com from chats, after I make a presentation, and through just listening and reading. What I’ve learned is that I can’t just look for a random person asking a question online. That doesn’t fire me up at all. Instead, I have to have a specific person asking me a specific question. And when I’m writing the answer, I’m thinking of that person. Which is what gets me to talk a walk in those shoes and write with far more fluidity than if I sat down with a blank screen staring back at me. But where do we get the questions? We all wonder: Hasn’t this question been answered before? Aren’t there fifty thousand and three variations of this question already on the Internet? And the answer is NO. No one is going to answer the question like you do. For instance, there are whole books on the topic of focus. But my angle on focus—and focus in a distracted world—is different. I take three months off every year, still meet our “fixed revenue” goals and still manage to write books, conduct courses, do workshops, paint, cook—in short, do whatever I want, despite the distractions. So my angle is always going to be unique; my voice is going to be unique. And yours will be too. Your voice, your tone, your language—even the structure of your answer will be different. The question may have been asked a million times before, but the answer—your answer—is different. And you get questions from many sources, but you have to listen—that’s what I’ve learned. When others speak, they’re asking you the questions and doing so in many forms. You’ve got to listen, answer those questions and then keep a writing pad right next to you. Why a writing pad and not a recording? Well, have a recording, but the writing pad is vital because it captures the gist of the conversation. Then, while the ideas are still fresh in your head, you sit down and write. And the orchestra in your brain begins to play. You may not be a great writer yet. You may struggle as I did. But even in the middle of that struggle, you’ll notice the emotion. You’ll realise that everyone has gone home from the cocktail party, but you’re not quite alone. You’ve got words on paper. Writing for yourself is disgustingly difficult. It’s hard to reach into your brain and work out how to write an article, a report or a book. But write for others and you get the feeling that Young and de la Parra talk about. Suddenly, you feel free. ====== A coach, an editor. They help you along. The client and her questions—they bring out the orchestra in your writing. And there’s the article itself. It is also a guide—a big guide. So how do you use the article to stay on course? It’s a concept called the “One Idea.” This takes us to the last element. Click here to continue reading about—Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing-Part 2  http://www.psychotactics.com/writing-for-yourself/

Whenever you hear the story of products and services, it’s always a sugar-coated, goody gum drop story. You rarely get to hear the not-so-great side of things; the mistakes; the second-guessing. In this episode, you get to hear what’s happening behind the stage. How—and why—we started the article writing course; how we decided to go to the Netherlands and do a workshop; and how we launched several of our products without a sales page.  If you like back-stories as much as I do, you’re going to love this episode. ============================= The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” Hi. This is Sean D’Souza, and you’re listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about how to work less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy the work that you do and to enjoy your vacation time. Billy Joel: I dreamt the song. I dreamt the melody, not the words. I had a dream, and then I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going, “This is a great idea for a song,” and going back to sleep, and waking up, and not remembering what I dreamt and going, “What was that? I had a really good idea, a really good idea, and then I forgot.” In a couple of weeks later, I’m in a business meeting talking to accountants or lawyers, some kind of boring stuff, and the dream reoccurs to me right at that moment because my mind drifted off from hearing numbers and legal jargon, and I just drifted off. Boom, it came right back into my head. I said, “I have to go. I have to go right now. I think I have an idea for a song,” so the accountants and lawyers were, “Go, go, go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go.” I ran home, and I started playing the theme that had reoccurred. On my way home, I was thinking, “Okay. How am I going to remember this? Da, da, da, da. Da, da. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be stupid.” They’re called “[bail out lyrics 00:01:34],” but you have to use them to remember the notes, remember the theme you’re saying that you came up with. I got home, and I ended up writing it all in one sitting pretty much about … It took me maybe about … I don’t know, two or three hours to write the lyrics. I probably reshaped them a little bit in the studio, but yeah. I remember writing that very well. It was a dream that reoccurred, which happens a lot on me. What you were listening to is the backstory of Billy Joel and The Stranger. As I was listening to this on my walk yesterday, I thought, “This is a good idea. This is an idea where I can talk about the backstory of a product, a course, and a workshop.” I can bring it to life to let you know what’s the backstory instead of just hearing the success story. The reason why I thought it was so cool was my niece, Marsha, and I, we watched the series on BBC by David Attenborough, and the thought that gets us really excited is when they tell us the backstory, how they started, the trouble they run into, and I hope to bring some of that excitement into you all listening today by telling you the backstory about a course, a workshop, and a book series. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the course, and let’s deal with the article writing course. Part 1: We’re going back to 2005. In 2005, there was no Article Writing Course. In fact, there was no plan to have an article writing course. You see, in the year 2000, I was writing an article maybe a week. I would struggle over it for one or three days, and then eventually, get it corrected and edited, and then finally, it would get published. By 2003, I started up 5000bc. For some reason, I promised the members at that time that I would write five articles a week. Did they care that I wrote five articles a week? I don’t know, but that’s what I promised, so that’s what I did. Because I did that, I started to write every single day, and my article writing got quicker and better as the years ticked along. By 2005, I was pretty sure that anyone could do what I did, which is sit down, work it a few years, and then you could write good articles. Did I think there was a demand for an article writing course? No, I didn’t think there was a demand for an article writing course. So then, why announce an article writing course? What we decided was that we’re going to take a chance. We’re going to put up a sales page, and we don’t really care if anybody signs up this year, but it would be like an advertisement for the next year. That was our goal, to have an advertisement for the coming year, and the article writing course filled up. That was a big surprise, and if there’s one thing that is streaming through this entire backstory, it’s this factor of surprise. Now we have all the strategy at Psychotactics, but surprise seems to jump up at every point in time, so there we are. We have signed up all these people for the article writing course. There’s only one problem. The problem is there are no notes. The problem is there was no audio. What are we going to do? What I did was I conducted the entire course through teleconferences and forums. There were no notes, and there was no audio, and the clients knew it, but they were still keen to the course. When you look at the article writing course, the sales page today, one of the testimonials, that really long, detailed testimonial, it’s from the very first course. It is from the course where we had none of the stuff ready, where we weren’t prepared mentally for it, but we knew what we were doing. Even back then, we knew what we were doing, and we went ahead. Surprise, surprise. It turned out fine. Since then, we’ve had courses in 2006, 2007, and then we got a little greedy. We started to do several courses, so we did … In one year, we did two courses simultaneously, so 25 people in one course, 25 people in the other course. Then, later on the year, we did 25 people and another 25 people, so 100 people went through that article writing course in that year, and it killed me. It was too much to handle because I’m there all the time in the article writing course, and if you write and tweak your articles several times a day, then I will be back telling you what to do, how to do. It’s pretty hands-on, and I had to learn from that lesson. I had to learn to space out the article writing course, so now, we have it just once a year, and sometimes, we don’t even have it for a few years like in 2013, we had the course, and then the next one was in 2015. If you want to take the jest of the backstory of the article writing course and put it into a nutshell, it is that we were surprised. We were surprised that it would turn out like it did. We were so surprised that we had to now deliver the course, and we didn’t have notes, but we did it our way anyway. Finally, the fact that we overdid it, and then had to pull back, and these are the lessons that we had from the article writing course. It’s one of the most fascinating courses for me because there’s so much depth to writing. Writing is not just a factor of, “Hey, let me string these words together.” It is communication. Once you can write, you can speak. You can do a lot of other things based on the structure of writing. To me, the article writing course is like you can’t do without this course, and yet, back in 2005, I thought, “Who would need a course like that?” I was wrong. Surprise, surprise. Part 2: Psychotactics Netherlands Workshop This takes us to our second surprise, and that is the workshop in Netherlands. Around the year 2011 I think, we decided to go to the Netherlands. Why did we decide to go to the Netherlands? For one, we started getting a lot of subscribers from the Netherlands, and we thought, “How are these subscribers coming in?” We went online, and we found that a lot of our products, especially the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and several other products were being pirated. Where were they being pirated the most? In the Netherlands. We decided that there were so many customers that were buying products from the Netherlands, and there were so many people that were pirating from the Netherlands that somehow we need to go to the Netherlands, and so we decided to go to Amsterdam. Now, the good thing about the Amsterdam trip is that I’d already done the Brain Audit workshop in the US. I’d done the Brain Audit workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, and