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December 2016

Announcement: How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

📅 December 31, 2016 | View in Gmail

How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

Have you ever wondered the reason for taking a photo?

Yes, it’s meant to record a memory, but one photographer explained it to me in this way.

“If it’s a food photo, it’s supposed to make you hungry.”
“If it’s a photo of a place, it’s supposed to make you want to feel like packing your bags right away”.
“If it’s even a photo of an every day object, you need to stop and stare at it as you’ve never done before.”

So what is it that makes the average photo amazingly evocative?

I own three cameras. One is a fancy Nikon with all the big lenses. The second is a mirrorless Fujifilm which takes amazing low light pictures. But over 95% of my pictures are taken with the iPhone and an app called Camera+.

In this book, I show you just a few steps that take your photos from “point and shoot” to pretty stunning.

The goal is simple.

You’ll be taking some stunning photos.

But don’t take my word for it. For just $9.99, you can find out what you need to do to make your photos come alive. As always, there’s a “smiley money back guarantee” if you’re not satisfied.

Introductory Offer: 5 Minute iPhone Magic with Camera + If you want to take some great holiday pictures—and pictures in the future, click below.

5 Minute iPhone Magic with Camera + https://www.psychotactics.com/products/iphone-photo-magic/

Regards, Sean P.S. You will need an iPhone and an app called Camera+ (It costs $2.99 in the app store).

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

📅 December 27, 2016 | View in Gmail

Announcing: How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

Have you ever wondered the reason for taking a photo?

Yes, it’s meant to record a memory, but one photographer explained it to me in this way.

“If it’s a food photo, it’s supposed to make you hungry.”
“If it’s a photo of a place, it’s supposed to make you want to feel like packing your bags right away”.
“If it’s even a photo of an every day object, you need to stop and stare at it as you’ve never done before.”

So what is it that makes the average photo amazingly evocative?

In this book, I show you just a few steps that take your photos from “point and shoot” to pretty stunning.

The goal is simple.

You’ll be taking some stunning photos.

Introductory Offer: 5 Minute iPhone Magic with Camera + If you want to take some great holiday pictures—and pictures in the future, click below. 5 Minute iPhone Magic with Camera + [ https://www.psychotactics.com/products/iphone-photo-magic/ ]

Regards, Sean P.S. You will need an iPhone and an app called Camera+ (It costs $2.99 in the app store).

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zCwsTIxMLGw=

How To Get Stunning Names For Your Information Products and Courses

📅 December 24, 2016 | View in Gmail

Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare. What if you’re wrong? What if the name isn’t well received?

Is there a way to make your book really stand out? Find out why we’ve been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done.

You will learn Part 1: Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. Part 2: The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out. Part 3: How to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles.

You can read or listen to the episode. Yes, there are transcripts too. (Look for episode 119) #119: How To Get Stunning Names For Your Information Products and Courses iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read [ https://www.psychotactics.com/names-information-products/ ] |

Binge listening Time Here are the two most listened to podcasts from 2016. Yes, there are transcripts too.

#110: How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 110) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read [ https://www.psychotactics.com/job-to-enrepreneur/ ] |

#113c: How To Create A Superpower That Instantly Attracts Clients

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 113) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] |

Warm regards, Sean P.S. I really would love if you would tell your friends about the podcast.

Some of our best clients come from people just like you—those who tell their friends about us. That’s why it would be really cool if you could tell a friend about—The Three Month Vacation Podcast. Here is a simple link http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/ And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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How To Predict If Your Business Is Going To Succeed: The Polaroid Moment

📅 December 20, 2016 | View in Gmail

How to Predict if Your Business is Going to Succeed: The Polaroid Moment

(From the archives: One of the most read articles of 2016. To read this article online click on the cartoon) [ https://www.psychotactics.com/polaroid-moment/ ]

In 1947, inventor, Edwin Land had a “tiny” issue on his hand

Land and his daughter were enjoying their day out, and Land was busy snapping pictures of his daughter. But she’s wasn’t impressed. She wanted Land to show her the pictures he’d been taking with his camera. She wanted to see the images “right now”—and this got Land thinking. What if he could create a camera that would somehow take—and print the picture in a matter of minutes?

200 transistors, dozens of moving mirrors, light sensors, gears and solenoids later, and we had the Polaroid camera—the most amazing camera in the world.

But what made the camera so amazing?

The amazing part of the camera is that it got “instant results”

But if you stop for a moment and think about Polaroid, you notice that a Polaroid didn’t take the best pictures; it was restricted in terms of size and format; it didn’t even give you the chance to print copies.

And yet, it created an instant solution for the client. For the client, the Polaroid moment is what really matters. And what’s the opposite of the Polaroid moment? Let me digress a bit and tell you about my curry leaf plants.

I had a problem with the curry leaf plants in my backyard

The term “curry” isn’t another word for “Indian food”. When you order a curry, it means you’re getting “gravy” (A chicken curry is chicken with gravy). Now, curry leaf plants have nothing to do with gravy, but they do provide an amazing aroma and flavour to Indian cooking.

However, curry leaf plants are particularly finicky.

They’re summer-loving and don’t take kindly to the cold and frost. Which is why we weren’t terribly surprised when the plants pretty much slept through autumn, winter and spring. Then along came summer, followed by the next summer. Five summers later and the plants—both of them were going nowhere in the hurry.

“Cut off all the leaves, except the ones right on top,” my father advised me when I complained about the dormant plants. To me my father’s comment seemed like really bad advice—because the plant wasn’t doing very well anyway. The only reason I took his advice was because I had nothing to lose. Imagine my surprise when the tree started sprouting twice the number of leaves.

The moment my father told me to cut the leaves, he became a Polaroid zen master in my eyes. Within days, I started to see results when five years had provided absolutely nothing but frustration.

Your clients aren’t super-impressed with more services and more information

What they want to see are results—they want what Edwin Land’s daughter wanted—instant or at least, quick results. Instead we pummel our clients with more information. The more information they have, the more confused they get. And it’s this “information avalanche” which keeps them away from the finish line. Imagine if we could design products and services that incorporated the Polaroid Moment, instead.

Let’s take a few examples, shall we? If you’re selling a product like an e-book or course, the Polaroid moment becomes relatively easier. For instance, a client gets to the Psychotactics website, subscribes and gets the Headline Report. 10 minutes later that very client is able to write headlines in three different ways—and know which headline works and which doesn’t.

A similar situation unfolds when that client reads The Brain Audit. By the time they read the first three pages of the book, they are suddenly seeing why their marketing doesn’t well as well as it should—and how to fix their communication. In fact, every section of the book keeps hitting you with Polaroid moments—not necessarily more information.

But how do you solve this problem if you’re in a service like sofas, for example?

Avoid trying to solve the entire “fix your garden” problem or “improve your marketing” problem. Instead, focus on a tiny subset. When selling sofas or something big and difficult to comprehend, you bring it down to a subset. Can you eliminate most of the information and focus on a tiny subset?

Can we stop focusing on the sofa and focus on just the foam instead? Teach me how to pick a good sofa just based on the foam. That gets me interested as a client, and once that problem is solved, I’m more keen than ever to buy the sofa.

And yet, just creating a Polaroid-like product isn’t enough to generate revenue You still have to do the marketing. You still have to promote it, deal with clients, etc. You still have to have something that clients are going to buy on a consistent basis. If you build it, they will come, but only if you do all the work that’s needed and then continue to what’s required to keep sales going.

Even Polaroid, with all its magic needed to chop and change to avert the bankruptcy in 2001. But this piece isn’t so much about how you promote or sustain your success. Instead, it’s about how to predict if whatever you’re about to do is going to have some positive impact to your business.

To make sure you’re on the right track to economic success, ask yourself a few questions.

Ask yourself whether you’re offering too much. Ask yourself if you have far too many features. Ask yourself the question that Edwin Land’s daughter asked him all those years ago: Can we see it right now? Can we?

P.S. What’s the state of the curry plant? It’s doing very well, thank you. Both the plants have gone from their puny state to a medium sized plant.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Chaos Planning Forget business planning and goal setting. Learn how to thrive and succeed in the midst of chaos. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/ ]

DartBoard Pricing How to systematically increase prices without losing customers. Don’t discount your products or services out of existence, read Dartboard Pricing! [ https://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies How Kicking Angels Help You Grow Your Business (Look for episode 112) iTunes [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] | Android [ http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/sean-dsouza/seanpsychotacticscom?refid=stpr ]| Read and Listen [ https://www.psychotactics.com/grow-your-business/ ] |

Report: How To Win The Resistance Game [ https://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/ ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)”

[ http://psychotactics.com/ ] Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

Important: You are subscribed to the Free Psychotactics Newsletter. If you un-subscribe from this letter, you won’t receive any goodies, offers, or newsletters in future. If you’re getting duplicate newsletters, email us and we’ll make sure you get just one copy. Email renuka@psychotactics.com

Privacy and Spam Policy

I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back)

📅 December 17, 2016 | View in Gmail

Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back)

Why do others seem more talented than we are?

Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else.

Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light.

In this episode on talent, you’ll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before).

Join me on this talent journey to learn about

Part 1: Our battle with talented people.
Part 2: Is talent a reduction of errors?
Part 3: What has “Austin’s Butterfly” got to do with talent.

You can read or listen to the episode. Yes, there are transcripts too. (Look for episode 118a) #118a: Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read [ https://www.psychotactics.com/rapid-talent/ ] |

And here are the top podcasts from November for you to binge-listen to:

#117: Three Ways To Instantly Get Your Readers Attention Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 117) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read [ https://www.psychotactics.com/instant-client-attention/ ] |

#116: How To Get $2500 Worth of Goodies (Absolutely Free)

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 116) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ https://www.psychotactics.com/business-structure/ ] |

Warm regards, Sean P.S. I really would love if you would tell your friends about the podcast.

Here is a simple link http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/ [ http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/ ]And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

📅 December 13, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/envy-stay-motivated/ ]

No one I know is free of envy

We all, at some level, are envious of others and even more so in our field of endeavour.

If you were to look at my inbox every morning, you’ll notice about 60-70 e-mails. Then as the day progresses, another 60-70 will stream in. And yet not one of the e-mails is from some one in the same profession as mine.

As you probably know, I’m in the marketing profession

If you want to put a weird tag on me, you could call me an internet marketer. So why don’t I have any marketing-based e-mails in my inbox? It’s not like I don’t want to learn about marketing. It’s not that I don’t want to read what others in my field are up to.

Instead it’s a lot simpler. The e-mails depress me, sometimes.

And I’m using the word, depression, but hey, I’m never depressed. I’m grumbly, upset, maybe even a bit paranoid, but not depressed.

However, I do feel this wave of frustration that takes my day down a few notches. I don’t feel happy and light hearted. And I figured it wasn’t depression after all.

It was envy.

This is my story about how I deal with envy

And I kinda know it’s your story too. I think very few of us are free of this problem of envy. We look around us and we see people doing things that we aren’t doing. We see them earning a lot more, and seemingly with a lot less effort.

And then there are those like me, who come along and talk about taking three months off. And I know that there are others who are working their tails off and there’s this joker who’s talking about the luxury of not just a vacation—but three whole months in a year.

How is it that we can have endless bounty and still feel envy? And how do we deal with such a situation?

Is Envy Good or Bad?

On the chilly night of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman approached John Lennon outside the Dakota Apartments in New York. Chapman opened fire at Lennon with a .38 calibre pistol. He fired five shots in quick succession.

The first shot missed Lennon, passing over Lennon’s head and hitting a window of the Dakota building. Two of the next bullets struck Lennon in the left side of his back, and the other two penetrated his left shoulder. By 11 pm that night, John Lennon was dead.

But what was going through Paul McCartney’s mind as he heard the news? These are Paul’s exact words related to Esquire magazine 35 years later. “When John got shot, aside from the pure horror, the lingering thing was, ‘Well, now John’s a martyr. A JFK’. I started to get frustrated because people started to say, “Well, he was the Beatles”. And me, George and Ringo would go, ‘Er, hand on. It’s only a year ago we were all equal-ish.

Paul McCartney, now Sir Paul McCartney was horrified. And envious.

Back in the 1500s, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was going through the same pangs of envy

Michelangelo was no ordinary man, no ordinary painter. He was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime.

This is the artist who created the statue of David, the Pietà, the Last Judgement, the statue of Moses and no less than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino (“the divine one”). And yet he was openly envious of another older contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci.

So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad?

In the August 2015 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky gives us an insight into envy. Smith who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors.

The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina’s beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us.

Even though we’re both writers, I’m unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying “potter against potter.” When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place.

So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad?

The closer we get to someone’s capability, the less we seem to admire them. Instead, what might pop up is an intense state of envy. I remember being in school, and there was a friend of mine whose father travelled by Swissair.

Back when I was in school, travelling locally by plane was quite the luxury but a trip overseas was almost out of the question. I remember being upset with the little Swissair booklets my friend brought to school.

It wasn’t even like this kid was taking those flights. He just had a few hand me downs from the flight itself, and yet there was this factor of envy that swept through me everytime I saw those booklets.

Envy it seems, is mostly bad for you

Admiration is good. Envy is, for the most part, complex and bad. Plus, it’s painful. Which is why my inbox has almost no e-mails from people who are marketers like me. I do read some e-mails, but just a few. I put in long days and I enjoy my work tremendously, yet it’s hard to watch an e-mail pop in about how someone just achieved some goal that you’ve been aspiring for.

Make no mistake. At Psychotactics. we’ve been very successful over the years, and we’ve lived a life that seems unimaginable. And yet, the admiration slips away over time and I feel the weight of envy.

