Podcasts about psychotactics

In this episode, Sean D'Souza of Psychotactics discusses how small businesses should approach differentiation when selling their products and services.  Sean is the author of The Brain Audit, and is a copywriter, cartoonist, and speaker. He is also the host of the three month vacation podcast. We discuss common challenges people have around differentiation, and how the biggest mistake people make is that they promote their company instead of talking about their products. We cover:How to position a product so it sticks to the consumers' mindsCommon challenges people have around how to differentiateMeasuring results through benchmarks Reasons for the high failure rate of small businessesLinkedin: Sean D'SouzaTwitter: @seandsouzaBook: The Brain Auditpsychotactics.comView the podcast transcript hereValuable Resources:Brand Tuned AccreditationBrand Tuned Newsletterwww.brandtuned.com

What was the trigger for the Three-Month Vacation? Why do we have workshops at random locations? This is it—the second part in the two part series of "how all these traditions started"

How did the gold star show up in Psychotactics courses? How did we start sending chocolate across the world? Here is a two part series on how all of these traditions started

It's time to stop losing customers and start understanding them. Sean D’Souza, author of The Brain Audit, founder of Psychotactics, and host of The Three Month Vacation Podcast, is a Marketing Strategist and expert on consumer psychology. He’s one of the most articulate and well-spoken people I’ve met in the field of marketing and he’s here to help you figure out why you aren’t selling as much as you should. In this episode, Sean sets the record straight on the number one reason your customers back out of a purchase. We also dive into how to ease your customer’s fears, the importance of having a uniqueness factor, and how to start understanding your customers in a deeper way so you can stop losing customers. Sean is giving a training inside of the Coalition on May 11th called, “Buy Your Life Back: How to Raise Prices and Not Lose Customers”. Apply to join the Coalition today so you don’t miss out. Episode Highlights: 4:23 Why Sean D'Souza created "psychotactics" 6:41 What stops people from taking a 3-month vacation 10:57 The best way to stop losing customers 19:30 Why your business needs to have a uniqueness factor 25:12 How to come up with your uniqueness factor 32:15 Unpacking the misconception around sales 37:07 Tiger Woods' iconic shot and what it has to do with your customers 40:58 How to start understanding your customer in a deeper way 45:04 Learn more about Sean D'Souza 47:08 Sean’s top recommendation for a vacation destination Links and Resources: Sean D’Souza’s Website The Three Month Vacation Podcast The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't) The Coalition @a_brawn on Twitter Review or subscribe on iTunes

Unsure what to put in a case study? The key is remembering to think like a prospect. What do they want to see?1. That you've helped people like them2. That you actually do things they want done3. That you get results they are looking for4. That you can get results for them specifically, tooThe first step before you begin is knowing what kind of clients you want to attract. There's no point in doing a case study on clients you have no desire to replicate.Like attracts like.Once you have a clear vision of the clients you want to attract, it's time to write.Here's what I normally recommend:1. The client's situation before they hired you - where they started (which should resemble your prospect's situation) 2. The things you actually did - clients want to see you can do the tactical things they already want. Remember, clients self-prescribe solutions. They come looking for tactics. This list shows you can do all of what they want and much more. Include photos/screenshots/examples if you can.3. The results you actually got (and why they matter) - Clients have a desired future state in mind. Maybe they need more revenue or maybe they been better performance tracking for their investors or key stakeholders. Combine the results you got, whether financial, analytical, subjective, or otherwise with the reason they mattered. 4. A client testimonial - this is the bow on the package that ties it all together. Their words describing the nuance and specific things they liked about working with you. Try to make it outcome focused but allow room for benefit-driven and emotional language. On the topic of testimonials...Sean D'Souza of Psychotactics has a list of questions you could ask (below). But don't feel you need to copy them verbatim. The key is uncovering the before, during, and after in their own language, and then seeing how they describe you and the benefits of working with you. Here's what Sean recommends you ask (with his explanation below each):1) What was the obstacle in your mind/hesitation before buying this product/service?We ask this question because the customer always has a perception, hesitation an obstacle. No matter how ready the customer is to buy your product/serv­ice, there's always a hitch. The hitch could be money, or time, or availability, or relevance—or a whole bunch of issues.And when you ask this question, it brings out those issues. And it does something more. It gives you an insight into issues you may not have con­sidered, because the client is now reaching into their memory to see what could have been the deal-breaker. And there's always an obstacle; always something you may not have consid­ered. So when the customer brings up this obstacle, it presents an angle that's unique, personal and dramatic.2) What did you find as a result of buying this product/service?This question is important, because it defuses that obstacle. When a client answers this question, they are clear about why the purchase was worth it, despite the obvious obstacles.3) What specific feature did you like most about this product/service?Now you're digging deeper. If you ask the customer to focus on the entire product/service, the answer gets waffly. It's therefore important to focus on one feature/benefit that the customer liked most about the product/serv­ice. This brings out that one feature in explicit richness and detail.4) What would be three other benefits about this product/service?Having already got one big feature, you can now go a little wide, and see what else the customer found useful. You can substitute the word ‘three' with ‘two' or simply remove the number. The number allows the customer to focus on ‘two' or ‘three' things, and then give you those ‘two' or ‘three' things that were useful.5) Would you recommend this product/service? If so, whyYou may not think this is an important question, but psychologically it's very important. When a customer recommends something, there's more than your product/service at stake. The customer's integrity is at stake too. So unless the customer feels strongly about the product/service, they won't be so keen to recommend it. And when they do recommend it, they're saying to prospective buyers: “Hey, I recommend it, and here are the reasons!”6) Is there anything you'd like to add?By this point, the customer has said all he/she has to say. But there's never any harm in asking this question. The questions before this question kinda ‘warm up' the customer, and sometimes you get the most amazing parting statements, that you simply can't imagine.And this detailed construction of testimonials brings us to a very interest­ing observation.I definitely recommend reading this full article for more info, and listening to his podcast for more great marketing tips: https://www.psychotactics.com/six-questions-testimonials/ That's all for now! Did this help? Let me know what you do differently if you have other ideas.Until next timeYours,—k

When you run a business, there are three things that seems to come up. The first is "ungrateful subscribers", the second is definitely "pirates" and the third is the "competition. No matter how hard you try, these three pesky occurrences seem hard to avoid, but as you'd expect, there's a way out.

This week, we welcome Sean D’Sousa, founder of Psychotactics on the show to discuss how the brain works when it comes to making buying decisions. Sean has an extensive background in persuasion from his experience in copywriting, writing TV commercials, marketing, and finally his work in graphic designs and cartoons. One of his greatest skill-sets […]

Cartoonist turned marketer Sean D'Souza joins us from his Psychotactics marketing headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand. In this episode, we dive into marketing tactics and beyond, including how to ensure you control your business, rather than your business controlling you.

Most of us are more than likely to get going by having a to-do list. Yet, we at Psychotactics do things a little differently. We start with the breaks, to begin with (and there's even a "Julia story" that explains why). Plus we also include a stop-doing list. To find out how and why this weird planning system may work for you, listen to this episode.

Welcome to the Conscious Millionaire Show for entrepreneurs who want to build a high-profit business that makes an impact! Make Your First Million, with your Host, JV Crum III…  Sean D'Souza: The Science of Why People Buy Sean D'Souza has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Like this Podcast? Get every episode delivered to you free!  Subscribe in iTunes And, download your free gift today... Get the High Performer Formula to Make Millions – Click Here! Please help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other entrepreneurs and business owners find our podcast… grow a high-profit business that makes an impact. Help your friends Become a Conscious Millionaire! They will thank you for it. Conscious Millionaire Network has over 2,000 episodes and 12 Million Listeners in 190 countries. Our original Conscious Millionaire Podcast was named in Inc Magazine as one of the Top 13 Business Podcasts!  

Welcome to the Conscious Millionaire Show for entrepreneurs who want to build a high-profit business that makes an impact! Make Your First Million, with your Host, JV Crum III…  Sean D'Souza: The Science of Why People Buy Sean D'Souza has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Like this Podcast? Get every episode delivered to you free!  Subscribe in iTunes And, download your free gift today... Get the High Performer Formula to Make Millions – Click Here! Please help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other entrepreneurs and business owners find our podcast… grow a high-profit business that makes an impact. Help your friends Become a Conscious Millionaire! They will thank you for it. Conscious Millionaire Network has over 2,000 episodes and 12 Million Listeners in 190 countries. Our original Conscious Millionaire Podcast was named in Inc Magazine as one of the Top 13 Business Podcasts!  

Worstel jij ook zo met de positionering van je merk? Dan ben je niet alleen. De meeste ondernemers en marketeers worstelen langdurig met de juiste positionering van hun merk. De oplossing komt echter vaak uit een volkomen onverwachte hoek: een ogenschijnlijke zwakte blijkt juist jouw kracht. Hoe dat werkt? Sean D'Souza van Psychotactics schreef er een ijzersterk artikel over en dit is onze vertaling, inclusief Nederlandse voorbeelden. Blijf dus zeker luisteren tot het einde, want deze tips zijn goud waard. Lees je liever? De voorbeelden bekijken? Of makkelijk doorklikken naar de genoemde voorbeelden? Check de blog op: https://mediaweb.nl/blog/positionering Interesse in het aanbod van CopyRobin? https://copyrobin.nl

When we think of business, marketing tactics and strategy comes to mind, doesn't it? Philosophy does exist but it may be a bit on the back burner. Yet, for us at Psychotactics, philosophy looms large. Here are just a few nuggets that you can ponder over and see how they apply to you—and how you can use them in your life and business.

My guest today is Sean D’Souza, author of The Brain Audit and the owner of Psychotactics.com. He’s a cartoonist and a marketer with more than 15 years experience in the field and makes a point to take a three-month vacation every year. In this episode, you’re going to learn how to convince people to buy without being pushy using Sean’s methodology called The Brain Audit. It works for all marketing and business types because it uses first principal thinking instead of relying on best practices that come and go. Listen in to learn this step by step process you can apply in your daily work starting today. Summary of The Book And Episode: Learning responsibility at a young age Overpromising by marketers Life satisfaction at a certain level of income The Brain Audit methodology Finding the target profile and solving their problem Answering customer objections Curating valuable testimonials Implementing successful risk reversals Uniqueness Resources Related to The Brain Audit: How to Convince Someone to Buy (Without Being Pushy) The Brain Audit Psychotactics.com Originals by Adam Grant TimHarford.com

You know how you're told to make lemonade when life hands you lemons? Well, what do you do with overripe bananas? You make Filos! This episode is about the times when we should have given up because the failure seemed so great. But they are also stories that show you what happens when you persist. You'll enjoy these stories about 5000bc and Psychotactics. And it's all about failure, and how things turned out on the other side. Read the transcript here: Failure Through Different Lenses.    

Taking your audience from avid listeners to paying members can be a lucrative way of monetising your podcast. Welcome to Should I Start A Podcast where each week Ronsley Vaz, with the help of a star-studded entrepreneurial guest lineup, explores why you should start a podcast; build an audience, and how to keep them hungry for more. If you're thinking about starting a podcast, or simply finding a better way to get your message out to your audience, then this is the podcast for you The membership model, on paper, is a great idea. You generate a community of loyal subscribers, they pay you every month and you have a consistent revenue stream. The problem is, it's not as easy as it sounds. The churn rate, or the amount of people that quit using a subscription after only a few months, can be very high. And people, especially nowadays with so much content out in the world, demand a very high degree of quality if they're going to pay monthly. At We Are Podcast 2016, we had a panel of industry experts sit down and share how they've made their own subscription models work. The discussion was informative, interesting — and sometimes downright hilarious. You'll definitely want to give it a watch. The featured panel guests include: Sean D'Souza, Owner of PsychoTactics and Author Nathan Chan, CEO & Publisher of Foundr Magazine Carla Papas, Co-founder of The Merrymaker Sisters Karly Nimmo, Director of Killer Kopy and Host of two No.1 iTunes podcasts: Karlosophies & Keeping Good Company They also discuss: Why memberships should be community driven How to create accountability in your members How to get members to share and participate more Using members to supplant recruitment for events Why membership models won't work for everyone The importance of making members feel safe and comfortable Some ideas for keeping things fresh in your subscription service How to recruit quality members   Links: We Are Podcast - website We Are Podcast - Facebook Group

We may often hear ourselves saying, we have a long to-do list. Or things that we still haven't completed. Or worse, we may talk about how we have no time. Often, it's just a matter of issues that can get resolved with a touch of philosophy. There's work to be done as well, but the philosophy needs to come first. In this second part of the series, let's find out how philosophy can come to our rescue and serve our business—even save us time! The Philosophy of Psychotactics

When we think of business, marketing tactics and strategy comes to mind, doesn't it? Philosophy does exist but it may be a bit on the back burner. Yet, for us at Psychotactics, philosophy looms large. Here are just a few nuggets that you can ponder over and see how they apply to you—and how you can use them in your life and business. The Psychotactics Marketing Philosophy

How do you speed up your writing process and what causes it to slow down to a crawl? Surprisingly, discussion and feedback play an incredibly powerful role in unblocking Writer's Block. The more you're stuck, the greater the reason to invite discussion and feedback. The moment you do, it causes you to explain the concepts in a way that catches you totally by surprise! Click here to read online: Writer's Block 3/4: Why Discussion and Feedback Are A Writer's Secret Weapon (And How Professionals Use it to Their Advantage) ________________________________________ C) Discussion and Feedback If you drop me in Kyoto or Paris, I'll walk happily for hours. However, the moment I have to exercise, I detest the very concept of walking. And yet, day after day, year after year, we go for a walk. It's healthy of course, and I actually learn stuff or listen to music, but the most crucial part of the walk is the part right up to the traffic lights. It's about a ten-minute walk from our house to the lights, and that's when I talk to Renuka about what I've been reading or watching. And there are days when Renuka is “sleep walking”, so I'll get nods, but some days she's wide awake, and we have a discussion. If I'm lucky, she'll disagree with almost everything I'm saying. Discussion is a great way to get prepared to write an article I remember the author, Malcolm Gladwell drumming home this very point. He tends to find a friend either in person or over the phone, and they discuss the topic. If the friend doesn't respond well, Gladwell knows the idea either needs tuning or needs to be dropped entirely. If the person gets interested or goes off on their version of the story, Gladwell knows the premise is interesting. It struck me that this method is what most writers tend to do instinctively, yet the ones that struggle don't do it at all, and it puts them at a significant disadvantage. If you keep your article under wraps, it's your own secret This secretive nature of ours tends to boil down to one aspect—and it's called insecurity. Sounds harsh, I know, but it's just because we're insecure about our topic, or that we'll be called out in some way. Feedback rocks our boat so much that we feel happier to simply get on with the job of writing, and avoid this discussion bit completely. It's sobering to note that discussion and exposing your ideas to the world is how great science is done. Scientists don't tend to work in a bubble They postulate an idea, or do some research and publish a paper. That paper is examined by others in their field, and they come up with holes in the research or idea. The holes might be so large that the scientist has to go back to almost the starting point if they want to ratify their idea. Is this method frustrating? Is it a big blow to the ego? Of course. It is Renuka is not the only source of feedback and discussion. I'll get on WhatsApp and chatter away with a private group. I'll have discussions via e-mail or Messenger. And often, I'll post a rough idea on the forum in 5000bc. If you're wondering why there are so few holes in a lot of the articles or books from Psychotactics, then wonder no more. Those holes existed. If you look at the courses, e.g. the Sales Page course, it's in Version 3.0. That tells you that the course material of 1.0 and 2.0 had holes. The same applies to the Article Writing Course, or any course, any article—just about everything we do. This article too will have holes in it, and we know this to be true, because the moment I post it, someone will ask further questions or have clarifications needed. Or, as the case may be, they may disagree with some point or the other. But feedback is about holes and the discussion is often just for the sake of clarity When you have an idea or a topic you want to cover, it's a bit premature in your head. When you put it down on paper, on chat, or in a verbal discussion, you have to be more precise in your argument. It forces you to think of analogies. You might say: “You know this topic we're discussing is exactly like the Barbie case study. Remember how…” And that discussion will spur case studies and examples, but it does a lot more. When explaining something to someone else, you also tend to bring up analogies. You say, “It's a lot like a roundabout, instead of a traffic light. Both systems regulate the traffic, but one works without any punishment or and yet is far superior in traffic control.” When you explain yourself, you can't help but try and pull up a series of analogies. The discussion becomes the groundwork for all the analogies, stories, case studies and examples you could insert into your still to be written article. Whether you choose a forum, chat, the phone or a walk in Kyoto the result is similar You're going for a little stroll with your ideas. And along the way, you meet other ideas or even run into that snarly feedback guy from next door. You haven't started to write yet, but you're beginning to percolate, which is far more important. It might be a good idea at this point to reach into your pocket and scribble the ideas down. I tend to dictate them into my phone into Evernote so I can access the ideas on any computer or device, later. You may think you'll remember it all. I promise you it's not a good idea. For one, even if you have a great memory, you have to use energy to remember those points. In doing so, your discussion won't move as quickly as it possibly should. I tend to quickly save whatever I can remember and then continue the discussion even as I'm marching up or down the hill. If you can, it's a good idea to have many articles going at once When I first started writing, I was so pathetic that I could only focus on a single article. I'd spend days over that article, and that was my sole obsession. In time I realised it was better to have many articles all at different levels of progress. You see what's happening, right? It feels chaotic to have many articles all on the go at once, but in fact, they're all percolating over the duration of a week or so. The one that started last Monday might be completed by the following week, or earlier. Or later. But the discussion and the feedback move it backwards and forward. When starting out, it might take all your energy just to focus on a single article, but in time you'll find having many articles inching ahead to be a great way to get discussions going on many fronts. Keeping secrets is mostly a terrible plan in almost all areas of life We get bad advice from well-wishers, parents and guardians. We're told as we're growing up that certain things need to be private. In reality, it's hogwash. In many cases, secrets only seek to make us more insecure. And this kind of “let's keep it private, let's keep it a secret” usually makes work worse, not better. Scientists prove this point, coders prove this point, and great creativity underlines this idea over and over again. If you really want to get your article moving faster, and want it to be more robust, you have to overwrite the nonsensical programming you had in your formative years. Discussion and feedback help you formulate, tear down and rebuild ideas at high speed. It's input Input shows up when you read about your industry's subject matter. It creates a sweet, creamy layer of creativity when you cross-pollinate with different case studies, industries and even different media. And finally, input pushes your ideas to the wall. Your job is to make your work clearer, more robust. The more you accept feedback and discussion as part of your routine, the more volatile the process will seem at first. In time, however, you'll seek out discussion and feedback at every turn, and overwrite the “keep secret” programming that slows you down and keeps you isolated in your own dark, insecure corner. So far We've tackled two main topics of—Why Lack of Pre-Work Almost Guarantees Writer's Block 1) The Lack of Pre-Work 2)The Scarcity of Input It's time to go to the third one: Understanding Energy Management When Writing Next Step: Writer’s Block Series 4/4: How a Lack of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers to Stall and Crash

