The Three Month Vacation Podcast

What's wrong with this statement?  Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger.  Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ 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.” This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can’t get a job. Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.” In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing. Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business. We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from. Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow. Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007. 2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot. The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income. In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing. When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc. At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters. When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time. There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving. Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite. In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you. If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive. That brings us to the end of the first part. Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier. Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information. It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance. It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got? The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption. You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like. It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work. You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going. We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life. Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it. The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything. Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy. Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids. When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend. That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work. The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value. You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving. This brings us to the end of the episode. What have we covered in this episode? We covered three things. The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important. That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier. The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun. That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today? Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive. When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep. The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off. We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well. That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/  

In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray! 

When you're so focused on a sales page, it's easy to forget that that sales page/landing page is just one tiny step in the whole sequence. There's a sequence that precedes the landing page. Most of us that create products or services ignore that sequence. We assume the product or service alone should have the spotlight. Which, as you're probably guessing, is a mistake. You need all the steps that come before the landing page. The landing page is the event? What comes before? Let's find out in this episode on the steps involved in creating an awesome buildup. ---------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you create a build up for your product? Part 2: Why you have to create a ‘moment in time’ for every product? Part 3: What is the one biggest reason our product launch fails? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources Something cool to read: Why “Failure” Is Just A Pre-Sell For Success More cool reading: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours The Irresistibility Factor: A complete summary of this three part podcast. ---------- What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 3 of 3 Build Up “You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing children’s books?” These were the words Joanne Kathleen—better known as J.K. Rowling heard from her agent when she first put forward the idea of Harry Potter. By 1999, Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. But how you take a phenomenon and make it even more phenomenal? You put it in a cage—that’s what you do! At Waterstone’s in Birmingham, the third in the series, “Prisoner of Azkaban” was in a cage guarded by two mannequins dressed like Men in Black. The kids—and their harried parents—could see the book, but they couldn’t get at it. All over the globe, a similar rollout was in progress to create a build up for a particular moment in time. That moment was the release of the next Harry Potter book. Let’s assume our products and services don’t have the cult-status of Harry Potter In such a case, how are you supposed to create this moment where you get clients to sign up for a product or service? The wrong way to have a launch is to shout, “Surprise” and present your product or service to the client. The right way to do it would be to create a build up. A build up that may have started weeks, months, even years ago. When you see a Psychotactics course sell out in less than an hour, there’s something important you don’t see You don’t see the pre-sell in action. And yet if you were to read this article, you’ll spot the fact that the Article Writing Course is coming back around June next year. You’ll also get notifications of the fact that this extremely popular course is getting a big upgrade. It’s Version 2.0 of the course with brand new notes, audio and assignments. Bit by bit the information trickles out, with very few specifics until the date gets closer. Build up is critical for both products and services If you’re a web designer, and you sit around waiting for something to happen, well, something might happen. But it’s also likely that nothing might happen as well. That clients don’t come rushing to you. If you’re a copywriter, it’s the same scenario. You’re waiting and hoping, and hope is a pretty iffy strategy. When you look around you, the biggest names in the business don’t play the game with iffiness in mind. If the big new Bond movie is coming out, you’ll hear about it for weeks in advance. You’ll see videos on YouTube, magazines splashed with the actors from the Bond movie. They’ll be eating, drinking, be on the brink of affairs, separation—and who knows what else! But they’re building up for the event. To make something—anything— irresistible, you have to create a moment in time Like a lunar eclipse that causes everyone to dust off their telescopes at the precise time, you have to control the build up. Bit by bit the information needs to peter out from you to your clients. Almost without exception, clients should know of your product or service—and the day of the launch. It’s this rigour that allows a product or service to become an “instant success”. Pre-sell involves buildup and the biggest reason for failure are that we’re too trigger-happy. We expect to launch something and then it needs to take off like a rocket. And yes, there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large you’re going to struggle a lot if you don’t go through the steps of pre-sell and build up. It’s the patience and planning that counts. The steps to a launch are: 1) Work on a date of the launch well into the future 2) Create steps along the way—and what you’re going to drip feed to your clients. 3) Keep adding different elements until the clients get caught up in the fever of the product or service. That’s when the product or service becomes irresistible. This brings us to the end of the three elements that make your product or service irresistible. So let’s summarise:  The Irresistibility Factor?A Complete Summary In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray! http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/69a_Irresistible_Offer_Summary.mp3 Still reading? Have a look at #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish)   

When we think of exclusivity, we often see sales pages that seem to have these ticking clocks. They're creating urgency by forcing our hand. And as small business owners, we often buy into that urgency. Yet, you don't need to resort to these cheap gimmicks when you have the twin factors of exclusivity. So how do you use these twin factors to your advantage. Here's Part 2 in a series of 3 on "How to Create the Irresistibility Factor". In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Power of Product Exclusivity Part 2: The Benefit of Working with Smaller Numbers Part 3: The Myth that you have to be Big to be Successful Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t) Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game ================= What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 2 of 3 The Power of Exclusivity There’s an anecdotal story about the late Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert was one of the best known direct-mail copywriters on the planet and so he decided to have a copywriting workshop. Even those he charged nose-bleed prices for the workshop, it was absolutely full. So he hosted a subsequent workshop. That too was full. He was on a roll, so another workshop was announced. Yes, it was full again. And then it went quiet. Deathly quiet, in fact. You’ve probably figured out the reason why the workshops stopped filling up My guess was that Gary ran out of people to attend his workshop. But remember this—Gary was super well-known. He had a list of thousands of subscribers. What he ran into was a problem of exclusivity. The workshops were being held at such a high frequency, that it seemed easy enough to put off attending the next workshop, because another one would always show up. This is why we last had the Psychotactics Headlines course in 2013—then nothing until 2015 The headlines course is extremely popular—and hence full every single time we announce it. It’s not hard to see why, either. As a business owner you’ve got to send out newsletters, possibly make a presentation, write sales letters for your product or service, and if you produce podcasts or webinars—yes, you need headlines. Almost all marketing activity is directly linked to writing great headlines. Instead of guessing whether a headline is outstanding or just average, you know precisely why it works and how to fix it. The question to ask is this: Should you conduct the course on a frequent basis? The answer depends on whether you want to create exclusivity or not If you want a product to be exclusive, you have to create scarcity, because scarcity creates exclusivity. This exclusivity is exactly what Studio 54 used to their advantage. It’s what caused people to want to jump that “velvet rope”. There was a sense of desperation to get into Studio 54 night after night. If you don’t or won’t have exclusivity around your product or services, you’re telling clients they can have it at any given time. As you can tell, that lack of exclusivity reduces urgency. The client can come in any ol’ time and get the product or service—and often they do. They put off the purchase until later. At Psychotactics, we haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel… Instead we work on just two parameters to create a factor of exclusivity. 