It’s hard to admit it too But eventually if you were pumped with a truth serum, you’d admit it too. You, I, we’re all envious about others. Some to a large extent, some to a smaller extent. And no matter how fabulously wealthy or well know we are. No matter how far we’ve come in our lives, we still have to deal with that envy.

So how do you deal with envy?

I remember the year 2000. I’d just arrived in Auckland, New Zealand from India.

I’d never been to New Zealand before And now I was planning to spend the rest of my life on these islands in the Pacific. If someone showed up at the airport, took me to their home, got me a phone, and rented a house for me—well, that would have been beyond my wildest dreams. And that’s what happened.

In Episode #50 [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] of The Three Month Vacation podcast, I talk about our move to New Zealand. And how fellow-cartoonist, Wayne Logue, who I’d only met online, did all of the above for me, and more.

To have such a start when moving to a new country was beyond my wildest imagination

And yet, let’s up the ante a bit. Let’s say someone else showed up at the airport. That person then said that in fewer than two years, I’d be in marketing, not cartooning.

Then that person went on to outline how my life would unfold. And going forward 15 years, that I’d have a membership site, clients, the ability to go where I wanted, when I wanted. What would I make of such a bizarrely rosy prediction the future? I’d think it was wonderful, wouldn’t I?

To understand just how much I have, I have to use the time machine

I get on board and take myself back to Auckland airport. I go to that point when I first got to New Zealand and that kills all kind of envy on the spot.

No matter how many waves of envy surge at me, I realise that I could never have envisioned the life I have now. And this is true for a lot of us today. Most of us have lost some hair, gone rounder at the edges, and possibly have a slightly rough life. Yet, almost none of us would swap our lives for yesteryear.

We can’t really stop ourselves from getting envious We look at the neighbours and they have a new car. We look at our friends and they are posting photos of themselves in Tahiti.

And it’s probably worst of all in the professional sphere, because we believe we work harder and better than most of our peers. Which brings in that okinami—a rogue wave—of envy.

Envy can’t be avoided

But the time machine trick works. It really works. Go back to the time when you were younger, and for most of us, it represents a time when life was different. And yet, we like the lives we now lead.

We like the gadgets we use today. Our families have grown around us and there are a thousand memories that would vanish in a flash if we went back in time.

I don’t know about you, but this is my trick for envy

I go back to my time machine. My time machine has one dial and it’s set to the year 2000. Just the thought of going back in time brings back pleasant memories. And yet, today is the world I want to live in. In a flash my envy is gone.

But I still have one more mountain to climb. I may not be envious, but I need to stay motivated—and happy. How do I pull that bunny out of the hat?

How to stay motivated—and be happy instead

I don’t know if you’ve ever fed seagulls at the beach.

On a sunny day as you head to the beach with your fish and chips, the seagulls are waiting. As you throw out a chip, there’s a mighty scramble, but notice who almost never gets the chip.

Yes, it’s the so-called “leader” of the flock. You know the one I’m talking about. This male (and it’s most certainly a male) spends his time chasing away all the rest of the seagulls.

You throw one chip. You throw another. You throw a third. But the leader never seems to get a chip.

So which of the birds get the chips?

The ones that are focused on the chips, not on each other. And this is really the secret of the how stay motivated. When we look around at each other, we’re too focused on the others, and not the chip.

And the chip for most of us is our work. It’s the one thing that brings us the greatest satisfaction in our lives. Whether we run a restaurant, sell strawberry cream, write books or dance for a living, it’s our work that brings us a deep sense of satisfaction. And yet we make a lot of mistakes along the way.

I’ve made a lot of strategic mistakes in my life

We were on the internet way back in 1997, and while I did catch on to the e-book phenomenon, I missed out on blogs.

I missed out on YouTube as well, I started the podcast before it was immensely popular and then gave up in 2009, just at the point when it started to take off. And so, as I looked on, others took my spot. Yes, my spot!

The way out of that seagull scrap is to look at your own work

At first your work may not seem a lot different from your competition. However, over time you’ll find your own space, your own plum projects. And you’ll get yourself a group of people that love your work. The envy won’t go away, but you’ll stay focused on your chip. And that will keep you motivated.

And that is the real secret of how to sidestep the envy and be happy instead The envy won’t ever go away. You’ll always be jostling for space in a scrappy flock of gulls. But you’ll know when you get the chip. And you can fly off with your chip, happy as a gull on a sunny day.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

When I first considered purchasing “The Secret Life Of Testimonials,” I was very hesitant. I had already read “The Brain Audit” and wasn’t entirely convinced that there was much more that I could learn in the $45.95 book.

More so than the investment in the book, I was cautious about my time: I didn’t want to spend 2, 3, or 5+ hours reviewing the material only to find that it wouldn’t help me or my business.

After purchasing The Secret Life of Testimonials, I felt confident enough to record 6+ hours of video testimonials with 15 different participants across 6 different product lines. I’m confident that because I read “The Secret Life Of Testimonials” and applied the lessons to the testimonial interviews, I added $XXX,XXX of future revenue to the business. Kai Davis, USA Judge for yourself: Testimonial Secrets [ https://www.psychotactics.com/products/secret-life-of-testimonials-simple-powerful-techniques-to-get-better-clients-and-sales/ ]

Chaos Planning Forget Business Planning and Goal Setting. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/ ]

DartBoard Pricing How to systematically increase prices without losing customers [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies 3 Ways To Instantly Get Your Readers Attention-The First Fifty Words (Look for episode 117) iTunes [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] | Android [ http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/sean-dsouza/seanpsychotacticscom?refid=stpr ]| Read and Listen [ https://www.psychotactics.com/instant-client-attention/ ]|

Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://psychotactics.com/ ]Report: How To Win The Resistance Game [ https://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/ ]

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

Privacy and Spam Policy

I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Bookings Open: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention (In Under 30 Seconds): First 50 Words Online Course

📅 December 10, 2016 | View in Gmail

Announcing: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention—First Fifty Words online course registration.

The details Registrations open: 3 pm Eastern (US) In this course you will master the ability to start your message with impact. Impact that strikes your clients between the eyes in a matter of seconds.

The link. (Remember to refresh your page to see the payment button) https://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/

Warm regards, Sean P.S. If you’re writing articles on a regular basis, this method of consistently being able to start well, is invaluable. If you’re doing a podcast, presentation, webinar or just about any kind of communication, those First Fifty Words are the most important and the most time consuming.

P.P.S. There are limited seats (only 5 seats left). If you’re keen, make sure you go to: https://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Write 4000 Word Articles Without Getting Exhausted

📅 December 06, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Write 4000 Word Articles Without Getting Exhausted

(This is a long article to read or listen to it online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/write-articles-howto/ ]

When I was growing up in Mumbai, India, I thought pizza was sweet.

No one I knew had ever eaten a pizza and all the references to pizza were from Archie Comics. Archie—and especially Jughead—always seemed to be eating a pizza. And for some reason, I associated pizza as a sort of candy, or sweet dish.

Imagine my surprise when I ate pizza for the first time in my twenties

I sense a similar sense of surprise when I talk about how I write an article. Every time I talk about article writing, clients are usually taken aback. It’s almost as though they’re experiencing a disconnect between what they perceived to be true, and the reality.

You may or may not know that I turn out about 3000-4000 words of fresh content every week. I do all this writing in between cooking and painting and everything else.

So how do I write an article? Is it really a writing gene?

Well, it can’t be a gene because I struggled like everyone else. I’d take two working days to write an article, back in 2000.

Today I can complete an 800-word article in about 45 minutes. So what’s changed?

Strangely it’s got not a lot to do with article writing itself, and a lot to with how I manage my energy.

So how do I manage my energy?

Stage 1: Putting space between activities Stage 2: Using a timer Stage 3: Never research when writing the article

Let’s look at each of these stages in detail.

Stage 1: Put space between activities

Here’s how I cook a meal.

I get fresh vegetables and ingredients from Huckleberry—the organic grocery store up the road.Then I do nothing.

Later that day, I’ll assemble the ingredients and then do a second bout of nothingness. Finally, when I’m ready to cook, several hours may have gone by. But cooking is quick, painless and the dish is incredibly tasty.

What you’re reading about seems to be my method of cooking, but it’s not.

It’s my method of conserving energy. To me, energy is what allows me to write so much. And the best way to expend energy is to do everything all together. The rookie writer will sit down, try to dream up the idea for the article, then try to write and get frustrated on a consistent basis. Instead, what you should do, is do as little as possible.

So here’s how I go about my writing

I’ll write down a topic, or if I’m, um, prolific, several topics. Then, before the idea slips away, I’ll write down three sub-topics. And in this article, the topic was about “How I Write” and the sub-topics were about:

Putting space between activities
Using a timer
Never research when writing the article

Once that’s done I let my brain take a well-deserved rest

It may seem like it’s important to keep the momentum going, but the best thing you can do when writing, is not to write anything at all. If you feel obliged to do so, maybe you can take those three topics and outline them.

An outline will have a lot more detail because it’s the structure of the article and shows the flow.

My outlines usually cover these main points.

What are we talking about?
Why is it so very important?
Other questions such as when/where etc?
Examples
Objections
Mistakes, if any
Summary
Close

A week usually starts off with me writing one or many topics and sub-topics

Then once I’ve let a day or two go by, I’ll write the outline. Another 24 hours will slide before I start to expand the outline. This part takes the most amount of time. If I write an 800-word article, it may take me about 45 minutes (it used to take me two days to do this part when I first started writing articles).

And if I take on a 3000-word article it might take about 3-4 hours. But here’s the thing: I don’t sit down to write everything all at once. And you shouldn’t either. You should break up your writing into bits.

There’s a very good reason for all this breaking up

It’s called energy. Every step takes energy. When I’m cooking, (and believe me I love cooking), just getting the ingredients is a minor mission. Then the cutting, chopping—again, stuff I’ve come to love over the years—it’s all takes time. And anything that takes time also drains energy.

But the moment I split up the activity and come back later, it seems like someone else has done the prep work. And all that’s left is to finish it off.

Energy needs to be your biggest focus

Time is what we focus on a lot, but hey, you have time; I have time; we all have time. We flop down on the sofa at 7 pm, and we’re not in la-la land until three, four, even five hours later.

So we have time. We just don’t have the energy. Which is why breaking up your article into bits is what makes it manageable. Writing is an incredibly demanding skill, even for an accomplished writer, and it’s best to get back when you’re reasonably charged.

But there’s more to it, and you know it

When you put space between your topics and outlining, your brain gets a chance to mull over the ideas. While you sleep, your brain is doing its thing. It sorts out the bad ideas, keeps good ones, and when you get back to writing, nothing has changed. And yet something has. It doesn’t stop there.

When I go for a walk, I’ll run the ideas past my wife

And especially on days when I’m really confused, this seems to work well. Even if she’s not quite awake at 6 am, and she mostly isn’t, just voicing the ideas lets the ideas distill.

At times, if Renuka doesn’t agree with me, she’ll snap right out of her slumber-walk and rattle out a list of objections. These objections force me to think, to refine the article. At this stage I’m still on the tightrope between topics and outlining, and nowhere close to writing the article.

Eventually I will have to tweak that outline, and it’s time to write.

This article was written in parts as well

I wrote the topics earlier in the week. I then wrote the sub-topics. Finally by Thursday I sat down to write it.

I may fudge a bit and try to edit it as well once I’m done—but only when I’m done

I realise that many newbies edit and write at the same time and in the process, they never get to the finish line. As you get better at writing, you realise that the deadline is all that really matters. And today, Thursday, my deadline is clearly to finish, not edit this article.

If I do get to the end point, I’ll run it through Grammarly, edit and we’re ready to go. But some days I might add one more step. I’ll e-mail a client or a friend whose judgment I trust. And ask them to look over the article. So now I have to wait even longer.

This break adds to the pause factor, and I mull over the ideas until the suggestions come bouncing back. When they do, there’s always some clarity that’s needed and some bits that need fixing. Which is slightly frustrating, but it almost always makes the article better.

When you’re just starting out as a writer, you’re likely to be amazed at how quickly seasoned writers turn out a finished piece

All my sob stories about how much time I used to take to write an article doesn’t wash well with you. Your goal is to write faster, instead of slaving over the article for hours, even days.

You want to get to the finish line, and that’s the biggest problem. Instead of trying to write the entire piece, break it up. Just thinking of these stages might drive you crazy because you’re likely to be thinking: who has time to go through all these steps?

And that’s the whole point of this section on spacing out your article

You don’t have time and drinking that bottle of whatever is in your fridge isn’t going to give you energy. By spacing your article, you’re not using up more time at all. I use 10 minutes to write topics and sub-topics.

Another 30-45 minutes goes into outlining. And finally, it’s another 45-60 minutes of writing, and I’m done. In all, even if you add editing time, an article takes about 2 hours back to back.

And when I’m done, I’m not drained. I’m ready to take on another task and keep going with my day. To me, that’s the biggest joy of all. I feel a deep satisfaction when my article is complete.

But I also know I have the energy to keep doing other work-related tasks. And that feeling is totally different from when I first started writing articles and was exhausted by the end of the article writing exercise.

But that’s not the only pizza moment I had in my life. I ran into a second concept quite by chance. It sounds like a deadline, but it’s not a deadline at all. It’s called a timer.

Stage 2: Using a timer

Notice how you’re all excited when you get a new computer? It’s a blank slate; there’s practically nothing on the hard drive.

And at least on the Mac, there’s a special section called “Downloads”

Whenever you start to download something from the Internet, the file goes right into the Download folder. When I last checked a few minutes ago, there were 74 files there. In a month from now, there may be 85.