This week I'm going to give you some lessons I learned from Speaking at We Are Podcast 2018 in Brisbane Australia. We also talk about the effectiveness of Audiograms. Sponsor: PodcastGuests.com – Get More Guests -Be Featured on More Podcasts PodcastGuests.com helps you find guests for your podcasts for free PodcastGuests.com will feature your podcast to its over 6,500 users to find qualified guests that meet your requirements You can also find 200 expert guests anytime in the directory at podcastguests.com/directory Sign up at PodcastGuests.com/sop Get a Mentor - Ask For Help I know a few people who love to travel. Monica Rivera from the You Wanna Do What? podcast gave me a great tip to download any episodes from Netflix to my iPad. George Hrab from the Geologic podcast (who gets to go to all sorts of cool stuff because of his podcast) gave me some heads up on a voltage converter. It's Rarely as Bad as It Seems When I heard the phrase "17 hours on a plane (along with some shorter flights for a total of 20 hours)" I thought it sounded like a horror story. I pictured some little punk behind me kicking my kidneys while their parents order another jack and coke from the flight attendant. In the end, even in coach, I was able to stretch my legs. I had two seats between my fellow passenger in my row and slept off and on. There were probably 3-5 small children who would occasionally cry, but it was not the nightmare I had envisioned. When I think of things that I have dreaded in the past, they are rarely as bad as you think you're going to be. Erode Your Comfort Zone I can be shy. When I go to a restaurant I'm not looking to think outside the box. When I was told that a large chunk of my schedule was planned for me, I got nervous. I didn't know where I was going, and except for a few people, I didn't know who I was with, what we were doing, and what I needed to be ready. We had assigned seats both days including assignments on who to go to lunch with. One day, Sean Desouza was going to cook authentic Indian food (I have never had Indian food). The Know Like a Trust Factor I talk about this all the time. When you create valuable content on a consistent basis, your audience trusts you and likes you. If you can share a bit of yourself, they get to know you. When people know, like, and trust you then you have influence. I know Ronsley Vaz from his "Should I Start a Podcast" show. We may have bumped into each other. I finally got to talk to him at Social Media Marketing World where I was speaking. He asked me if I would speak at We Are Podcast. I said yes on the spot. Who doesn't want to go to Australia? I saved up my pennies (and busted out a charge card) and made it happen. As I mentioned above, I was nervous. This was a new country, a new conference (for me), with new people. The first day was very good. I got to meet a lot of people. It was somewhat of the "warm up act" for the main event happening the next two days. Every speaker at this event was awesome.  Every person I met was super friendly and shared my love of podcasting. The hotel I stayed at was great.  By the end of day one, you could color me impressed, and I was ready for day two. By the end of day two, I believe I had met about 95% of the people there including Jules from Hong Kong Confidential. By the end of day two, where I once felt uncomfortable I now felt relaxed. The Speakers Retreat When I realized that I was going to be living with a bunch of people I had never met, previously this would have put me way outside my comfort zone. By this point, Ronsley had not let me down and I just went with the flow. Here again, it was not as bad as it seemed and was actually kind of fun (in the end we just slept here, and all the speakers hung out at a second house). I would start the day with some sort of healthy pancakes made from buckwheat and for toppings I had some sort of berries instead of maple syrup. Different? Yes. Delicious? Absolutely. The conversations were awesome, and the jokes and laughing were endless. More New Things The following day I had Indian food for the first time. As I was told I was a "Picky Eater" growing up, I assumed I would not like this. I loved it. Sean is launching a course in the future to show people how to cook these types of meals quickly. I'm in. I was scheduled for a session of Holographic Kinetics. I had no idea what it was, but I had heard that "it was a bit woo-woo." All I knew was Ronsley had selected a few people to do it, and I was one of them. I was not here to judge. I was all in. Holographic Kinetics is an advanced Aboriginal healing technique based on an ancient understanding of Lore, the universal laws that govern the creation, and the knowledge that everything in nature is alive and can be communicated with. Thoughts and emotions from difficult experiences in the past can become trapped in a person’s body to create realities. When experienced in the past they affect the present, which in turn affects the future. Once trapped, these energies are carried through time, negatively affecting people’s lives. These trapped energies interact with the external world, and following the law of attraction, like attracts like, they will attract to themselves similar negative experiences. More Info This was the first time I had ever tried it, and it did help me connect some dots from my past. If I'm a better, more confident person, I don't care how I got there. My New Australian Family For me, this was an experience that was truly hard to put into words. I rarely checked email, got almost no sleep, and just enjoyed the beauty of Australia, and the friendship of some truly great people. Jordan Harbinger is hilarious and his wife Jen is a walking firecracker of energy. Check out Jordan's show ( I love feedback Friday) and I went through his level 1 (free) of his Human Dynamics course. Jordan is all about learning and he shares some great insights in his course. Nicole Baldinu and Omar Zenhom are the team behind $100 MBA which I had heard of, and I had also heard of Webinar Ninja software. These two are the brains behind both those entities. I enjoyed talking books with them at breakfast one day and Omar's talk on building teams really opened my eyes Steph Taylor creates the podcast Socialite. She is always smiling and with her accent its a bit like learning about Instagram from Mary Poppins. I LOVED her presentation on having a plan for your podcast launch. Sean D'Souza - Sean is not a know it all, but yet, he seems to know everything (he is the man behind Psychotactics). His presentation on developing skills was very cool ( Energy + Confidence = Skill) and has me rethinking how I present things at the School of Podcasting. He has a podcast called Three Month Vacation. I can't wait to learn how to cook from this guy. Leanne Hughes was the Co-MC of the event and has a smile that will light up the room. She was also my hero as the volunteered to take myself, Ally, and Pat to the airport at six AM. I wish I had more time to pick her brain as she is all about making great presentations. Check out her podcast First Time Facilitator Byron Dempsey is another hero. I had plugged my iPad into to keep it as charged as possible and then forget to put it back in my book bag. Bryon was nice enough to ship it back to the States for me. Byron is a super talented videographer and helps people grow their brands with video. Laura Peterson is someone I kind of knew as I listen to her Copy that Pops podcast. She was the trooper who had to deal with a presentation clicker that did not want to participate. She is super funny and if you are in front of her, please have her to her "California Girl" imitation. If you are thinking of writing a book, she's your gal. Ange Henderson is a business consultant that is super friendly, outgoing, and was always there when we needed a food run. THANKS ANGE! She's worked with huge companies like Netflix and I could go on, but just know she's done it all. Travis Chappell dropped knowledge bombs during his presentation on how to follow up without being a pest. He's one of those guys that doesn't say much, but when he does it is hilarious. Carl Taylor seemed like a nice guy and was in a pretty good mood considering he had just had his wisdom teeth pulled. This mild-mannered guy had sold three businesses and wrote a #1 business book by the age of 25. Every time I hear the phrase Koala Bear, I will think of Carl who let me know Koala's are not bears. They are marsupials. Allison Melody is someone I had met at other conferences, but just getting to chill with people builds that relationship deeper. Her presentation on monetizing you podcast had some new strategies I had not heard of. Check out her Food Heals Podcast. Shannon Morrison is the head of operations at Amplify Media and the founder of Mighty Social World. A super nice guy, and always willing to help with anything and everything. Jason Malouin is nuts. He has a great laugh and was the co-MC of the event. Jason was a great American to Aussie translator and stopped me from getting a sunburn that would've been on a whole new level. If you're in Australia and need a portrait photographer, he's your dude. Check out his Communicator podcast. Harry Duran and Natalie Jenkins are my partners in crime at many conferences. They both make me laugh, and occasionally snort. I love them both very much. You know Harry from Podcast Junkies, and Natalie is often taking head shots at events you attend. If she can make me look good, she can make you look amazing. When I found out I was going into the Hall of Fame, Natalie was one of the first people I called to see if she would photograph it. James Cridland is another person who has been on the show and his the host of the Podnews podcast (And newsletter which has more stories). James was the one who said, "I know a place where you can pet Koala's and Kangaroos" for which I will be eternally grateful. Check him out at www.podnews.net  Pat Flynn - I've had Pat on my show. I bump into him all the time at events, but never really got a chance to hang. Pat Flynn (much like Harry and Natalie) makes me laugh a lot. I'm here to tell you the guy is hilarious. He is super chill, and he turned the groups on to some great games such as Psyche! and SpaceTeam. Both games are a lot of fun. He has Smart Passive Income, his book Will it Fly is a MUST READ, his Smart Podcast Player, and he is now teaching people how to podcast with his Power Up Podcasting. Shayde Furlong was the "Audio Engineer" for the whole week, and was cool enough to BRING A GUITAR! I enjoyed all out talks, super nice guy. Ronsley Vaz - The man behind the whole thing. The man behind Amplify media. If I am the Gandalf of podcasting, you are the Jared Easley of Australia. EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU. Check out his Content Amplifier it's amazing (and it's free) as well as his podcast "Should I start a podcast" at http://wearepodcast.com/shouldistartapodcast/ Rochelle Fernandes is always happy. How do you do that? Anytime we needed something, there she was. Amazing. Katherine Maslen of Brisbane Natural Health - Thanks for sharing your team. Your passion for helping people lead healthy lives is amazing. You're a great Mum. Quick Hits Jackie Campbell of Breaking Business podcast had a great story that sometimes you have to STOP to start Every author/artist has the same keyboard Viral Sweep looks like a cool tool for growing your list if you have $49/month UTM Links in Google Analytics allows you to track where your listeners are coming from (kind of) Laura's link to her Show notes template Check out his Content Amplifier If you use Stripe for payment processing you won't believe the information you get from Profitwell (free) Conclusion Sometimes you have to stop gathering data and start with what you know It's rarely going to be as bad as you think it is Where I Will Be November 5th Libsyn Podcasters Meetup 5-8 PM ET  November 9-10 DC Podfest - Keynote Speaker How Effective are Audiograms at Growing Your Audience? Check out the previous episode where we discuss how to use an audiogram (Episode 616 ) Elikqitie from Travel Gluten Free - has not found shows through audiograms Daniecae Next to Nothing Podcast (gaming Podcast) twitch.tv/danicae Vanessa from Vanessa's View Podcast  Garret Godfried - Good Patron Emily Prokop from the Story Behind Podcast - and the Hate to Weight Podcast Jonathon from Weekly Awesome  Steve Stewart from Stevestewart.me mentioned Powtoons and Bobbi Rebell here is her tweet example Bryan from  engagingmissions.com  Mentioned: Episode 616 on Three Audio Gram Tools Ready To Start Your Podcast? Are you lost in a sea of noise when it comes to podcasting? Are you watching old YouTube Videos that may be outdated? Do you ask a question and get 14 responses (but no answers ) when you post on Facebook?  I can help eliminate the noise, and listen to what you want, and help you get what you need. Join Today to take my step by step tutorials on your own schedule If you are looking for a one on one podcast mentoring program, I can do that as well . Testing the Payment Link for Next Week's Show http://www.patreon.com/davejackson"> Support this podcast

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

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

“A well written article can be transformational for your readers”, says Sean D’Souza, the founder of Psychotactics. “It has the power to educate, inform and entertain and with a good structure at your fingertips, you can overcome the myth of writers block, the myth of it’s all been said before and the myth that it’s a difficult skill to master and create impactful articles that connect you, your ideas your business and your clients”.

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

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

When it comes to testimonials for our product or service, we assume clients have to get to the end. Or do they? The reality is that it's a mistake to wait until the end because anyway clients aren't giving you a review of the entire product or service, but only a small section. But what structure and system do you follow to get a testimonial—or even to get the client to respond to your request? Let's find out in this episode on pit stop testimonials. Read on the website here: Pit Stop Testimonials -------------------- How do you know if the fruit is ready to be picked? According to monk and philosopher, Matthieu Ricard, here's how you do it. “You reach up to the fruit and touch it. You don’t have to pull and break the branch to get the fruit. You just touch it, and it falls in your hands.” Which is fine when you're dealing with fruit, but what do you do when your course, product, workshop or consulting is still unfinished? One of the most frequent questions I get is one about testimonials And clients ask: How do I get testimonials if my product is new? Or they may make a comment which goes like this: The course I created is so new that no one has completed it yet, so it will be a while before I can get these testimonials done. I have one student who is in part 3 (of 3), so hopefully, she will be ready soon. It's easy to see how you can wait forever to get a testimonial—or do you? Let's take both the situations and deal with them separately. Situation 1: You have a brand new product, course or service Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet. Situation 1: A brand new product or service When I was young, I'd occasionally get to see a movie before everyone else. Movies were only ever screened in the cinema, and to get to see a movie, days, often a few weeks in advance was a rare treat. However, my father seemed to know people who did these early screenings which got us into the movie theatre in advance. However, there were other people in the same cinema hall. Who were these people, I wondered. My father told me they were movie reviewers. They'd get to see the movie in advance; then they'd critique the movie in their newspaper or magazine columns. Not a lot has changed in terms of advance reviews Movies still run private screenings so that they get reviews as do books, software and pretty much most products you can think of. In most cases, if you have something physical or even digital, someone can go through it and give you a review. You may or may not have a list of clients or subscribers. If you do, you can ask them to review your material. If you don't have the list, you may well be able to ask on social media, in forums, or in your networking group. Some of this review process can start earlier than you'd expect Most of us tend to finish our books, tie up the courses, go through from start to end in a training program. And you don't necessarily have to go to the end. You can get someone—even a friend—to help you while you're still putting that course or book together. They can not only be a source of feedback and information, but they can then give you that testimonial. To give you an example, let's say I was putting a course together on cooking Indian food At this point, if you go to the Psychotactics website, you'll see a recipes page with yummy food photos and recipes, but there's no mention of any recipe book or course. Let's say I wanted to create a course or book. I could invite a friend, or people from my networking group, members from 5000bc, or anyone who was interested. Take my friend, Els Jacobs, for instance. We communicate almost daily through Facebook messenger. And I send her some recipes, and she tries them out and gives me her feedback. Now let's say I wanted to get that book or course going, I could get Els and others like her to be on a sort of beta program where they tested the product and gave their feedback. And here's a question for you: Do you think they'd be likely to provide a testimonial sooner than later, even though the product isn't ready? It's easy to believe that a product needs to be complete before you get your testimonial However, let's assume that your product is ready for the market. In such a case, you have to get some early reviews, so that you can put the product on your site or in your marketing material. In such a situation, you have to reach out to someone you know—or some group that you belong to. However, this is precisely the point where things tend to go wrong. You try to get people to review your product, but no one is interested. Several requests later, you've received no response at all. Why should this be the case? Part of the reason is you're asking for too much When you ask people to review your book, your course, your entire long and winded consulting program, you're asking me to put my life on hold, to meet your deadline. Most people simply ignore such requests, because they're already busy. Even the most helpful people shy away from such a complex task. Which is why you make it easier by breaking it up into pieces. In early August, we launched a new version of the Psychotactics site A week before the launch we asked our members at 5000bc if they'd be keen on reviewing the site. What was the response? It was terrific, but why was this the case? The reason for their enthusiasm was two-fold. We promised we'd get them to review just ONE page. And we had clear guidelines as to what feedback we wanted in return. When you look at most people asking for a review, they do just the opposite. They ask their friends or clients to “review the site”, or “review my book” or “give your critique of my course”. Are you surprised there's little or no response? If you really want to get a response, you have to have both elements in place. You have to give the reviewer a tiny piece to review, and you have to give them guidelines—clear guidelines. And that's when you get reviews in advance. Not surprisingly, if you follow this practice of asking for specific feedback on specific sections, you also solve the second problem. This takes us to the part where we look at: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet. Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet. Early in 2016, we launched a three-day Sales Page course workshop in beautiful Queenstown, New Zealand. And six clients made their way from the US, UK and Australia to be on that course. How can you get a client to give you a testimonial for the course on the first or second day? You almost know the answer, don't you? It's not unlike the website review situation. Instead of the client talking about the entire course, they can talk about a section, instead. Maybe they were surprised to find out that the sales page needs to be written from the bottom up and not top down. Perhaps they learned how to create a uniqueness from the features and benefits. Or let's say they understood how they could create bonuses from the bullets. All these three aha moments come through on the first day of the course. Does the client have to wait until day three to give a testimonial? In our case, the clients had flown in all the way to New Zealand and weren't exactly leaving in a hurry, but it's still exhausting to collect testimonials on the last day when your brain is like a fried potato. If anything, we tend to get clients to give testimonials right through the course itself. Some give their testimonials early on the next morning, some in the lunch break and at other times of the day. You see what's happening? The product, course or service is brand new. No one has finished it yet, but why do they have to get to the end? No single testimonial can cover every single aspect of the course anyway. A client is always going to give you just one or two points that were of value to them. Why not ask which part was of value to them? When you do, people will be happy to volunteer. Or you could change the question. You could say, what did you find in Section A that was useful to you? Or what did you find in Section B? Or Section C. This line of questioning causes the client to review what was important and, if requested, they would be more than happy to give a testimonial. Your product or service may be unfinished Or it might be that clients haven't quite reached the end of your book or course. It doesn't matter, because you can still get testimonials if you structure things well. However, there still might be a problem getting a testimonial, if you don't set things up. Let's say you're quite desperate for a few testimonials You don't have people in a room like in a live workshop, so you are dependent on them getting back. Nonetheless, you can improve the odds right from the start. When a client buys your product or service, you can let them know you're keen for feedback and testimonials. Would it be possible to get their feedback early—long before they finish the product? Would they give their feedback on the first chapter itself? It might seem premature—almost like a fruit that's not ripe—but you'll be surprised at how many people say yes, but provided you don't use the word “testimonial”. Unless they know you well, they're likely to want to give a testimonial only after they get to the very end. But feedback? They can give feedback from the very start. While in this feedback mode, they'll also want to balance things a bit. They may tell you what you can improve (which is great for you) but also what impressed or changed things for them. And that's your moment—ask them whether they can elaborate on that point. They are likely to do so, which in turn gives you your testimonial. And there you have it. You usually have two situations where you struggle to get a testimonial. Situation 1: You have a brand new product, course or service Situation 2: The product, service or course is not brand new, but no-one has finished it yet. In both situations, it's relatively possible to get a testimonial well in advance. And strangely, Matthieu Ricard is right. You reach up to the fruit and touch it. You don’t have to pull and break the branch to get the fruit. It’s just “touch it, and it falls in your hands.” You just have to set up the situation so that the client is ready well in advance. And that's how you get your testimonial. Next Step: Find out—The Six Questions To Get Outstanding Testimonials