so I had the page ready. I just had to activate the page, and then send it out to the list. Again, we weren’t expecting a thunderous response. What we did was we set up the page, we sent out the email, and we went for a morning walk. By the time we got back, 7 people have signed up, and that took us totally by surprise. We were expecting some people to show up from different parts of Europe, but 90% of the people that showed up were from the Netherlands itself, and this was a really good lesson, and this is the lesson that we’ve learned other companies use as well. There is a rumour that Netflix follows the same strategy. They look at these sites where they’re streaming movies and series, and they see the series and the movies that are the most popular on the pirate sites, and they decide, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to put on Netflix.” Because it’s already popular, and that’s what it told us. It told us that the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and the copyrighting class, they were already popular, so there were people that were buying it, good clients, and there were the not so good clients who were pirating it. Instead of getting mad at the not so good ones, we decided to work with the good ones, and we decided to have the Netherlands workshop. It went really well. Amsterdam, of course, is beautiful. It’s wonderful to walk around Amsterdam, so we had an outstanding workshop in the Netherlands, but it was a surprise. What this is teaching us is that we have all the strategy, but there will be a surprise, and this takes us to our third part, which is about a book series, which is the Black Belt Presentation Series. Part 3: Black Belt Presentation Story One of our favourite places in New Zealand is Nelson, and Nelson is on the northern tip of the South Island, and it’s got the Abel Tasman Park. It’s a wonderful place to go, but one of the reasons why we go there is food. We love our food, and there is this restaurant, which is sitting right on the edge of the bay, and it’s called the “Boat Shed.” Now, at the Boat Shed, you get this fabulous view, but you also get this fabulous food, and they have a regular a la carte menu and a trust-the-chef. Trust-the-chef is as you’d expect, the chef decides what you’re going to eat tonight, and they put it in front of you. You have no idea what it’s going to be. Every time we go to Nelson, we go to the Boat Shed, and every time we go to the Boat Shed, we have a trust-the-chef, so what’s the business application of trust-the-chef? We got back to Auckland, and I wanted to write a book on presentations. I love presentations. I love to make presentations, and I love the structure of presentations. When I looked at all the books out there, they weren’t covering it like the way I wanted to cover it, so I decided to write a series on presentations. In reality, there were 2 problems. The first is the books weren’t written, and the second is that there was no sales page. I didn’t have any time for the sales page, so what I did was I decided to use the Boat Shed’s philosophy of trust-the-chef. I wrote an email. I said, “I’m writing a book series on presentations, and it’s going to cover 3 elements. The first is, how do you design your presentation so it looks absolutely stunning, absolutely yummy? How do you have 200, or 300, or 500 slides, and the client doesn’t even know? They think they’ve just been through 25 slides? How do you make every one of those slides work for you in a way that’s amazing?” That was the first part of the book or rather the first book. The second part was the structure of the presentation. How do you get the presentation to flow from one end to the other, so it’s absolutely seamless, and then you have these summaries? Pretty much like you’re listening on this podcast. You have a structure, and what is that structure? That’s what the second book was all about. Finally, it was about the crowd, the audience. What do you do with the audience that enables you to get their attention, to keep their attention? I felt that was very critical because you can have a great presentation, you can have great slides, but if you don’t know what to do with the crowd, how to get them to do what you want them to do, then you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for. So, all of these dreams, all of these plans, but there’s no sales page, and we just send out email. We said, “The book costs about $200. If you would like to get a refund because you find it useless at the end of it all, we’ll be happy to do that, but here’s the trust-the-chef offer.” Only 200 people signed up, but do the math, 200 into 200 is $40,000. Now, a lot of people talk about, “I sold to 400,000 people. I sold to 100,000. I sold to 50,000 people.” You don’t need to do that. You can sell to 15 people and be fine with it. Think about it, 200 into 15 is $3,000, $3,000. That’s good revenue for a book. We happened to sell to 200 people with that email, but the point was that it surprised us. It was surprising how clients were willing to trust you even though you had no information or very little information about those books. Summary This is the theme of today. When we summarise, we look that surprise becomes a strategyin its own way, that you want to surprise yourself, and that’s what happened with the article writing course, which we didn’t expect people to sign up. They’re still signing up 10 years later. We didn’t expect anyone in the Netherlands to sign up. It was just a random email, and people signed up. Finally, the trust-the-chef. That was the