And give or take a year and the folder will continue to accumulate junk that I never look at. In short, the more space I have in that folder, the more I’m likely to fill it with something.

On the Article Writing Course, clients, tend to fill it with hours of writing

The Article Writing Course at Psychotactics is like no other writing course I know of. Clients who join the live course, and this is the live course online, often have to write two about two articles a week.

The first half of the week is spent on topics and sub-topics. Then it’s a day of outlining and finally it’s time to write. The writing stage is when they labour over their work for hours on end. Until 2015, clients would often take 3, even 4 hours to write an article.

Then in 2016, I gave them a fixed amount of time

The instructions were clear. Every assignment had a finite amount of time, and when the timer went off, they had to stop and submit their work. Even though the participants were given a fairly chunky bit of time, writing is not always easy.

You have to write often enough so that the structure becomes second nature. Once that structure is in place, it’s relatively easier to complete the article in time. But at the start, most of the clients didn’t finish in time.

It didn’t matter.

They had to submit their work

Once the timer went off, it was akin to an examination hall. You had to hand over your assignment. As you can imagine, this causes a fair level of frustration among the writers. They feel they need more time to complete their work; more time to edit it and perhaps polish it. And yet, it doesn’t matter.

If you write to a timer, you are acutely aware that you have to finish before your deadline. As I’m writing this piece, I know that I have to finish about 1600-2000 words in the next hour and a half and then the timer goes off.

The timer is an energy saver

Let’s do it your way for a change. Let’s say you keep writing until the article is done. And let’s assume that journey from start to finish took you four hours. You’re now wasted for the rest of the day, aren’t you?

You took on such a monumental task, but you’re completely drained and headed to the fridge to scoop up the remaining ice cream. But if you stopped in about 90 minutes, you’d be tired, but certainly not exhausted. You’d have to take a break, there’s no doubt about it, but you’re ready to go after a while.

Understanding how to manage your energy is a big deal in life

This article is about writing, but without a timer, your cake gets burnt, food has to be tossed, and articles are just about as inedible. The reason why most writers keep going for hours on end is because they believe they’re improving their article.

But I can tell you from years of experience, and having read close to a few thousand articles on the Article Writing Course itself. Time doesn’t make your article better. If you spend 50% more time on your article, it doesn’t get 50% better.

Instead if you break away, you do yourself a big favour

I had to learn this lesson because I didn’t realise the value of a timer. I just looked at the deadline and kept working towards it. And the deadline is a mirage. The only thing that counts is a timer. When the timer goes off, you’re done. On the Article Writing Course, clients don’t get a chance to keep tweaking their articles.

Instead, they just get better at writing, so that by the time they’re done with the course, they’re able to write at close to, or at the amount of time allocated. In your world, you may still need to meet that article deadline. Even so, let your article lie unfinished for today.

Tomorrow, set yourself another timer

Then come back, finish the article, give it that spit and polish and you’re done for this round. People often ask me how I get so much writing done in a week. The answer is not simple because it involves so many factors, but one of the biggest weapons in my armoury is the timer.

And just to be sure that I don’t get distracted, I put on a Facebook and Gmail block. I can’t surf the Internet, can’t do anything but write.

Get a timer

It’s hard to believe a timer can change your writing life, but it will. You will learn to write faster because your timer demands it. And in doing so, your quality will improve.

You’ll have fewer articles in the article graveyard. You hear the bing, and you get up. Your work is done for the day.

Which takes us to the third part: No research when writing the article.

Stage 3: Never research when writing the article You can continue reading this article online. Click here. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/article-writing-research/ ]

Announcing: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention (In Under 30 Seconds) If you’re writing articles on a regular basis, having a method of consistently being able to start well, is invaluable. If you’re doing a podcast, presentation, webinar or just about any kind of communication, those First Fifty Words are the most important and the most time consuming. Bookings Open: 10 December, 3 pm (Eastern) USA. Click to read more. [ https://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/ ]

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Announcing: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention (In Under 30 Seconds)

📅 December 03, 2016 | View in Gmail

I remember the seventh time I went to a bowling alley. I remember it well, because I was consistently knocking down two or three pins. I’d start my run up, let the ball fly and it would angle itself and smash the two or three pins into oblivion. You could say I was the world’s expert on knocking down two or three pins.

No matter what I tried, about six pins would still be standing. Midway through my madness, a stranger gave me some unsolicited advice. “How about moving two steps to the right”, he said. “That way you can still throw it at an angle but you’ll hit more pins”.

I took his advice. Two steps to the right. You know what happened next, right? Something similar happens when you’re starting up an article, webinar or presentation. You put in all the effort into the meat of your content, but the opening seems forced. It’s not quite a “gutter ball” but it’s not a “strike” either.

So how do you consistently get your client’s attention? It’s called the First Fifty Words. Within the First Fifty Words, you should be able to get and then keep their attention, so that you can guide them to the meat of your content.

If you’re writing articles on a regular basis, this method of consistently being able to start well, is invaluable. If you’re doing a podcast, presentation, webinar or just about any kind of communication, those First Fifty Words are the most important and the most time consuming.

Which is what the First Fifty Words course is about. It’s 8 weeks of intense taking “two steps to the right” in your content creation. And at the end of 8 weeks, guess what? Every single person on the course will be turning out such amazing starts, that you’ll want to steal them all. Except you won’t have to, because you’ll be able to do it yourself.

You’re still reading, aren’t you? It’s the First Fifty Words that got you here. And kept you interested.

The course starts in March, but you get to sign up on December 10, 2016 at 3pm (Eastern US). Look it up in your own time zone. And set an alarm to be there if you want to do the “two steps to the right”. Psychotactics courses are intense and they fill up (often within a few hour), because you get skill, not just another truckload of information.

Here’s the link. https://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/

Warm regards, s-

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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November 2016

3 Ways To Instantly Get Your Readers Attention (The First Fifty Words)

📅 November 29, 2016 | View in Gmail

3 Ways To Instantly Get Your Readers Attention (The First Fifty Words)

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon [ https://www.psychotactics.com/instant-client-attention/ ])

In 1974, New York had a problem that didn’t seem to go away.

No matter where you rode the subway in New York, there was graffiti painted both inside and outside the trains. Young men with their spray cans covered the city’s trains with their version of art and soon the subway came to be seen as a symbol of a city on its way to the gutter.

The city put up security fences, razor wire and brought in guard dogs

They even went through one amazingly misguided strategy to paint all the trains white. Sure enough, The Great White Fleet as they called it, was soon covered with a fresh layer of graffiti. The city couldn’t seem to think of any way to solve the graffiti problem.

Then along came David Gunn

In 1984, Gunn was appointed as the president of the New York City (NYC) Transit Authority. Gunn had a track record of cleaning up subways in Boston and Philadelphia. Even so, the city of New York had been battling the graffiti problem for over a decade. What radical idea could Gunn implement that would turn back the clock to better times?

As it turned out Gunn’s solution centered around a single idea

The moment a train was bombed with graffiti, it was to be pulled over and painted. If a train car was being repaired, they’d ensure the car remained graffiti-free.

If they found graffiti on a train overnight, the NYC Transit Authority would sweep in and repaint the train. Even during rush hour if they found a train had been “bombed”, they would pull it back to the yard and clean it up, so that the graffiti was nowhere to be seen.

On May 12, 1989, the city declared victory over the city’s graffiti artists.

Notice what just happened?

You started reading this article to find out how to write the First Fifty Words. But before you knew it, you were transported back to New York, the subway and the graffiti dilemma. And the reason why you got to this point is because of the drama created by the First Fifty Words. When your article, presentation or webinar has a powerful opening, the client gets pulled along happily.

And yet, it’s not always easy to know how to go about creating those First Fifty Words. So today, let’s take a look at three ways to create the drama.

Method 1: The power of story Method 2: Disagreement with your premise Method 3: Lists

Method 1: The Power of the Story

In the 1980’s a persistent drought swept through the African Savannah.

Watering holes dried up, food was scarcer than ever. Yet, one animal, the kudu, wasn’t affected as much. This is because the kudu can continue to get its nutrition from the hardy Acacia tree. Most other animals don’t tangle with the Acacia’s thorns, but the kudu navigates its way between the thorns to get at the juicy leaves.

But suddenly dozens of kudu started dropping dead.

When the kudu were examined, there seemed to be no reason for the deaths. They looked perfectly healthy and didn’t appear to be suffering from any malnutrition. However, the number of deaths soon soared into the hundreds, then into the thousands.

Now we may believe that Africa is one vast open area, but in reality a lot of wildlife lives in vast ranches

While it was devastating for the ranchers to see the kudu fall to the ground in heaps, they were also puzzled by the inconsistency of the deaths. On one ranch the kudu continued to thrive. On other ranches, their numbers decreased precipitously. There seemed to be no answer to the question, until they considered the number of kudu on the ranches.

On some ranches there were a lot of kudu On others there were a lot less. As the drought raged on, the kudu had no other vegetation but Acacia leaves. Once the tree lost all its leaves, it would no longer be able to harness sunlight. In effect, the Acacia trees would die. In an act of self-preservation, the tree started producing more tannin.

Not just more tannin, but lethal amounts of it. Biologist and African herbivore expert, Professor Woutor Van Hoven examined the rumen of the kudu and found the digestive system to be in complete shutdown. Now tannin is a compound can only come from a natural source. It wasn’t hard to point fingers at the Acacia tree.

On the ranches with dense kudu populations the Acacia tree was producing 400% more tannin

The tannin was getting inside the digestive system and killing the kudu. In effect, the Acacia trees were culling the kudu. On the ranches with sparser kudu, the tannin wasn’t anywhere close to these lethal amounts. The plant was clearly going through a stage of self-preservation.

Story, it seems is easily the fastest way to get a client’s attention

And we all know this fact of attention-getting to be true. But we aren’t sure where to find the stories or how to make them work and then how to reconnect them to the article.

Those are three elements in themselves, so let’s start with finding the stories. I tend to find my stories all around me. But if that’s not a good enough answer for you, here are a few links. Go to smithsoniancom, or livesciencecom, historycom, bbcearth or listversecom.

In effect, what you need to do is to go any of these sites, spend some time reading and then save whatever you need to Evernote.

Of course, as I keep harping on repeatedly, without Evernote, you’re just wasting your time.

I can literally find hundreds of stories in a few minutes, precisely because of Evernote. Finding stories was a bit of a nightmare at first, but I soon realised I could find two or three stories a day that related to history, geology, biology and case studies.

Added to that were my own personal stories, and so the first problem was done and dusted. If I could find three stories a day, I’d have about 21 stories by the following week. And no matter how prolific a writer or speaker I turn out to be, I can’t go through that volume of stories.

But how do you know which stories work?

Look for the unfolding ups and downs

The most boring story is one that stays on a single track: either up or down. A good story is like the kudu story. It started out with the drought, went to the fact that kudu didn’t care and neither did the ranchers. Then kudu start dying, yet the next ranch with fewer kudu has no such trouble. The biologist comes in, investigates and we have the killer: the Acacia tree itself.

It was an act of self-preservation. That story has bounce all the way, as do most good stories. You’ll probably have noticed the same bounce for the NY subway story. How the situation went from bad to worse, until David Gunn came in and put an end to the graffiti.

Stories make for a dramatic start

You know how to find the stories and how to store them in Evernote. You can even find the bounce in these stories. What remains is how to connect them to your main content. Notice how I finished the kudu story? The last line was about self-preservation.

So what would the theme of the article be?

Sure, self-preservation. But what if the last line was “speedy response”? Well, then the article would head over to “speedy response”. The last line of your story, whatever you happen to choose, is what creates the bridge towards the rest of the article.

The first port of call should always be a story, or analogy

When you go to Amazon.com and read the reviews of The Brain Audit, you’ll find most of the readers seem to agree on one fact. Many of them seem to suggest The Brain Audit is exceedingly easy and refreshing to read. But what makes it refreshing? Or rather what makes content boring? It’s clearly the lack of stories and analogies.

You can’t turn more than two-three pages without running into analogies and stories in The Brain Audit. The Three Month Vacation Podcast has at least three stories or analogies and it could go to as many as six or seven. Articles, webinars, reports—they all have stories and analogies.

To get your article going, you need to start storing stories

You need to start looking for those ups and downs. And then it’s a matter of reconnecting by inserting the last line into the story, so it reconnects with the article.

But stories are just one way of taking on the First Fifty Words. The second method is to disagree with your headline.

Method 2: Disagreeing with your premise

In 1949, the ad agency DDB had a reasonably big challenge.

They were given the opportunity to sell the Volkswagen Beetle. This wasn’t just another car. It was a post-war German “people’s car”, connected with development plans that went back to Hitler himself. Plus the car was small, slow and considered ugly.

Added to the challenge was the fact that DDB had a paltry advertising budget of just $800,000. So how do you create instant drama when the odds are stacked against you?

You simply disagree with your premise, or in the case of Volkswagen, the prevailing premise

Back in 1949, the war had ended and overblown consumption was the order of the day. American cars were big, bulky and drank tons of fuel. All the advertising pointed to how fast most American cars happened to be. All, except Volkswagen, that is.

One of their earliest ad took almost everyone by surprise. It said: Presenting American’s slowest fastback. And the ads talked about how the cars wouldn’t go over 72 mph (even though the speedometer shows a top speed of 90).

What Volkswagen Beetle advertising did was create intense drama by disagreeing with the status quo.

The very same principle applies to your article writing and gives you the clue as to what you should be doing as well. To snap your audience out of whatever they’re doing, it’s a good idea to disagree with the prevailing situation or idea.