Is it hard to get a client? Sure it is, but how many of us “lose” the client within minutes or days? We may not realise it, but without a very clear on-boarding system, clients simply get confused and leave. Or they feel unsafe and don't consume your product or service. The question is: how do you get an on-boarding system in place and what does it entail? Let's take a sneak peek into what's possible. Click here to read online: Onboarding is Crucial -------------- There are three distinct stages before we order a meal in a restaurant. The first stage is when you're standing outside the restaurant, deciding whether to go in. The second stage is when you get welcomed into the new space. Finally, it's when you first get acknowledged after sitting down; you get a glass of water, and a menu. All of this happens so quickly that we don't realise that every stage is essential. More so, the very same steps have to play out when you're getting a client into a new space, like a membership site, course, or even an offline store. The first stage is before they enter your site or course. The second is how you greet them and the third and equally crucial stage is how you make them feel within “minutes” of entering that new space. These three sequential steps are what you'd call “on-boarding”. Every stage of on-boarding is vital because if we were to go back to the restaurant, would you be happy if no one received you once you entered? And having been assigned a table, how long would you wait before stalking off when you got no service? All of these ideas and this very sequence seems particularly vivid when we think of restaurants, yet we fail to roll out these systems when clients sign up. The importance of onboarding can be boiled down to a single term: safe zone Standing outside the membership site, course or workshop, you are trying to gauge if you're making the right decision. Once you do get in the door, it's equally important to feel as if you're in a safe space. You need someone real to step up to you and take care of you. Instead, what you get is an automatic e-mail that confirms you're in the membership site and then it's just a bunch of weekly e-mails that don't have the slightest personal touch in place. Now wait a sec, no one is saying you shouldn't use automation What's about to follow is how automation doesn't become a crutch but is a handy companion that allows a small business to keep in touch with clients and prompt them to consume what they've purchased. However, depending on automation alone is a mistake. At some point very early after the client has shown up to your “restaurant”, a real person (that's you) has to make yourself available. If you're surprised at where this article is going, it's only because of how a large part of the internet works. They take a hands-off method and wonder why there's constant churn. Which is why they then have to do constant advertising (which in itself takes time), joint ventures etc. to make sure their membership site doesn't look barren. At 5000bc, we like to see ourselves as a restaurant. And here are some of the things that we do within less than a month of a client joining the site. • Tiny increment autoresponders • Cave Guides • Taking Action • Contact individually • Chocolate • Buddy • Country welcome • Video conference • Tags In this episode, we will look at three things. 1. Tiny increment autoresponders 2. Cave Guides 3. Taking Action 1: Tiny increment autoresponders Have you noticed how there's a lag when you're talking to customer support on chat? Let's say you get to a site. On the right-hand side, you see a little button that signals you can talk to someone. You click on the chat button and almost immediately you get a response. It may say something like, “Hi, I'm Maria”, how can I help? You automatically assume Maria is around and start to type your question. It then seems to stall you for a while, asking for your name and possibly a phone number, just in case you're disconnected. Then, there's a lag after you type in your details. So what just happened? I'll tell you what. You were talking to a machine. All that “Maria bit” of chatter was an automatic back and forth and once you got past a certain point, it handed you over to a real person. And for the most part, no one is wiser, or unhappy, but it allows the transaction to go ahead pretty flawlessly. This is what automation can do well, if used intelligently. Which is why we use autoresponders. It makes sure a client gets into 5000bc and then continues to gain from it. Some clients jump right in, introduce themselves and are off the mark right away. Others may not enter right away, and things go on the back burner. It's easy to buy something these days, fully expecting to use it, but then other distractions take over. Hence the autoresponders. There are seven that show up in the client's inbox, over a period. The welcome Meet others Next step Cave Guide Handy tools Two questions What you expected Every one of these autoresponders is meant to do something similar to what you'd experience in a chat. They're designed to engage with the client. It means that in the early stages, you're giving a sense of what's where (it's mostly information). But as you go down the line, you're called to participate and given many options to do so. At every single stage, Renuka or I respond back to the client. If you've ever gotten an e-mail from us, and replied, we write again and keep conducting a conversation, asking questions, etc. It's not just a “here you go, it's automation, and you're in a funnel”. Instead, the emails are designed to help us help the clients to consume what they've bought; to get use of the resources; to find others just like them. Without the automation, it would be too much for a small business (or any size of business to handle). It's a nightmare keeping track of who's been contacted, what they've been told, etc. The automation allows us to give the pertinent information to the client and then to work with them on an ongoing basis. That's the starting point, and there are a lot more elements in place. The second primary factor is the Cave Guides. Why are Cave Guides essential? Let's find out. 2: Cave Guides When I first visited Paris, I got lost for several hours. I thought I knew my way around, so one morning before Renuka was up, I stepped out for a walk. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because I couldn't find my way back. What made it worse was I knew Renuka would be up and getting ready to go out for some croissant and coffee, but she wouldn't know where I was, or how to reach me because we never have any data on our phones. Worse still, though I can read French reasonably well, I can't speak much, if at all. It was nearing 9 am, when I had an idea. I walked into an Internet cafe, and typed in the destination. It worked out where I was, and where I needed to go. With a printed map I was able to make my way back in half an hour or less. Google Maps had calmed me down and helped me get back when lost in a new city. Cave Guides perform a similar function in 5000bc When you get to 5000bc, it's a whole new city, possibly a whole new world. At this point, there are hundreds of articles, vanishing reports, and over 322,000 posts of extremely valuable discussions. When a client signs up to 5000bc, they have a heightened sense of anticipation. However, it's very possible, despite their excitement, that they find themselves on an unexpected road, and get lost. Which is where the Cave Guides come in. The Cave Guides are 5000bc members who volunteer to help those who are new in the membership site. A guide doesn't necessarily give any business advice, but instead merely gives you the chance to familiarise yourself with the city. However, it's the feeling of safety that's more important than just familiarisation When you and I get to a new place, we are apt to be uncertain and tend to make mistakes. Some clients will push through, but others may feel silly when they make a mistake. Others still, may not even attempt to make a move as they think they are guaranteed to make an error and be publicly called out. And this fear could be justified as there have been numerous instances where people are made to feel small and insignificant, in the full glare of a large group. Having to deal with one person, and a person that's specially dedicated to being a guide, brings a tremendous amount of safety to the entire exercise. Even seemingly “trivial” questions are asked—and they seem “trivial” to the person asking the questions, but in fact they're huge barriers to getting comfortable in that new space. It's an integral part of the onboarding process Just like in a restaurant where someone is usually around to receive you, you need to have some guide to help you along. If you walk into an Apple Store, for instance, you'll see this level of guidance occurring as well. When I walked into the Apple store for the first time in 2008, I had been a Windows user for years. Everything about the Mac was weird and unknown, if enticing in some way. However, because I could make a quick appointment with someone at the Genius Bar within the store, enabled me to get my questions out quickly and safely. In a course, we have onboarding of a different kind With the cartooning course, there's a fair bit of posting cartoons and linking to be done, which is why the entire first week is about slowing down the progress. The clients get assignments that enable them to get familiar with the forum and how to get their cartoons to display. With headline course, or any other online course, clients are given extremely tiny instructions so they can get through the first week familiarising themselves with their environment and with each other. At a live, onsite workshop in a city, we have a meet and greet the evening before. The clients are often told what to expect the next day, and wherever possible we take them to the room itself so they're comfortable and can show up having gone through a rehearsal of sorts. Being a guide or having a guide is essential for a company When you're selling a product or service, it might seem like a big bother to take so much trouble to get a guide system in place. It might seem that a guide might be betters suited for a workshop or course instead. However, every entry point is fraught with the chance that the client may get lost, sometimes for a short while, but often for hours, just like I did in Paris. That one mistaken turn might put them off getting back and they've lost the chance to be part of your wonderful enterprise and you've lost a potentially fantastic client. Which is why you need guides or at least a guided system that everyone follows. But that guide is still just one step. What's needed is a sense of comfort. How do you achieve this sense of happiness? We find someone who's familiar. Let's find out how it all works and why it's so imperative. 3. Taking Action Way back in 2009, Mackay Rippey (a founding member of 5000bc) made a suggestion. “How about a Taking Action forum?” he asked. That was the start of a journey that's had a ton of ups and downs, but today is the core of creating a quicker onboarding. Why? Because getting into a new community is always scary. There are far more people than you want to deal with. The Taking Action section forms a tiny little capsule where you (and just one other member) can create a bond and move ahead in tiny steps. You'd think a taking action post would be easy for clients, right? It's not. As Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler says: It's not that people are dumb. It's that life is hard. And taking action is one of the hardest things that a person can do, but also one of the most critical steps for onboarding. Let's take the example of 5000bc first and experience the journey of a client, before heading out to see how it may work in other cases both online and offline. In 5000bc, a client signs up to become a member They do so for reasons of their own, but primarily are interested in relevant information, access to me, priority for courses—but also to be part of a community. The moment they join, they wander in, may add their details and photograph, look around and leave. Will they come back? Sure they will, but to get value out of their membership, they have to come back more often. They have to not only absorb the information but implement it. This is precisely the point where things start to go off course. The client is often too unsure to ask for advice, and they lurk. The key is to get them out of lurk mode, which is where the Taking Action forum comes in At first, the Taking Action forum was just a place where you went and posted your goals. In time, the instructions got refined because it was easy enough to get started, but then lose track because of a lack of planning. When we look at the Taking Action Forum today, it has seven steps. They read like this: Here are the easy steps to play. Step 1: Name your goal. Step 2: List what you'll do. Keep it restricted to 2-3 things. Step 3: List how you intend to do it. Step 4: List how much time you'll spend on it daily x 21 days (this is very important) Step 5: What resources you have/ What help or information you need. Step 6: Start date/finish date. Let's keep it for 21 days. Step 7: Don't miss this step: Get a buddy: It is always good to have someone nudging you along in case you start slacking off. Sean me an email me, and I will assign you a buddy: renuka@psychotactics.com All of the steps are important, but there's one that surpasses them all Naming the goal, the list, all of that organisation—that's all crucial to the success of the plan, but the most critical element of all is Step 7: getting a buddy. It's obvious when you think of it, right? What does a buddy do for you? You're in an unknown forum, a new membership site and are bound to get lost. You can't depend on the power of the group, but another person—your buddy—is easy to lean on and learn from. Plus, it's easy enough to lose steam when you're trying to motivate yourself. When you have a buddy to keep you going, the very act of knowing someone is waiting nudges you on. The Taking Action Forum works incredibly well in many cases And the reason why it works so well is because it gives the newcomer a tiny space and a friend. That's usually all we need when we enter a website—or at least a membership site. However, the dynamics may change depending on the business itself. In the courses, like the Article Writing Course or cartooning course, the group size is larger at about 5-7 people. The same applies to the group size in live, on-site workshops. And there's a reason why this is the case. When working on an individual goal, the input, often just the nudge from another person is enough. When it comes to learning a skill like writing or drawing, the higher the contribution, the better. Also when the client is part of a group, they're able to see what the others are doing, and most importantly the mistakes they're making. This in turn, reduces their error rate, and it keeps the group going. However, the moment you start to go beyond 7 people in a group, you're asking for trouble. About 7 is just right to create activity and keep the momentum going. Beyond 7 you merely have anonymity and it's not hard for clients to slip away. No matter whether you have a membership site or something offline, you want to get them involved with a human We get so gung-ho about technology that we forget that we're humans first. And that humans seek humans. But once they're done finding the other person, they also want to contribute. And this contribution needs to be towards their cause (their action plan) but also help the other person. The combination of settling in and getting moving is probably the more natural way for a new client to get going, without being too much in the spotlight. The final question is: does it work? For the most part, it does, but it doesn't work automatically. In our case at 5000bc, we make sure that we pair up clients. In the workshops and courses, it's the same. All of this requires a bit of groundwork on your part. When one of the pairs goes missing—and it happens—there needs to be a mechanism in place so that the client can get in touch with you and you can assign another partner. It's easy enough to dismiss this activity as too much work, but it gets clients in and keeps them coming back. Which in turn means you don't have to spend all that time and money—and energy, I might add—trying to get new clients all the time. Onboarding is crucial, and a big part of this onboarding is getting people to know each other and start working on a project. When we started out the forum back in 2009, based on Mackay's request, we had no idea how useful it would be. However, it's been one of the main areas for us and I suspect it will be for you as well. Start up a Taking Action Post to take action on your membership site. Oh and before I go If you haven't yet subscribed: Here are the links to get all the Psychotactics articles, goodies and podcasts automatically. iTunes | Android | E-mail (and get special goodies) | RSS  

Some of us are rich, but are we wealthy? For Sean D'Souza, founder of marketing strategy company Psychotactics, wealth is having enough time on your hand to do what you want — whether that's travelling, cooking, spending time with your family or anything else.   By all means, Sean is wealthy. He takes three months holiday every year, and spends plenty of time with his family and pursuing his hobbies. On the latest episode of the Get Invested podcast, Sean and I spoke about how his journey through life taught him what's important and how anybody can simplify their life and put their energy towards what's really important.   During the episode, we talk about:   Why Sean wakes up at 4 AM every day The reason Sean doesn't believe in inborn talent How to find more time for vacation How to become wealthy, not just rich Why time is our biggest asset The importance of finding a good teacher How energy leads to confidence and skill Why luck explains nearly everything   Links:   Psychotactics LinkedIn

Some of us are rich, but are we wealthy? For Sean D’Souza, founder of marketing strategy company Psychotactics, wealth is having enough time on your hands to do what you want — whether that’s travelling, cooking, spending time with your family or anything else. By all means, Sean is wealthy. He takes three months holiday […] The post 18. Sean D’Souza on the Power of Time, True Wealth and What’s Really Important appeared first on Bushy Martin.

Worstel jij ook zo met de positionering van je merk? Dan ben je niet alleen. De meeste ondernemers en marketeers worstelen langdurig met de juiste positionering van hun merk. De oplossing komt echter vaak uit een volkomen onverwachte hoek: een ogenschijnlijke zwakte blijkt juist jouw kracht. Hoe dat werkt? Sean D'Souza van Psychotactics schreef er een ijzersterk artikel over en dit is onze vertaling, inclusief Nederlandse voorbeelden. Blijf dus zeker luisteren tot het einde, want deze tips zijn goud waard.

What happens at 4 am? That's a question I often get at Psychotactics, because I've been up for well over 25 years at 4 am. Well, that's how the question started, but you also get a bit of a peek into how the day unfolds. This isn't a business podcast. Instead, it's a view into the world of the 4 am crazy person (that's me). Hope you enjoy the journey.

Is there really a cure for perfectionism? How can you make your work far superior in a shorter amount of time, often moving ahead of your peers? The answer lies in nature. In this episode we look at two different kind of plants: the monkey puzzle tree and the campion flower. The monkey puzzle tree stands for perfection, but the campion flower is able to make 120 dramatic changes while the monkey puzzle struggles with perfection. Interesting? Find out more in this episode and get rid of your perfection sooner than you think. Read the article online: https://www.psychotactics.com/use-procrastination/overcome-perfection -------------- You've probably heard of the Monkey Puzzle tree. The Monkey Puzzle tree is a conifer that grows to 40 metres (130 feet) and may live for hundreds of years. Yet, there's a bit of a problem because the tree doesn't reach sexual maturity until it's 40 years old. Compare the Monkey Puzzle tree with a Campion flower and the flower looks puny at just a foot or two. But here's where it all gets very interesting. The Campion flower reproduces within just four months. This means that while the Monkey Puzzle tree goes through a single generation, the Campion flower goes through 120 generations. And with every generation, there's a possibility of a genetic mutation. That mutation that may give it some slight super power to help it survive and thrive. The speed of the lifecycle means one very crucial thing: The species can adapt to rapid changes in the environment. There's a far greater chance of them getting better, hardier, different and possibly superior. Perfection, on the other hand, doesn't allow for speedy turnarounds Many of us like the idea of perfection, toiling away at our work, in order to reach a seemingly impossible goal. And like the Monkey Puzzle tree, we put ourselves at a disadvantage that's may seem hard to measure. But in reality, it's relatively easier to measure, and that's exactly what we've done on our courses like the Article Writing Course; or when training our niece, Marsha. We've seen speed work better when learning to cook or learning to draw cartoons. And yet this isn't a clarion call for shoddiness. In this series we'll explore the importance of speed vs. perfection, while also giving a nod towards really outstanding work. But is it all about speed? Doesn't a lack of speed play its role? All of this information is about to follow, so stay tuned, little Campion flower. How speedy progress reduces drain on energy Marsha, my niece, was struggling in maths in Year 4 and seemed to be almost at the bottom of the class. Four years later, she won a distinction in maths for being among the top performers in the class. This year (five years later), teachers routinely call on her to evaluate and help with corrections of tests, plus she often gets called to the board to demonstrate how she solves a problem. And you might have an inkling how Marsha was able to make this dramatic turnaround Yes, there's hard work, and there's good mentoring. In fact, on IXL alone (which is an app for maths learning), Marsha has solved over 18,000 problems. Staggering as that figure might seem, there are two ways to get anything done. The first way is to be slow and methodical. The second way is to beat the clock. In a Psychotactics course, clients are trained to beat the clock When you're conducting a live course at a venue, it's easy to monitor what clients are doing. However, the moment you conduct a course online, it's impossible to tell how much time and effort is being put into a project. You don't get to see the drafts, the cancellations and the huge volume of edits. All you ever see is the finished work. However, on Psychotactics courses, we have a simple bunch of questions that need to be answered every single day. One of the questions are: how much time did you take to finish this project? In order to answer the question, it's important for the client to monitor the time. Which is why it concerned me deeply when one of the clients wrote her answer, after doing her article writing assignment. “Three hours”. Three hours? Three hours for an article? I'd imagined my instructions were clear enough. That you needed to get the job done as quickly as possible, but I wasn't counting on the perfection monster. It's not hard to imagine the state of that client.—let's call her Candidate No.1. Perhaps she started the assignment at 9 pm, after an incredibly hard day. At midnight, the article is still not perfect, but she's too tired to argue with her drooping eyelids. She hits “publish” and the article is done. On the other hand, we have Candidate No. 2 who rigidly follows instructions and stops typing the moment the clock strikes the 90 minute mark. Whose article will be superior? The article of Candidate No. 1 or No.2? The answer is that they're both not very good. When you're just starting to learn to draw, write, dance or draw cartoons, you know approximately where your ultimate goal lies. As broadcaster, Ira Glass says: You have style. You know what the finished product looks like but there's this gap between what you would like to see, and what you can produce right now. Hence, both the articles are usually very early versions of a good article and nowhere close to amazing. Yet one person has taken three hours while the other has stopped diligently at 90 minutes. Who's going to be more tired? Who's going to make more mistakes as the fatigue sets in? Who's going to be struggling both at work and to complete the assignment the next day? And what about the day after next and the day that follows it? The Campion flower comes to mind, doesn't it? It's all very fine to aspire to be a Monkey Puzzle tree and soar at 100 feet or more. However, the Campion flower concept is what we all need to get there. Which is exactly what Renuka did with Marsha's maths tuition. Instead of considering her situation, which was pretty dire four-five years ago, she simply gave her an assignment and used a timer. Invariably the mistakes would soar at the start, but all the mistakes were made in a precise amount of time, giving Marsha, a chance to recover. The brain learns a lot while doing the task, but the downtime is just as, if not more vital, in the learning and implementation process. Whether it's cooking a meal or completing a project, you should be a Campion flower This goal is important, because it allows you to make a huge number of mistakes. Skill, or talent, is really a reduction of errors, so you need to make the errors and then reduce or eliminate them completely. If you take your time over a project, you can only make a fixed no. of errors. Which is why, on a course, on in a workshop, I encourage clients to do their assignments quickly, rather than perfectly. Which means that if a client were to do their assignment early in the morning, they could get a correction, possibly many corrections within an hour or so. By their break time they could fix their minor errors while having a cup of coffee. Then at noon, another correction later, they could fine tune their errors (after I corrected their third or fourth tweak of the assignment). By tea time they could have gone through four or five drafts, and with every submission, they'd have fewer errors to fix. However, only the first submission would be lengthy. The submissions through the day would be shorter, and we'd be tweaking nuances which don't take too much energy or focus. Now compare this with ol' Monkey Puzzle client The client who waits all day, mulling and toiling over his work. When he finally submits it, late at night, he misses out on all those nuances, but more importantly from an evolutionary point of view, he's barely budged at all. Ironically it's the speed that has created more errors, more genetic modifications to the skill. If you're trying to be perfect, your Monkey Puzzle submission is the worst possible way to go about it. Energy is crucial when working on any project Creating versions, or tiny bits, to a fixed deadline and moving on to the next version might seem like a pretty idiotic method to go about your work. However, the main point of this article is that your work will not improve dramatically if you put 200% more time, or 300% more time. If, on the other hand, you create more versions of the same job, you will almost always see a fairly dramatic improvement. Even when we are struggling to learn or implement something, we are almost always able to come back and do the same thing better, the second time around. Let's say you're recording a YouTube video or a screencast. Not one of us is surprised to find the third or fourth version to be superior. If you're asked to take four different pictures of an object, you'll find yourself composing the picture a tiny bit better in the second, third, or fourth round. Even in the movies, they do many takes, not because they have money and time to blow, but because the versions improve with every take. Instead of trying to labour onwards with your first version, it's almost better to move on to the second and third and fourth—and to a deadline. The problem is we often look at projects as a whole For instance, you see yourself as writing ONE article, doing ONE podcast, writing ONE book. However, the bigger picture is far more important. What if you had to write an article a day? Or a book a month? What would you do differently? The changes you'd make would all be energy-dependent. You'd work in short, intense bursts, improving as you went along. And you'd proceed to create a greater volume of work, and far, far superior work than your peers. Doesn't painstaking work count? Yes it does. You want to do outstanding work and take loads of time over it. However, just working as a perfectionist, means you're going to just manage a single version of your work. If two people: Person A and Person B were to start the same assignment on the same day, the person that lavished more attention to their work would have a much better result. However, that advantage would not stay in place for long. Within a few weeks, Person B would be far ahead of Person A. And just remember one thing. What you consider to be imperfect is often just your own perception. If the client or the person receiving your work is happy with it, there's really not a reason in the world to be a perfectionist. If you truly want to do outstanding work, you have to be Person B most of the time, occasionally slipping back to your Person A perfection level. The greater the output, the better your work is going to be, especially if you take feedback as you move along. Marsha moved at a high speed, but the program always gave her feedback. The students on a course move quickly and they get feedback just as rapidly, thus allowing them to make big changes. The painstaking work is great when you have the luxury of time. Ironically, that time never seems to be on the horizon, so we have to improve even as we battle deadlines. One more point and we're done I really struggled to write this article. I wrote one version, then cancelled it. Then another version, and that too was deleted. In fact, I ditched well over 1000-1500 words including some really nice stories because I realised they didn't fit. However, I had a deadline for this article. And right now, I'm seven minutes over the deadline. Which is why I must stop. In short, you make your revisions, learn from the feedback, but then there's a deadline that you can only overshoot by a tiny margin. After which you have to hit “publish”. And that's exactly what I'm going to do in about three seconds. Three, two, one… Epilogue Let's face it. If you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, well, you'd have spent almost all your life being told, or telling yourself that you're a perfectionist. You're probably trying to shake that habit, but it's easy to see why it's easier to stay in your comfort zone. Well, here's what psychologists suggest If you want to break out of your comfort zone, you stretch yourself ever so slightly. If you're labouring over a single article for several hours, how about spending half the time getting to the same goal? Your work may not be as perfect as you hoped, but it gives you a chance to get feedback and to improve your next article. If you're struggling to do one cartoon (correctly, of course), how about drawing just two, getting feedback and drawing even more in the given time? It's easy for an article like this to suggest that you need to take a big leap That massive jump may not be possible. Instead, take a smaller one—just a slight stretch goal. Set yourself the time in which you'll complete the job, stop, and get feedback. Then, tomorrow, do the same. If you follow this simple formula you'll find yourself less exhausted and with more energy. However, the biggest benefit of all is you'll become far better and far quicker at what you're doing. And that's what you wanted anyway, didn't you? You wanted perfection! So there you go! P.S. Oh, and print a picture of the monkey puzzle tree! Stick it on a prominent place where you can see it, just in case you forget. And don't look for the perfect picture. Any picture will do. Next Up:  How to use procrastination to your advantage