1) Reduce frequency 2) Work with small numbers. Reduce frequency If you look at the courses we host online (for e.g. the Article Writing Course, headlines course, copywriting course etc), they’re all held with a substantial gap. That gap is at least a year apart. It means if you miss signing up for the course, you have to wait at least a year, sometimes two. There’s no guarantee that the course will be held on a recurring basis, and this creates a factor of exclusivity. Let’s take the Article Writing Course for instance. Let’s just say we’re going to have a course in May next year (and right now we’re in November). When will we have the next course? We don’t know for sure. All we know is it’s not going to be in June, or July, or August—or even in that year. But won’t that drive clients away to the competition? There’s always a possibility that the clients would want to learn a skill desperately and hence head elsewhere. And yet, that’s not what a lot of our clients do. They’re clear they want to do the course with us, and so they wait for the announcement and they sign up. As you’re reading this information, you are clearly being pre-sold for the Article Writing Course being held next year. You are aware that there’s a sort of sales pitch in what you’re reading and yet you’re also keen to know why the course is so exclusive. Why would clients wait? Why would they pay a hefty fee of $3000 for the privilege? Why would they sign up for something that’s known as the “toughest writing course” in the world? It’s not like clients won’t try the competition. Even if you have the best products or services in the world, the clients will still buy into competitor’s products or services. Yet, we all want something that’s exclusive—something we can’t have. Make no mistake Just putting a tag of exclusivity on a product or service isn’t going to help you sell better.Your product or service has to be top-notch. No client is silly enough to spend $3000 on a course. They’re not going to get on a plane, take a whole week off from their work to get to your workshop. They certainly aren’t going to just throw money at whatever product you’re selling, if it’s not top notch. And while all product or services start off a bit less than great, with time they can all become exceedingly good. That’s when the demand starts That’s when you need to put a “velvet rope” around the product or the service. The greater the demand the more you’ve got to protect your property. Instead it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to make our product or service easily available. Yet, in some cases, availability is exactly what’s needed. Some products or services may need to be put in place so that clients can get to them at any point in time. These products and services provide a doorway to your business. In our case, The Brain Audit is the doorway Prospects find The Brain Audit on Amazon.com or on our site. And once they read it, they go on to buy more “doorway products”. We know this to be true because we track their progress. They’ll buy books such as “The Secret life of Testimonials” or “Chaos Planning” or “Story Telling”. Then they move up to buying more expensive products such “Black Belt Presentations”. But then they hit a wall. To join 5000bc, they can’t just waltz in. They have to pay to be on a waiting list. Who pays to be on a waiting list? It’s just $10, but you have to get on the list and then after we check out your history a bit, we let you in after 3-4 weeks. The same applies to any of the workshops or courses. Not only are they less frequent, but our members at 5000bc get the first chance to sign up. There have been numerous occasions where the product or service is sold out before the rest of the list can even have a crack at it. The more expensive the product or service, the less the frequency of availability. So yes, you want to start with looking at your product or service Is it a doorway product? If so, it may not need that tag of exclusivity. But as it goes up in price, create a barrier—create several barriers—and make it exclusive. Even if you have a digital product that should be easily available, you can offer it only once a year and make it exclusive. This takes us to the second factor: working with small numbers. Working With Smaller Numbers A 947 person waiting list. That’s the Tory 2.0 dress by MM LaFleur. MM. LaFleur is a direct-to-consumer fashion retailer started by a former financial consultant Sarah LaFleur and Zac Posen designer Miyako Nakamura.  At $235 it’s not cheap, but the very fact that you can’t get it right away—that’s causing the waiting list to keep soaring. The same applied to my Nakaya Naka-ai in Araishu pen The pen is handcrafted from ebonite and Urushi lacquer, and comes a solid gold 14k nib. I ordered this handcrafted pen from Japan back in May 2014 and it arrived a year and a half later. My wife, Renuka, jokes that there’s some wizened old man in Japan somewhere working day and night bent over the nib. The price? After all the taxes, it hovered close to NZ$1000—for a fountain pen! And yet, there’s a waiting list. As if to underline the Japanese connection, here’s a third example Jiro Ono runs a sushi restaurant under the Ginza railway station in Tokyo. Jiro has been honoured by Michelin—and gets Michelin’s highest three star rating. A meal costs approximately US$380 per person. So how many people would you expect to see at Jiro’s restaurant? A hundred, fifty, thirty—perhaps? The correct answer is ten. Night after night only ten diners sit in for a twenty minute meal. So does a restaurant that makes over $1 million a year sound like a good business? It’s a myth that you have to be big to be successful In reality, being small—and having small groups as your clients can be as, or even more successful than getting bigger all the time. This in turn creates an enormous amount of exclusivity—and makes your business irresistible. If you’re a woman who’s keen on a superb office dress, you’ll be checking out the Tory 2.0 dress. The foodie in you would want to experience Jiro’s food and the pen—no you can’t have it. There’s only one kind of it on the planet. In short, smaller numbers play a massive role in creating exclusivity. And this factor of working in smaller numbers has a big, almost-guaranteed benefit Let’s take the membership site at 5000bc, for example. 5000bc has been running since 2003 and yet it has fewer than 400 members. That may, at first, seem like an awfully small number when you consider that the Psychotactics list runs into several tens of thousands. Yet, that small number is responsible for generating almost 90% our income. The members know the benefit of being a member. They get first access to the courses or workshops. They get personalised attention. Being a member has its privileges both for the client as well as for the person running the membership site. The moment the membership site gets big, it almost always gets hard to handle. There are no personal relationships, everyone is trying to hawk something to someone else and there’s a constant show up of upmanship. This concept of having smaller numbers applies not just to services, but training as well At Psychotactics, we may boast that we don’t do joint ventures, affiliates, advertising etc., but why have we been able to get away with this for so long? The reason is because clients keep coming back. On average, if a client does one workshop (at a venue) or one live course online, they come back to do as many as four-five courses, buy several products and services. Even the clients who don’t do many courses, end up doing at least a couple. I think you know where this line of thinking is going The smaller numbers cause the product or service to be exclusive. The exclusivity leads to urgency. Add a good helping of lesser frequency and you have an even higher factor of irresistibility kicking in. But more importantly, this tiny number also allows you to pay closer attention to the needs of your clients. And if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not even remotely expecting to rule the world. Your core goal is to live a comfortable, satisfying life; to have really good clients; to have a solid cash flow and money reserves. But you can have your cake and eat it too All your products and services don’t need to be out of reach. Some products may be produced in larger numbers. You may choose to have some events with 500 people—while others are just for 25. Not everything needs to be small, but you can put a ring around some products or services and decide to keep them small forever. Or, like Jiro Ono, you may decide you never want to have 11 people for dinner. Smaller numbers work magnificently well to create a factor of exclusivity You get to live your life on your terms—and because you have such small numbers your product or service is always in demand. Go smaller, not bigger. Reduce frequency, don’t increase. These are the keys to creating a real exclusivity for your product or service. This takes us to the third element: Build Up Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 3 and 3.