And since you’re the one who wrote the headline, what better way to go than to disagree with your headline?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say your headline says: How to increase prices (without losing customers) You’d think the article would continue in the vein of increasing prices, wouldn’t you? But instead, it goes the other way. The first paragraph instructs you to reduce your prices in half. Then down to a quarter of the original price.

And then the text goes on to explain something you’re already quite aware of: that reducing prices is a very bad strategy. However, the technique it uses is what gets your attention. Instead of going in the direction you’d expect, it moves in quite the opposite direction. Disagreement works because of the mild shock, and the consequent curiosity to figure out what’s happening.

But it’s one thing to examine an ad or an existing article. How do you create this disagreement in your own articles?

Let’s start off with a headline: The 3 Keys To A Perfect Ayurvedic Diet.

How could you disagree with this headline in your first paragraph? Start off by thinking how you could sabotage the perfect Ayurvedic diet. Got the idea, yet? All you need to do is think up your headline and think of the exact opposite behaviour.

Let’s try another headline, shall we? How to get your projects done using an unknown system of time management.

Now let’s disagree with the headline.

Time management is an erroneous concept, which is why most of us struggle to get anything done. Haven’t you gone through whole days where you’ve had loads of time, but still failed to get anything done? That’s because we don’t really work with time. We work with energy instead.

See what’s happening?

You’re pushing in a headline that seems to talk about one thing but the opening paragraph seems to disagree. But you don’t have to keep the disagreement going.

After you’ve made your point in a paragraph or so, you can go back to the original premise of the article. You’ve completed your mission. You’ve woken up your audience with the disagreement and they’re keen to read more of what you have to say.

So far we’ve looked at stories. We’ve also looked at disagreeing with your premise. But there’s a third way that really helps when you’re feeling blank. And this method is called the “list method”. Let’s find out how we start articles with lists.

Method 3: Lists

Let’s take one type of list: The Netherlands 70% USA 30% UK 30%

Ok, so let’s take another list: A bucket A spoon Two ladles of chocolate ice-cream

Lists get attention and especially when you use it within the First Fifty Words.

And in case you’re wondering, the first list that comprised of the Netherlands, USA and UK, it was a factor of social trust. In the Netherlands, 7 out of 10 people say they trust each other.

In the US and UK, only 3 out of 10 people seem to have social trust. However, we’re not here to debate the issue of social trust. What we’re looking at, is the power of lists when used in the First Fifty Words of your article.

The moment you slide in a list, the reader is intrigued

And rightly so, because a list is a sequence of elements and somehow that sequence needs to end up in a logical place. So if your headline was: “How to get a business up and running in 90 days”, you could start your article with a list.

That list immediately catches the attention of the reader and keeps that attention as you transition over to the main article.

Lists don’t need much preparation

Unlike a story that needs all that bounce and mystery, a list is almost sterile in its approach. You don’t even need any disagreement in a list. If anything, a list seems to take the reader right to where they want to go, just like a recipe.

And that’s why lists are so cool, but there is a downside. Lists are so spartan that they stand out. If you’ve used a list to start up an article recently, you’re probably going to have to wait to use a list again. The very format is so conspicuous that it requires a good deal of time to pass before you can re-use the technique in another article, podcast or presentation.

Nonetheless, they are great starting points and in you’re in a tricky situation, start with a list.

Summary

In this very article, we ran into the story of the NY subway, the kudu on the African savanna and the story of the Volkswagen Beetle being introduced to America in 1949. Stories are easily the best tool to get the attention of your readers within the First Fifty Words.

It’s what I use consistently in books from The Brain Audit to Dartboard Pricing. If you find it easy to read the books, yes, it’s because of two elements. The first is the structure of the book, but easily the biggest other factor is the sheer volume of stories and analogies that help you understand the concepts faster and more permanently.

However there’s more than one way to skin a cat

The method we looked at was the factor of disagreement. And the way to go about disagreeing with your headline is to write a headline e.g. How to buy a second hand computer that will last six years—and then go in the opposite direction. Tell the reader a story about computers that failed. Go the opposite way and you do what DDB did with Volkswagen Beetle. And this method sure gets a ton of attention.

Finally we get to the third way: creating lists

This method is the easiest of all. For instance, if I wanted to start this article with a list, I could start with the three points we’ve covered, namely, “The power of the story, disagreeing with your premise and lists”.

And that would get the reader curious enough to want to read more. Then I could continue the article by simply explaining each of the points and fleshing them out in detail.

But where should you start? What’s the ONE thing you can do?

If you’re stuck for time, try the list today. But ideally the best thing you can do for the long run is to fire up your copy of Evernote. Start saving stories.

Go to BBC Earth, History.com, ListVerse.com, Smithsonian.com and start saving stories. There’s nothing more powerful than stories especially when you’re starting up the First Fifty Words.

Next Step: You know how they say “first impressions count?” Well, they do. Within the first three seconds of reading an article or an email, your client is already making a decision whether to read on. Many of us aren’t restricted to email. We use webinars, video, podcasts and presentations. And all of these media have one thing in common: they all need a great start.

Yet, many of us us stutter through the first impression. The reason for the stuttering is simple: We’ve never mastered the ability to start our message with impact. Impact that strikes the client between the eyes, and in matter of seconds.

So how do you consistently create this impact? Find out more here: http://psychotactics.com/first-50-words [ https://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/ ]

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Coming Soon: How To Start Every Article With Instant Impact

📅 November 26, 2016 | View in Gmail

You know how they say “first impressions count?” Well, they do. Within the first three seconds of reading an article or an email, your client is already making a decision whether to read on. Many of us aren’t restricted to email. We use webinars, video, podcasts and presentations. And all of these media have one thing in common: they all need a great start.

So how do you consistently create this impact? Find out more here: http://psychotactics.com/first-50-words

Warm regards, Sean P.S Learning how to really create outstanding openings (whether in articles or any media) is deeply gratifying. And powerful. More details: http://psychotactics.com/first-50-words

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Make the Mental Leap From A Job To A Business

📅 November 22, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Make The Mental Leap From A Job To A Business

(This is a long article. You can read or listen to it online by clicking on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/job-to-enrepreneur/ ]

Today I sat down to install one of my most-used programs: Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I use Dragon a lot in the membership site, on our courses and also for e-mail. So when I got a notification that a newer version of Dragon was available, I paid my $99, downloaded the software and started to install it.

Except it wouldn’t install.

The software informed me I needed to upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan —which is the Mac’s current operating system. And therein lay the problem. All my computers were humming nicely on Yosemite, and there seemed no need to rock the boat and install a new operating system.

At least if I were having some trouble with the existing system, it would be worth the trouble, but I was doing just fine. Then along came this new version of Dragon and it was forcing me to do something that involved a whole lot of risk.

When you’re in a job, it’s like living in Yosemite land

It’s not the best thing ever and you know there’s a world of entrepreneurship you’d rather explore. But it’s safe in Yosemite-land so why make the leap into the unknown? And how do you know things will work out anyway? You don’t.

That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur. You have no clue if or when things will work out. The only thing you know for sure is that change is happening. That the Dragon wants to be let loose in your world and you’re holding back.

I understand there’s a huge difference between taking a leap from a job into the world of business. I know that the fear is a lot greater when you have a family, a mortgage, and bills to pay. Yet, there comes a time when your hand seems to be forced. You can stay where you are, or you can take the leap.

In this series we deal with three recurring questions

Managing the fear
Keeping the vision strong
Focus—And why you need a hatchet person

Part 1: Managing the Fear

I hated my job as a web designer.

I’d just immigrated to Auckland, New Zealand in Feb 2000 and my priority was to find a job. Compared with India, where I came from, Auckland was terribly expensive. And anyway, I couldn’t see myself starting up in business right away. To my utter amazement, I found a job that was going to pay me $50,000 a year to build websites. By the second day, I was ready to quit.

My wife, Renuka, wasn’t so sure

To get a job that was reasonably well-paying was not an easy task. At the time she was still in India, and she asked me to hang on until she showed up in the following month and got a job of her own. “Then you can quit your job if you like, ” she told me.

However, things don’t exactly pan out the way we imagine

When Renuka got to New Zealand, she found it hard to find a job that fit her position. For the next few month, she bounced between temporary jobs and at least at the time, my job was the one that paid the bills—and the mortgage. Barely three months after we entered the country, we bought ourselves a house and had a mortgage of $200k. […truncated for display, saved in full JSON]

Announcing! How To Speed Up Your Sales With Client Attractors

📅 November 19, 2016 | View in Gmail

Announcing! How To Speed Up Your Sales With Client Attractors

You already know that 80% of a sales letter depends on your headline

And therefore it’s not uncommon to see writers spend many hours testing and re-testing their headline.

But what happens once your customer goes past the headline into the rest of the copy? Which are the elements that cause customers to feel an urge to buy your product or service?

The remaining 20% is what causes customers to buy…

In order to take customers to the next stage, you have to have a rock-solid system to help structure your sales page.
You have to know and understand the elements so that customers respond to your offer.

So isn’t it time to find out what the remaining 20% is all about? And how you can quickly learn and implement that 20% to improve results.

Find out more details at this page and judge for yourself! http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors

Warm regards, Sean P.S. The bonus on this product is really worth having. It will really give you an insight into sales pages like never before. Check out the bonus :) http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Write An Unlikely Bestseller: The Kathy Sierra Story

📅 November 15, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Write An Unlikely Bestseller: The Kathy Sierra Story

(This is a long article and you can read or listen to it online. Click on the fun cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/kathy-sierra-story/ ]

It was the around the year 2000

Technology companies that just months prior were considered extremely, reported huge losses and folded. These losses created a economic cascade which came to be known as the dotcom crash. Stuck in the middle of this seemingly thermonuclear disaster were thousands of programmers. […]

How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

📅 November 12, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

Envy isn’t something we talk about, or even admit to openly.

And yet it’s the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us.

So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success.

Join us as we explore the three parts of envy: 1- Is Envy Good or Bad? 2- How I Cope With Envy with a Time Machine 3- How To Stay Motivated—And Happy.

Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 115) #115: How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/envy-stay-motivated/ ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to:

#112: How Kicking Angels Help To Jumpstart Your Business Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 112) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read [ http://www.psychotactics.com/grow-your-business/ ] |

#108: How To Write A Sales Page Using The Bottom-Up Method

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 108) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/ ] |

Warm regards, Sean P.S. Can you do me a tiny favour? Will You Tell A Friend About The Podcast?

Here is a simple link http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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How To Write A Sales Page Using The Bottom-Up Method

📅 November 08, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Write A Sales Page Using The Bottom-Up Method

(This is a long article and you can read or listen to it online. Just click on the turtle) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/ ]

26 Olympic medals. 22 of those medals were gold.

You know his name because almost anyone following the Olympics knows his name.

As Michael Phelps stepped up to the starting blocks, the eyes of the world bounced between Phelps and his biggest rival in the race: South African Chad Guy Bertrand Le Clos. Their short and intense rivalry had fired the imagination of the press.

No one was particularly fixated on Singaporean, Joseph Isaac Schooling.

Schooling it seems was the underdog. No pushover in the pool, Schooling had won the bronze at the 2015 World Championships. He’d been clocking up wins in the Asian, Commonwealth and South East Asian competitions. But at the finals 100 metre butterfly event, he seemed slightly outgunned.

When you’re dealing with copywriting and a sales page, the spotlight always seems to veer between the headline and the opening paragraphs. Other elements of the sales page seem to have a much shorter, less important stature. Yet it’s these seemingly obscure elements that are the powerhouse of the page.

If you’ve been frustrated with the process of writing a sales page, there’s a quick, more efficient way to the finish line.

And it starts not from the top down, but instead from the bottom up. And this is why we’ll look at three factors in this article.

Factor 1: The bullets Factor 2: The features and benefits Factor 3: The target profile (even when you don’t have one).

Factor 1: The Bullets

Last week I bought a new car. Not just another car, but a kind of car I’d waited for since I was 12 years old.

An electric car.

An electric car that was tiny, responsive and had a rich pedigree of car engineering. I bought myself a BMW i3 and plugged into the socket to charge—yes, just like a toaster.

I’m no car fanatic

I don’t revel in terms like torque.
But a week later if you asked me to describe the car, I’d go into a slight rhapsody. I’d do what most of us would do when asked about a product or service. I’d spit out the bullets.
It’s the greenest car on the market
It’s the most efficient electric car you could buy at this point in time.
It’s not a monstrous hulk. It’s sub-compact.
Did I tell you that you can park it by using gestures? Imagine doing that in a car park.

You could do the same for any product or service

You could describe your house using bullets. Your computer? Your home town? The cafe you visit? All of them could be described with a series of bullets.

And seasoned copywriters tend to avoid the headline and opening paragraphs of a sales page They start with bullets instead. They sit down and write 10, 20, 30, even 60 bullets for a single product or service. And that’s what you should do too. When you write bullets, you get into a brainstorming trance of sorts.

Try it.

Try it right now.

Sit down and make a list of a service like a cafe. The way to go about it is to break up the service into sections. So if you’re writing bullet points about a cafe, for instance, you’d have main topics. e.g. the food, the drink, the ambience, location etc. It’s pretty much what you’d expect to see on an AirBNB listing online. Those points, they’re bullets.

When you tackle a product, a similar method applies

Several years ago I wrote a series of books that I was very proud of called ‘Black Belt Presentations’. I realised that people get on webinars all the time and do a terrible job.