weirdest one of them all, and clients still bought into that. We’ve done several trust-the-chef offers ever since, and all of them have worked the same way. This happens when you have respect for the client, when you act like a GPS system because that’s what the client really wants. They don’t really want more information, do they? They want you to be their GPS just like a GPS works. No matter whether you get to Rome, or Auckland, or Berlin, you switch on your phone, and your GPS is working, and it takes you to your destination, and that’s what clients want you to do. They want you to take them to their destination. They want you to be the guide. They want you to show them the sites, and that is why the article writing course worked, and that is why the presentation book series worked, and that is why the Netherlands workshop worked. It’s because clients expect us to care, protect, and guide them just like a guide does. In that, there is no surprise. What is the one thing that you can take away from today’s podcast? The one thing that you can do is to surprise yourself, so we can believe in planning, and we plan every Friday. We’d go to the café, and we work on a plan, but one of the things that really works in our favour is this factor of surprise. Now, you have the backstory of the article writing course, and the Black Belt Presentation Series, and one of the workshops, which is the Amsterdam workshop. Go and surprise yourself. You don’t know what you will get. That’s what life is all about, that’s what business is all about, and that’s what The Three-Month Vacation is all about. One of the things that’s not going to be a surprise is when you sign up to the article writing course. When you do that, you’re not going to sleep all of April, all of May, and all of June. The reason for that is we don’t want it to be surprise. We want you to be able to write and to write well, to have a skill and not to have more information. The article writing course is starting in April. March 5th at 3:00pm Eastern, that’s when we open the doors. As you know, we have only a few seats. Everyone says we have limited seats. We put a number on those limited seats, not more than 25. If you would like to surprise yourself and figure out how good a writer you are, then join the article writing course. Later in the year, we’re going to have the cartooning course, and that’s at psychotactics.com/davinci, and you can learn how to be a cartoonist too. Most people are surprised when they can write so well, when they can draw cartoons, when they can make great presentations. They think that somehow this skill has to be inborn, and it doesn’t have to be. There are no inborn skills. You can learn from a good teacher. You can learn from a good system. You can learn a lot from a good group, and that’s what the Psychotactics training is all about. It’s not about information. It’s about skills, so get yourself on a course this year, and you will surprise yourself. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now, but wait a second. If you run into postcards anywhere while you’re walking, send me a postcard. I’ll send you a postcard back. To send a postcard, send it to PO Box 36461 Northcote, Auckland 0748. You can also find us on the website, on the “Contact Us” page. The address is there. Send a postcard, and bye for now. Useful Resource 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. (5000bc.com)

Risk doesn't just come in one flavour, yet The Brain Audit takes away a ton of that risk. In this second episode on risk, we take a forensic look at what happens when you release a new version of your product or service. Is it still the same product or service? Or is the risk magnified many times over? And how do you overcome such an unwarranted risk? We also look at pre-sell and why it reduces, almost eliminates risk. Why pre-sell done right is like a soothing balm that doesn't seem to bother the client (or you) very much. This episode is loaded with the biggest reasons why clients don't buy, and why pre-sell works like magic. You'll love it, guaranteed (Ok, that was a joke). But really, you'll like it a lot! --------------------   In ‘part 2 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about Part 1: What’s the link between risk and pre-sell Part 2: How pre-sell works like magic Part 3: The big reasons why clients don’t buy Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Read: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours Listen and read: How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility: Episode 69 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ----------------- If you’ve ever seen a Bollywood film (Hindi movies from India), you’ll notice there’s a lot of music and dancing. And a film release in India is like movie releases anywhere in the world of cinema. Trailers, interviews with the actors, publicity and the hoopla. It’s all part of the strategy to ensure that the movie is a stunning success. While back in 1964, a movie would be release six to eight weeks before the film release. However, by the 1990s, the music was being released three months or more—before the official launch of the movie. But what’s the link between risk and pre-release of the music? Since most Hindi movies are musicals, the songs are the primary reason most people go to the cinema. If the songs are catchy—and become hits, the movie’s success is guaranteed. When you look at it, an overwhelming number of Hindi movies have a similar plot. There’s a good guy, a bad guy, a romance between the hero and heroine—and lots of dancing and