How do you make your product or service irresistible? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, can you use simple techniques to create a great offer? This episode shows you two psychological methods that we can't turn down?as humans. We love both the buffet and the specialty. No matter if you're a small business or a big one, you can use these techniques and increase your product and service sales.  In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Buffet vs. Specialty Principle Part 2: How Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy Part 3: What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.     What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 1 of 3 Imagine you’re Frank Sinatra. No matter where you go on the planet, people know of you. Doors open magically for you. People can’t help but gape in wonder as you show up at an event. So imagine a place where the great Frank Sinatra can’t enter. It’s inconceivable, isn’t it? And yet it happened. When Frank showed up at Studio 54, he was turned away. So was the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia’s son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys. Even the famous movie star, Jack Nicholson was unable to enter on opening night. Studio 54 was like no other place in New York From the moment it opened its 11,000-square-foot dance floor, it was packed with celebrities dying to get in. Olivia Newton-John, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, Tine Turner—you get the idea—they were just some of the visitors to Studio 54. Almost every night since it opened its doors on April 26, 1977, it was packed to its capacity—almost 2000 people a night. If you considered yourself cool, you wanted to get into Studio 54—but there was no guarantee you’d get in. There was someone stopping the flow… This someone was at the door Studio 54 night after night. He’d show up at the door at 11:30 pm and get on a step stool above the crowd. He’d pick who could get into the club that night—and who was to be turned away. His name is Steve Rubell, part-owner and the person who made sure the Studio was one of the most irresistible places in New York! So what made Studio 54 so irresistible, when there were so many cool places in New York at the time? And what makes any product or service irresistible, even without star power? Let’s take a look at three core elements. Buffet vs. Specialty Exclusivity Build Up   Buffet vs. Specialty Principle If you were to go to Lynda.com you’d be faced with a buffet. On Lynda.com there are hundreds of tutorials on software, business and creative skills. In 2004 alone, there were over 100 courses on the site. And that course number has gone up exponentially. For the past few years, Lynda.com been adding more than 18 hours of content, almost every single day of the year. That means you’re likely to run into thousands of hours of tutorials topics such as Photoshop, computer animation, 3-D animation, photography—in all about 224,413 tutorials to date. That’s a huge buffet, don’t you agree? And as humans, we’re primed for buffets. We love the “eat all you want” concept and it’s even better if the “food” is of an extremely high quality. This means that a potential client of Lynda.com can access all their content for just $250 a year. Immediately you see why this kind of deal is incredibly irresistible. If you decide to learn a program like InDesign, you can easily do so, because there are at least a dozen courses on InDesign alone. If you want to learn to work with WordPress, hey, there’s a mountain of video instruction already in place. No matter where you look, the volume and quality of content tantalises you. Which brings us to our first principle—the buffet principle If you’re offering your clients an enormous amount of something, they’re instantly drawn towards it, whether they can consume it or not. When given a buffet option, few of us can stop ourselves from feeling the need to buy the product or service. When you look at 5000bc.com, you get a buffet option 5000bc is the membership site at Psychotactics.com. The moment you get to the sales page at 5000bc, there’s a feeling of a ton of information at 5000bc. There are cumulatively, hundreds of articles on topics such as copywriting, web design, branding, lead generation etc. Which is why most clients tend to sign up to the membership site at 5000bc. It’s more than likely they’ve been a subscriber at Psychotactics for a while, bought and read The Brain Audit, possibly even bought some other books from Psychotactics—and then they’re exposed to 5000bc. And the buffet concept kicks in. At $259 a year (remarkably similar to Lynda.com), clients can get not only a ton of curated content, but also have the opportunity to ask me dozens of questions—some of which are answered within hours, if not minutes. This concept of a buffet becomes impossible to resist, and has been the main factor in attracting clients to 5000bc since it started way back in 2003. Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy The magazine, Vanity Fair, describes it as the “giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse of beautiful people, endless cocaine and every kind of sex. Once you were within the velvet ropes, you were exposed to raunchiness, debauchery and creativity of an unimaginable scale. “It felt like you were going to a new place every night,” says Kevin Haley, then a model, now a Hollywood decorator. “And you were, because they changed it all the time for the parties. Remember the Dolly Parton party? It was like a little farm with bales of hay and live farm animals—pigs and goats and sheep. The designer Karl Lagerfield’s party: an 18th century paty with busboys dressed up as courtiers, powdered wigs and then—a live reggae concert at 3 am in the morning. Another night might bring Bianca Jagger popping out of a birthday cake. Some nights might bring in a sea of glitter, another night Lady Godiva on a horse—or Hell’s Angels on Harleys on the dance floor. Ironically, the buffet-concept represents just one way to create an irresistible offer. The other way is the exact opposite—where you take away everything and create a specialty offer. Remember Lynda.com where you get over 200,000 tutorials? Remember the price? Yes, it’s $250 a year. And yet, at Psychotactics we sell an InDesign course that’s $269. It’s not an entire course in InDesign. It’s not even a partial course. All the course promises is ONE thing. It shows you how to create an e-book in InDesign in less than an hour. If you were to learn a course in InDesign, you’re likely to take at least 18 hours—and that’s the first time around. It’s likely you’d have to go through the entire course (or at least part of the course) a second time. And then when you’re ready to create your snazzy e-book, you have to work out which part of InDesign will help you get the result you seek. It’s not inconceivable to spend 40-50 hours just to get your e-book going. Now the specialty offer makes a huge difference to the client Instead of wading through hours of material, they get right to the point. And this specialty concept applies to more than just courses or training. A phone. Most of us want smartphones that have all the bells and whistles. But what if you want just a cell phone that makes calls? The Doro Phone Easy 626 does just what you’d expect a cell phone to do—it makes calls. Like the InDesign course, it’s not meant for everyone, but just a smaller audience that finds it irresistible. What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service? It means you can have your cake and eat it too. When we sell the book, The Brain Audit, it is akin to a buffet (like most books). It has several chapters and spans 180 pages. Yet, elements of The Brain Audit are then isolated. For instance, one of the elements, uniqueness, is a complete course. Another element, testimonial is a 100+ page book. Clients who buy The Brain Audit are extremely satisfied with the content and applications. However, when they want to go deeper on an isolated topic, they will buy the other products as well. Studio 54 catered to almost 2000 people a night—yet there was isolation in place If you were part of the select few, you could go down to the basement. The basement was essentially a storage area connected by zigzagging passageways. The in-crowd was in the basement, away from the party upstairs, mostly talking through the night and drinking bottles of a vodka brand— Stolichnaya. Even if you’re no Studio 54, you can have a smörgåsbord of goodies while at the same time putting a velvet rope over other product or services. And since we’re talking about buffets, a restaurant could have the buffet, while at the same time offering a special meal for just a tiny audience. A website designer could put together a website with all the bells and whistles—then create a service or product that was very niche and hence, irresistible. To be irresistible, you don’t have to choose between buffet and specialty items In reality a specialty item is easier to put together (because it’s less stuff, rather than more). In the grand scheme of things, it’s also easier to market as it has a clear point of focus. While we’ll look at all three elements: buffet/specialty, exclusivity and build up, it’s important to note that specialty is a great starting point. So start small—and charge more. This takes us to the second element: Exclusivity. Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 2 and 3.