They also have to make presentations either in person or via audio. And they tend to be so verbose and unfocused. So this series of books were about three main topics (yes, it’s always a good idea to break up any product into sections). The topics were about “slide design”, “presentation structure” and “crowd control”. And every single one of those books had different elements that when compressed, formed bullets.

For example

Part 1: Controlling Presentation Design or DIY Slide Design: How to create stylish slides without driving yourself crazy.

Understanding the ‘proximity of elements’ and why it avoids visual chaos
The power of invisible lines and how they help avoid distraction—and increase focus
Why a simple colour palette saves you endless amounts of preparation time
How to avoid ‘unwanted noise’ by choosing uncluttered backgrounds
Why 95% of your slides need just one thought for max impact
The palm test: How to get rid of unwanted and distracting graphics
How to use the power of size to make graphics pop on your slides
Two core methods to instantly increase curiosity on every slide
Why most photos/graphics are flat on slides and how to bring them to life instantly!
How to avoid busting your budget on photos/graphics
Easy ways to stretch your budget without compromising on quality
How masking and transparency make graphics stand out
Why most graphs are confusing—and why to avoid 3-D completely
How to transform graphs into powerful visual data that make audiences sit bolt upright
How to avoid the downsides of animation
The secret of how ‘invisible’ animation helps reduce surprise
Handy presentation resources to help improve your presentation skills….

Every product or service has dozens of points that can be covered

If you look at the pencil lying right in front of you, you could cover at least 10 interesting points. In your case, the product or service you’re selling is going to be way more complex. You could easily generate between 30-50 bullets on that product or service alone—provided you break it up into sections first.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but bear with me

I’m looking out of my office and I see a shed. I see the sections: the roof, the exterior, the interior etc. I can’t stress how important it is to break up a product or service into sections before writing the bullets. If you lazily look at the shed, you’ll have very little to write. Break it up into sections and your brain starts to co-operate. Suddenly you have a ton of bullets.

And once you have a mountain of bullets you’re done with Stage 1 of writing your sales letter.

It’s time to move to the second stage: the features and benefits.

Factor 2: The features and benefits

At one point or another, we’re likely to have been to a buffet.

Spread in front of us is a variety of food all beckoning to us at once. And so we decide on a temporary strategy where we try just a little of everything. About 15-20 minutes later, we realise the futility of such a strategy, because we’re clearly overeating. No matter how little we take of everything, the little bits add up to a lot.

The bridge from bullets to features and benefits is somewhat like a buffet

With a little work we can drum up between two-three dozen bullets. And if we try to turn every single bullet into a feature or benefit, we end up with a sales page that’s an overkill. There’s way too much for the reader—they’re stuffed too quickly. The best strategy when moving between bullets and features is to pick about 7-8 of the most valuable bullets.

But how are you supposed to know which ones to pick?

The act of writing bullets is akin to brainstorming. You have some great points and some that are less interesting. In an ideal situation the best judge of what’s interesting or not is the client. But let’s assume you’re working all by yourself, you’re going to have to trust your own judgement.

Let’s go back the ‘Black Belt Presentations’ series yet again and pull up some bullets Quote

How examples can save your bacon when you’re running out of time
How to get a good chunk of your audience to sign up for more information
Why a break in the middle of your presentation improves conversion

Out of those three bullets which ones got your attention?

The least interesting was the “sign up for information” bullet. The “examples” and “running out of time” ranked higher. But there’s not a shred of doubt that the “break in the middle” and “improving conversion” is the most powerful of all. That’s what you need to pull aside because we’re going to take that bullet and turn it into a feature or benefit.

When writing a feature or benefit, use a simple formula

The formula goes like this: problem + curiosity.

Hence the bullet we chose might read like this: Wondering why the audience claps but you get poor conversions? Speakers thrive on audience applause, yet some speakers get a thunderous applause, plus have a high conversion rate. How do you increase your conversion rate by using a little known “break in the middle” technique? How can you improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate almost overnight?

You could clearly spot the problem and solution couldn’t you?

It’s about speakers that get applause but the sales don’t match the audience response. And then right after the problem we had a set of points/questions that ramped up your curiosity. You may have been a little keen to know what the “break in the middle” technique was all about. You’d have been chomping at the bit to figure out who to improve your webinar or seminar conversion rate.

If you’ve got a slightly expensive product or service, go with 7-8 features and benefits

Features and benefits are usually a paragraph of 3-4 lines long, so don’t stuff too much on the reader’s plate. 4 x 8 = 32 lines to read and that’s more than enough for the prospect to make up his or her mind.

If you have a less expensive or simpler product, you may want to reduce the features and benefits to about 4-6. There’s no right figure and if you choose to run with 7-8 every single time, that’s perfectly fine. The only criteria you have to consider is the problem + curiosity. If you have those elements in place, you’ve managed to write some great features and benefits.

What’s even more vital is you’re not stuck at this point

Remember the times when you tried to approach the sales page from the top down? Remember how long it took you to get started? When you start at the bottom with the bullets and work your way to the features and benefits, you’re moving at a relatively frenetic pace.

You could spend the morning writing the bullets, take a lunch break and by 5pm you could be well on your way to finishing the features and benefits.

There’s just one itty-bitty problem Having a client would make this process simple and reliable. But what if you don’t have a client? What if you can’t do a target profile interview in advance? Let’s find out how we clamber our way to the top of the sales page despite having a terrible disadvantage.

Let’s move to Part 3: Getting the top of the sales page (even without a target profile).

Factor 3: Getting to the top of the sales page (even without a target profile)

Do you know when the world had a massive recession that lasted over 19 months? If your mind automatically went back to the Great Depression, you’d be slightly off the mark.

The correct year was 2009. 2009 was what the International Monetary Fund called the Great Recession—the worst the world had faced since World War II. So guess what headline was topmost in my mind as I planned to conduct a workshop in Campbell, California? Yes, you probably guessed correctly. I was conducting a website masterclass workshop, the headline was about how your website could beat the recession.

Until a client told me I was hopelessly off the mark and that she wasn’t interested in the recession at all.

When we write a sales page, we often make a fundamental mistake

We don’t talk to or interview a client about our product or service. Instead, we often write what we perceive to be true. Like for instance the headline I wrote about the recession which had zero interest for the client. And it’s a mistake I made many times over before I realised that the best way to write a sales page is to interview a client.

But what if you don’t have a client?

This is the problem that many of us face when we’re just starting up, or even when starting up a new project. And finding a prospect, let alone a client might seem quite impossible.

A lot of business owners start to go around in circles at this point. They can’t find the prospect so they can’t write the sales page and without sales, well, you know how the story goes, don’t you? Which is where you the bottom-up structure comes to our rescue yet again.

We started out with the bullets, chose 6-8 features and benefits

From those 6-8 features, 2-3 may turn out to be really powerful. When going through the brainstorming stage and churning out bullets, it’s hard to know which bullets are great and which are not.

But by the time we get to the features and benefits, we seem to pick the ones that resonate more strongly than the rest. And finally, if we were to narrow it down to 2-3, we could eventually get to just one point and make that the biggest problem on the sales page.

When I first wrote the text for the sales page of The Brain Audit, I didn’t have a target profile

It was early 2002, and hardly anyone was selling products, let alone e-books on the Internet. I had just one client, the owner of a sofa store, who though very friendly and helpful, wasn’t going be of much use with the sales page of The Brain Audit. And so I took a stab at the most important point—the most important feature—and made it my headline.

Which is why you see the headline: Have you seen a customer back out of a deal at the very last minute? on the sales page.

I didn’t have anyone in mind when I wrote that headline. But it was the strongest headline out of the list of bullets. And so it went to the top. It formed the basis of a headline.

Once the headline was in place, I continued to write the rest of the text. And no, you don’t have to believe me because the proof of how I got to the whole conveyor belt story is sitting on Archive.org. You can see how the features and benefits have the very same idea and how that concept got transferred to the headline and the opening paragraph.

And you can do the same if you don’t have a target profile or prospect

You can work your way up from the bullets to the features and benefits. You can then pick the one that most resonates and drive home that problem and solution. However, this advice isn’t what I’d recommend.

The sales copy for The Brain Audit worked and has stayed reasonably consistent since 2002. Yet, it could have gone horribly wrong.

The text I wrote for the 2009 workshop didn’t do any of this “resonating bit” with anyone

Luckily I had the client who said her biggest problem was that her list was too small. She wanted to know whether I could show her a way to run a business even though she had a tiny list. In the case of The Brain Audit, the bottom up method worked—and it might work for you in a pinch. But my advice is to keep searching for a prospect—for two specific reasons.

Reason 1: If you can’t find a prospect, there’s a good chance your product or service is a non-starter

The biggest reason why a product or service fails isn’t because of the quality of the product or service itself. Often it’s because the writer doesn’t understand the pressing problem.

If you have the best product or service in the world but there’s no clear need for it, your product or service is unlikely to succeed. If you are endlessly searching for a prospect, it’s a good chance your product or service is a dud.

Reason 2: While you can guess your way to the headline and first paragraph by using the bottom up method, you’re also missing out on the emotional language of the prospect or client.

When a client speaks, they go back in time to the time when they were deeply frustrated. Their language is laced with deep rivers of emotion. This emotion is what makes your sales page come alive.

The reason why many sales pages are boring is simply because they lack the power of the client’s language. Finding a prospect or client is critical to making sure your sales page (and sales text) gets other clients to respond and buy your product or service.

Something is better than nothing

When you’re not going anywhere in a hurry, the most efficient and speedy way forward is to build your sales page from the bottom up. Start with the bullets, work your way to the features and benefits. Finally pick one of the most powerful points in the features and benefits and use that to start your sales page.

And that’s how you quickly get a sales page up and running.

When the media looked at Schooling, we didn’t think about him being an underdog.

They didn’t think of him at all. They were focused something completely different. And that’s the problem we have with writing a sales page. We tend to start with the big dogs: the headline and the opening paragraphs. We don’t ignore the bullets but we don’t realise the value of working your way upwards.

The next time you’re writing your sales letter start from the bottom up. In the race to the finish, it’s the fastest most efficient way to go.

If you’re keen on reading more detail about bullets and features, there’s a really good book called Client Attractors. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors/ ]

What’s Coming Up Next

Feb 2017: New Zealand Live Workshop: Booking Open Is your landing page effective? Learn the step-by-step system to deconstructing and reconstructing your landing pages. http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/newzealand/ [ http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/newzealand/ ]

March 2017: How To Start Every Article With Instant Impact: The “First 50 Words” Online Course: Booking open 10 December at 3PM Eastern (US) http://www.psychotactics.com/first-50-words/

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Critical Website Components How to design pages that help customers find their way around and do what you want them to do. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/websites-that-workinternet-marketing-psychological-secrets/ ]

The Brain Audit How to market in a way that is respectful to your customers, yet powerfully compelling. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/ ]

Sales Pages How To Write Benefits and Bullets That Speed Up Sales [ http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies NEW! Audio and Text: It’s time you got a real break—every year—without any drop in income. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://psychotactics.com/ ]

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

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What I Learned On My Unusual Vacation

📅 November 01, 2016 | View in Gmail

What I Learned On My Unusual Vacation

(To read or listen to this article online click on Sean) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/vacation-learning/ ]

Sometimes life takes you down a diversion. And you end up exactly where you need to be.

This is the story of my trip to Goa, India. It’s where my grandparents came from.

Where I spent many summers under the mango trees in the sweltering heat. It’s also the place that has led me back to where I needed to be.

So what did I learn? I learned a few things:

The importance of digestion (and sleep)
The importance of food and types of food
Breaks are not enough to avoid extreme stress.

Part 1- The importance of digestion (and the avoidance of sleep)

“When you turn 40,” my dentist said to me, “you should go for an annual medical checkup.” There I was on the dentist’s chair having a bridge fixed and my dentist wasn’t giving me dental advice. Instead, he was telling me to go see my doctor, even though I hadn’t been sick a day for almost 20 years.

And since my negligence with my flossing was causing me a small fortune, I decided to take the dentist’s advice. I went and visited my doctor and did my first ever medical test.

It wasn’t good

My blood pressure wasn’t high, but it wasn’t normal either. My cholesterol and blood sugar was creeping up too.

And like clockwork, year after year, those numbers edged upwards. Sometimes, they nudged their way downwards, but the general trend was not looking terribly good. You know me. I’m the 3-month vacation, take weekends off guy.

I work hard, but I take a lot of breaks to rest, think and just do nothing.

And yet all of that nothingness wasn’t dropping the pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar. And then I did something that made a huge difference to my life and health. I went yet again on vacation and this time to India.

I have a love-hate relationship with India

I grew up in Mumbai, vacationed in Goa and travelled through many parts of India before I finally moved to New Zealand. India seeps within you as you hang around that sub-continent. The food, the culture, the languages, history and science going back thousands of years. This trip was about the monsoon (something that’s worth experiencing), the food and most of all to see my parents (who I hadn’t visited in five years).

Yet within days of landing in Goa, my agenda was hijacked

Oh sure I started out with the food and drink, but we also wanted to get a few massages. And that search for massages got us to an Ayurvedic centre. Now you’ve probably heard of Ayurveda, an ancient system of natural healing from India. Some think it’s 5,000 years old, others believe it to be older, going back a whopping 10,000 years.

But I wasn’t there for any medical checkup—I was just there for the massages

Yet life takes you down this diversion, and it’s just where you need to be.

It was July, the rain was coming down in torrents and the doctor at the Ayurvedic centre was available. And we found out that my blood pressure and cholesterol was pretty high (conducting the article writing course and working through 12,000 posts helps, I guess). But even as he was telling me about the course of action to take, he brought up one important, yet obscure point.