singing. There’s so little variation in scripts that the only risk for the moviegoer is—will I be entertained? When they listen to the songs in advance, the risk is removed. Pre-sell reigns supreme and the movie is a super hit! So what is pre-sell? Pre-sell doesn’t involve sales at all. In fact, it’s a systematic dispensation of information. A simple example of pre-sell would be a wedding being held next summer. At first, there’s no information at all. Then, one day the bride and groom-to-be announce they’re going to get married. And now we have a countdown of sorts. There are announcements along the way and events. What you’re getting is a drip feed of information that goes all the way to the wedding day itself. The reason you and everyone else shows up on the day—and at the event, is because of pre-sell. When you pre-sell, there’s limited risk because the very act of pre-sell is drip, drip, drip One of the biggest reasons why clients don’t buy is because they feel pressure. They feel they’re about to make a decision they could regret. And it’s more than likely their brains have been drummed with messages of “sleep on it, sleep on it, sleep on it”. In most cases, sleeping on anger may help a great deal. If you’re irritated and angry, it’s a jolly good idea to sleep on it. However, when buying a product, or service, the information rarely changes from one day to the next. What holds clients back, most of the time, is the fear of making a decision they’ll regret. The run up to anything reduces this pressure Take for instance the 2017 workshop in New Zealand. It’s in beautiful Queenstown—in the South Island. Now you may have heard of the beauty of New Zealand, but you go south, and it rocks. Queenstown is incredibly beautiful, has stunning views, and there’s one more thing you have to do when you’re in Queenstown. You need to take the road to Glenorchy. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been on the planet, and no matter how many amazing things you’ve seen—the road to Glenorchy is breathtaking. What you just heard was a pitch for 2017 But it didn’t sound like a pitch, did it? And the reason it doesn’t sound quite that way is because approximately 363 odd days stand between now and the workshop. As the workshop is mentioned more often, you start to feel this urge to visit the last stop before Antarctica—yes, New Zealand. You think, well, it’s now or never. Sure it’s going to be a long trip. Sure it’s going to cost a small fortune, but it’s a workshop—and you think—well, I can write it off as a business expense. What are the chances of me visiting New Zealand and finding a business reason to do so? In your head, you’re selling the event to yourself. Now make no mistake. This place called Queenstown is no mirage. It doesn’t matter how many pictures and videos you see—it will still blow your socks off. And because of the distance between the event and your decision, you feel no risk, only great expectations. Pre-sell is the best way to sell a product or service At Psychotactics, we roll out a pre-sell for almost every product or service. There’s the pre-sell right before a course or product launch—like the one we’re doing right now for the Article Writing Course. But there’s also the long pre-sell. If you were on the Psychotactics list, you would have received a simple chart that gave you details about all our courses and products for the year. That too—it’s a pre-sell. And the moment a course finishes, alumni are encouraged to post their experiences of the course in our membership site at 5000bc. The pre-sell for the next year’s course starts almost the second the previous one has finished. What’s interesting to note is that no details are mentioned. No prices, no dates—it’s all pretty vague. So yes, you know about Queenstown, and you know about New Zealand. And you know there’s a workshop, but you don’t know the month or the name of the workshop or even how much it will cost. And yet, notice how you want to find out more—even if you have no plans of getting to New Zealand That’s what pre-sell does: It reduces risk like crazy simply because it’s way out there in future-land. It has this feeling of being risk-free and what it’s doing is creating a slow but steady percolation of information. No pressure, no hard-sell, but just this tiny little snippet of information coming your way. It’s the way Hindi movies make their way to the launch date. It’s how weddings attract a full house when a simple Sunday lunch can be a problem. It’s how most of the products and services are sold by us at Psychotactics. It’s also the reason clients sign up so quickly. Once you’ve been given information in bits and pieces, you don’t need any more. The risk has left the building, and you’re ready to buy! And that brings us to the end of this series on risk. Let’s take a quick run around the block and do a little summary! Coming Soon. Don’t forget to read this article—How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours. http://www.psychotactics.com/pre-sell-article-course/