Success is good. Focus is good. Until it’s bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business. So what’s the option? Surely it can’t be distraction? Actually it’s a mix of both that’s required. Using the concept of “spinning plates”, you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. ----------------------------- Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Once upon a time in New York’s Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You’ve probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I’ve kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife’s nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out. He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn’t ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, it’s pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it’s rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away. This is often what happens in business, especially if you’ve got a successful business. You get a blind spot. You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else. Now, almost instantly you’re wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what’s the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that’s what this episode is all about. It’s about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot. In this episode we’re going to explore three elements. First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time?   Let’s start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect. If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They’ve just shut off their comments. Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they’ve decided that they’re big enough they don’t need the comments, but that’s not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place. Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It’s embarrassing, so they have to turn it off. Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing. If you made a successful out of blogging Or Facebook or any other medium, then it’s very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, “Hey, podcasting is a big thing.” You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you’re doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot. This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot. We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We’ve had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly. Of course we send out a newsletter weekly. We’ve done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We’re able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It’s great focus,” and it is. But the ecosystem is connected. When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we’d get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we’d get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We’re talking about really big blogs. You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It’s not true anymore. They’ve had to relook their strategy; we’ve had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you’ve got to be watching for what’s happening around you. This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you. The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, “Hey, here’s a new method,” they just put the word new, improved, and we’re off like a bullet. It’s almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does. It’s the same thing for business. If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you’re doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they’re very tough. They’re very tough for me. They’re very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I’m on my feet for three days. I never sit down. I’m always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I’ve already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they’re just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long. If you want to make a success of anything you’re going to have to be willing to be there for the long run But as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective. …to continue listening or reading the transcript of this podcast Right click here and save-as to download—How Success Causes A Blind Spot (And Creates A Rip Van Winkle Effect) To continue reading, download the transcript ---------------------------------

There’s a difference between the “four-hour work week” and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can’t create magic.Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we’d love a “three-month” paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that’s the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time. http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/ ===== I don’t mow the lawns. I outsource it. I don’t do my accounts. It’s what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it’s all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced. I don’t build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn’t even bother to weave my own carpet. So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life. What I don’t outsource is magic It’s magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email. When I think about those who keep yearning for a “four-hour” work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time. I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a “four hour” workweek makes zero-sense to me. You can create money in four hours You can’t create magic. Money isn’t magic. It may seem that way, when you’re slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it’s not. Work is magic Work well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can’t outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they’re just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you’d be happy. I can assure you that you’d be happy for a while, but then you’d seek magic. And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort. I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many years I don’t have to wake up. We’ve done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we’re Internet-based, that’s like a hundred years). Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We’ve banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle. So why wake up at 4 am? Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It’s all extra work, isn’t it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster. The answer lies in magic You can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that’s going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week. Get used to it!..to continue listening to or reading the podcast Right click and save-as to download this episode: Four-Hour Work Week A Waste Of Time?

When we sit down to write a landing page, we usually have a ton of confusion in our heads. We have so many elements on that landing page. What should we put first? What should we leave out? The sales of our product or service depends on us having incredible focus. So how do we get that focus? The answer lies in the "pebble system". The moment we apply the "pebble system" we are able to prioritise what's important to our client—and to ourselves. The sales page gets crystal clear and we stop going around in circles. So what is this "pebble system" and how do we use it right away? -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/64 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Improve your planning (with chaos): http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos Write your home page/about us page: http://www.psychotactics.com/web ---------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 1) How To Avoid Dragging Out A Well Known Story (And Boring The Reader) 2) Why Stories Are Great For Sales Copy3) How to put that Zing-Kapow in your articles (with story telling) -------------------------------- 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.” This is the Three Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. Every evening at about twilight in New Mexico and Arizona, thousands of bats stream out from caves. One of the most famous of them all, at least among biologists, is the Mexican free-tailed bats, because they’re known for their hunting sprees. Like all animals, bats communicate with each other. But these Mexican free-tailed bats, they not only communicate; they also confuse. Aaron Cochran is a biologist who’s at the Wake Forest University. He was studying the hunting habits of Mexican free-tailed bats in Arizona and also in New Mexico. What he found was that his ultrasonic equipment was picking up two completely different sounds. When the free-tailed be able to was trying to communicate it was one sound, and then, the moment they had competition in the area, they would send out a send that was totally different. What these bats were doing was jamming the signals of other bats. Usually when a bat is hunting, what it does is it sends out a signal. It sends out what is called a feeding buzz. That bounces off the prey, and then they know, “Hey, it’s time for dinner.” What these free-tailed bats were doing was jamming the signals. It reduced their capability of capturing moths from 64% down to just 18%. This confusion, this reduced capability is a lot like what happens on our sales pages. When we are trying to write sales pages, we’re trying to get too much information across. It sounds like there’s one buzz and a second buzz, and now there is confusion and we miss the point. Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to stick to the point and we’re going to use pebbles. We’re going to use pebbles to figure out how we get to exactly what we want to say to the client, and then how we continue to say that over the rest of the sales page. The three things that we’re going to cover are, one, we find the confusion. The second is we use the pebbles. The third is we expand each issue all by itself. Let’s start out with the first one, which is finding the confusion on your sales page. Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages About two weeks ago I was on Facebook. I learn a lot through Facebook, despite what I say. Yet, I was watching this video by this conductor called Alondra de la Parra. I was so taken by this video that I saw on Facebook that I went to YouTube. On YouTube, there she was directing the Paris Orchestra. One of the songs that really got to me, one of the pieces that really got to me was “Huapango.” I started listening to “Huapango,” and then to another piece, and another piece, and another piece. Before I knew it, I had three albums of Alondra de la Parra. Of course I was driving Renuka crazy because I was playing this music all day long. Now the interesting thing about this music is it’s classic music, and like a lot of classical music, it requires an orchestra. An orchestra is complete confusion if you let it be. That’s what a conductor does. A conductor has to stand up there and somehow know that music in advance, and push and pull so that instead of cacophony we have music, we have this beautiful-sounding orchestra all playing together, but somehow separately at the same time. Your sales page is not difference. It’s got to have all of this information, but it’s got to play something louder than the other. This is why you have to first find the confusion, because when you find the confusion you know exactly what’s driving the sales page crazy. The answer is usually with the clients. When you ask your clients questions about why do you choose our business, they will tend to use a single word or a single phrase. Theygive you a line that you then try to put on your sales page, and of course it’s total confusion. Let me read you a line from the Running Coach. Now we’re talking about head coach Ken Rickerman, and he runs 5speedrunning.com and he teaches people how to run faster and better and with fewer injuries. Of course help go and help speak to a client, and help ask them, “What is it that drives you to come to 5speedrunning.com?” Of course they’ll give their response, and it sounds like this: “I want to move more freely. I want to go longer on the runs, and I want to improve my form.” The question is, does that help? It doesn’t help, because when you look at it, there are three points there. One is move more freely. Second is longer runs. The third is improve form. It sounded like a single sentence, but there are three whole topics in there, and that’s what we have to do. First we have to find the confusion. In that single line, there is enormous amounts of confusion. You can’t write a sales page or you can’t write an email if you’re trying to cover three points at the same time. You have to cover one point, just like this podcast. We’re going to cover three points, but hey, let’s start off with the first point. Let’s go into a lot of detail with the first point. Then we’ll go to the second point, detail the second point. Then we go to the third point. This is how we do stuff, or we should do stuff. Instead, we end up like those Mexican free-tailed bats, and there’s all this confusion because we’re trying to cover all of it together because it seems like one sentence. We take that sentence and we break it down into bullet points. That’s how you sort out any confusion. Take the sentence from your client, whatever that might be, and then break it up into bullet points. Once you break it up into bullet points, you will see very quickly that hey, there are four or five points here, or there are two or three points here, but there is almost never one point. That’s where the confusion lies. First step: make sure that you break up the sentences into bullet points. Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page That takes us to the second step where we start using the pebbles. As you know, we take three months off every year. We work for three months, and then we take a month off. For at least two of those months, we travel internationally. We’ll go to places like The Netherlands, or Japan, or Sardinia. When people ask me, “Which is your favorite city?” that’s not a fair question to ask because every city is completely different. The people are different and the food is different and the experience is different. Even so, you could specifically ask me, “Here are three cities, like three bullet points. Now, can you allocate pebbles to them?” If we took three cities like Amsterdam and Kyoto and Cagliari, then I could allocate pebbles. Because when you rank cities, it’s very difficult. You could say Kyoto is one, Cagliari is two, Amsterdam is three. But that doesn’t give us a sense of weight. What gives us a sense of weight is the pebble system. The pebble system is very simple. If you said, “Now allocate ten pebbles. You’ve got ten pebbles and you have to allocate them to these three different cities,” and then Kyoto would get maybe four or five pebbles. Because Kyoto is old Japan. It’s got temples and shrines and gardens. It’s got lots of ramen, lots of it, great food, great people, and these amazingly sublime gardens where you can sit there for hours and do nothing, just like you would imagine Japan to be, this very quiet, non hustle bustle place. In my ranking, Kyoto would get five pebbles. Now we have just five pebbles among the rest of the cities. Now we have Cagliari and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is amazing. It’s got lots of cheese, and Renuka loved that place more than any other place. But I would give Cagliari three pebbles, and then Amsterdam two pebbles. Now we have a weighted system. We have this concept of Kyoto, five pebbles; Cagliari, three pebbles; and then finally we get to Amsterdam, which is two pebbles. Now, if we have those three bullet points, we’re clear which one is the most important. When look at what Ken had, he had move more freely, longer runs, and improve form. Longer runs got five pebbles. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start off with longer runs. The next thing was improve form; that got three pebbles. Finally, move more freely got two pebbles. Now, what we have with this pebble system is clarity. We know that the most important thing for that runner is for longer runs, so we’re going to deal with longer runs on our sales page. For now, we totally abandon the other two, which is move more freely and improve form, and we focus on the problems that runners have with longer runs: the injuries it causes, all that stuff, but only with longer runs. Then you’re able to get that message across very clearly. You might never have to go to point two and point three. Because, as Ken mentioned, with the longer run you get tired, you get physically exhausted, you lose focus, you get aches and pains, you have oxygen problems, you go out of breath. Then finally, you lose motivation and confidence. There is a lot of stuff to cover with just one topic, as you can see. What we do on the sale page is do the Mexican free-tail dance. We try and put all the points together, when this one point itself could drive half the sales page. Imagine yourself as a client. You get there, you’re having trouble with longer runs, and you see so much information in the form of a sales page about longer runs. That’s when you realize, “My goodness, this guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. This is the stuff that is of interest to me,” instead of all of this confusion and all of these bullet points bouncing back and forth. What we’ve covered so far is we’ve found the confusion. Then we started using the pebbles. Now we’re going to expand the issue. Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message Yes, we’re on the third and final part of this podcast. Let’s expand the issue, shall we? Let’s go back for a minute to Alondra de la Parra. There she is in front of this orchestra, and there is this accordion. Now this was a different piece altogether, and not “Huapango.” In this accordion we have the analogy that we need to understand how you expand that one point. In the last section we looked at this one concept of longer runs. What we have to ask are three questions. The first is what does the solution look like? When someone goes for a longer run, what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? The best thing to do is not to answer this question yourself, especially if you’re writing the sales letter. Because we’re hopeless at writing sales letters. It’s better to call up the client, get a recorder going, and ask them: What does it feel like? What does it look like? They will give you two, three paragraphs. Then you ask that client the second question, which is: When it doesn’t work out? How does it feel? What are things that stop you, slow you down? What they’ll do is come up with that list. I get tired, I lose focus, I lose motivation. What they will do as well is they’ll give you the words that you need to use on that page. If you’ve got that recorder going, you’ll find that the client is giving you the exact words and the exact feeling and the exact emotion that you want from them. The most important thing for you to figure out at this point is that you stay one point. Even when we have gone to just longer runs, we still have five subtopics under that, which is get tired, lose focus, aches and pains, can’t catch breath, and then lose motivation. We have five topics, and you have to be very careful. You have to stick with one thing at a