“The reason why we have a lot of problems with our health isn’t the food we eat,” he started.

Food makes a difference, but the bigger problem is digestion. If we don’t digest the food completely, it sits in our system and it becomes like the inner side of a kitchen pipe. It’s got all this junk that starts to accumulate over the years. And it’s that junk that causes a huge number of problems. So he put me on an Ayurvedic course to get rid of the junk.

It was interesting, this course

Spanning over 11 days, it started mildly. All I had to do for the first three days was avoid oily food. But then it got really weird. For breakfast, all I could have was liquid ghee (mixed with some herbs).

I don’t know if you know what ghee is, but it’s high in saturated fat. And if you’re trying to get someone’s cholesterol down, it sure seems like the last thing you want to dole out. And yet, it wasn’t just a sip of ghee. On the first day it was 30ml, then it went progressively to 80, 130 and 180 ml (almost a full glass).

As it turns out, the ghee is supposed to permeate all the parts of your body down to your fingers and toes. And then to cut a long story short, the ghee pulls all the impurities and chucks it into the stomach. And you know what happens next, right?

So did it work?

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a “quick fix”. I detest Lemon diets and detox diets of any kind. I don’t care to believe in quick and easy. But there I was, on vacation, and keen to get the cholesterol and pressure down.

And 11 days later, we had our results. The blood test before and after could not have been more dramatic. There was a plunge from abnormal to well within normal range and in the process I’d even lost about 3 kilos (about 6 pounds).

But I’m skeptical about quick fixes

So when I got back to Auckland I did another blood test. And I weighed myself again. By now I was down 5 kilos and the blood test showed something remarkable. My current cholesterol and blood pressure was not only normal, but it was the best it’s ever been in 7 years.

“It’s the digestion” said the doctor who put me through this treatment.

Get the digestion right and you’ll find that a lot of things go perfectly well. And part of the issue of digestion was eating foods that digest well, that we all know. But the second part was giving the food time to digest.

I love my sleep because I sleep so little anyway

And I will take an afternoon nap when I can. Yet, it flies in the face of digestion. The moment you wake up, the body is running like a machine and having any nap causes it to slow down. What doesn’t help is that nap is usually right after eating a meal. Now it’s not like I’ve not taken a nap since I got back to Auckland, but the concept of digestion is clear in my mind.

That was the first learning for this trip

I never realised how much digestion mattered. I ignored it as much as I could. And then it proved that once your body is clear of the junk, it works more efficiently. But that’s only the first part of this learning experience. The second factor was one of food and types of food.

Part 2- The importance of food and types of food

I’m no vegetarian

If you look at my Facebook page, I’m updating it almost daily with some sort of food. And when you read The Brain Audit or many other books from Psychotactics, it’s quite clear that Butter Chicken takes a place of prominence. Even so, this trip changed my mindset a bit simply because I wasn’t allowed to eat any meat—or fish for that matter

My diet for at least seven days was pretty spartan

In India, we have a dish called Khichdi. It’s a combination of spices, cumin, ghee, rice and yellow moong dal. It’s a dish that is very easily absorbed by the body, which is why it’s often recommended to older people and for very young children. The version of khichdi I was allowed to eat was more basic. It consisted of no spices, no ghee and on most days all I ate was yellow moong dal and rice, tossed into a pressure cooker.

So when I got to the other side even the simplest vegetarian dish was amazingly tasty.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of vegetarian food and if you’ve ever had the chance to visit India, you’ll know there are over 150 types of vegetarian food for breakfast alone. Once I was off the spartan diet, I wasn’t that keen on meat any more. It’s not like I haven’t eaten any—it’s just that Im not keen any more, especially since I found so many different recipes.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been sidetracked by a diet

Back in 2011, I was told not to eat spicy or oily food. And yet we were on our way to Vancouver and Washington D.C. to do our workshops. That’s when I discovered another side to Chinese, Ethiopian and other foods. But to go back into my own culture—my Indian culture—and find so much to eat took me totally by surprise.

I don’t know if a vacation will make such a change for you

But I think it just might. A trip like this to India or even to an Ayurvedic centre somewhere could change your mindset a bit. I wake up everyday and enjoy exploring food I can make in just 10-15 minutes. Food that may involve something as simple as rice flour and semolina. Food that’s easier to make and digest. Food that’s still extremely delicious and nutritious. And amazingly good for you.

It’s a change, but the biggest change of all was simply following the diversion.

Part 3- Breaks are not enough to avoid stress

11,645

That’s how many posts were generated in just three months of the Article Writing Course. And though the course has just 25 clients, there’s a ton of activity and assignments. So to have that many posts is pretty normal for a Psychotactics course. What’s not normal is having to write a whole new set of notes, new assignments and re-recording all the audio.

In short, it was too much—yes, even if you’re a crazy person like me.

And that’s one of the recurring themes from most vacations. Almost always I’ll work myself to a frazzle, then go on vacation. And that’s because I like to do so many things. I like to paint, write, deal with 10,000+ posts on the forum—and most of it fits into my work day. I realised that the additional bit, like having to write the notes and re-recording was just too much.

It seems obvious to you, doesn’t it?

It’s obvious that too much work is too much work. And that all that extra work leads to unwanted stress. Stress that directly leads to health issues. And that while I may take time off on weekends and vacation, there needs to be more paring back. To be hit with such a blatantly obvious idea seems odd.

And yet it’s taken me a long time to figure this one out. For starters, taking weekends off was not obvious but in late 2015 and then in 2016, I got it all under control. This trip underlined why my health was not quite as good as it could be. There’s a direct link between too much stress and cholesterol and pressure.

I get it. It took a while. It took many vacations, many weekends.

But now I get it

I get that we all need to be less frazzled. I get the fact that vegetarian food and fruit is good for me. And I get the digestion bit.

This vacation was supposed to be about food, drink and sleep.

We didn’t get to eat the food we wanted. We were told to avoid alcohol during the treatment. And yes, no sleeping in the day time.

And yet, it’s been one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.

Sometimes life takes you down a diversion. And it’s exactly where you should be. Announcing: New Zealand Workshop—Feb 2017 Is your landing page effective? Learn the step-by-step system to deconstructing and reconstructing your landing pages. http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/newzealand/

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Article Writing How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines [ http://www.psychotactics.com/learn-how-to-speed-up-article-writing-with-simple-outlines ]

DartBoard Pricing How to systematically increase prices without losing customers [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity

(Look for episode 44) iTunes [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] | Android [ http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/sean-dsouza/seanpsychotacticscom?refid=stpr ]| Read and Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/ ] | Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://psychotactics.com/ ]

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

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October 2016

Announcing: How to Put That Zing Back in Your Articles

📅 October 29, 2016 | View in Gmail

Storytelling seems to be the rage these days. And yet, it’s not new at all. It’s been around for thousands of years.

What’s more, it’s not even alien to us. Even as a three-year old, you can tell when a story is really cool and when it’s just plain boring.

The problem arises when we have to take this storytelling skills to our articles. The moment we have to write an article, we freeze up. The article gets riddled with facts and figures. Or sequences. Or whatever. But we know instinctively that the power of the story is missing.

But it’s not just the story that’s important. It’s a story well-told.

A well-told story is like a well-told joke. It has zing. And kapow! So what are the elements of a well-told story? Why have they been playing hide and seek with us for so long?

Find out right here in this three-part series on Storytelling! You’ll love it. I

How Kicking Angels Help You Grow Your Business

📅 October 26, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Kicking Angels Help You Grow Your Business

(To read this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/grow-your-business/ ]

You’ve heard of a guardian angel, haven’t you?

But what on earth is a kicking angel? Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

It’s an angel that does the job of giving you a swiftie on your rear.

We got our first swiftie in the year 2002

We’d just set up Psychotactics. And we were looking to sell our products on the Internet. Um, did I say products? I meant ‘product.’

But as most of us do, we were waffling. We’d been busy tweaking our website. We had been searching for a merchant provider for a month or two.

We’d been thinking of setting up a sales page for about three months. We’d been yiddling and yodelling, and doing diddly-squat.

Then along came the ‘kicking angel’

This kicking angel happened to be an Internet Marketer. He was kinda impressed with our first product, and promised to help us market it to his list.

“But here’s what you have to do first,” he said. “I’ll give you a week to set up everything. You’ll need to get a merchant account. And write your sales page.

And set up an affiliate account. And we’ll start marketing your product in September. And your product will go to my list that’s well over 25,000 prospects.”

You know what we did next, don’t you?

Yup, in one week we did everything we’d been waffling about for well over a month. And then we went back to the Internet Marketer. And here’s what he said: “I’m a little busy doing promotions in September. How about October instead?”

October turned to November. November turned to December. Santa came and Santa went. Our Internet Marketer was always too busy; too pre-occupied; too whatever.

We felt betrayed, and angry And what we didn’t realise, was that this Internet Marketer wasn’t a guardian angel at all. He was a kicking angel. He’d got us moving. And as summer (yes, we have summer in December) rolled around, we started selling our product.

It was a measly 20-page booklet, but hey we were selling…

And doing a jig around the room every time yet another product sold. Amazingly, our kicking angel never came back. Ever.

And that’s when it dawned on us

A kicking angel isn’t supposed to come back. That’s what they’re there for. To give you a kick. They kicked us into starting workshops . They kicked us into writing/creating a series of products. They even came along, and cajoled us into starting the Protege Program–a biggie for us at the time. There’s one who’s been kicking into starting up the Brain Audit Trainer program.

And here’s the irony of it all…

Kicking angels are classic ditchers. They promise to help us promote. They promise to buy into the product. They promise to join a workshop. They swear to be there to sign on the dotted line.

But they never ever show up again.

But in our desire to please these angels, we created products

And services. And courses. And workshops. And our business grew.

It took us a while to realise the role of the kicking angel

That they weren’t our friendly neighbourhood volunteer. Not one of them even turned out to be a strategic alliance or customer. Their only job was to get us off our butts. So we could create stuff. And jig. Jig a lot.

The kicking angel is not a guardian angel by a long shot.

Their only job is to land that swiftie

And the funny thing is that they’ll keep at it, till you listen. If your bum is sore from getting all those swifties, it’s probably time. Time to listen to that kicking angel.

Are you listening?

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Top-Selling Products Under $50

The Brain Audit How to market in a way that is respectful to your customers, yet powerfully compelling. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/ ]

Story Telling Series How to have that zing in your articles—to catch the attention of the reader and keep them interested? [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-telling/ ]

Chaos Planning Forget Business Planning and Goal Setting. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies

NEW! How to Make the Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship (Look for episode 110) Audio [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] | Text [ http://www.psychotactics.com/succeed-chaos/ ] | Audio and Text [ http://www.psychotactics.com/job-to-enrepreneur/ ] | Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://psychotactics.com/ ]

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

Privacy and Spam Policy

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The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)

📅 October 22, 2016 | View in Gmail

When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn’t supposed to be a bestseller.

They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it?

They didn’t pull the stunt that many Internet marketers do.

Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles.

To find out about their open secret, let’s take a trip into Kathy Sierra land. Part 1: The Page Vaporiser” moment Part 2: Not Identifying Confusion and the Bermuda Triangle Part 3: The Perfect Life

Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 109) #109: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/kathy-sierra-story/ ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to:

#110: How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 1110) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/job-to-enrepreneur/ ] |

#98: How To Create A Profitable Product (Three Core Questions)

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 98) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/create-profitable-product/ ] |

Warm regards, Sean P.S. Can you do me a tiny favour? Will You Tell A Friend About The Podcast? Some of our best clients come from people just like you—those who tell their friends about us. That’s why it would be really cool if you could tell a friend about—The Three Month Vacation Podcast.

Here is a simple link http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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Last Day: How to get customers to buy, long before they pay: The Art of Pre-Sell

📅 October 18, 2016 | View in Gmail

We’ve learned a lot of stuff over the years. We’ve done a lot. Nothing has been as magical as pre-sell.

Nothing.

At Psychotactics, we’ve gone the opposite path We’ve always tried to operate like it was 2002, and we’ve just started our business. When we sell products, services or courses, we rarely go out to large numbers. In fact, most of our courses/services are filled up with an audience of fewer than 400 customers—sometimes less.

We don’t have any affiliate program, no advertising campaign… No Google adwords; no social media presence to speak of; no joint ventures blasting our products/services to everyone in sight. And yet, we’ve thrived over the years simply by putting out great products/courses and services. And doing so with small audiences.

You’re probably small too Your audience may not be much to boast about. Yes there’s a ton of blah-blah about how to get 20,000 fans and increase your subscriber list by 432%. And yet, you know deep down in your heart, that isn’t going to happen in a hurry.

Pre-sell helps your clients know about your products/services a lot in advance And it helps them decide based not on this relentless joint-venture-formula-blast, but through a slow, organic method that works. There’s no fluff here, no soul-selling craziness. And yet, make no mistake, the products services fly off the shelf when offered.

It’s saved us time, made us a small fortune, allowed us to take 3 month-vacations every year. And most, if not all, the aggravation of wondering and waiting is minimised.

So how do you buy into the magic? Today is the last day to buy this product, after that you will have to join the waiting list. Judge for yourself—http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/

Warm regards, Sean P.S. The premium bonus is a product in itself. You’ll be able to create a “mini-sales page” that works and takes away a ton of aggravation. You’ll learn how to put together a template quickly and effectively (which really is a big boon, considering all the work that has to be done when launching just about anything).