If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be "risk". When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there's a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute? In this two-part series, we examine the "big boy"?risk. And we find out how it sits on its end of the see-saw and dominates the buying process. We then use The Brain Audit (yes, it's a book you should read) to remove those barriers that cause risk. Find out for yourself how we get to the end point and do so much more than just risk-reversal! -------------------------- In ‘part 1 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service Part 3: How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t) 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems Read or listen to: How To Attract Truckloads of Clients -------------------------- Last month I decided to buy some software for sound editing. And with that decision, I started a merry dance. You know that dance, don’t you? It’s called the “should I, shouldn’t I” dance. First, I spent an enormous amount of time reading up on what I was about to buy. Did it fit my needs? Was it just a duplication of the software I already had in place? Would it be easy enough to learn? Then, I delved deep into the testimonials. 20 minutes later, I was still reading—not quite sure what I was looking for, when every testimonial clearly seemed to signal the software was right for me. Almost an hour later, not entirely sure of my decision, I pressed the “buy now” button. So what was the price of the software? It was $350. And you think—“Ah, that makes sense You have to do a fair bit of research before plonking down that much money.” And you’d be right. When faced with a slightly risky decision, we have to make sure we do our due diligence, don’t we? I spent another hour going through the very same process: The features, benefits, testimonials, comparison—all while assessing whether I needed the product. The only issue was this new product was priced at two dollars and ninety-nine cents! So why spend the same amount of time and effort on a product that costs less than the price of a coffee? Welcome to the tangled universe of risk, where logic seems to go into a blackhole. Where we spend as much time debating whether to go ahead with a decision, even if a product or service is offered free. We explore why risk isn’t always connected to money, or even the size of the transaction. And while it may seem that we behave unpredictably, our actions are remarkably consistent every time we have to make a decision. Worst of all, despite knowing it’s pointless spending hours debating whether a $2.99 purchase is worth it, we can’t help ourselves. We go through similar actions over and over again. If we’re so hopeless when we’re aware of our actions, how can we predict the behaviour of our clients? And how do we reduce or even eliminate risk? How do we get to the stage where the client doesn’t even read your sales page and buys your product completely on trust—even when it’s an expensive purchase? Let’s dig into this crazy universe of risk—shall we? We’ll delve deep into three topics – Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) – Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service – How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) Modern see-saws are kind of boring. You don’t even need someone to sit on the other side. They have all these fancy spring mechanisms so that—in effect—you could see saw your way to your heart’s content. What the modern see-saw misses is the fun that came with understanding balance. As kids, the see-saw mechanism was quick to demonstrate how balance made an enormous difference. And when we decide to look at risk, we must first understand balance. Now if you’ve read The Brain Audit, you’ll know that you need seven elements to take the client from “hmmm” to “yes, I want to buy your product or service”. The first three of those seven are the problem, solution and target profile. The next four are objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. What we’re experiencing in The Brain Audit is a factor of balance. The first three elements of problem, solution and target profile balance out the next four elements. The first three elements are all about attraction—the next four are about risk. Risk, as you can see, is the big boy on the see-saw No matter how good you are at attracting a prospect, there’s an enormous risk factor always lurking on the sales playground. To understand how we need to reduce that risk, let’s examine each of those four elements, one at a time. On our list, we have objections, testimonials, risk-reversal and uniqueness. And of course, that list makes no sense at all, does it? Because we just saw risk-reversal as one of the elements in the list. If this topic is about risk, then isn’t risk-reversal supposed to take care of the risk? Interestingly, no. Risk-reversal is only a part of the whole “gang of four”. Let’s start with the first of the four—objections Objections are the harbinger of risk. They’re like vultures waiting to land and chomp off the sale. But just like vultures, the reputation of objections is misplaced. Every possible purchase has not one—but many objections. But even if we were to sidestep the sales process and just look at your life, you’d see that objections play a big role. If someone said to you: Come over on Sunday—notice, notice how your brain goes for a little spin. That’s because your brain is bringing up the objections—even if you you’re semi-keen to go over. Is it just a “come over” situation, you wonder. Or will there be lunch? Will you have to have lunch in advance. All these questions go circling madly in your brain. Should you make an excuse, and just stay home, you wonder? And the moment you do all of this wondering, you’ve entered the world of objections. There are two big reasons why objections show up The first—and most important reason objections are roused—is because necessary information is missing. As we noticed in the “come over to my place” situation, the complete lack of information drives the prospect crazy. Most objections arise directly