time. Among those five topics, which are the most important? Then you drive that. You address that one topic. Then they answer in a paragraph. That paragraph goes on your sales page. Because they will tell you exactly how they feel, what’s happening in their brain, and what’s really important to them. The client might say that the aches and pains are the most critical of all. That’s where you start. Then maybe they go to the fact that the aches and pains make them lose focus. Then you continue down that path. Let them speak for a while. You just have to transcribe. Maybe you have to tweak a little bit here and there, but most of the time you’re just doing a transcription. This is the beauty of the pebble system. Instead of dealing with all of these things, we go down to one point. From that one point, we get another five points from those five points. We still have some level of ranking. In this case, you can have the ranking, all the pebbles all over again. The client will explain to you how they feel. Then you want to take that and put that on your sales page. What about the other points? The move more freely and the improve form? You can put that in your bullets. You don’t have to put that in your main text. You can put that a lot later. What you’re really trying to do is drive home one problem. That is longer runs and what it means not to run that long. What are the consequences of not running that long? Then you bring up your solution: introducing the long run system. Then you explain your solution. How do you explain your solution? The client told you, remember? We asked them what did the solution look like. In effect, the client is writing your entire sales page. The critical thing is to use the pebble system. Because the pebble system allows you to focus. Otherwise, we have all this confusion, too much information. When someone reads your sales page, they don’t get a single message. We often try to write sales pages ourselves, and it’s a big mistake. Even if you’re a copywriter, it’s a big mistake. The client can come up with terminology that you just cannot dream of, because they live it and they breathe it and they feel it. They have this specific information, the specific term that they want to use. You want to use that on your sales page. The best way to do it is to ask them. First you have to clarify. While I’m talking about clarification, let me reiterate what we’ve covered in this episode. Summary The first thing that we looked at was finding the confusion. We saw that it didn’t matter what we’re doing, there were several points that need to be covered. What we’re going to do is isolate them. We isolated them by using pebbles. We then said five pebbles for this place, three for that, two for this. The same thing applies to your website. There are all of these points, but you allocate pebbles. Then you take the one that got the most pebbles. Then you expand on them. That was the third part. When you expand, you ask them, What does the solution look like?” and let them talk, and let them talk, and let them talk. You keep recording. You’re the transcriber. You’re the person asking the questions. Let them talk. Then you ask them what the problem looks like. Then they will give you four or five points. You can ask them more details about those points. Now you have enough content to put on your page. It’s not just content, but emotion-filled content on that one single topic. That is why the pebble system is so powerful, because it helps the client focus, helps you focus, and you’re able to create a much better sales page than just sitting at your computer and churning something out. What’s the one thing that you can do this week? The one thing that you can do is to help yourself find that confusion factor that you’re dealing with every single day. Do this with your grocery list. Just take three items and then allocate those pebbles. This is five, this is three, this is two. Get into the habit of allocating for pretty much everything. Your to-do list looks a lot better when you allocate pebbles, because you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you have any questions, I’m at Twitter, Sean D’Souza; Facebook, Sean D’Souza; or sean@psychotactics.com. To get this episode, go to psychotactics.com/64, and you will get the podcast as well as the transcript. There are still a few seats remaining for the storytelling workshop both in Amsterdam and Nashville. To find out more, go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. This is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th of December in Amsterdam. Storytelling is critical. Most people think of storytelling as just telling stories, but no, it’s a branding issue. It gets your message across in a way that is so amazing and so powerful. As you’ve discovered on this podcast, there are all these stories, and that’s why you’re listening to the podcast right to the end. When you read The Brain Audit, when you read Dartboard Pricing, when you read the book on presell, when you go through any of our courses, there are stories. It’s not just about telling stories to sell, but also your books and your podcasts and your webinars, and your pretty much everything. The reason why stuff is so boring is because it doesn’t have stories. This is what the storytelling workshop will do for you. It will show you how to construct those stories for business rather than just telling another story. That’s psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Do you know—Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t? In this free except on—The Brain Audit you will  find out why customers put off buying your product or service.

Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we're not good learners? Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you're a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there's no true learning, no true application. A teacher, on the other hand, is completely tied to getting the student to apply the skills. When you're creating info-products, writing books or articles, this what needs to be kept in mind. Are you a teacher or a preacher? And are you following a teacher or preacher? Here are three benchmarks to watch for! -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/63 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic The Brain Audit: http://www.psychotactics.com/brain -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Responsibility Factor Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark To Teaching Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources Audio and Transcript: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition Free Goodies: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t Audio and Transcript:  Deconstructing Why Bad Habits Succeed (And Good Habits Fail) ---------- 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.” This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. If you were to step into India today and go to most Indian households, you would be surprised at what you saw at the doorstep. You would see a Swastika. Yes, the very same Swastika that the Germans used in World War II, the same Swastika that came to be hated by everyone who saw it then, and today. What is a Swastika doing on the doorstep of so many Hindu households? The reality is that the Swastika comes from the Sanskrit word Swastik which means good luck. It has been around for thousands of years. While it’s prominently found in Indian culture even today, it was also found in ancient Greece, it can be seen on the remains of the ancient city of Troy which existed over a thousand years ago. The Druids and the Celts they also use the symbol, the Nordic tribes, the Christians, the Teutonic Knights. The Swastika goes back a long way. In modern history, Coca Cola used it, Calsberg used it on their beer bottles, the boys’ scouts adopted it, and the girls club of America, they called their magazine Swastika. It was used on playing cards, and even by the American Military Units during World War 1. It can be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. And then, Hitler came along. He took something that was wonderful and incredibly powerful and made it something evil. He took something that was empowering and twisted it in his own way to make it work for him. He changed the meaning of the word. That is the kind of thing that happens very often when we look to learn. When we look around we see that people call themselves teachers, but in reality they are not teachers, they are just preachers. When you get this kind of information in the form of video, and audio, and PDF, you think, well, I am being taught by someone, but in reality, all you’re doing is getting a ton of information. You’re getting a preacher instead of a teacher. While it might sound like just words being twisted or replaced, there is a very big difference between a preacher and a teacher. How do we know what makes a preacher thus as a teacher? That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to look at three things, the first is the responsibility factor. The second is the three benchmark system. The third, the ability for the student to become the teacher. Part 1: The Responsibility Factor Let’s start out with the first one which is the responsibility factor. If you try to learn a language like Spanish, or German, or French, it will take you many, many months to get there. In every classroom, you have the bright students and the not-so-bright students, or at least until Michel Thomas came along. Michel Thomas was a language teacher, and he didn’t believe in bright students, and dull students. He believed that the responsibility lay with the