Why do clients leave? It seems odd, doesn't it? When you ask a client why they join, they seem to suggest it is all about information and content, but then they inexplicably leave. They seem to suggest they need either better content, or they need time to implement the content. But that's rarely the case, as we've found out. The need is far greater and we've all experienced it. Clients leave for a very obvious reason that you're never going to find in analytics software or surveys. Listen to find out more. Read the podcast online: Why Clients Leave. --------------------------------- Ok, so it has always bothered me why clients leave. And when that thought crossed my mind, I was sitting in the cafe—the very cafe I'd been avoiding for well over a year or more. So now I had two thoughts: why do clients leave? And why did I return to the cafe? In case you're wondering, the answer is not “coffee”. And if wasn't the coffee, then it had to be something else, right? But let's leave the cafe for a second and go online—say to a membership site, instead Let's say you belong to a membership site and the membership fee comes up for renewal. Why do you stay? Or why do you leave? The obvious answer is: it's the product or the service, right? And yet when we look at membership sites all over the place, there's really no shortage of content. No matter how grotty the site, there's usually way more content than you can browse, let alone consume. Videos, audio, articles, reports—they all swarm around you with increasing intensity. If the content were really the problem, you have no problem, do you? So let's take another angle There's too much content, and you really can't absorb it all. You've had your fill, and you now need to buckle down and focus on your business. Even if you have received advice and answers to your questions; even if your business has indeed gone ahead, you still need some breathing space to implement all of that information. We say it, but we don't mean it, do we? None of us has time. We didn't have time yesterday, or last week, last year, or even in the last decade. Time marches on to the sound of a jiggling rumba beat, and there's no way we can stop that time parade. So it can't be the focus or the time off, because the moment we've left the site, that information will cease to exist, but some other stuff will replace it. And that's when I finished the foam of the coffee, and I got my “bfoto” Yup, that's short for “blinding flash of the obvious”. People, clients—they don't leave because they need time to focus; or because they're not getting enough content. Most of the time they don't even leave because they need the money. Unless the relationship with the site or the coach is just crappy, it makes more sense to get good advice and pay the fee. If it's not the money, or the content, or the time, what is it? It is the “people”. To get back to the cafe story above, we were regulars at the cafe about two years ago. However, back then, we knew a lot of the people at the cafe and by people I mean the staff. Then the manager, Justine, left and took some of the staff with her. Suddenly the place wasn't so appealing, even though nothing much had changed. Two years slipped by, and we avoided the place. One day early this year, the current manager invited us in. She assured us we'd get great service and the coffee we were used to. And suddenly we're home again. We got to know the current staff, they know us, and it's like nothing's changed. The bfoto—or blinding flash of the obvious is just “people” When asked why we buy products or services, we often give a logical reason. We reel out the features or the benefits, but in reality, it's the people. It's the reason you and I have a preference for a particular petrol station, when all petrol stations have the same product, at approximately the same price. It's the reason why we don't care for rotating hairdressers or barbers, choosing as far as possible to go to the same one every single time. I know it's evident that people matter, but how does this play out when you consider the field of marketing? And what are you supposed to do if clients are starting to leave even when you're doing your best? The plot thickens. Stay tuned. We noticed something very odd in the courses we conduct online The online courses, like the Article Writing Course, is remarkably difficult, and rightly so. You're trying to compress a skill that usually takes years, into just 12 weeks. This intensity means you're going to have several sleepless nights, have to do assignments, interact with the group. Wait, interact with the group? Isn't learning about the teacher and the student? What's this group nonsense about? And if you look at the data, the data speaketh plainly. It says: those that interact with the group do two things consistently. The first being they finish the course and show a far higher skill level than those who don't interact with their group. The second point is that clients, having done one course, then show up for a second course; then a third; buy many products and services; come to offline events, and so on. The ones that don't interact with the group, and merely do their assignments don't exactly fall off the face of the Earth, but they're—and I hesitate to say this—less skilled and more likely to leave, or find it harder to go on (for some reason or the other). Africans knew this a long time ago In Africa there's a saying: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. However, when you look at the saying, or the course, or the cafe, what you see repeatedly is the interaction with people. We are really like a herd of elephants that want to travel together, as far as possible and not some lonely leopard sitting by itself on a tree in the middle of the Himalayan foothills. We want to be together, or at least to know each other. The blinding flash merely is that if you don't get people to become part of the group, they will get less of a benefit, pick up fewer skills and finally find they need to leave. We've found this phenomenon to play out repeatedly in our business If clients come to a workshop, they meet. And at Psychotactics we don't have this thousand person, 150 session seminar. We have boutique workshops, which means you don't take notes; but instead, you work on your project and the projects of the group (yes, here comes the group again). And in doing so, we find that clients come back repeatedly not just for the workshops, but also for other products and services. They've connected with Renuka and me, that's for sure, but they've also connected with each other. Which is why we started having paid meet ups You noticed the term “paid”, right? We tried having free meet ups, and they just fizzled and died because it's easy to look out the window, see the rain and climb back into paid. A paid meet up leads to commitment, and you get a 90-100% turnout. Anyway, the meet ups had the same effect. The more people met, the more they knew each other and the more they then interacted in 5000bc. The interesting bit is that they didn't just interact with others they'd met, but with the rest of the members in 5000bc. And as you'd expect, a phenomenally large number of those we've met in person are still members of 5000bc. Some have been members for ten years, some have been around for 15, while others are newer. It isn't to suggest that longtime members are people we've met with or interacted with on a live course. If you're looking for a magic trick, it's right in front of your eyes: it's the people. What should we do at Psychotactics to increase this interaction? What are we currently doing? Quite a few things. The first is the chocolate bar, the second are the e-mails, the third is the Taking Action forum, the fourth is the welcomes when you join—but instead of a list, let's find out how it all works. And yes, let's find out what else we can do because there's a real downside when a client leaves or doesn't participate. If you look way back to the tribe, you'll notice that every person in the tribe could bring knowledge to the fireplace. When that elder didn't participate, the group was poorer. Or if a participating elder died, that group's learning and interaction were greatly impoverished. Going alone sounds pretty cool, but it's terrible for the group, and it's crappy for the individual. We're not done yet. I'll be back to explain how we use and how we can use the people interaction for mutual benefit. Oh, and you know how it's frustrating when you don't have examples, lots and lots of examples, well, “don't you worry”, there will be examples galore. Let's move to the next part, shall we? But before we do, let's take a little detour into what makes people happy. Robert Waldinger is the director of a project that should have been abandoned a few decades ago. He's the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is possibly the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. Over the past 75 years, the study tracked the life of over 724 men, year after year, deeply digging into their homes, their lives, their health and one more thing. They were also asked how their life stories would turn out. A study like this is extremely rare, because funding tends to dry up, the researchers get bored or the people involved in the study die. Yet this study is still going and still has about 10% of the original participants still alive and well into their 90s. And what did they learn? The real happiness came from something extremely boring: good relationships. Yup, that was it. 80% of today's millennials, when surveyed, want to be rich and at least 50% want to be famous. Yet, the thing that people figure out over time, is seemingly mundane. It's that we crave relationships most of all. People who are socially connected to each other are physically healthier and live longer and happier lives. Secondly, the quality of those relationships matter. Toxic relationships don't count for much. And the third big lesson that they learned about relationships is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. But what has all of this got to do with your business? It's the “bfoto”: the blinding flash of the obvious. We all want stuff, don't we? We want to be rich and famous, but most of all, we want to feel wanted. All those phrases of “no one is an island” or “love me or hate me, but don't ignore me” comes into play. And this feeling of being wanted goes right to the very root of our happiness. UC Berkeley psychologist and author Dacher Keltner. When Pixar was doing research for the movie, Inside Out, they needed guidance from an expert on emotions and they turned to Dacher Keltner. Anyway, here's what Keltner said in an interview with Shane Parrish from Farnam Street.com. “The connection, you know, happiness, our sense that life is going pretty well, is strongly driven by three things in the vast scientific literature now. One is the positive emotions we’ve been talking about, like mirth and laughter and love and sympathy. Another is how you handle stress and negative emotion. The third is social connection“. We are so focused on adding content, playing with technology and dancing with keywords that we forget to work on the most basic (and most wanted) human emotions of connectedness. Advertising and great salesletters are important to get the client to become part of your clientele or community, but it's what you do next that makes all the difference. Keeping clients is—at least to my mind—the most important part of a function of how you go about connecting them, getting them to talk to each other and help each other. And voilà we are still going to have some people that leave, but by and large, people want to stay. This concept applies to every job most of us have ever held Most of us get into a job for economic or prestigious reasons. Even so, even when the money or prestige is great, we feel like chumps and long to find another job if the company isn't great. We long for the people and the connections and to be treated with dignity and respect. This “bfoto” is something almost all of us have experienced if we've been in a job somewhere. And it applies just as profoundly in your business. But how do we go about creating this community and connectedness? Let's find out what we are doing at Psychotactics and maybe you can add to the list as well. it would be great if you added what you're doing, to the list as well. And why you're doing it. But first, let's check out what we've done so far and how it has helped. Next Step: Have you seen your customer back out of a deal at the very last minute?The Brain Audit  is a complete system that enables you to understand what's going on inside the brain of your customer. It's a system that is based on a deep understanding of how our mind works.

A waiting list seems to be both a barrier and an enticement The problem with waiting lists is that they fail, and fail miserably if you don't get the elements right. So what are the elements that contribute to a really smart waiting list? Let's find out in this episode, shall we? Click to read online: 3 Elements That Create Waiting Lists that Work: Episode 183 ======== Why do most of us prefer Friday to Sunday? It's odd when you think about it, right? Friday is a working day (in most countries), and Sunday is a day of rest. Yet we wait with baited anticipation for Fridays. The reason is probably apparent to you by now. Friday clearly and consistently holds the promise of the weekend that is to follow. We all know what follows Sunday, don't we? Anticipation—that's one of the big reasons that you need to have a waiting list Anticipation creates an enormous amount of drama in our minds. If you have to wait for something, there's a pretty good chance you're going to value the product or service a lot more than if you hit some magic button and got an instant delivery. We create waiting lists for three core reasons: The first reason is the anticipation The second is to create a barrier And finally to get a commitment. Let's take a deeper dive, shall we? 1: Anticipation In 2010, some British ministers came up with an incredibly interesting, if slightly preposterous idea. If you were going to apply for British citizenship, you had to learn to queue. Phil Woolas, the immigration minister at the time was dead serious when he suggested that to-be citizens would need to learn to queue. He said: “The simple act of taking one's turn is one of the things that holds our country together. It is very important that newcomers take their place in queues whether it is for a bus or a cup of tea. It is central to the British sense of fair play, and it is also better for everyone. Huge resentment is caused when people push in.” There you go—anticipation in a nutshell And you know something, the British are spot on when it comes to creating anticipation. We like stuff better when we have to wait. Tali Sharot, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London gives a simple example of how anticipation works. Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy The behavioural economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. Then he said, “How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a superstar if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years? He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. They were willing to pay extra to wait. Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an ageing celebrity. But three days seemed to be the optimum amount. So why is that? Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. Anticipation made them happy. A waiting list is all about anticipation, isn't it? No matter whether you're about to sell a product, service or training, it would do us all a bit of good to create a waiting list. And waiting lists work for a simple reason: it creates a feeling of scarcity—even if you're not exactly well known in your field. Take the example of Joseph Pilates, for example. When Pilates started out his studio, he wasn't just an unknown; he was also an immigrant to the US with a German accent. That didn't exactly stop Pilates from creating a waiting list. He started his exercise regimen near a niche audience—dancers. Despite being brand new in the business, Pilates never agreed to see a client right away. The client was always put on a waiting list, a few days or a week or two after the initial contact. Waiting in that “queue” as it were, created anticipation for the client. When the day rolled along, they were eager to get started. In the case of a kiss, that anticipation needed to be relatively quick However, that's not always the case. A few years ago, I bought a cigar-shaped Nakaya pen from Japan. If you're into fountain pens, you can bow now, because the Nakaya is easily one of the most revered pens. Solar orange in colour, the nib is fashioned to your writing style, and yes, the nib is made from 22 karat gold. It comes with its own fancy box and a whole lot of razzmatazz justifying its price. And as you'd expect, you can't just walk in and buy a Nakaya. That would ruin everything, wouldn't it? The joy of owning a Nakaya is in telling this story. The story of how I was told I'd have to wait for at least nine months. Nine months turned to a year, and if I'm not mistaken, it took yet another six months to get the pen. By the time it showed up, I had almost given up on ever owning it. Which brings us to an important point of anticipation Some anticipation can be relatively quick; some months long. The main factor is to keep the flame alive while the client is waiting. Waiting for the Nakaya was partly interesting, partly a pain. I didn't get any updates on what was happening, and as a client, I had to follow up. That's not good practice, especially since the delivery was an unspecified date. Even if the delivery time is well into the future, it's a good idea to keep the client in at least a mild state of anticipation, or the whole experience can quickly turn to irritation. Pilates' system wasn't complex He created a list. Anyone of us can do that. Whether you use a notebook, appointment software or some form online, the first task is to create a list. That list alone creates the first level of anticipation. And believe me, it makes a big difference to how clients perceive your offering. Take for example the home study courses we have at Psychotactics One of the downsides of creating content is that there's this eagerness, almost a lust for creating new products. It's so much fun to create yet another course, yet another product, yet another service. And it's inevitable that as you produce new products, the older products—powerful as they are— seem to become very Cinderella-like. They don't get much attention because all you're doing is promoting the new and fancy program or workshop or app. Well, in 2016 I overdid things a bit. I rewrote the entire Article Writing Course so that it was now in Version 2.0. However, I like to do things “live”, which meant that I rewrote all the notes, re-recorded all the audio, and moved around whole sections of the course. Stuff that was in week 8 moved to week 2 and let's just say it was like trying to refuel a plane while flying it. Anyway, that fried me a bit and I couldn't do any more courses that year Which is when Renuka and I sat down and decided to bring out the stuff that we'd already done. The uniqueness course, the copywriting course, and yes, since I wasn't going to conduct the Article Writing Course in 2017, that too went on the list of courses to be sold. We then created waiting lists. And just because we're weird, we kept the list down to a fixed number. Which meant we'd sell only 25 copies. As you can tell, the scarcity works quite well, and the sales of the product replaced me. Instead of me doing a course, just the combination of the waiting list, the anticipation and the scarcity created enough revenue so I could do something else instead of conducting a course. If you're just starting out, Pilates is an excellent beacon in the dark Yes, go and do some Pilates at a class, but also pay attention to how he created anticipation by making people queue in an imaginary line. And that's the first point to consider when designing a waiting list; the first element to put in place. Create the anticipation. However, a waiting list is an instant barrier. Is that a problem? Or a blessing? And can it blow up in our faces? Let's find out. 2: Barrier If you host a valuable seminar and charge a lot, will more people show up? Or is it better to have one free of cost? Back in March 2007, we had the chance to test the free option. We'd decided we wanted to give back to New Zealand because we got so much from this strange and lovely country. We decided we'd have free marketing events under the brand name “The Learning Rock”. You could come to the event; there would be no up-sell; no charge and not even the Psychotactics logo anywhere in sight. In effect, we decided to spend over $1000 a year (and these were the costs of hiring the venue), without expecting anything in return. We had a room capacity of 40 people. Would enough participants turn up or would the room be half empty? The answer lay in the barrier that needed to be put in place. For one, the event was at 7:32 am. Not 7:33, not 7:34. The doors were fastened as though with superglue once we got to the start time. The attendees were put on a list, and if they showed up, they'd get a chance to be on the priority list. If on the other hand, they didn't show up they'd be taken off the priority list. All of these barriers should have put people from making the long drive into the city. Instead, the room was packed to the brim, every single time. Barriers play a significant role in creating a filtered waiting list It's not like there aren't waiting lists online, but having a barrier of sorts makes a big difference to the quality of the clients. It's easy to believe that a barrier isn't much use if you're selling something like products or digital products, but it matters. In our case, we don't sell products, but we do sell information products. When there's a barrier in place (and we insist on clients reading The Brain Audit), they tend to buy a home study product and finish it. This behaviour carries on to online courses like the Article Writing Course. The course is incredibly tough and should have a high dropout rate. Instead, the opposite scenario unfolds. Over 90% of the clients get right to the finish line and get the skill of writing. Having a barrier in place is one of the first things to consider when starting up a waiting list The size of the barrier doesn't matter. What matters is that there's some sort of barrier in place. You could get the client to read a few pages of a report. Or you could get them to fill in a detailed form. Or there could be a small fee—say $10—that creates a barrier. The waiting list itself is a barrier, but to make it, even more, wanted, add one more level, and you get a far better quality of clientele. However, easily the coolest reason to have a waiting list is, so you don't have to bug clients who are not interested in your product or service. Having a waiting list creates a nice opt-in and commitment factor. Next-Up:   Listen to—Why Waiting Lists Fail.