P.P.S. If you want to read how some people have used the product, here is the link. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell-tst/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: How Pre-sell Helped Reduce Frustration by 75%

📅 October 15, 2016 | View in Gmail

Do you know what’s the biggest problem with sales of any kind, whether offline or online, product or service? It’s the fact that the customer is not ready to buy when you’re ready to sell. So there you are with your wonderfully crafted product or service, and while a lot of folks have promised to buy it, those sales aren’t happening right this moment.

So you have to do what we did at the start We had to keep promoting the product for weeks (actually, months on end) to get traction. And when it came to live events like workshops or online courses, it was even more critical that everyone bought by a specific date. Of course, if you’re terribly persistent, things happen.

But all this persistence drains you And anyway we never wanted to have those rotten squeeze pages. We didn’t care one whit for joint ventures (even when offered). Affiliate systems are nice, but again, not quite our cup of tea. So we had to find a system that would meet our goals and reduce frustration dramatically.

Even so, the first time we ran the pre-sell strategy we were surprised! Most products or events took a bit of time to fill. So we sent out our email, put the sales page up and went out for a coffee. An hour later, this $2500 course was already oversubscribed. And while that’s nice, we thought it was a fluke.

So we tried it again and again We tried it several times in 2010, then in 2011, then in 2012. Yup, 2013 and all the way to 2016. And we even got some of our closest clients to try it on other products e.g. a company selling tea. Without fail, it reduced the frustration and sold the product/service.

If you want to say goodbye to the frustration you will find the pre-sell (pricey as it is) is well worth the price—and then some.

But check it out for yourself at: Pre Sell: How to Pre Sell any product or service http://www.psychotactics.com/presell

Warm regards, s- P.S.What if you put in time and effort to create a product to sell, but no one buys? Trying to sell a product or service is a slightly terrifying ordeal. What if you’ve put your hopes and dreams into a product and are left with nothing to show for it?

Is there a reliable system that will help you sell that product or service just like you’d expected?

Here is the sales page with all the details about the product. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/ [ http://www.psychotactics.com/presell ]

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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The 17 Question Testimonial System: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response

📅 October 11, 2016 | View in Gmail

The 17 Question Testimonial System: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon)

A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time.

If you were to go back into Earth’s history, you’d choke and die quickly

And that’s because the Earth’s atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapour, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor.

A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun’s energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it w

Why Marketing In 2016 is like being in 1920

📅 October 08, 2016 | View in Gmail

In 1920, marketing was a chore. People were separated by vast distances. To get any sort of message across was a royal pain.

And this is what 2016 looks like as well. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Glitter, Mitter and a million methods that are distracting you—and your customer. And with every month that passes, the distraction gets even greater.

Marketers, of course, will tell you a different story They’ll tell you that you can get 10,000 Facebook fans overnight. They’ll tell you that their list is growing by 500 customers a day. They’ll give you these wonderful, overnight success stories.

So you’ll buy the “magic trick” And hope that it works for you, and invariably the market takes over. The distraction kicks in, and it’s harder than ever to get newer customers (let alone get customers to listen to you).

So what’s the solution? The solution has been staring all of us in the face for the longest time. You never needed (or will need) 10,000 Facebook fans. Yes, it’s very nice to get 500 customers a day, but hey, let’s be realistic.

What you’ve know all along is that you can indeed get all the revenue you need from fewer customers.

But fewer customers come with their own caveat The fewer the customers, the more you’ll have to make sure they’re paying attention. And that’s why you need to drip feed them information over weeks, possibly months. It’s a patience-based system, this concept of pre-selling.

And yet, pre-sell works pretty solidly. With pre-sell, you are able to systematically get the few customers to buy your products and services consistently. This ensures you have a lot less stress, a very solid income and aren’t spending all your time doing yet another joint venture, affiliate program or crazy ad campaign.

Best of all, pre-sell enables you to test the validity of your product or service (yes, even a service) long before you spend all that time and effort creating it. If you do it right (and there’s no reason not to), you get a small stampede that keeps you more than satisfied—even with just a small group of customers.

1920 was indeed a chore. And 2017, will be a pain too. Or not.

Have a look: http://www.psychotactics.com/presell

Note:

This is a pre-sell page. There is no “buy-now button”.
The buy now button will be live on 15 of Oct. 2016 (at 3 pm Eastern US)
Yup, all the details are on the page. Have a look. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/

Regards Sean P.S.What if you put in time and effort to create a product to sell, but no one buys? Trying to sell a product or service is a slightly terrifying ordeal. What if you’ve put your hopes and dreams into a product and are left with nothing to show for it? Is there a reliable system that will help you sell that product or service just like you’d expected?

Here is the sales page with all the details about the product. (The ‘Buy Now’ button will appear on 5 of Oct. 2016 (at 3 pm Eastern US). http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results

📅 October 04, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon)

I’ve always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut

Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily.

To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut.

She’s just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don’t need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter.

We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They’re gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the big

Presenting Pre-Sell: How To Get Customers To Buy, Long Before They Pay

📅 October 01, 2016 | View in Gmail

In the year 2009, we tried selling our copywriting course. We gave away a ton of goodies, marketed it for weeks, and guess what? Even though we had a pretty large list and a rock-solid reputation, we sold just four seats.

Four seats? Yup, just four.

And yet when we ran the very same course in 2013, every single seat was taken in under 25 minutes.

Sounds like a fluke? Every workshop since 2009 has sold out in record time (often in under a week). Every course since 2009 has sold out in less than two hours (mostly in less than an hour).

Products that didn’t move at all for weeks, flew off the shelf (yup, since 2009).

Obviously something happened in 2009, right? That something is called “Pre-Sell”. It’s the understanding of how to get your customers to buy, long before they pay. And no matter whether you’re selling products, services or training, the concepts still apply.

And we’ve not had to sell our soul to get results If you look around you’ll see that you’re told to do more joint ventures, do more advertising, spend a bundle on adwords, Facebook marketing etc. The louder you scream, it seems, the better the chances that you’ll get results. And we’ve gone a lot quieter. Most of the above results were achieved with a tiny group.

No joint ventures. Not a single one. No affiliates. No adwords. No publicity. No free elephant rides either.

Makes you wonder, eh? Well, wonder no more. Because now you can learn what we figured out in the year 2009. You too can learn how to pre-sell a product/service. And you don’t need all that hype or a big audience to get results.

Sounds good? Well, here are the details where you can read more. But before you click, here’s what you need to know.

Yes, this is a pre-sell. It’s ironic if it weren’t a pre-sell, right?
When you go to the sales page, you will find all the information.
However, there is no buy-now button.
The buy now button will be live on 15 of Oct. 2016 (at 3 pm Eastern US).

Ok, now you can clickety-click! http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/

[ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/ ]

Warm regards Sean P.S. The ‘Buy Now Button’ will be live on 15 of Oct. 2016 (at 3 pm Eastern US). Set your alarms. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/presell/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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September 2016

Three Disaster Stories (And How We Recovered and Soldiered On)

📅 September 27, 2016 | View in Gmail

Three Disaster Stories (And How We Recovered and Soldiered On)

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon [ http://www.psychotactics.com/three-disaster-stories/ ])

Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show.

That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running.

That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air.

I was excited beyond belief. I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic.

You know what happened next, right?

Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And

I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics. They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days.

How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before.

These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics.

Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop

In 2004, we did something quite bold. We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles.

That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out. Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home.

When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up.

Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time

When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats.

For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees.

Even so a uneasy calm set in

The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10.

It was too late for us to change our minds

We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne.

Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs

We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn’t cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue.

Which is when we got our next shock The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you’d expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, “That table hasn’t moved in a hundred years, and it’s not going to move now”. The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind.

But the surprises didn’t stop at the venue and the table

On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one person turned up, the workshop would go ahead. As we always do, we started on time at 8:32 am.

Then, at 8:45 the doors burst open and another participant showed up. Yup, it was our first paid participant and one who’d seen the announcement of the workshop on our e-mail newsletter and decided to come to the workshop.

We were going to recover some of our costs after all.

However, this paying participant was no ordinary participant

She happened to be the General Manager of a $500 million company that was located in Melbourne. In the break she spoke to me and expressed her surprise at the lack of attendees, but also expressed her admiration. “I was amazed that with just two people in the room, you started right on time”.

Over the next two days we went through the elements of The Brain Audit workshop and by the end of the workshop we had a bit of a reward. The GM wanted us to come and present to her company while we were still in Victoria and she was willing to pay us for the trouble.

And so, we broke even

We could have given up at the stage when the client was sending his depressing e-mail reports. Instead we decided to persevere and yes we had a happy ending, but what are the lessons?

Three lessons here:

Lesson 1: Duds are part of the game The reason I’m relating this story to you is because I see so many people today who want to start a business, but they want to be successful in a very short time—and preferably with no downsides.

If you’re starting up a business today, how many duds are you willing to embrace? The biggest reason why I see businesses failing is because they don’t want to fail. They play safe. They want clients to come to them via a blog or website. They don’t want to go out on a limb and fail a bit. Failing isn’t a nice feeling but it teaches you a great lesson. And sometimes, like we did, you get lucky.

Lesson 2: Cover your costs We bought our plane tickets and paid for the venue before we had enough information. We trusted that things would work out in the end and it didn’t. Since then if we’ve had a workshop that involves costs (and they all do), we make a temporary booking of the venue. Until we sign up at least a few clients, we don’t book or buy anything.

We’ve never made a loss on an event, but we came terribly close with this Hepburn workshop. It taught us to pre-sell and then commit to an event. We use the same concept for our product launches. We pre-sell and only once we have sign-ups do we create the product.

Lesson 3: Work your own contacts When we started out, we didn’t have much of a list. We built that list though writing really good articles. Not just your run of the mill articles, but insightful, funny articles. Despite the presence of a list, we didn’t have many names from Australia. And we decided to work with the client who’d promised to get 60 participants. That was obviously a mistake.

When you give away that much amount of control, you don’t know for sure how things are going to work out. In the end we had no control of the venue, the participants and were stuck with a billiards table in the middle of the room.

But that trip to Australia was only one of our early adventures. The second scary one was definitely the insurance company speech.

Story 2: The Insurance Company Speech

I don’t remember how I got some of the early speaking assignments—or maybe I’m just trying to forget.

This early assignment was in Wellington where I was supposed to speak to a large group of insurance agents. The presentation was about The Brain Audit, but I tried valiantly to get case studies about the insurance business. I met with the client many times at their local office, I did my research and found many examples about the insurance industry.

And that’s where I made my first mistake.

Well, anyway, I flew to Wellington and started my presentation

As I got through the first 15 minutes or so, I realised the audience was not reacting the way I expected them to do so. Instead of being interested in the case studies, they seemed to be bringing up objections and interrupting my presentation. And rightly so.

I was the outsider in the room. I didn’t know squat about insurance and the insurance industry and there I was giving them case studies that left me open to attack.

That’s when my second mistake became apparent

I was still very much a rookie at presenting so I took whatever advice I could get in that field. And one presenter told me never to use slides. He suggested that slides were like the kiss of death. As it turned out, slides would have saved me from going to pieces on that particular day. As the audience grew restless, I got extremely nervous on stage.

And then someone walked out

Who knows why they walked out. Maybe it was just to go to the toilet or to get a drink. But as my eye moved towards the exit, I could see the entire audience walking out in droves. And though no one else was walking out at that point, I couldn’t focus and forgot what I had to say next. If I had slides, I could have used them as a guide and moved along.

Maybe the presentation would have still been a disaster, but it would have been a lot better than a professional presenter standing on stage with his mouth open and his mind blank.

I still had twenty minutes to go and nothing came to mind, so I fled. I left the stage, went down the corridor and locked myself in the room until the taxi came to pick me up to the airport, later.

But that’s not the end of the story

Three years later I was asked to speak at quite a different event, but at the very same venue, on the very same stage. To say I was mortified was putting it lightly. I could see myself forgetting what I had to say, and fleeing for the second time in a row.

You know how it is when you’re all wound up, don’t you? You don’t sleep very much at night and I counted every ambulance and police siren that roared by on the street as I lay high up in my hotel room.

Except I’d learned from my mistakes

The first mistake was trying to appeal to the audience That wasn’t a mistake I was going to make ever again. When you try to appeal to an audience of people in your industry, you have at least some authority to do so. But when you’re facing an audience from another industry, it’s like walking into the jaws of a steel trap and I’d had one experience and it was enough. I presented my information as is, and the audience drew their own conclusion.

The second mistake I’d made was to speak without slides It may sound like a good idea, but if you’ve spent the previous night counting sirens, you’re likely to be tired and prone to mistakes. That one event made sure I never left home without my slides. I’d even take a backup on an external drive and print out a sheet of the main points—just in case technology failed at the last minute.

But easily the biggest experience to draw upon was walking back on that stage. It was scary but I realised if I backed out I’d always fear that venue and stage. The venue wasn’t the problem, it was the way I handled my presentation that caused all the trouble. Going back into that seeming danger zone made me more resilient than ever before.

Which takes us to the third story: the boat cruise.

Story 3: The Bouncy Boat Cruise

I’m not a big fan of “believing in the universe”.

I believe you need to put in the effort and you get the result. And yet I couldn’t explain how I ended up on this cruise from New Zealand to Australia. At the start of the year I’d written my goals and one of the goals was to get on a cruise ship. But as I ploughed through the year no cruise ship had my name on it.

Then in May I had a meeting with a CEO of a bed franchise

“I’d like you to make a presentation at our annual event”, he said when I met him at his office. You know what’s coming next, right? Yes, the annual event was on a cruise ship. As excited as I was about the “universe pitching in”, I still had a job to do. And the presentation wasn’t bothering me too much because I’d just made many similar presentations in the months running up to the cruise.