teacher. He made a bold claim, he made a claim that you could learn the fundamentals of grammar in any language within 10 hours, and then he set about proving the fact. The BBC followed him around for several days. If you look up Michel Thomas on You Tube, you will find a three part episode that shows you how he taught these students. Students who were told by their teachers that they were not supposed to learn a language, that they were stupid, that they were dull, that they should never bother to try and learn any language. He sat them down in a classroom. In a week or so, they were already speaking the language. This is the language, the very same language that they were told they should give up, they should never try this anymore. What happened? When we ask what happened, we’re trying to solve the problem of the language. What did he do, how do we learn languages like that? We don’t look at that, we look at what was the core of Michel’s system. The core of Michel’s system was responsibility. He felt that the responsibility of the teaching didn’t lie with the student, it lay with the teacher. When you think about that statement for a few minutes, it changes your whole mindset. It means that the person learning under you is not responsible. You think, well, how is that possible, you can’t control what someone is doing. May be you have online courses like we do and they’re sitting in South Africa, or Australia, or the United States, and you can’t control what they’re doing. Yes you can. This is the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A preacher simply gives you information, you get more CDs, more information, more PDFs, more videos, but whose responsibility is it for you to succeed? The teacher on the other hand changes the way they give you information because they realize that if you don’t get these tiny increments, you will start, and you will go few steps and then you will give up. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A teacher doesn’t believe in stupid students. A teacher doesn’t believe in dull students. A teacher believes that it is their responsibility to figure out how to get across to that student. Let’s say you have a web design company, and let’s say you’re giving instructions to your clients how to set up their websites. Let’s just say for a second that the client comes back and asks you a whole bunch of questions. Are they dull? The answer is, whose responsibility is it. It’s your responsibility. The reason why that client has not figured out what they should do and how they should go about it, is because you haven’t given them precise instructions, you’ve hurried through the process. Or, you just have the curse of knowledge. You know so much that you don’t realize that you’re going through so many steps. Therefore, you have become a preacher. You’re no longer a teacher, you’re not breaking down things into steps that are foolproof. When we see clients doing silly things, what we say is, well, they’re not smart, or they’re silly, or they’re stupid, but, the responsibility lies with you. If they fail you have failed. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. One of the best examples I have for you is this yes and yes pricing grid on the Psychotactics website. When you go and you buy any product, or any service, or any course on Psychotactics, you will encounter the price grid which is where you click the button to buy now. We have a regular and a premium pricing there. As the teacher, it is my duty to get that message across. How do you create a pricing grid so that you can earn 10% or 15% more when you have the pricing grid on your own website. People make mistakes, if there is one thing that I’ve seen where clients consistently make mistakes is on this pricing grid. We tell them to put ticks, they put crosses, we tell them to put red ticks, they put blue ticks. This is because everyone interprets your information in their own way, and that’s absolutely normal. They want to be creative but their creativity doesn’t end up being beneficial to them, and clients end up buying the regular instead of the premium. What’s my job as a teacher? My job as a teacher is very simple, my job is to make sure that they get it. If they don’t get the pricing grid right, then I have to take responsibility for that. In the book which is Dartboard Pricing, it goes through steps. One step, second step, third step, then it shows the mistakes you can make, and the mistakes other people have made. What it’s doing there, even with the book, even when I cannot be there, I have to make sure that’s it’s my responsibility for you to get your pricing grid right. It’s very easy to say that people don’t understand. “Look, I told them how to do it and they didn’t do it,” but no, it’s your responsibility. That’s the critical element, the difference between a preacher and a teacher. Two and a half years ago I started coaching my niece Marsha. She wanted to get better at her studies and so we started the coaching. I sat her down on the first day and I said to her, “Marsha, if you get everything wrong at school whose fault is it?” She said, “It’s my fault.” I said, “No, no, no, it’s my fault, if your get everything wrong, it’s my fault as a teacher.” She said, “Cool.” That’s the whole point, that’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. You have to take responsibility. That’s how you know that you’re picking the right teacher because they take responsibility for you. They don’t just dump information, they make sure that you get it right. Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark This takes us to the second part of this podcast, and it’s called, the three step benchmark. What is the three step benchmark? When I was 12 years old I used to come home from school and I’d very hungry. School would finish at 4 pm and then it will be a long wait until dinner. Dinner in India is a lot like Mediterranean countries and it’s late, so it’s about 8:30 or so. I’d come home and I’d be ravenous, I want to eat something, and no one would be at home. But there in the pantry on the shelves would be a packet of Ramen Noodles, in this case it was Maggi Noodles. This had a masala flavor which you don’t get in other countries, but you do get in India. What I’d so is I would boil some water and add the noodles, I’d add the taste maker which is the masala flavor, and then five minutes later I’d be eating it. Notice what I did, I only took three steps, boil water, add noodles, add taste maker. This is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. They use these three step benchmark system if they are aware of it or not. The preacher will not do that, a preacher will give you a lot of instructions, they will tell you, you should do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and you get lost in that whole sequence of things. I know this because this is what I used to do. I would give people instructions, here’s what you need to do, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, not anymore. You need to solve the problem in three steps. If the client cannot get to the other side within three steps like Maggi Noodles, then you have given too many instructions. If they keep coming back to you and asking you something, then you’ve given too many instructions. There is no other way, the responsibility lies with you. We just finished the headlines course for 2015, and there are many ways to write a headline. A lot of people will tell you to just copy headlines but that’s stupid. You should know how to write headlines just like you know how to speak, how to write. There is a structure, and a system, and a format, to write headlines. The problem is also that there are many ways to write those headlines. If you want your student to get their mastery, then you have to follow these three step benchmark. If you give them an instruction and they can’t get there within three steps, then you have made a mistake. Let’s take an example of the headlines, let’s say I needed to get you to write better headlines in the next few minutes. Well, how I’m I going to get this done on a podcast? Here’s how you do it, you’re restricted to just three steps or fewer. What you’re going to do is going to put either “even” or “and.” You’re going to put this in parenthesis or brackets as you call it. Here’s how you do it, you say, how to raise prices “even” when clients are price-conscious, how to raise prices “even” when the competition is offering discounts. The headline with “even” in it, it creates a contrast. It’s a headline going one way and then it starts to go the other way. Now let’s use “and.” How to consistently raise prices “and” still keep 95% of your clients, or, how to tell amazing stories “and” connect the stories to your business articles. What we have here is “and” and “even.” The “and” moves the idea forward, and the “even” takes it a step back, or, it provides contrast. If you’re thinking to yourself, wait, that was such a small step. That’s the whole point, this is how teachers teach. The preachers will give you 7, 8 different steps to do. In the headline course, we spent a week doing this, and people still make mistakes. Bit by bit we outline it. A very small thing can be interpreted in many different ways and a preacher will just dump information on you. A teacher will take a very small element, just three steps. If you can’t get that client to do what you want in three steps, it’s your fault, it’s your responsibility. When you’re looking for a teacher, look for a teacher that has these tiny increments. That helps you get there to the next stage instead of telling you how silly you are, or how dull you are. Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher? This takes us to the third part which is the most scariest benchmark of all, which is when the student becomes the teacher. When I go to seminars, I notice something very interesting. A speaker will stand up and make this presentation, and then they’ll have all these slides, and all of these information, and all of these statistics. Then at the end of that presentation, they get a rousing applause, they get a lot of [inaudible 15:24] they get all of that stuff, but, what is the benchmark of the presentation? The real benchmark of the presentation is that the persons sitting there in the audience should be able to say what you said in their presentation. That sounds bizarre doesn’t it? Of course it is bizarre, but that’s what a teacher does. A teacher makes sure that you don’t go out there with your head full of information. All this shock and awe that you bring to the presentation, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is what the student can then teach. When that student goes out, can they repeat exactly what you said and often in the sequence that you said it? If you come to a Psychotactics course, or you come to our workshop, or you come to our presentation, one of the most important benchmarks is that you should be able to repeat what I have just taught you. You should be able to tell someone else exactly what you learned, the sequence in which you learned it, and then you have become the teacher. If the person cannot do that, the client there, the person in the audience cannot do that, then there’s something wrong with the way you’re teaching, it’s that simple. If all you have done is given information, then they’re going to cling on to some fact or the other. They’re going to cling on to one fact, or two facts, or three facts, but they don’t have that system in place, because you didn’t put that system in place. That’s the difference between a teacher and a preacher. A teacher will make sure that the student knows how do whatever it is that they are teaching. Their responsibility is to get that student to know what they are teaching. It’s not just information being given out, it is application, and it’s instant application. When there is complication there is no application, when there are too many steps there is no application, and so you start to see the difference between a teacher and a preacher. In fact, let’s summarize because you’ll need to be the teachers. If someone asks you what did you learn on this podcast, well, you’ll need to know the difference between the teacher and the preacher. You’ll need to know how to change your methods, you’ll also need to know how to choose a teacher versus a preacher. Summary The first thing that we covered today was the factor that Michel Thomas taught us, and that is the responsibility lies with the teacher, you are responsible. The student is not responsible, you are responsible. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, you are still responsible. When you take on a task you have to make sure that you formulate your teaching in a way that enables the student to learn. That changes the whole perspective of teaching. You can do this very simply by having the three step benchmark in place. If the student cannot get from this point to that point in three steps, then you have given too many steps, you have to reduce those number of steps. That takes us to the third part which is, how do you know that the student is now smart enough and that is because they have become the teacher. You go from this factor of changing your mindset, responsibility, to then boiling down to just three steps. Then finally, you know that they have reached there because now they can teach what you just taught them. That is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. Whether we are in the service business or a product business, we have to make sure that we get this message across. This is not just about training, this is about getting your clients to achieve what they want to achieve. Most of us will blame the client. If you find yourself blaming the client, listen to Michel Thomas’ words yet again, “The responsibility lies with you, it’s your fault, it’s always your fault.” When you say that to your client, they’ll be like Marsha, they will say, “Cool.” This brings us to the end of this podcast. You can find me always on Twitter or Facebook, I’m @seandsouza. You can also email me at sean@psychotactics.com. However, if you are listening to this podcast in sequence, I won’t be available for the next two weeks, I will be in Uluru which is in the middle of Australia. There is this massive rock there, there is nothing else but this massive rock and three hotels, and that’s where we’re going to be, we’re going to be in Alice Springs. It’s going to be really hot there, I hear it’s about 33 °C, which is 91 °F, I wish it were cooler. But hey, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, this part of Australia specifically. You can only ever go there in the colder months, and now we have slipped past the cold rainy months and we are into October, so we’re going to have to put up with some of the heat. While we are away make sure that you read The Brain Audit because it will show you why customers buy and why they don’t. There is also the Web Component Series which is website secrets and you’ll learn how to create your home page, or About Us page, your download page, very effectively. You can find it at psychotactics.com/web. If you’d like to join us at Five Thousand B.C that’s fivethousandbc.com, that’s the community of mostly introverts, and there is me, the extrovert. You’ll find that Five Thousand B.C is a membership site like no other because I’m there all the time, 17,000 times a day, except for the next two weeks when I will be in Australia. That’s it from Psychotactics and The Three Month Vacation, make sure you send this over to your friends as well so that they can listen to The Three Month Vacation podcast. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance.  There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. (http://www.psychotactics.com/free/brain-audit-excerpt/)  

When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/62 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Concept of Consumption Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly Goodies: How to design a visual “yes-yes” pricing grid for all your products The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don’t  -------------------- 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.” What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?” Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.” That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product. What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Part 1: The Concept of Consumption The first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption. In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix. Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference. In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical. When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time. What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline. In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something. When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?” That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect. Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower. That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section. Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Let’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista. Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee. The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it. Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness. When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried. That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content. Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on. That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product. Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain As you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away. You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain. I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore. Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff. Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample. Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future? Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product. Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right? What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you’re giving away and see is it built for consumption. Can they go from A to B to C and then have that superpower? If no, then you’re just giving information. We don’t need more information. We’re done with information. Just give me some skill that I can sort out in the next ten minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, whatever, but quickly. We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be. If you would like to meet us live at a workshop, then there’s a storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Amsterdam, which is in The Netherlands. You can find out more about this on psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. Be sure to read The Brain Audit before you arrive, because The Brain Audit is compulsory for any course that you do with Psychotactics. Yes, it’s a barrier, and we’re happy to keep that barrier in place. You will find The Brain Audit a tremendous read. It is really fun to read and to understand how people think. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)