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D'souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for part two interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D'souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for part two interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D’souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for an interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D’souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for an interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Is it really possible to get a surge in sales with products? And are product sales similar or different from services? In this episode, we go exclusively into the sale of products. But more importantly, you get to see where you need to dig to create the power of your headline and how the consequences that follow make a massive difference. Listen and read this episode. You'll enjoy it. To read online: How To Increase Sales Using The Brain Audit: Episode 179 ============ You've probably never heard of Ben Curtis Ben's a client and a self-described fan. In an e-mail addressed to both Renuka and me, here's what he wrote: “I am a massive fan! I listen to all your podcasts and reread sections and chapters of the Brain Audit over and over. I am constantly applying your tools in every way possible. I am using your advice and information in exactly the way you hoped people would from your book. I also purchased the “Applications for the Brain Audit” too. I am constantly using those tools for headlines, marketing material, and websites.” But it's not all hunky-dory, rah-rah Ben also has a bit of a bone to pick with me, in particular. And here's how he puts it: “I'd like to make a suggestion, recommendation, or at least make you aware of something when you're writing content.” “It's not that anything is wrong (I love it), I just wish there was more relatable or direct content for people who have products. That's what I do, and many other people have products too. I have products to sell either online or in retail stores, or both. In the Brain Audit, there were two examples– Website Strategy Workshop and Allergy Clinic. Both are service-based businesses. It was difficult for me to try and write with a product in mind when there were only two examples, and both were services. I'm was very happy to stumble upon the Applications to the Brain Audit because I was dying for more examples. I just started it, and already love it. However, I noticed the same thing here. The 15 case studies in Chapter 2 are all still service businesses and not directly relatable or useful for myself. It's difficult to model after the examples when none of them are products. I know that what you write can apply to many industries, but I am talking specifically about examples for products. There are 15 examples, and there wasn't a product based business.” Ben's got a point, don't you think? Well then, it's time to correct this grievous mistake, because it gives us a chance to dive deeper into The Brain Audit. Well, here we go. Let's look around the room for some products and play a game of “I spy”. What do I spy? It starts with the letter M. It's a product, and it's a microphone. Except that I already have six microphones, so why bother with another one? Let's find out, shall we? In this series, we'll go through the stages of how to get—and keep the attention of the client. Stage 1: We'll list all the benefits—and narrow down on our problem. Stage 2: This stage calls for us to drive home not just the problem, but also the consequences of ignoring that problem. Stage 3: We'll do an instant check after we've gone through the first two stages. We didn't start off needing or even wanting the products because the products have been randomly chosen. Has that desired level gone up just a little bit? Let's find out. Let's start off with three different products. And as you'd expect, I spy something with my eye, and we know, it starts with the letter m. M as in “microphone”. Stage 1: We'll list all the benefits—and narrow down on our problem. Microphone? Let's look at the microphone that I recently bought. What problem could it possibly solve? Why buy yet another microphone when there are plenty lying around? As you're probably aware, every product solves many problems, and since we're on that trend of reasoning, every product must have many features and benefits. Let's list the benefits and features of this microphone, shall we? • Let's start with the weight: It's just 10 g. That's just 0.35 ounces. That's light, don't you agree? • The usage time on a single charge is 6 hours. That solves a problem too, of having to change batteries all the time. • The operating temperature is from -10°C to 50°C. Which means it would work well in a desert, which is freezing by night and boiling by day. • And finally, it has an operating distance of 65 feet or 20 metres. That's a fair distance away. But what problem does it solve? Let's say you're keen to shoot videos of yourself as a speaker. There are two reasons why you'd need to capture the event. The first reason would be to capture the information for a showreel for your clients. The second reason would be to see and hear yourself so you can improve your technique. However, you've always needed a slightly sophisticated set up with a cordless mic. But imagine a microphone so small that it's just a clip-on. And once you have it on, you can be a whopping 65 feet away and record perfect video—but more importantly, the audio. It's a Bluetooth mic that frees you from cords and cables. That's it! No cords, no cables, but what about the other points? What about the weight, the extended battery time, the ability to work under crazy weather conditions? They're all important, but you have to pick one problem if you want to get the attention of your client. It's not like we're chucking away the rest of the points. We just can't have it all up in lights together. Only one problem needs to be chosen. Think of it as a movie. There's the hero, and there is the supporting cast. The rest of the points; those benefits and features are the supporting cast. The only thing that matters is the “no cords and no cables”. And if you're a speaker, you know exactly what that means. To be able to simply walk across the room, over even across the bridge to the other side and be recorded perfectly, that seems like a dream come true. It's a big problem and this microphone; this Bluetooth microphone solves the problem perfectly. That's example No.1 down. Let's take another example: Daniel Smith watercolours. Now this example is interesting because I've never used these watercolours. Back in 2010, I went for a watercolour class, and my teacher, Ted, told me to do one small watercolour every day. Being a model student, painting every day is approximately what I've done. In the past eight years, I've probably painted about 2500 images—yet not one of them was with Daniel Smith. My goal today was to find out why I should bother with Daniel Smith watercolours when I already have several tubes with a rival company called Winsor and Newton. So many tubes of paint, in fact, that though I paint every day, I'd still be using those tubes for at least two-three years. And yet, here we are, looking for a problem to solve with a whole new brand of paints This diversion brings up an essential fact of customer behaviour. In a majority of situations, clients or prospects may not have a problem. I am reasonably happy with my paints, but that doesn't mean I'm not on the lookout for something different. When we, as sellers of a product fail to get the point across clearly and succinctly, the customer is left in a bit of a limbo. Which is what Daniel Smith colours tends to do when you do your research. But here's a start from a post online: I love Daniel Smith. What I like about the paint is the pigment load, ease of re-wetting in my palette; ease of handling on the paper. Every tube I have bought is fresh, soft and well mixed with the binder, no separation into binder and pigment. And I love their range of colours. No other paint maker offers such a huge number of colours. It seems Daniel Smith is always looking for new colours to add. In that short client description we have the bits and pieces needed for a problem, don't we? Let's look at the features and benefits mentioned in that post. • Ease of pigment load: That's a bit technical, but what I can figure out, is that the paint sits nicely on the brush. • Ease of re-wetting: This is a nuisance with watercolours. They tend to dry up into a hard rock-like mass. Re-wetting is a definite benefit. • Ease of handling on paper: It's a vague description, but we'll take all the description we can handle. • Well mixed with the binder—no separation of binder and pigment: That's yet another winner. • And the final one: Astounding range of colours—especially for those always on the lookout for yet another shade. Once again, we have to pick, and most of the time, the pick will be based on the target profile It seems that artists are always on the lookout for new shades, new textures and so the range of colours is a big solution. And the opposite of the benefit is—tah, dah—the problem. Daniel Smith has a massive 252 colours, including the Primateks as well as 48 luminescent, pearlescent and interference colours. The problem is evident isn't it? With the paints I've been using, I've more or less restricted myself to a range of shades. Daniel and Smith seemed to have gotten me out of my stupor and caused me to investigate a whole range of colours that I may never have considered before. In effect, it's created a problem where none existed. This takes us to a third product, like the t-shirt I'm wearing. I'm a big fan of graphic design, and there's probably no greater joy than to walk into a t-shirt store when on vacation. Portugal, for instance, has an astounding design sense, which frankly surprised me. Whether we were in Vancouver, Tokyo or Sardinia, I'd be on the lookout for new, well-designed t-shirts. Yet, for the past three years or so, I've more or less given up buying t-shirts while away from home. It's a strange phenomenon, don't you think? The plot, as it were, thickens, because the t-shirt brand I now wear doesn't quite suit my design appetite. Even so, I've made the change to the Icebreaker brand. And the reason why I've made this leap is that it solves a precise problem: it doesn't stink. It's summer here in New Zealand, in January And summers here are hot, really hot, and with heat comes sweat and body odour. Which means you have to get yourself some sort of deodorant or wipe rubbing alcohol, vinegar or hydrogen peroxide onto your underarms. If you want to save yourself of the trouble of any of those weird and wonderful methods, all you do is wear an Icebreaker. That's it. No odour. Wear the t-shirt for a day, no odour. Ten days, still no odour. Forty days? You're getting the point, aren't you? As you can quickly see, Icebreaker solves a problem you didn't know you had in the first place. I wouldn't go so far as to say all my t-shirts are Icebreaker, but let's just say they've taken the whole fun part out of my vacations. I haven't bought a new t-shirt on vacation in over three years. I ask people to send me vouchers for Icebreaker for my birthday, or if they want to give me a gift. I use Icebreaker in my presentation on Dartboard Pricing at events. I can't even begin to tell you what killjoys this company has been for me, consistently solving my problem. And there you have it, random picks right in the room with me. A set of paints from Daniel Smith watercolours (I had to look up the name again). A t-shirt range called Icebreaker that wasn't on my radar but now accounts for 100% of all t-shirt purchases. And a microphone—the sixth or seventh microphone that I own, just because it solves the problem of no cords, no mess. Of course, we could go on and on. There's a type of cream in the room, shoes, a language course, computers—three of them, a standing desk that I never use any more, drives, etc. All of these solve a problem, but where do we go digging to find the problem? In the benefits, that's where We may not be clear which problem is the one we need to pick, but we sure know the benefits. You can pick up any object in your room, or head downtown to any store and randomly pick up a product. There on the side of the packaging are all the features and benefits—what we like to call the “solution”. The opposite of the solution is the problem. As you'd expect, an Icebreaker t-shirt will happily tout all its benefits, but it's best to stick to one as the lead actor, letting the other problems take a secondary role of supporting cast. And once we have our problem, you know what The Brain Audit recommends next, don't you? Yes, it's time for the consequences. A problem is a problem, but it's not quite as big a problem unless there are consequences. What are consequences and how do we use them with the marketing of our product? Let's find out. Stage 2: The consequences of the problem Imagine you're driving down the road, and in the corner of your eye, you see flashing red and blue lights. What do you do? You slow down, don't you? You're aware that somewhere in the vicinity there are cops and there's no point in flooring the accelerator. That's how the brain works. It senses a problem and immediately most other thoughts are subdued. The focus is almost exclusively on that problem. However, to stay in that state for too long would be counterproductive, so once the cops are out of sight, you and I tend to go back to our normal behaviour. When clients are buying products or services, the problem gets their attention, but it's not enough Once the problem isn't front and centre, there's the risk of the client going their own way. It's akin to spotting a cop car on the highway and then encountering a sign that says: No cop car for the next 300 miles, guaranteed. Without the consequences, the attention wavers quite a bit. Which is why when you introduce the problem, you need to pick the problem that is top of mind for your target profile (read about target profile in The Brain Audit). If you don't have a target profile, then you're going to have to make a choice, but it's more precise if you use the target profile. Anyway, let's not go off track, because we still have to focus on the consequences. So what are the consequences of not having an easy-to-use Bluetooth microphone? If you've ever fiddled with a wired microphone, you'd know what a pain mics can be. The cords and cables run all over the place, someone trips over the cords and cables, or at the very least they need to be taped down. That's great if you're in the sound business because as disaster hits, you have Option B in place. However, as a small business owner, you're hoping for one take. You want to get your video on YouTube, or you want to record that seminar you're giving. That's one take, in most cases, and there's no going back. With a Bluetooth mic, a simple phone can record the video from anywhere in the room, while capturing very high-quality audio. Without audio, even the sharpest video is unwatchable. And that's why a Bluetooth mic is so very crucial. One that you can quickly fasten to your clothing and in seconds the wired microphone is history. That's an example of consequences Just because you've brought up a problem in your headline or speech, doesn't mean that clients get the point to the fullest extent. There's no doubt they're paying attention, but unless the consequences are driven deeper, there's a good chance of bypassing, or at least not valuing the product to the fullest extent. The consequences are akin to underlining what's being said, and yet staying on point. We're not trying to cover all the problems the product solves. If anything, you have to be careful to stay on target. When I was writing about the microphone above, I was tempted to talk about the lightness factor and how it lasted for six hours. It took all of my focus to stay on topic of “no cords or cables”. We can bring up the issue of how it lasts for six hours later in the message. On a sales page, there's a lot of space to bring up features and benefits much later. At first, however, we have to nail down the problem and the consequences to the exclusion of everything else. And the consequences matter. Take for example another product like “Dartboard Pricing”, a product about pricing on the Psychotactics site When you look at the sales page, it's clear that the problem—the biggest problem—is about “losing clients if you choose to raise prices”. That message is clear, but just letting the headline do all the work is a mistake. The consequences have to come in quickly. And here's what the page reads like: How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers? Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers? And how do you keep those costs going up, up and away—and still keep customers coming back? We all undercharge! No matter what our business, we've all undercharged for our products and services. And yet, at this very moment, there are others in our field that charge a lot more—for what seems to be a similar offering to ours. We know we should increase prices, but we can't bring ourselves to take that leap because we're deathly afraid our customers will leave in droves. And so we charge a lot less for our products, workshops, services and courses. As if that first section were not enough, there's a story that comes into play that explains the consequence of not being able to increase prices. I remember the first time we sold a copywriting course in 2006 I was reasonably happy with the price until I read the feedback from one of the participants. “You're charging too little,” she said.”I just did another course on a similar topic, and they're charging twice as much.” I took the feedback but felt the terror of having to increase, let alone double my prices. This is the dilemma we all face. We don't know how to increase our prices, even by a tiny bit. So how do we strike a balance between running a profitable business without losing clients and sales? How do stop trusting our mostly inaccurate “gut instinct” and work with a precise system instead? How do we raise prices solely based on client demand? And most importantly, how can we do this price increase step by step, instead of randomly increasing prices? The consequences put a spotlight on the problem, but because it creates agitation, it also sets up the client for the solution that must follow. As you read in The Brain Audit, the problem shows up, and then we go to the solution. But sitting smack in the middle is that big consequence that needs its share of the spotlight. Execute the consequences correctly, and it's clear why Daniel Smith range of colours solves a pressing problem of not quite having the shade you need in your paint palette. Or why choosing Icebreaker as a garment makes for the most pleasant t-shirt wearing experience, because who wants to stink? The consequence of being inadvertently socially unacceptable or even having to put chemicals (or for that matter vinegar) on your body is a bit of a pain. And it's only when those consequences are driven deep that we're ready for the solution. In fact, we're not just ready; we're hankering for the solution at this stage. Stage 3: An instant check Which brings us to the third part of this series: An instant check after we've gone through the first two stages. We didn't start off needing or even wanting. Did you need a microphone? If you're recording an event, do you feel like you need one now? And do you need that specific brand so that you don't run into cords and cables? What about the paints? Maybe you're not a painter—yet—but should you wander into watercolours as I did back in 2010, you'd want the best possible colours, right? And personally, I'm feeling a bit like a dunderhead because I haven't heard about this brand though I've been painting for eight years straight. What about the t-shirt? Icebreaker has no stink, even if you wear it for a month. Not that you want to wear it for a month, but notice how the problem and the consequence have gotten your attention and kept that attention. The proof of the pudding is almost always in the eating If you feel you need the products mentioned above, then The Brain Audit has started to weave its magic. We're not done yet, of course. There are the other “bags” of The Brain Audit that need to be tended to, as well. We still need to go to the target profile, the solution, the objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. All those “seven red bags” need to be taken off the conveyor belt (and you'll know what I mean by conveyor belt when you read The Brain Audit). However, what we've done here is gotten off to a great start. And more importantly, we've found out that products, physical products or digital, don't differ that much from services. In fact, we just have to look at one thing to figure out the problem and the corresponding consequence. What's that one thing? Let's find out in the summary, shall we? Summary The three things we covered in this series were: Stage 1: The list of benefits that to narrow down the problem Stage 2: The consequences of ignoring the problem Stage 3: An instant test of desire This is your ONE thing to do today. Create a list of benefits. Look around your room and pick on that lampshade you bought. What are the benefits of that particular shade? The bookshelf that's in the corner does it have features and benefits? What about that bottle of wine that's on your desk? Wait, you have a bottle of wine at work? Anyway, all the stuff around you is probably there for a reason. You could make your work a little easier by heading over to Amazon.com because you won't need to hunt down features and benefits because all packaging has a list of bullets. However, this exercise is a solid one whether you're hunting down stuff in your office, on Amazon or just about anywhere. This exercise shows you that there's no real difference between a product or service or training. They all have their features and benefits, and one of those points is going to need a flip. You'll take one of those benefits and turn them into a problem. Which takes us to the second point: consequences. If you don't stick with the consequences, it's unlikely that the client will continue to pay attention. In many cases, the client may already fee the consequences, e.g. the roof tiles are missing, and a torrent of water is pouring in, but in a lot of situations, you have to drive home the consequences. For instance, I can tell you that The Brain Audit helps you in removing that last minute hesitation that you feel from clients. However, it's only when I recount the story of the seven red bags that the message really stays with the client. That's the point when they buy The Brain Audit, use it and write those wonderful testimonials. The entire sequence: from The Brain Audit to 5000bc, to other courses like the Article Writing Course is mostly dependent on taking the time to elaborate the problem with a paragraph or two of detail. And finally, we get to test the power of the problem I didn't start out wanting Daniel Smith paints. In fact, at one point, I even forgot the name and called them Daniel and Smith. But by the time I realised the problem they were solving, I was keen to buy some and test them out. The same concept applies to the microphone (yes, there's a link below). I didn't realise how intrusive wires and cables had become until the microphone company brought it to my notice. Did they do a good job of consequences? Maybe not. Most of us are too busy trying to get our message to every possible audience and to line up the features and benefits. We think the more we load onto our website or marketing material, the better. But in reality, it's the core stuff: the problem, the consequences—that is what really matters. And we can test it because clients don't just say, “wow that's interesting”, but instead ask, “where can I see it or where can I buy it?” That's your test. That shows you that your message is working. And that's pretty much it. You can use The Brain Audit on products, services or training with equal effect. Try it out today and you'll see how effectively it works. Special Bonus: The Brain Audit Excerpt Find out—'Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t'       