from the fact that you’ve held back the most important information—the information needed to make the sale. Whether you’re buying a car or software for $2.99, the objections are what will hold the client back repeatedly. And we may say, “I know this stuff. Objections are marketing 101”. And yet, time and time again, a client will come right to the point of buying the product or service—and then back away. In some cases, this is because the information is not available, but in today’s world, there’s also a pretty good chance that the client hasn’t seen the information. Because we’re all drowning in information, we start to skim—and miss out on certain points—points important to us. This builds up the risk tremendously—and more so for an expensive product or service. At this point in time, the Article Writing Course is about $3000 $3000 is a fair bit of money, even when you’re absolutely sure of the results. There are a ton of objections that come up almost immediately. – Will Sean be present at all times? – Will there be specific assignments and will they be looked at daily? – Will the group I’m in work out—after all, I don’t know any of them! – Will there be specific guidelines for the course? The answer to all of this is yes, yes and yes. And yes. The sales page must, in graphics and text—take apart the objections. And this brings us to a very important juncture. No matter what you say on your sales page, it’s just you saying stuff to sell your course. What an audience looks at, right after you’ve reduced their risk is the very next element—testimonials. Testimonials are the opposite of objections Yup, you heard right. Testimonials are not the wonderful things client write about your business. Instead, they have a clear and definite purpose. That purpose is to destroy the objections—and the risk—but from a third party point of view. Which is why you need first to list all the objections you receive—and continue to receive from clients. Once you get these objections, get your current clients to address the risk with their testimonials. When you look at the Article Writing Course, for instance, we realise that it’s expensive. We realise there are courses that are $1000 or even $500. They may not be the competition for Psychotactics, but you have to know that first hand from a client who’s done the course. Someone who’s taken the journey. They need to tell you how the course has tiny increments; how it has groups that magically work together; that I—Sean am there all the time, almost never sleeping, always hovering, always moving you ahead. But they also need to compare it with courses they’ve done before; experiences they’ve been through and found to be less than satisfactory. And to make sure this happens, we ask the alumni of every course as many as 17 questions. In return, we get a 1500 word answer. Notice what’s happening to you as you skim through the prospectus? You suddenly notice there are over 80 pages of testimonials. You read maybe one or two, possibly even getting to three—but those walls of risk are coming down very quickly indeed. But why? Because the testimonial attacked the risk from three angles—first it took on the objection head on, it was a third-party experience, but most importantly, it wasn’t just a few lines. 1500 words mean a lot to a prospect. They paint a picture that 20-30 words could never do. And the risk factor starts to reduce considerably. But we’re not done yet—because we’ve only dealt with the objections and testimonials. Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service It’s now time for the risk reversal Seems odd, doesn’t it? Why have a risk-reversal when you’re already dealing with the objections? This is the question we had to ask ourselves as well when we ran into the concept of risk-reversal. Back in the early days of Psychotactics, we would sell home study versions of our courses and workshops. Back then in the good ol’ days, clients were more than happy to get a big box in the mail. That box would contain a binder with a ton of notes and yes, CDs. As we continued to sell the product, we’d get a few returns now and then (every product gets returns). When we’d open the returned products, we were foxed at how immaculate the contents of the boxes happened to be. The CDs looked like they’d never been touched—or touched and wiped clean. The notes—not a smear or tear in place. The boxes looked almost identical to the condition they were shipped out. And that made us realise that risk-reversal is not the same as objections. Risk-reversal is the biggest fear the client has—a fear that must be addressed and put in bold, bright lights so it can’t be missed. The risk wasn’t that clients wanted their money back The risk was they were afraid to go through the package in detail as they feared they wouldn’t get their money back if the materials were soiled in any way. From that came the “The Lawn Mower Guarantee”. A guarantee that stated: If you don’t like the product, you’re free to take your lawn mower, run over the CDs and notes—then put them in the box and ship it back. The moment clients set their eyes on that guarantee; the sales went up exponentially. When Zappos.com started selling shoes online, there were smirks Who would buy shoes online? Sure, shoes were a $40 billion market, but shoes online? As you can see, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com was voicing his objections. But his eventual partner, Nick Swinmurn, was prepared. “It’s a $40 billion market”, Swinmurn repeated, and the most interesting thing was that 5% of shoe sales was already being sold by mail order catalogs. But what was their risk-reversal? A money back guarantee, right? After all, shoes may not fit; they may not look as good as they do online—or you may just change your mind. But no, that wasn’t the guarantee The risk was that you’d have to figure out how to ship the shoes back. So Zappos put in a 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways. Free shipping both ways! That’s the biggest risk of all. And this is the part that most of us may not take the time to figure out. What is the client’s most significant risk? In some cases, it’s a simple money back guarantee, but in most cases, the clients will voice their biggest risk. To find the real risk, you have to dig. To find the biggest risk, you have to get clients to list all the possible risks and objections—and get the clients to pick their greatest risk. And sometimes even that may not be enough. The packages that came back to us untouched told us a precise story—a story that the client might never have voiced. To get to a real risk-reversal and reduce that risk, you can’t just hope that a shiny money-back guarantee will work. You have to dig, and dig deep. But nothing needs more digging than the last element—the uniqueness We’ve covered objections, testimonials and risk-reversal, but all that does is set up a client to go to the competition. And that’s where uniqueness comes in. Once you’ve covered all the other elements, the client needs to know why they should buy from you and not from anyone else. If we were to drag the Article Writing Course back into the picture, we’d notice that the competition may be offering courses at a far lower rate—and promising quicker results. After all the Article Writing Course takes 12 weeks—that’s three whole months. You have assignments, and these are checked daily. This means you have to run your business and do your assignments every single day. This makes the course baby-tough So what’s baby-tough. If you have a cat, you have to put out their food, their water, and that’s probably all you need in terms of work. A dog—now that would involve a walk, some play time—it’s a lot more work. A baby on the other hand—a newborn—that means you’re sleep deprived for quite a while. That is the uniqueness of the Article Writing Course. It’s baby-tough. It means you work extremely hard for the three months—and that hard work shows up as a skill on the other side. Right before we had this uniqueness in place, it was a lot harder to sell the course We tackled the objections, had reams of testimonials and the risk-reversal (not money-back, but that you’d only tackle tiny increments every day). Still, it was a lot harder to sell the course. The moment we added the uniqueness, the seats were filled in a day, then half a day and in some cases as little as 25 minutes. A client wants to get the most unique product or service possible. To get anything but the best is hardly acceptable. The moment the Article Writing Course became baby-tough, the clients knew they were in for some real work. And real results. The other courses with their “easy” and “quick” results now became a liability. In fact, uniqueness can stand alone—and clients may ignore the other elements of risk if the uniqueness is strong enough. When you think of Domino’s pizza delivering in “30 minutes or it’s free”, there could have been many other objections, zero testimonials, and well, we’ll accept the risk-reversal. But it’s the uniqueness of screamingly quick delivery that got the attention of the client. When you look at products and services that clients choose—even when they’re not the best in the market place, it’s usually because of the uniqueness. And that’s because the uniqueness creates extreme clarity. When you’re faced with why you chose one computer over the next, why you chose one chartered accountant over the other—you don’t need muddiness. The more fuzzy the message, the less likely your audience is to pick you over the other. Working on your uniqueness is your top priority, and every product or service should have their uniqueness. The company may have one level of uniqueness, but every product or service needs to have their uniqueness as well. When we think of risk, it’s easy to isolate ourselves to just the risk-reversal There’s no doubt the risk-reversal is very important—once you find the real risk involved. Just like Zappos figured out the both-ways free shipping was more important, you too have to dig into the nuances of your product or service. The objections can’t be left out because they cause too much chaos in the mind of the client. Even a simple Sunday outing without the proper information, becomes a matter of “should I, shouldn’t I?”. And testimonials are a science that’s worth delving into. Getting long, detailed answers turn your testimonials into an experience, not just some sugary, nice things your client is saying about your product or service. But what’s the one thing you need to work on as quickly as possible? It’s always the uniqueness. What makes your product or service unique? What makes it different from the competition? That’s the question clients want you to answer right away as it creates clarity. The client can justify to themselves and others in their world, why they bought the product or service. In The Brain Audit, there are two distinct parts: the attraction factor—and the risk. It’s like a see-saw—an old-fashioned see-saw. It’s fun when both sides are balanced—well, almost balanced! Coming Next: Part 2—How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction. http://www.psychotactics.com/82