So much effort goes into the launch of a product, but what happens next? How do you handle the calm after the launch? How do you keep selling products on an ongoing basis? These are the questions we tackle in this episode as we get rid of the "post-launch" blues. Read the article online: How To Sell A Product When There’s No Scarcity Factor ------------- Do you like cold pizza? Apparently, some people do. They eat pizza, leftover pizza, the next day and they thoroughly enjoy it over breakfast. Some people eat it as a snack, while others may eat it for lunch or dinner. What's the point of this pizza discussion, you may ask? The pizza analogy is to demonstrate that barring some exceptions; pizza is almost always treated as some kind of food. A similar sort of concept applies to selling a product. Often, people believe that selling a product is entirely different from a service. Or that selling training, a workshop or course, for example, must somehow be different from selling info-products online. The reality is sales is sales—pretty much like pizza. There are various situations in play, but by and large, whether you're selling a dump truck, a $20,000 course or a pizza, the principles are remarkably similar. You launch a product or service when it's ready. You get a few, possibly a fair number of sales. And then what? This article is about the “then what” that occurs right after you've done your launch And the reason for all that “pizza preamble” is because the example you're about to read about involves a digital information product, namely, The Brain Audit. When we launched The Brain Audit back in 2002, we had no clue what we were doing. To put things in perspective, Google was just four years old, YouTube didn't exist, and hardly anyone bought anything online, let alone an e-book that was twice the cost of a hardback that you could get in a bookstore. We launched The Brain Audit, then we waited. And nothing much happened. A similar concept might apply to whatever you're selling, whether it's a product or service. You'll launch the product and wait, but find that nothing seems to happen. How are you supposed to keep selling the product/service for years on end? Do you create scarcity all the time, or will it get old and tired? Will clients get fed up with your tactics? This series outlines the things we've done with The Brain Audit, just because it's our most enduring product However, just to give you a framework so that we're all on the same page, we've sold services too. We've sold consulting, both one on one, as well as group consulting. We've sold seminars and workshops, courses like the info-product course or the Article Writing Course. And as you'd expect, e-books, videos and audio—both digital and physical, as well as to sell a membership site like 5000bc. In short, while this story is mainly about The Brain Audit, it's really a “pizza story”. You can quickly and efficiently apply these steps. And they are steps. They take time, often months and years. But that's the reason you're reading this article, aren't you? You've created a product or service, and you don't want it to languish on the bottom shelf, do you? You want it to sell on an ongoing basis. Let's find out how we rolled out The Brain Audit. Let's go all the way back to 2002, shall we? Stage 1: You've launched the product; now what? The moment after the launch can often be a thud. Nothing happens, simply because nothing is supposed to happen. All the clients who intended to buy your product at launch stage bought your product or service. Those who hesitated, stay in the wings and what you're faced with, is an unreasonable amount of nothingness. This is true for any product, like software, a new kind of shampoo, or for that matter a workshop announcement. There's a bit of a spike at the launch, and then there's nothing. We were faced with this nothingness factor when we first sold The Brain Audit Except our launch was a bit different. We simply put up a sales page, and one person came along and bought the e-book. It took us totally by surprise. And so we'd sell a book here and a book there, often selling twenty or thirty books speaking at local events in Auckland. Nonetheless, the slow pace of sales can't be sustained forever. There are two primary reasons why an increase in activity is essential. The first and I think the most important is that a client that doesn't read your information will often go elsewhere. To me, getting that client to understand that information was far more important than just seeing yet another sale. Nonetheless, the sales matter too. Which is why both of these factors are vital. Your product partially brings a client into your “fold”, your way of thinking but it also helps create revenue. Even so, there's a lot of “nothing” that happens once you've launched your product. Which is why you need to prepare for both the drip and the next launch The drip is your newsletter or any method you keep in touch with your clients. At first, we'd send out one newsletter a month with an article. Then we changed it to twice a month and finally a weekly. We then moved it to twice a week, once on Tuesday and the other on Saturday (no, there's no logic for the days chosen). But to go back to the very start, all we'd do is send out the newsletter and then add a little blurb—an interesting blurb—at the end of the article. It would say something like: “Aren't clients odd? They nod at all the right times, agree with what you're selling, and then suddenly don't buy. Or worse, buy from someone else. What causes such behaviour? Find out what's going on in the brain of the client with The Brain Audit (and there'd be a link). That little blurb would cause the drip purchase. A few people would buy the product with every e-mail. As we increased the frequency of the e-mails, the sales of the product went up as well. Then we'd announce a bonus sale several times a year. We'd package The Brain Audit along with a few other goodies or bonuses and offer it to our list. The bonuses always did the trick. We'd get a tidy spurt in sales with every launch. Right from the very start, we tried to put ourselves in our client's shoes. We didn't want to be in their face all the time with all of these launches, which is why we'd send out an offer twice or thrice a year. If we went really nuts, it would be four times a year. And just for good measure, we'd pick days that were supposedly bad days. For instance, one of our e-mails would go out on Christmas Day. No one is supposed to be checking e-mail on that day, but our sales would be extremely high. A few launches like this for The Brain Audit and we were well on our way to creating the leverage we were looking to achieve. The key is not to get too predictable If you know there's going to be a sale or some goodies, would you buy something earlier and forfeit the goodies? Which is why we kept the announcements of such sales, unpredictable. It ensured that clients bought through the year in small batches and then we'd see a spurt in sales. However, there's a bit of a downside to this strategy as well. If you don't put in the dates in your calendar, you'll see the months fly by without the bonus sale happening. We'd often “wake up” to find half the year gone and we'd forgotten to announce a bonus sale. We now have the entire year planned to make sure this kind of periodic amnesia doesn't recur. There's a little note about the bonuses too When we began, we only knew what we saw around us. And everyone would pile up a ton of bonuses. Monkey see, and monkeys do, so we did the same. In time, we realised that a single bonus is enough. However, there's a significant point to consider, which is to have a must-have bonus. Every product or service has must-have items, yet they're often included as part of the package. Unbundling the item from the product or service and offering it as a bonus, is an excellent first move. However, you then have to take the time and effort to describe the bonus in detail, almost as if the bonus were the main item; almost like the primary item doesn't exist. We weren't always brave enough to keep one bonus over the years. For instance, the Article Writing Course has many bonuses, just as a matter of legacy. We put it there, and now we haven't removed it, but by and large, when announcing the bonus sale, a superior move would be to choose or create one bonus and then push that bonus to the hilt, so that the client must have the bonus, no matter what. And all, or most of this selling is done through your own channel, most often your e-mail newsletter. Your newsletter is easily the most powerful way to drip sell and to sell a bonus version of your product or service. However, it's not the only way. The other way is to get onto someone else's platform. Let's explore how to sell via someone else's list, without making a big hullabaloo about it. 2: If you have a podcast or videos or anything, keep repeating the name of ONE product over and over again. Many years ago when I first started in advertising, I read a book by David Ogilvy. Ogilvy was a master at promotion, but he came about it the hard way. He had to sell products door to door and work out what caused customers to buy. One of the things that he seemed to underline to aspiring copywriters was an idea of consistency. And my memory is a bit hazy because I read those books back in 1990, but it went something like this: You'll need to follow up about nine times. And it's not because the client is not paying attention. It's just that she or he is lost in their own problems. Which is why repetition is a must in your newsletter, but it's easy to go off track in other media When you're sending out a newsletter, and if you do it on a frequent basis, you're going to think about including your product. You could either add the links to the product as part of the editorial, below the editorial (right at the end) or do a sales pitch several times a year. However, when it comes to other media, that factor of repetition might not be as consistent. Take the podcast for example. When we started the Three-Month Vacation podcast, I'd mention products, courses and workshops right at the end of every podcast in the section called, “What's happening in Psychotactics land?” However, the choice of product or service being offered would not always be consistent. Then at one point we decided to create a format of sorts Every podcast would talk about 5000bc, no matter what else was trying to hog the spotlight. Let's take the Houston workshop we're conducting in the last week of October. That would need to get into the podcast, but even so, 5000bc would be mentioned, even once the Houston workshop promotion ceases. In short, you want to get the same message over and over and over—and over again. But do you say the same thing? Essentially, yes. I always say “5000bc is filled with introverts and that I'm the extrovert”. However, the tone or the message may change from time to time. At times, there may be an example from 5000bc or a story that's related to 5000bc, but the core message of “introverts” and “5000bc” stays doggedly on target. You too need to change the angle but keep the story consistent. Let's take an example of The Brain Audit If you were to drive home one message from The Brain Audit, it would be about “hesitation”. It's about why the client gets hesitant. Why at the last minute she goes from being not sure and not buying your product or service. That concept of hesitation has to be drummed in, over and over again. However, let's take a chapter from The Brain Audit. Let's talk about the concept of “uniqueness”. How does the concept of “uniqueness” and “hesitation” relate? Or what if you picked a chapter like “objections”. How do “hesitation” and “objections” relate to each other? Did you buy a 99c app online? Did you spend 3 hours and possibly six days wondering if you should buy that app or not? What caused you to hesitate? With 5000bc, the message of introverts represents “a safe place”. All the messaging about 5000bc has to be about it being safe. And what does “being in a safe zone” mean to most people? It means it's different from other places online where there's hacking and hustling, pimping and pumping. It's the polar opposite of people trying to climb over one another to get noticed. It's a place where you can be heard and treated with respect. Both 5000bc and The Brain Audit have a consistent message as do most of the products and services on Psychotactics. All of the consistency comes from “one wordWhen you examine your product or service, it will almost always seem to represent more than one word. Take The Brain Audit for example. It could be about hesitation, but it could also be about “speedier conversion”. If you have a service like a yoga class, you might achieve mindfulness, flexibility, injury-free. You could end up with three, four, even a dozen ways to explain your business. The big mistake most people make is they use two or three, and in the process, they don't get a single message across. A single message sent out repeatedly is what sticks in the brain of the client. And that's what you need to put in your podcast or video. I say video, or podcast, but the application doesn't matter You might be using webinars, speaking to live audiences, or getting your message through social media. The consistency is what is going to bring you repeated sales. The consistency of the “one word/one idea” is the ONLY thing that's going to cut through the clutter. When the client runs into flexibility issues, they're not thinking of mindfulness. Drum home that one message and you'll get the point across. Then take the same message into videos, podcasts, speaking, webinars or any medium that you're going to employ in the future. However, it's not enough to do a sales pitch. In almost every situation, you also need to embed the product or service within your content. Let's find out how. 3: Embedding the information within the editorial Russian dolls. You've seen those Matryoshka Russian dolls, haven't you? Also known as nesting dolls, it's a set of wooden dolls inside each other. You open one doll to find another smaller doll within, the smaller doll reveals yet another smaller doll, and so on. It's like one doll embedded into the other. When it comes to selling your product or service, it's a lot like embedding the information within the editorial content, with one prominent difference. The embedded information doesn't necessarily get smaller. If you do it right, you can take all the time and space you need to get your point across. Let's get right to the example, shall we? If you've been following this series, you'll notice that there was an entire discussion about 5000bc, our membership site. You got told how 5000bc was for introverts and got other bits of information about 5000bc. Then, there was a follow up of The Brain Audit, which is also a product being sold on the Psychotactics site. In effect, you were introduced to two products, and if you paid close attention, the sales page/landing page workshop was brought up as well. Yet, you may have also noticed something else. You didn't resent the information at all. If you're already a member of 5000bc, you are happy that your decision to be a member has been reinforced. If you've already read The Brain Audit (thrice as suggested), then you don't resent the information. And the workshop: that too would have caught your interest if you wanted to attend a Psychotactics workshop in October. In short, the entire piece in part 2 was embedded as a form of a sales pitch, as well as the information you just read in the past paragraph. What makes it so non-confrontational is that it's giving you information that is useful to you. If you imagine a photographer conducting a workshop, you'll know exactly what I mean. Let's say that photographer is a stockist for some lenses. And during the workshop, she can either talk about the lenses and give you the prices, or she can do something quite sublime. She can introduce you to the lenses, let you see them, play with them, even use them on your camera. Not everyone will be captivated, of course, but some will. And in embedding that information, she's got prospects who move over to clients. Think of that yoga class we mentioned earlier What could you do in the yoga class? Maybe you're having a weekend session. You could say it during the class itself. It's possible you are selling some new yoga books that you've sourced. Often enough you don't even have to mention the books. You could simply display them on a stand, and you'd get clients wanting to buy the product. However, not everyone notices or gets why one book is better, or why they should join one membership site over the other. And it's why editorial is so very crucial. When you explain concepts using the editorial format, the client gives you lots of time to drive home your information. Try doing a sales pitch as long, and many, if not most of the clients will tune out immediately. However, there's one more point to pay attention to when bringing up your product or service You can't merely keep the spotlight on yourself. Notice that Psychotactics doesn't have yoga classes. It doesn't sell photography lenses, either. Even so, you ran into those examples and for two good reasons. The first big reason is that more examples let the client get a better picture. If you're embedding examples of info-products and courses, for instance, a lot of clients may not make the leap. But as you add more examples, like yoga and photography, you're creating depth in your presentation. You're giving them examples of both products and services, and you're doing something even more critical. You're moving the spotlight away from you for a little bit. Once you've embedded your information, it's time to move on and give other examples, just to level the playing field a bit. Clients don't feel like they're stuck in an unending sales/editorial sequence. Embedding sales information in your product isn't hard to do Once again, you can use it not only in your articles but also in your video, podcasts, webinars and every other media. Even a casual social media post can show a bunch of camera lenses or photo equipment. Or it can mention a workshop that you're thinking of having in New Zealand. Whatever the eventual goal, you don't have to get stuck with just trying to sell. You can also use plain ol' editorial to keep selling products through the year. You may not sell in huge volumes when mentioning the product or services through the year. Your sales won't see any great spike. However, that doesn't mean your clients aren't paying attention. These embedded pieces of information are getting through, and when you finally do your sales pitch or your sales email, all of this hard work will pay off. There's really no downside to embedding like a Matryoshka doll. You've created great content, have sound examples and have moved strategically towards greater sales of your products and services. Next Up: Find out the magic that already exists within your existing info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time. Find out how  you can really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago?

How do you sleep in an exceedingly noisy environment? How do you beat jet lag? These are some of the questions we've had for years. This episode shows you how we've stumbled on a few nifty tricks to make travel so much better. Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/travel-tips/ =========== My friend loves egg curry And though I've learned over the years to make complex Indian dishes like biryani, peeling a humble hard-boiled egg seemed to be beyond my control. So here's what I did. I tapped the egg dozens of times so that it looked pretty much like a parched field. Six eggs probably had six hundred fragments with that insane tapping of mine, and it took me about half an hour to peel six eggs. Then I went on YouTube and found that all you had to do was tap the egg once on the kitchen bench and roll it forward and the entire peel would unfold in a matter of seconds. That's tip. A nifty tip. And since we travel so much every year, we've picked up some of these goodies along the way. Let's take on four of them. Some of them we've been using for years, and some we picked up just on this vacation to Sri Lanka and India. Here are the four, all in a row. 1: How to entirely sidestep jet lag 2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs) 3: A travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys) 4: Why travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet). 1: How to completely sidestep jet lag In 2010, we conducted a series of workshops based on The Brain Audit. It seemed simple enough. The first three- day workshop was in California, the second just outside Washington D.C and the third in Vancouver. There was just one problem. All three workshops were in a span of approximately two weeks. This meant that we had to fly economy (we fly exclusively business now, but back then we flew economy) from Auckland to California. That's a distance 10,492 km and 12 hours. We conducted our first three day workshop in Campbell, California and then flew to Washington D.C. You see the problem unfolding, right? The time difference between Auckland and California can be between 3-5 hours. You land in a different time zone, have little or no time to get used to the difference and you're off to Washington D.C, which is three hours ahead. And Vancouver? Yes, Vancouver is three hours behind. All of this meant that we were zipping back and forth between time zones, and bear in mind we had 3 workshops to conduct and no time to get used to jet lag. Except there's where our first nifty trick comes into play It's called No-Jet-Lag. They're tiny little pills you take every two hours on the flight. So if our flight was 12 hours long, we had to take 6 of those pills for the journey. There's just one problem: homeopathy isn't supposed to work. The dosage is so tiny in any homeopathic prescription that most doctors will tell you that it's a sham. Do we care? Of course not, because for years we've been having these pills on flights, stepping out on the other side and getting right into the time zone. To give you an extreme example, we were speaking at an event in Sweden in 2017 Sweden is the “polar opposite” of time zones for us, because there's about a 12 hour difference. We flew from New Zealand to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Stockholm and the entire trip, if I recall, was 39 hours door to door. The day after we landed, I was to give an hour-long presentation at around 3 pm. If you do your calculations correctly, that's 3 am New Zealand time (plus you do have to wake up, shower and go through some practice runs). We don't have the time or the energy to argue with whether homeopathy works or not All we know is that we travel a lot every year, crisscrossing the globe for work, but mostly on vacation. International travel is tiring and No Jet Lag won't help you with the tiredness. It's like being in a car. If you travel 12 hours, it feels like 12 hours. However, you don't feel like you've changed so many time zones. For me, especially, this is important, because more often than not, a Psychotactics workshop will be three days long. It's one thing to get on stage and give an hour long speech, but quite another to be on your feet (and awake) for three whole days. There are no doubt, many methods to beat jet lag One ex-air hostess said she doesn't eat or drink anything on the flight. Sorry miss, but we love our champagne and the food helps us pass the time on these very long trips out of New Zealand. We've used No Jet Lag since 2004, and it's worked just fine for us, so we'll stick to our weird little formula. There's one downside, however No, it's not to do with the ingredients. Instead it's more to do with keeping to a plan. Before I leave, I set alarms on my phone to go off every two hours until we reach our destination. That way I can be sure we don't miss the two-hour cycle. Apparently, you can take it every four hours if you're asleep, but not many of us sleep for hours on a flight, hence the alarms keep us on track. The instances where these tablets haven't worked is when we've been sloppy and popped them whenever we feel like it. Like this trip, returning back from India. We didn't keep to an alarm plan and we were waking up at 3 am for about a week. Do your due diligence and you're likely to still be exhausted, but at least nicely ensconced in the new time zone. No Jet Lag is made in New Zealand, so pretty much every medical store and travel store has it on display. If you go to their website at http://www.nojetlag.com/where-to-buy-No-Jet-Lag.html, you can find out where it's available. Try it. And that's it. Our first nifty travel tip. The second one is pretty cool, though because noise is just part of travel. How do you sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs)? Get ready for a story that you're just not expecting. 2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without earplugs) Let's assemble some speakers, shall we? Let's take a speaker, the size of your desk. Then let's add another speaker on top. Then just for good measure, let's add two more huge speakers on the other side and turn them on at full blast. Do you think you'd be able to sleep through the night? When we travelled through Sri Lanka, we ran into some exquisite hotels and villas However, nothing was quite as nice as Apa Villa. A huge mansion-like villa, it seemed to be surrounded by forest. Almost without fail, as you were seated for breakfast, you'd have wildlife of all sorts not more than 50 metres away. Monkeys, peacocks, monitor lizards and the occasional mongoose, they all were part of this jungle scenario. And in the middle of it was Apa Villa, in all its luxury—but mostly, quiet. Quiet that we luxuriated in. Then on the last day something happened that would shatter that quiet The place had been rented out for a big, noisy party that would start at 9 pm and go on until 7:30 am. And those speakers, that wall of speakers, was aimed right towards our room. And where there's a party, there are people drinking, talking and getting louder every minute. Except for the fact that we mostly slept through most of the noise. The secret is white noise The moment this concept is brought up, most people nod and smile. They know what white noise is all about. It's a sound created by say, the hum of an air conditioner. Or the sound of the sea. However, most people don't think of battling noise with more noise. Instead, what they tend to do is try and reach for earplugs. Which, if you're someone like me, is a pointless exercise. Not only am I a light sleeper, but I damaged my right ear, using cotton buds when I was younger. I can't sleep with anything in my ear as it just hurts. Enter the white noise app We turned it on loud, to the sound of rain. At first, it might seem too loud for your ears, but your brain soon adjusts to it. And in doing so it tunes out the rest of the noise almost completely. Think of it as being at a party. Someone across the room mentions your name and your attention is instantly focused on that person, instead of paying attention to the discussion right in front of you. White noise—and yes, there's an app for it—does exactly that function. It helps your brain focus on the rain—or whatever sound you prefer, and tunes out the rest. We slept through the party in Sri Lanka We slept through the noisy clatter of feet in Leiden, in the Netherlands. We even slept with a jackhammer going outside our hotel window in Goa, India. Few hotels in the world have true soundproofing And the more you travel, the more you realise how much you crave silence on your vacation. Well, there you have it. Battle noise with white noise and you'll have a restful sleep. In fact, don't just use it on vacation. You can even use it at home when your neighbour has decided to create his own wall of speakers to party through the night. 3: A travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys) Many people go on vacation from Point A to Point B. If that's the case, you don't need much help, do you? However, if your travel plans are a bit like ours, you're going to need a bit of help. And incredibly, that help is free in an app called TripIt. The app works like a really efficient secretary. As you book hotels, cars, and other elements on your vacation, you tend to get an e-mail with the confirmation. All you have to do is forward that e-mail to TripIt The moment you forward it, it will collate all the information from that e-mail and order it sequentially in the app. This means if you're headed to Auckland on Thursday, via Air New Zealand, then staying at an Airbnb, and picking up a car at 2 pm, the app will slot all of these activities in chronological sequence. All the details, booking numbers, directions—anything contained in the e-mail will all be put in neat little sections so that you can dig deeper into your reservations as well. If you've forgotten to book a room, TripIt pays attention As soon as you open the app, it nudges you with a paid link. You are likely to ignore the paid link, but it's enough of a red flag to get you book your accommodation for the night. If you choose to opt for their paid service (which isn't much at $45 or so, per year) you'll get a lot more features that all help the frequent traveller. If you're not a frequent traveller and just a complicated traveller like me, then the free version works just as well. But what about your privacy? Obviously all of this information is sitting somewhere in a server. Someone could get all of this information and use it for nefarious purposes. They know where you're going, what you're doing, etc. Isn't that dangerous? Yes, it's dangerous, but if someone really wants to track where you're going; if they're really motivated, there are many ways to get that information. The moment you start booking things online; or rather the moment you went online fifteen or twenty years ago, your privacy was private no more. There's always the option of keeping all the information in a printed format with your passport, but if you're into digital apps, this is the way to go. That's nifty trip no.3. Shall we go onto 4? 4: Why travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet). Travel agent? Isn't that a profession from the last century? That's what I thought until I ran into a travel agent at a party. We got talking and later when I got in touch with him, I realised that the Internet wasn't the friend I thought it was, after all. For years, Renuka and I have been booking our air tickets and hotels online. Imagine my surprise when I realised I'd been paying a lot more by going online. Granted, our trips can be extremely complex, but even so, I was shocked at how useful the travel agent happened to be. Not only was he able to save us money, but help us avoid a lot of needless arguments A single vacation can involve several hotels, connections etc. And if you're zigzagging, it's not easy to find connecting flights or even airlines that you prefer. These days, all I do is e-mail the travel agent, and a few hours later, with no work whatsoever, on my part, he shows up with all the flights I need. Just to make things easier, he knows we hate to catch early morning flights because it means you've got to wake up even earlier. Many of our flights take off around 11 am or noon, or even later, depending on where we're headed. In short, the travel agent's screen is entirely different from the one you have at home. Instead of burning through an entire evening trying to get the flights and hotels you want, an agent takes over all the hard work for you and gives you a quote. Agents know you have Google They know they can't randomly throw in high quotes. At first, we got some incredibly unintelligent agents, but in time we did run into one who understood our needs and was able to make the bookings quickly, effectively and at the prices that worked well for us. This agent also looks at my schedule and will make suggestions. For instance, he told us to avoid spending more than a couple of days in a city in Europe because the city was boring (it was). It's the little bits and pieces, the little suggestions that make a good travel agent worthwhile. Plus if you get stuck, things change, while the other passengers are lining up, a travel agent can quickly make changes for you. Walk into a travel agency today if you're planning a trip. You might be amazed at how much time and energy you save in the future. And at no extra cost either. And there we have it, our four nifty tips. 1: How to completely sidestep jet lag. You do it with No Jet Lag. Remember to set your alarms before you leave. 2: How to sleep soundly in extremely noisy environments (without ear plugs). Get a white noise app. Most of us would sleep soundly to the sound of falling rain. 3: TripIt is a travel app that sorts out your entire sequence (especially if you have a complex set of journeys). Every single part of your journey is mapped out in handy screen. No need to dig through a dozen e-mails. And you can often use the information on TripIt when checking in at airports. 4: Travel agents are invaluable (even though you can book everything on the Internet). You may never have considered a travel agent recently, but I am totally hooked. Our travel agent has saved us hours of needless searches, gotten us out of boring places, made bookings in places where everything is seemingly full and done it all without any extra charge. I don't know about you, but that's magical. That's pretty much it. Bon Voyage! Next Up: No one thinks running a small business is easy But even so, there are forces that pull you in all directions. These forces almost seem to tear at us as we go through our daily work. Find out the answer here: How do you cope with the forces of small business?

On this episode of Build Your Network, Host Travis Chappell interviews Sean D’Souza, founder of Psychotactics about energy and leveraging your past for the future of your business. Here’s what Travis and Sean discuss in this episode: About Sean D’Souza Sean started in India with limited internet accessibility. Read the book by Harvey McKai “Drinking… The post Build Your Network (http://www.buildyournetwork.co). For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy (https://www.acast.com/privacy)

In 1970, two psychologists did a very interesting experiment called the “The Good Samaritan experiment”. It was meant to determine whether we're kind other some conditions and oblivious at other times. What makes us kinder, more generous? Is there something that's been under our nose all along that we've been missing? Let's find out. You can read the transcript here: #167:The Incredible Power of Kindness (And Why It Has Nothing To Do With Business) ------------------- A few months ago, my brother in law's house was burgled. What do you say to someone when their house has been burgled? What do you say when you run into a friend, and you find she's lost her father? We live in a world that's filled with kindness, or else we wouldn't function on a day to day basis. However, as one writer wrote: We're only one generation away from anarchy. We're all born selfish. Kids hang on to their toys and bawl at the need to control the entire ice-cream stand. We have to be taught to be kind. And kindness comes in different forms It's not just about charity or letting the other driver cut into your lane on the motorway. In today's episode, we go all philosophical, simply because of a book I'd been reading (which I didn't complete, of course). It's a book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Sandberg and her husband, David were on vacation to Mexico. David was on the treadmill exercising when he collapsed and died alone. In her book, Option B, she recounts the horror that inhabited her brain at the time of the accident, and for months later. This episode isn't about business. It's about kindness and its many forms. Let's find out how we can be adults in a world of “kiddy tantrums”. And how we can be kind as children, in a world of jaded adulthood. Here are three things we'll cover. I promise it will change the way you look at kindness from now on. 1) Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead 2) Telling someone how they changed your life and being very specific 3) Slowing down, because kindness can be heavily dependent on how much you slow down. 1: Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead. In 2010, my father in law; Renuka's father, passed away. I don't remember much about the day. What I do remember was the act of our friend, Cher Reynolds. Somewhere after the funeral, Cher showed up to the house with muffins. “I baked these muffins”, she said. Cher then stayed a while and left. So why did the incident of the muffins stay in my head? I only realised it when I read Sheryl Sandberg's story. The difference between Cher and so many people is that Cher left out a question that so many people tend to ask in times of crisis. When there's a disaster, death or sudden misfortune, we feel helpless. And our helplessness shows because we all make a similar sort of statement. We say: If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know. On the face of it, such a statement is exceptionally kind. In effect, we're writing a sort of blank cheque. We're saying we'd go completely out of our way to help, no matter what the request. And yet in its kindness, the statement becomes a bit unkind. It's asking the person who's under enormous stress, to let you know what they need. The stress is so high that the person is often cut off from reality and can barely function. It's at this point that we misguidedly ask them to “think up a list of what they need”. Author Bruce Feiler writes, “that the offer while well-meaning, shifts the obligation to the aggrieved”. Cher didn't ask if she could bring muffins Instead, she took a decision, made the muffins, drove halfway across town and gave the muffins. In the book Option B, Sandberg talks about her colleague Dan Levy. Levy's son was sick and in hospital. That's when a friend texted Levy with a message that went like this: What do you NOT want on a burger? Levy could see how the friend has not dumped the obligation. “Instead of asking if I wanted food, he made the choice for me but gave me the dignity of feeling in control”. Another friend texted Levy saying she was available for a hug if he needed one. She added that she would be in the hospital lobby for a whole hour, whether he came downstairs or not. Kindness comes from specific acts, writes Sandberg “Some things in life can't be fixed. They can only be carried.” My brother-in-law and sister-in-law weren't the same people I'd met just a few days before the incident. They were shocked beyond belief that someone had violated their space. It's at times like these that we sip from our cup of helplessness and ask that question, “how can we help?” It's at this time that we have to step up and act. That's just the first act of kindness, however. There's more. Like letting someone know how they changed your life. And be specific about it. 2: Tell someone how they changed your life and be specific At the end of every Psychotactics course, we do something quite unconventional. We ask for feedback. What's so unconventional about that, you may ask? This act is unusual, because clients are expected to give about 1000 words of what went wrong, and suggestions on how to fix the course. Which means that if there are 35 clients on the course, we get a mind-boggling 30,000-35,000 words of feedback. And it was on one of these courses that I got feedback from a client named Gordon. Here's what Gordon wrote to me, separately in an e-mail. “Whenever I do an assignment incorrectly, you take a lot of effort to tell me what's wrong. You help me get back on track when I'm struggling. And I really appreciate that a lot. However, when I do an assignment, or part of an assignment well, you simply say, “That was good”. You get what Gordon is saying, right? He wants specifics both when he's going off the road, but also praise when he's done something correctly. And then for good measure, he wanted to know exactly which part he got right and why I thought it was so very good. In hindsight this request seems so very obvious, doesn't it? Look how quickly we snarl when the coffee's cold, but never stop to tell the barista when the coffee is perfect, and why we think it's so well done. Every day we get countless opportunities to get mad—and probably just as many where we can be exceptionally kind Being specific is the key because just a pat on the back, while helpful, is nowhere as good as telling the person why they earned it. Baristas, waitresses, the chef that you never see at the restaurant, they all count. Even the guy who is trying to get you to buy something at the doorstep counts. And within our own families, our kids, our friends, they all do little things for us, and we often forget to be specific. We forget to tell them how they changed our day, often our lives. I've learned a lot from my nieces, Marsha and Keira, for instance. Keira runs in like a typhoon every Friday, turning off all the switches where devices are not charging. I have to remember to tell her how she's changed my laziness with keeping switches on. Marsha has told me how she often doesn't force her opinion in a discussion, even when she knows she's right. And I've learned to be less pompous as a result. I think we can all be slightly more kind to the people we run into every day. No one is saying you need to be a saint, of course. We all need our moments of anger and frustration, but when we turn on our faucet of kindness, let's make sure we turn it all the way up and tell people how they make a difference to our lives. Which takes us to the final aspect of kindness Strangely, this has nothing to do with how we choose to act. Instead, it examines what causes us to stop and be kind. It's the odd phenomenon that's now known as the “Princeton Seminary Experiment”. But what was this experiment about? And how does it determine our ability to be kinder people? 3: Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent on an unusual factor If a traveller is assaulted on the road, who stops to help? If you've ever read or heard the story of the Good Samaritan, you'll be familiar with how a traveller is assaulted by thieves and left to die. A priest and a Levite pass the injured traveller but don't stop. The Samaritan stops to help the traveller, bandage his wounds and takes him to an inn, where he proceeds to pay for the care of the traveller. In the 1970s, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson decided to run a modern-day Samaritan test The students of the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Once they had reached a reasonable level of preparedness, they were expected to deliver a sermon on that very parable. However, in order to give that sermon, they need to get to a studio, in a building across the campus, where they were told they'd be evaluated by their supervisors. Bear in mind that all of the students were studying to be ordained priests. And every one of them had already been buried in their preparation of the story of the Good Samaritan. Both these scenarios would suggest that if they ran into a scene where someone needed help, this group of all people, would be more inclined to help than any other group. However there was a little monkey wrench thrown into the mix As the student prepared to go across to give his sermon, he was given one of three sets of instructions: “You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition. “The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition. “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition. The students—all the students—were then expected to walk by themselves to the studio In every case, the student would encounter a “victim” in a desert alley, just like the injured traveller in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The victim was a plant, but the seminarians didn't know that. All they could see was a slouched, destitute-looking person who desperately needed assistance. In such a scenario, and bearing in mind how they were influenced by the parable, how many seminarians would stop to help the “victim?” The research findings were startling Only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and a whopping 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations stopped to help the victim. The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behaviour, but being in a hurry decreased it.” Time, or the lack of time, that was an overwhelmingly important factor when it came to being kind To be kind, we all need time and energy. This isn't to suggest that someone with more time will be a kinder person, but when we're in a hurry, we are definitely more aggressive. Tunnel vision comes into play, and we fail to see how we can help others who are in need of our kindness. It's scary to realise that our lack of time could make us inadvertently selfish And the anguish that comes from the lack of time isn't new either. Way back in 1911, poet, Henry Davies wrote about how we lead a life of care, and we have no time to stand and stare. Over a century ago, time or the lack of it was still the problem. There's no easy way to solve this problem, of course. We have to hurry up, but there are moments when we can decelerate, so that we have time to be kind. Kindness isn't something we're necessarily born with. We learn kindness along the way. To get more kindness in our lives, we need to look at three core aspects. 1) Stop asking what we should do, but doing something instead. 2) Tell someone how they changed our lives, and be specific about how they did it. 3) Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent when we're not in a hurry. Epilogue The motto of 5000bc is “Be kind, be helpful or begone”. Kindness is a lot of work and I'm very grateful for everyone that pitches in. All of those who ask questions are being kind because you're helping others who are reluctant. Those who help out in the critique section or in the Taking Action forum, or in the Technology forum—you're all taking the time to be kind. The way you welcome a new member, that's an extreme act of kindness, because nothing is better than feeling safe in a new environment. And there are the Cave Guides who voluntarily step in to help new members navigate their way, plus the Cave Elves that step in to make sure all is well while we're away on vacation. Every one of you makes a big difference. Thank you for your kindness. Thanks very much. Next up: Why Happiness Eludes Us: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome

What causes clients to keep coming back? Is it information? Or could it be entertainment? For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun? And what if you had a ton of fun as well? Let's find out how to speed up client learning with some pretty minor tweaks in your e-books, courses, presentations and webinars. Click here to read the transcript on the website:  #166: How To Speed Up Client-Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment ===================== When my mother-in-law, Preta, was in her twenties, she was teaching at Sunday school. Like most Sunday schools, the kids were there to learn about the Bible. However, my mother-in-law decided to teach the girls how to sew tiny dresses for their dolls. Within weeks of her starting up, all the girls wanted to be part of her class. Ironically, this made the other Sunday school teachers jealous. They complained to the “higher authorities”, and Preta was called in to explain herself. “We've heard you're not teaching them about the Bible, and instead only involving them in play”, said the person in charge. “You can come in and test the knowledge of the kids,” retorted my mother-in-law, “and you'll find they know they're well-versed in their Bible studies”. You can clearly see the wisdom of play in this story, can't you? You can also see how people in charge resist it a lot, even though it's apparent that we all have a maddening streak of playfulness we can't seem to shake. That when learning something, we want the trainer to bring a sense of joy into our learning. Instead, most education is soulless, incredibly dull and it's not surprising that clients drop out. The problem is that we're pretty sure we're guilty of this callous training and teaching as well. But what if we were to make fun the core of our system? What if we postponed designing the information-based section and thought about the fun elements, instead? What if fun wasn't an afterthought but part of the entire structure of learning? How would we do things differently, if this were the case? In this series, let's look at:
In this series, let's look at: 1) How to create Infotainment 2) Why we need to understand the goal 3) How to place the fun elements in your training 1) How to create Infotainment If you were in charge of getting a kid to write, would you start with “slimy, oozy eyeballs?” Here is a story of Jen Jackson from Seattle. She'd started a small English tutoring business aimed at kids that were being homeschooled. One of her students was Michael, Michael clearly despised writing, despite being able to read well. His mother tried “everything”, but her methods weren't working, so she called Jen to help Michael write. Except for the fact, that Jen didn't make Michael write at all. The two of them read joke books, challenged each other to tongue twisters and did everything but write. The second meeting involved fun drawing games and drawing a monster. Still, no writing was included. It was only the third session where a Monster Cafe was created, apparently to accommodate Michael's monster. That's when Michael wrote out a short menu that included slimy, oozy eyeballs. In the sessions to follow, Michael went on to create many menus for different monsters. Today, Michael is not exactly prolific, but he willingly writes short paragraphs and is eager to keep improving. When we read this story, we can see how entertainment has led to information success, can't we? Yet, as an educator it somehow feels scary. Even if you embrace the power of entertainment as the doorway to learning, how are you supposed to implement it? If you did what Jen did, wouldn't Michael's parent look at you funnily, wondering if you were just wasting their time and money? What are you supposed to do when you're not dealing with kids, but adults instead—and in serious fields like marketing or finance? The core of entertainment is to take the pressure off, completely Let's say you wanted to learn Photoshop. If you've never looked at Photoshop before, that sounds a bit intimidating, doesn't it? So how do you make it fun? You look at the what causes people to freeze. Incredibly, it's the computer and Photoshop itself. When I'm showing clients how to use Photoshop for the first time, I usually take them to a cafe—without the computer. We sit down and work our way through some core shortcuts. If the client wants to learn to draw, what alternatives would they need? Wait, you're reading this, so you can easily play along. Let's say you want to get the brush tool. Which letter on your keyboard would you press? Yes, you're right, it's the letter B. What if you wanted to change the opacity of the brush to 30%? What number would you press? Some clients say 30, but of course, the answer is 3. What about 50%. Yes, it's 5. And 70%? I'm teasing. Of course, you know the answer. Let's move on to the brush size. If you wanted to increase the brush size and you had to choose between the left and right square bracket, which one would you choose? Most of us correctly select the right square bracket, which means that the left one will reduce the brush size. Imagine you're sipping a cup of coffee, there's no computer in sight, and you're told to create a theoretical drawing in Photoshop. You have to get to the brush, get the opacity to 90% and then reduce the brush size? Notice how much fun that whole exercise turned out? The first way of taking the pressure off a person or a group is merely to get them as far as you can from the activity. When you put yourself (and the student or client) in a different setting, the pressure is instantly off and a sense of play sets in. However, not everyone can waltz their way into a cafe or garden Some teaching needs to be done at the venue itself. What do you do, then? One of the best and most effective ways to get the pressure off is to get the clients to do something wrong. Let's take an example. Of the many workshops we've had over the years, one of the more intimidating ones is the uniqueness workshop. The fact that we were going to take three days to get to uniqueness didn't help. How do you take the pressure off? You get the uniqueness wrong, that's what you do. Within minutes of starting the workshop, I gave each client an advertisement for a local business. They all had the same ad, and they had to figure out the uniqueness of the company in under 10 minutes. However, before they started, I informed them, that all of them, no matter how hard they tried, would get the assignment wrong. Imagine you're in the room right at this very moment You can hear the hush, can't you? You have an assignment, but you're going to get it wrong. But that quiet lasts only for a few seconds. Everyone has a big smile on their face as they take on the assignment that they just can't get right. The pressure to get it all correct is gone, and they can have a jolly good time. They start the assignment, complete their version of it, and then they're all chattering away and having a great time. After which everyone is called upon to give their answers, and a logical explanation follows. They've been entertained as well as informed! Tah, dah, infotainment! Good teachers know the value of play. Good workshop trainers will take the pressure off as quickly as they can. Excellent writers and speakers will use the power of stories to get their audience smiling, long before the main guts of the information comes along. The more pressure you put on a student, client or audience, the more the brain goes into shut down mode. Which is why we have to release the tension. But more importantly, it's because you need to understand the real goal. But what's the purpose? Ah, that's easy. You want the client to want to go forward of their own accord. You want them to beg you to continue. They must enjoy themselves so much that what you're teaching them must feel like a bowl of warm, chocolate muffins. Understanding the goal is what makes the client—or student come back repeatedly. Let's find out how we can get this goal going, shall we? 2) Why we need to understand the goal “‘Better, faster, cheaper.’ That was NASA's mantra around the year 1999. And it was in this very year that the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed. On Nov 10, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million satellite was supposed to become the the first weather observer orbiting over another world. For the orbiter to do its job, it needed to get into a stable orbit around the red planet. But something had gone wrong. The software was required to control the Orbiter's thrusters, and it did so, using the system of measurement of “pounds”. However, a separate software was processing data in the metric unit—”newtons”. The two systems of measurement threw the entire mission entirely out of whack, and atmospheric friction likely tore the fragile satellite apart. From the outside, it might look like a doofus-plan: that sophisticated scientists didn't notice that the software was calculating in two completely different units. And just like that, the mission—the $125 million mission—was no more. When training clients, the burnout rate is consistently like the Mars Orbiter That's because we're using completely different systems of measurement in our teaching methods. The goal isn't necessarily to get the ideas or learning across. Yes, that's the final goal, but not the primary goal. The primary goal of any training system is to get the client back. Remember the story about Jen Jackson and how she tackled Michael's writing problem?
Remember how my mother-in-law got her students to get all excited about Sunday school? When you think about education in an objective sense, you may feel that it's your job to get the information across. But knowledge is tiring. It's frustrating. It's the wrong system of measurement. And it's most often what causes the client to burn up before the mission so much as gets underway. Instead, think of how you can get the client back using fun and a factor of entertainment. Entertainment doesn't just mean you're rolling out tacos and a Mariachi band
But then again, who says learning has to be all work, work and more work? In the headlines course, for example, we start off with an assignment that goes like this: Day 1: Introduce yourself Day 2: Watch three videos—and these videos are from the movie, Karate Kid Day 3: List five topics and many sub-topics

And what does their list look like? Ice Cream •   Cup •   Cone •   Scoops •   Buckets •   Sprinkles •   Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup •   Brown Cow •   Whipped cream By Day 5, clients are clearly having fun Mermaids, dinosaurs, deep sea aliens (yes, deep sea aliens exist, you know)—they all make a list. And everyone is having a blast. They're getting to know the members of their tiny group; they're coming up with all of these crazy topics and sub-topics. And it's a lot like what happens at our place every Friday. On Fridays, for the past four years, we've taken our niece Marsha to the food market The assignments could involve walking to the veggie section, weighing an object and writing down the weight. Or we might have to skip—no walking, just skipping—to the dairy section to find out how pricing works, and how Swedish rounding of prices works. In short, Marsha (and I) have been running, jumping and skipping through our learning exercise. She's learned about frozen, dried and fresh foods. She's learn about weights and measures, about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Then when we get home, we do spellings in the garden or walking around the car (yes, I get sneaky steps on my Fitbit when I do that activity). However, let's make this really boring. Let's hunch over a desk or dining table and you get the idea why most kids detest having to study. There's zero entertainment and a lot of screaming and do this, do that, involved, instead. So what would Marsha want to do the following week? And the week after? Doesn't take much imagination, does it? If our goal is to educate, to train, to impart knowledge, you and I are sure going about it the wrong way. A workshop doesn't need your audience to reverentially worship you as you show them slide after slide. At Psychotactics workshops, clients go for walks and do their assignments. They sit by the pool. We have games, we have soft toys like Jordan the otter, and of course, Elmo comes along wherever we go. At one workshop, two our clients, Jessica and Alia, who happened to be belly dancers, taught one part of the group to dance, and the other to clap along and create the mood. Would you want to go to another dull, reverential note-taking-workshop or come to a Psychotactics workshop, instead? If it sounds like too much fun, and no work, that's not the case at all Every course online, every workshop, every book you write needs to be result-oriented. If the client buys your product or service to get a result, a result needs to be the finale. But why does it have to be boring? The only reasons why any learning is boring is because the trainer doesn't realise that fun is possible, or they take the easy route and do what they've already done a million times before. To create a fun-based situation takes a lot of work on your part. It's not as if to suggest that a serious training session isn't a lot of work. It's just that you need to do so much more planning when fun is involved. Entertainment is great for the learner or the audience, but it's a hard grind for you to put into place. However, the results of information + entertainment are incredibly predictable Clients come back repeatedly. If you were to attend a Psychotactics workshop, you'd find close to 50% of the audience are back for a second, third, fourth helping. Clients travel long distances just to be at the workshop. And they sign up even before we have time to put up a sales page. For instance, if you take the Singapore Landing Page workshop, ¼ of the seats are already gone. With the Brussels workshop, ¾ of the seats were taken before we completed the sales page. A similar trend plays out when we're conducting courses online. There's the Article Writing Course—yes, the live course online—in July 2018 The seats would go on sale by early March. And before you know it, and often within 24 hours, that course is filled to the brim. If you look at a presentation, there are compelling videos, loads of cartoons, a touch of animation—all designed to give the audience respite, even though the presentation may be under 40 minutes long. And if you've read a book from Psychotactics, you know that once again there are cartoons, a recipe in the middle of the book and an epilogue at the end of the book telling you the process of how the book was made. What's the goal of education? To come back, that's what the goal should be, shouldn't it? Imagine you as a kid wanting to race to school every day, because, hey, school was so much fun. Imagine desperately wanting to continue a video series on a topic like Photoshop, because the presenter is so amusing. Now make no mistake. It's not about pure entertainment. You're there for the information as well, but why on Earth does the process of imparting information have to be so boring? “Better, faster, cheaper” That was the mantra, the chant that caused the Mars Polar Lander to fry just 23 days after the Mars Climate Orbiter. According to an article in Wired Magazine, vibrations in that craft’s legs may have convinced the craft’s on-board computer it had already landed when it was still 100 feet in the air.“The specific reasons [for that failure] were different, but the underlying parts, this overly ambitious appetite, were the same.” “NASA made some “big-time” changes after that,” said NASA engineer Richard Cook, who was project manager for Mars exploration projects. They got rid of several other missions, including one that involved bringing rocks back to Earth. NASA, it seems, reevaluated what they were doing, based on strategies and concepts that had stood the test of time. When teaching, what stands the test of time better than entertainment? Would you rather go back to a place that is boring, or one that is a fun-learning experience? Which one are you most eager to go back to, time and time again? Well, since we're on the same page, let's go to the third part. Now that we're pretty sure that fun is part of learning, let's move to the third part and find out just where we can put fun parts in the learning. 3) How to place fun elements in your training Rob Walling has an unusual video in the middle of his presentation that takes the audience by surprise. In May 2017, I spoke at the Double Your Freelancing conference in Sweden. Rob was one of the speakers, and his topic was about the topic of “how to launch a startup.” Rob's a pretty easy-going speaker, with well-thought-out slides and a gentle progression. Until midway, when the entire presentation seems to stop for an intermission of sorts. Walling decides to show the audience a video of how his son solves a problem progressively. It's a home video, nothing flashy, yet the audience laughs as they watch the story unfold. How did the video show up in Rob's presentation? It's the same question that could be asked when you attend a Psychotactics and go off scampering for a scavenger hunt. Right in the middle of the workshop, there's a peculiar assignment. The pre-assigned groups are given 30 minutes to go out and find a whole bunch of items, return and then upload the pictures to the blog. The next day each group makes a presentation; the best entry is chosen by popular vote, and there's a tiny little prize ceremony. You noticed the fun element in both the examples, didn't you? The question is: how did they get there? And the answer becomes pretty apparent even as the question is being asked. Someone has to put it there, because yes, it may show up quite by chance. However, in most cases, the creator of the product or service has to be proactive enough to put in the fun elements. Your product or service needs this break as well Why should it be? When I went to school, we had a short break of 15 minutes, then a lunch break of an hour. We'd race out of the class at break time, so we could get onto the playground. Was the play connected in any way to our biology or physics class? Of course not, but the fact that someone decided to have the short and long break enabled us to study and play on every given day. Your product or service needs this break as well The way to go about creating the entertainment factor is to sit down with the book you're about to write. If you could make it fun, more interesting, what would you do? If you're about to conduct a course online, what do the assignments look like? Is there any space for play? What about your workshops or seminars? Are the participants like prisoners listening to you drone on forever? Or is there some factor of entertainment and play? If you remember picking up a copy of the Reader's Digest, you have this example with “The Lighter Side of” and “Laughter the Best Medicine” in the middle of some pretty serious articles. Someone sat down and said: “Ooh, all of this stuff is intense. We need to lighten up”. Not everyone appreciates the entertainment, of course A scavenger hunt may not go down well with 100% of the participants. Cartoons in a marketing book sound a bit crazy, doesn't it? A door that creaks open on a website (it's going to be on our new website) may seem outlandish. And there are always going to be naysayers. However, by and large, those are the people who wanted to stay in and do their homework while we ran out during school breaks. If they're unhappy with the entertainment factor, don't go around chaining the rest of your group to ol' grumps. Instead, design the event, the book, the product or service with a bunch of fun elements. Look through other books or situations to find inspiration Esquire Magazine may have a joke section—just one joke told by a supermodel. Could you be that supermodel in your book? If you've got a video course, why do you have to be Ms.Serious or Mr.Let's-Get-To-The-End? Have a couple of videos that tell a joke, or show something funny around your neighbourhood. Maybe take a leaf from Rob Walling's book and put in a video about your kid's crazy jokes. The fun part doesn't always have to be disconnected. It can connect quite easily as well. In The Brain Audit, there are sections where there's a whole page of cartoons, and they connect quite precisely. There's also a total disconnect with a butter chicken recipe. Do what you please: connect or disconnect at will. • Crossword puzzles • Recipes • Funny home videos • Cartoons • Stories • Case studies These are just some ways to entertain your audience while educating them As this article demonstrates, entertainment isn't just a nice-to-have. Instead, it's a necessity. Sometimes it is the reason why people show up. Sometimes it's the reason why they stay and continue. And sometimes the entertainment may be right at the end, like when David Attenborough and his crew put in the “how we made this documentary” as an epilogue of their film. When you see an idea you like, make sure you borrow it and use it well. We've used ideas from video and used it our books. We've been to a Sting concert and used some of the concepts in our podcasts. You can get ideas from everywhere if you look out for them—and more importantly—implement them. My mother-in-law's Sunday school story didn't end well. She managed to get the kids interested, but jealousy worked against her. She was told to stop the fun bits and focus only on the serious religious teaching, instead. You, on the other hand, aren't going to be pulled up if you add entertainment to your work. However, you have to plan in advance. The entertainment isn't likely to just work its way into your syllabus. Sit down, create the entertainment. Start small and build from there. Work is fun. But play is just as educational, if not more so. Next Up: The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly  

How do you get clients to return? One of the most underrated tactics is often right under your nose. Yet most people having events don't realise the mistake they're making and have to work a lot harder to get clients to come back. In this episode we look at what every business should do: not just get a client but get the client to come back repeatedly. Read online: How to Get Clients To Return To An Offline Event ============ If you head down to the South Island of New Zealand, you'll run into a little French town called Akaroa. The story goes all the way back to 1838 when the commander of the French whaling ship Cachalot what can only be called a slightly questionable purchase of the land around the area. Then, the French colonists left France to sail to New Zealand to establish a French colony. The French did get to Akaroa but found a treaty had been signed between the Māori and the British. The whole of New Zealand was officially a British colony. As the story goes, the French were just a wee bit late. The French seemingly missed out on yet another colony, and we can feel the impact of being late when it comes to testimonial-gathering as well. But why testimonials? Because testimonials are the lifeblood of any organisation, product or service. The more testimonials you have in place, the more the prospective client can experience your product or service, long before they pay for it. Which is why books have testimonials on their dust jackets, and websites have testimonials on every single product or service. But back to the concept of lateness If you wait long enough, the client is unlikely to give you a testimonial, simply because they've gotten too busy. It's also harder for the client to gush as much once they've moved on. 2) How and when to get testimonials Getting a testimonial for an event is almost as important as the event itself. For one, when a client gives a testimonial, they're ratifying they made the right decision to attend the event. However, it gives you, the person holding the event, a chance to make sure you never have to struggle to fill in seats in future. Which is why you should get testimonials during the breaks If you don't have breaks in your event, there's no way to stop the juggernaut from rolling on. At Psychotactics we have workshops, and for information-based events, it's critical to have many breaks or clients simply get more tired. If you're having an event like a cooking class or a watercolour class, something that's not usually break-oriented, it's easy to forget that every event could do with a break of some sort. People need to get to the toilet; they need just to step outside or reduce the intensity of what's happening. Most trainers or people hosting events fail to pay attention to the concept of breaks, merely because they think it will stop the flow of the event. What you'll quickly realise is that people regroup speedily and focus better after a short break. It gives you some downtime as the organiser, and it leaves some room should something go wrong during the event. If you simply go from one end to the other, you're not really planning for any chaos, and as we know, that's a hazardous strategy. Chaos can erupt from nowhere, and it's best to prepare for it in advance, by having at least one, if not several breaks. It's in this break that you're going to be able to get your testimonial Usually a client will be having a great time and will come and tell you so. It will quickly be evident as to who's having the most fun, and you can usually go up to them and ask if you can shoot a quick video. Be prepared to know in advance where you can shoot the video, ideally some places that are slightly quieter and away from the scene of action. I tend to use another room or another area close enough, but far away from the group. Ideally get 2-3 people to give testimonials, and in about 10 minutes, you can get about three quick testimonials that can be used in a video, audio, or when transcribed, in text format. Be sure to use the six-questions found in The Brain Audit The Brain Audit gives you typical questions to ask a client, and when you use the format of the six-questions, you get a client experience instead of yet another sugar-coated testimonial. It also gives you a clear pathway to follow when asking the testimonial. You rarely have time as you have to get back to the event itself. Even so, you may well run out of time, and it's good to schedule testimonials for the breaks, but also for a short time after the event. Despite all your best intentions, sometimes it's not possible to get the testimonials, or all the testimonials during the event. Even if that's the case, ask people if you can call them on Skype video and get a testimonial. Most people will agree, and that serves as a form of an appointment, and you've more or less got your testimonial in the bag. Waiting for a testimonial after the event can often be too late Once people leave, or if they don't make a commitment to speak later, the task of getting a testimonial gets increasingly harder as the days go by. You're eager to recover after your event, and they're keen to go back to their lives. This means you've lost the one thing that's incredibly important to business: third party proof. Getting a testimonial needs to be almost as important as conducting the event itself. At Psychotactics we've goofed not once or twice, but often It's quite tiring getting an event off the ground. You're never quite sure whether clients are quite ready for the testimonial. And notice that break? That break should give you a breather as well, but you're often using it to get testimonials. However, we've had to learn to structure our testimonial system in a way that we get a bit of a break and get our testimonials too. There are times when it's all too much to do on the day itself. For instance, we hosted some really popular meetups that were three hours long but went on for six and seven hours. It was difficult to break away from the fun and chatter to record a testimonial. It does feel a lot like work, and it takes an iron resolve to keep working when everyone is having a great time. If it's really so hard to break away, simply ask the group to write each of their names on a piece of paper and give it to you. Later, you know who's keen to provide you with the testimonial, and you can call in or video chat and get your testimonial. Testimonials are how clients decide, so getting them early is critical to your business. But there's one more thing to cover, isn't there? It's about getting the clients back. How do you do that? Let's find out. 3) How to get clients to come back. If you were to get a dolphin to do a trick in the pool, would the size of the reward matter? In the wonderful book, “Don't Shoot the Dog”, author, Karen Pryor talks about how a dolphin would learn and execute a trick. However, the trainer decided to give the dolphin a smaller fish as a reward. You'd think the dolphin wouldn't bother too much, considering a fish is a fish, is a fish. However, dolphins do care about the specifics too, just like humans. Which is why if you get a client to come to your event once, you're going to have to figure out how to get them to keep coming back. You've probably heard that getting a new client is the most expensive part of a business, right? Even if you don't spend any money on advertising or publicity, getting a client to trust you and attend your first event is a huge task. And your mission should be to get the client to come back repeatedly, if possible. When a client trusts you, they're likely to sign up at higher prices, and without needing you to create a long sales page and endless promotional messages. Which brings us back to the fish, doesn't it? Why do clients tend to come to one event and never return? There are many reasons why clients may not return, but one of the most significant responsibility lies with you One of the biggest reasons why clients come to information based events is, ironically, not to get information. We may believe they come to get more knowledge, but YouTube is full of information. So is Google, Bing and their inbox. The reason they're coming to you is to get less confusion and more skill. Strangely, the information you're imparting can only be less confusing if you just what's required. When we started out with Psychotactics, we had no idea how to get the client back to an event We got lucky because we sat down and did some planning in advance. At the very first event, where I presented early concepts found in The Brain Audit, I had an ending section where I talked about follow up sessions. For $75 a month, clients could be part of a group that learned different concepts just like The Brain Audit. We'd didn't have the money to book a venue, so we asked for help, and people offered their offices since no one was around after 6 pm anyway. But why did clients sign up for the follow-up sessions? It's because they got their reward, their right-sized fish, the first time they showed up. That presentation, as amateur as it may have been, got them to a result and they were keen to come back. If you're hosting an event, clients are eager to get a similar sort of reward } If you're teaching them how to do a pose in yoga, please don't spend the evening showing them ten thousand poses. Show them one or two and get them to a result. If you have a cooking class, don't run around like a headless chicken trying to get five-six dishes going. A single dish, maybe two will do the job. Clients are increasingly going nuts with the level of information that's streaming through their doors. What they're looking for isn't a bucketload of fish. They just want one—provided it's the right size. When we did our first event, we didn't expect anyone to sign up for future events All the same, we put our strategy together and were pleasantly surprised when about ten people signed up and consistently showed up over the year to follow. Some of those clients then attended higher priced workshops and even ended up consulting with us. All of this information is very important for those of us who've grown up believing that everything can be done online. The internet is a great tool to market our business, but just starting up a blog and hoping people will visit is a strategy that may get you quickly disappointed. The core of today's world is a factor of overwhelm, but also a sense of loneliness. Which is why an offline workshop or event should deliver not just a factor of skill, but also the chance to meet others on a similar journey. So what do you do from this point on? The first thing you need to do is to work out how you can get the client the reward he/she is seeking. If they come to an event that promises they'll learn to make mozzarella, then all of them should be walking out with that mozzarella-making skill. Once you have them at the event, and possibly get a few testimonials, you need to do them the courtesy of asking them to come back repeatedly. Even if you're hosting an event in a different country, there's a high likelihood that clients will come back to future events. Over 50% of the attendees at any event, have met with us before or been through our courses or events. We invite them back to another event, and they come along happily because they enjoy the experience. If you're going to do an event, plan for six, or ten This is true especially if your audience is local. The key is to prepare, go into the event, give the participants a skill and call them back. That's the way to go about making sure your events are full in future. Three things to consider: 1) Where you'll get your clients 2) How and when to get testimonials 3) How to get them to come back. Now go out there and host your event and give your computer a break . Next Up: Imagine being a hostage at your own workshop! Imagine not having access to your own venue; having to take permission from someone else just to conduct your event. This is the crazy story of the very first Psychotactics U.S. Workshop. And while it's an entertaining story all by itself, there's a lot to learn as well for any small business owner. Click here to read more: The Psychotactics Story_The Craziness of The Very First US Workshop

In today's episode, we're excited to share our chat with Sean D'Souza. You may know Sean from his business Psychotactics and or his podcast, the Three Month Vacation. His specialty is understanding how customers think and our interview focused on storytelling. More specifically, how us copywriters can use stories to boost the effectiveness of our copywriting.   Tune in to learn: How Sean went from cartoonist to author Essential elements of a good story How copywriters can integrate storytelling into everyday copywriting projects Types of stories to be avoided What signature stories are and why you should use them And from you we'd love to know, what is your morning routine? Tell us on Twitter or our Facebook page.   Tell us what you think  Leave your thoughts and ideas on the Hot Copy website. And tell us if you prefer to write or type! And subscribe on: iTunes | Android | RSS  Share the pod love! If you like what you're hearing on Hot Copy, the best way to support the show is to take just a few seconds to leave a rating and / or comment over on iTunes or Stitcher. Thanks! Oh and big hugs to Caroline for her review on Stitcher. Links mentioned in this article: Psychotactics website Storytelling mini-series (Psychotactics) Three month-vacation podcast The 17 Question Testimonial: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response Psychotactics on Facebook Sean on Twitter Good to Great: Jim Collins Cliff-jumping goslings (BBC)

Sean D'Souza is the author of the Brain Audit, a cartoonist, marketing strategist, and brilliant entrepreneur. He has a degree in accountancy and started working with one of the best advertising agencies in the world, which guided him into the world of copywriting, writing TV commercials, graphic design, cartoons and web design. He is now the owner of PsychoTactics, where he writes about marketing strategies, offers business and marketing strategy workshops, as well as personally advising at 5000BC, his highly sought after membership community. In his spare time, he is the host of The Three Month Vacation podcast.

In this special edition, Brad interviews Sean D'Souza, marketing expert/strategist and founder of PyschoTactics. Brad and Sean discuss how customers think and why they buy and why they don't. Why do customers back away at the very last minute? They go on to talk about why a prospective parent would ‘buy' a school and how they reach a decision. This week's links: Psychotactics.com http://www.psychotactics.com/ Why clients buy and why they don't http://www.psychotactics.com/xbrain

In this episode I'm joined by Kavit Haria from London. Kavit is a specialist at helping people set up automated businesses on the web that hit $100,000 by the end of their 1st year. Like others that we've interviewed, such as Jesse Krieger of Lifestyle Entrepreneur and Sean D'Souza of Psychotactics, Kavit started out as an entrepreneur […]

Getting Past the Myths and Traps of Talent At 5 years old, nearly everyone is an artist. At 10, nearly none of us is. What happened? And how can we become more talented at the things that interest us, so we can have richer, more successful lives? Entrepreneur and business teacher Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics... Listen to episode