The first night, as we sailed away, there were incredibly calm seas

But calm seas and the Tasman don’t go together, especially in June. June is the start of winter in this part of the world and winter brings stormy seas. Added to that, the Tasman Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water. But we were in a good mood and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oily bacon and buttery-eggs.

And then all hell broke loose.

The ship started bouncing about like crazy

The bacon and eggs—well, let’s just say you shouldn’t eat oily stuff under normal conditions—but on this rough sea it was pure hara kiri. Renuka and I were not only sea sick, we were throwing up for a solid hour. And later that morning, I had to make my presentation. Somehow, Renuka staggered to the medical centre to buy some overpriced pills to quell the seasickness.

And then it was show time

Luckily the presentation was in the lower part of the liner which happened to be the most stable. But I was feeling terrible and had a hard time standing up, so I didn’t get on stage. Instead I made the presentation from the bottom of the stage (at seat level) and held the stage for support. 45 minutes later I was done, and the CEO came up to continue the proceedings.

“You didn’t look too well,” he said to me as we passed. “Did you drink a little too much last night?”

“No I didn’t”, I informed him. I never drink the night before I have to make a presentation. What he didn’t know of course, was that Renuka was responsible for that advice. She warned me to stay away from any alcohol the previous night, no matter how many free drinks were being offered. And so I stayed sober, which was a very good lesson in itself.

Often you’re judged not by what you can do, but other people’s perception of you.

If I had been drinking the pervious night, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was sea-sick. My pale demeanour would have been attributed to the fact that I wasn’t a professional. I’ve found this to be true with not just speaking engagements but in every area of my life.

When there’s a course on, I don’t tell clients what’s happening in the background. If I have a workshop, I focus on the slides and not about any other issues. When you let your audience know that you have other issues, they automatically attribute some slip up to that issue, even though that issue may not be connected.

Oh, and that universe thing.

I still don’t believe too much in it, but I write things down anyway. I put in the effort and then it comes true. Funny that!

Epilogue Often in life we’re waiting for that miracle moment. We are sure that if we simply put up the website, or start writing that blog, things will happen. What I’ve found is a bit different.

With the Australia one person workshop we found that persistence paid off, but it was less a story of persistence and more about learning how groundwork and preparation avoids failure. We still need to get out from our office. We still need to push ourselves into the unknown, but we can do so without taking nutty risks.

The Wellington presentation story was also one of willing to go beyond the computer screen. But it was also one of facing your demons and conquering them. Once I found that I could win that battle against fear, I feel comfortable taking on a scary situation time and time again.

Finally the boat cruise could have gone horribly wrong if Renuka wasn’t around to give me advice. Her advice kept me in the good standing of the CEO. Perception is far greater than reality. And I’ve learned over the years to manage perception, because what people believe is what they feel to be true.

No one is saying you need to be fake or feed your audience what you think they should hear. I openly share what we do, where we’ve succeeded and where we’ve failed. But in the middle of an assignment, you need to focus on the assignment and keep any additional stories for later, much later.

Presenting: How to Put That Zing-Kapow in Your Articles (With StoryTelling)

📅 September 24, 2016 | View in Gmail

Storytelling seems to be the rage these days. And yet, it’s not new at all. It’s been around for thousands of years. What’s more, it’s not even alien to us. Even as a three-year old, you can tell when a story is really cool and when it’s just plain boring. The problem arises when we have to take this storytelling skills to our articles. The moment we have to write an article, we freeze up. The article gets riddled with facts and figures. Or sequences. Or whatever. But we know instinctively that the power of the story is missing. But it’s not just the story that’s important. It’s a story well-told. A well-told story is like a well-told joke. It has zing. And kapow! So what are the elements of a well-told story? Why have they been playing hide and seek with us for so long? Find out right here in this three-part series on Storytelling! You’ll love it. It’s full of cartoons, precise advice—and yes, the zing! That’s what you’ll learn: how to create the zing. So have a look right away. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-tellingRegards, Sean P.S. Here is what Kyle Newell has to say: “The obstacles that would have prevented me from buying–The Story Telling Mini Series was having enough other story telling products and books already.” I like the simplicity and quick implementation. Just yesterday, I was able to take them out, pull a few ideas and start writing! The specific feature I liked most about–The Story Telling Mini Series is how quick they were to get through. Thats not a bad thing, its a great thing. So many time products are just too much information and therefore are never consumed and never implemented. Three other benefits? Gave me a variety of options, gave great examples and helped me to build my knowledge of story telling. I would recommend this product for sure! It is very easy to understand and implement and most people have no idea that stories are the most powerful way to communicate. Kyle Newell , USA Judge for yourself: StoryTelling Mini Series Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

Article Writing Advice Writers Don’t Want To Hear

📅 September 20, 2016 | View in Gmail

Article Writing Advice Writers Don’t Want To Hear

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon [ http://www.psychotactics.com/article-writing-hallmark/ ])

A friend wrote to me today and asked me what seemed like a pretty normal question. She expected 5 lines, maybe 6. Instead I ended up with 1800 words.

So what was her question?

What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content?

The answer is something that most writers may not want to hear. It’s an answer that demands sacrifice, going against the grain and being persistent when things are going horribly wrong.

Still interested?

Well, here’s the question again: What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content?

The answer:

Contrast
Lack of pandering
The gap between style and ability.

Let’s start with contrast It’s the year 1986. John Heritage and David Greatbatch have an itch to scratch. They’re studying applause and what causes it. So they embark on what could be considered one of the most boring tasks in the world: they analyse politician’s speeches.

476 of them.

And what were these two poor souls looking for?

Applause, that’s what they were keen to find. Why was it that one speech received total silence, while other speeches got applause? But not just applause, but applause twice per minute!

Nineteen thousand sentences later they had a clue

It was contrast. The moment the audience encountered applause, the brain was no longer dormant. Contrast brought a smile to their faces, and cheering followed.

Contrast requires you and me to work so much harder

But contrast also puts you in a strange and precarious position. If everyone says: You should go this way and there’s a writer that says, “Nope, you’re headed into sheep land. This is the way to go”. Now that is going out on a limb. Contrast is scary. It’s much easier to say what everyone else is saying.

If you want to start with the hallmark of quality, contrast is where you start.

Let’s take an example of contrast

Let’s say you’re writing about a subject such as productivity, for example. Now productivity doesn’t bring to mind any sort of rest or sleep does it? Instead the enduring message of productivity has almost always been one of focus and concentration.

It’s always been one of working out astounding efficiencies to do more work than ever before. At this point in time, let’s say your article talks about sleep. It talks about taking the weekends off. It even goes on to suggest that you take several months off in a year.

You’ve shaken up the force a bit, haven’t you?

You’ve created a counter force that may at first seem impossible to defend. Yet, that’s what great writing is about. Conceptually, it stands out and picks a topic that’s contrarian. But not all topics need to be contrarian to have that hallmark, do they?

You could write articles on topics that have none of this rebellious nature and still bring out the big guns.

This calls for a bit of a roller coaster in your writing

An article needs to have a flow so the reader can move forward, but just as important is a counterflow. So let’s say you’re writing about how to “grow a curry leaf tree”, you also need to bring in the counterflow as you’re writing.

That counterflow would be a possible glitch in the planting process. It could be a couple of mistakes you’re about to make. To be able to speed ahead, brake and go in a counterflow direction isn’t easy. Some writers do it while creating the material. Others create it later during an edit process.

Flow by itself is super boring

Try this paragraph for example: We went to the airport, there was no traffic on the highway. We got through check in and immigration in next to no time. And then we sat down to have a beer.

So what are you thinking at this point in time?

I’ll tell you what. You’re wondering if the story has any purpose. And yet, the moment counterflow comes into play, you’re alert again. Let’s go back to the story. You’ve had your beer, when a policeman walks up with a grim face.

That’s drama, that’s contrast. And the hallmark of a great article is the ability to insert contrast into various sections of your article. Case studies can have an up and down. The concept can start out being all in favour of something and then diverge without warning. Now you’ve created contrast and lifts the tempo of your words.

Counterflow needs to head back to flow, however

Too much counterflow and your reader is turned off. The grim policeman, the spilling of beer on your white shirt, the missing of the flight—and the article seems to be falling right out of the skies. Which is why contrast matters so much.

Contrast is about a constantly evolving set of words that get you to slip slide through like—yes—a roller coaster. Up, down, up and down.

But contrast is only one hallmark of good writing. The second is a lack of pandering.

The second hallmark of great writing is a lack of pandering

Clients often ask me if I write articles with keywords in mind. The answer is no. I never have. I’ve been told I can get ten times the traffic if I pandered to keywords, but frankly I don’t care.

The moment you pander, you’re not really writing for yourself

Most of the greatest writing is not done for another. Most outstanding writing is done to clear the cobwebs in your own mind. You know this feeling well if you’ve tried to do a bit of a project like writing a report, presentation, or a book. There are a million thoughts floating through your mind and none of them seem to sit well until you put them down on paper.

The reason why I wrote a book on the Secret Life of Testimonials wasn’t because a client asked me to do so.

I wrote because I had these floating ideas in my head. And when I started writing the book, I expected to complete between 20-30 pages. There was good reason for me to have this pagination estimate. I’d already written a book on testimonials earlier and the first edition stopped quite firmly at 30 pages. Imagine my surprise when I went past 30, onto 50, then over 75 and sailed past 100, before settling at 125 pages.

When you pander you lose your soul

You stuff keywords into your headlines, write less than interesting opening paragraphs and do things that just don’t resonate with being a writer. And we know this to be true with one simple test.

Would you use those same words if you were writing the article back in 1995? Pandering means a compromise that’s not necessarily walking step by step with producing the best possible work.

How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job Into Entrepreneurship

📅 September 17, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Do You Make The Mental Leap From A Job Into Entrepreneurship?

The leap may seem physical, but it’s mostly mental. In your head you don’t know if it’s the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur.

What about the mortgage, the family and the bills?
And how do you deal with the fear?
How do you stay steadfast to your vision?
And what about focus?

These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again.

This episode isn’t an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap.

Join us as we explore the three key parts of this journey. Part 1: How to manage the fear Part 2: Why and how to keep your vision strong Part 3: Focus—And why you need a hatchet person.

Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 110) #110: Part 1-How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job into Entrepreneurship iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/job-to-enrepreneur/ ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to the top two podcasts in August.

#107: How To Thrive and Succeed In The Midst of Chaos Listen or read this episode here.(Look for episode 107). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/succeed-chaos/ ] |

#102: How to use a simple “Pebble System” to write amazing sales pages Listen or read this episode here.(Look for episode 102). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KMgUH&m=3hda1DMgEMUTVt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://www.psychotactics.com/sale-page-pebble-system/ ] |

Warm regards, Sean

P.S. Can you do me a tiny favour? Will You Tell A Friend About The Podcast? Some of our best clients come from people just like you—those who tell their friends about us. That’s why it would be really cool if you could tell a friend about The Three Month Vacation Podcast.

Here is a simple link http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zMxMzCwsTGw=

Last Day For Special Offer—Dartboard Pricing + Special Bonuses ( worth $49)

📅 September 13, 2016 | View in Gmail

Just a reminder, in case you missed the last email.

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 10th, 11th, 12th or 13th Sept. 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Dartboard? As in darts and a dartboard? Yes, exactly!

If you go to a bookstore and buy a dozen books on pricing, you will find pricing is some incredibly sophisticated system. You’ll run into fancy and complicated pricing models that rapidly put you to sleep.

So is pricing simple? Sure it is. You don’t need a book to figure out pricing.

A simple dart board and some prices on the board would solve your problem in a matter of minutes.

The price itself is of little consequence What matters is all the stuff around the price.

Special Offer: Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers + Special Bonus Valued at $49

📅 September 10, 2016 | View in Gmail

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 10th, 11th, 12th or 13th Sept. 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Dartboard? As in darts and a dartboard? Yes, exactly!

So is pricing simple? Sure it is. You don’t need a book to figure out pricing.

A simple dart board and some prices on the board would solve your problem in a matter of minutes.

How to Quickly Get Customers to Consume Your Report (And Come Back for More)

📅 September 06, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Quickly Get Customers To Consume Your Report (And Come Back For More)

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/creating-reports/ ]

Ever watched a marathon on TV?

Yup, I thought so. It’s painful watching while all those folks make their way through the bay, over the bridge and finally to their destination. Instead it’s much easier to watch the 100 metre sprint. It starts, and they’re off. And then nine second later, there’s a finish line in sight.

Your report needs to be like a sprint, not a marathon. And there’s a reason why.

When customers come to your website for the first time, it’s likely that you’ll entice them with a report

It’s also quite likely that they’ll sign up for that report, or read it online (depending on how you deliver the report). And while you can get fascinating reports of marathon-length, remember that this report is almost like a first impression.

If you spend way too much time labouring over the details, the customer may never get to the end. And the goal of this report—among all other reports—is to get the customer to the end; to get the customer to consume it completely.

Announcement: Why Most Planning Fails—The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

📅 September 03, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve.

Then suddenly it’s September, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected. And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. And what’s worse is that you’ve read all the books on planning as well.

But they haven’t helped either. There’s a reason why they haven’t helped. It’s because those books were written by highly organised people. What you need is for someone disorganised to write a book. A book based on chaos. And how chaos is critical to starting out your plan.

August 2016

How To Thrive and Succeed In The Midst Of Chaos

📅 August 30, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Thrive and Succeed In The Midst Of Chaos

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/succeed-chaos/ ]

Most of us have grand plans to succeed. Yet, almost the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out.

At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos.

How To Get Ideas When Writing Articles: 3 Brilliant Sources

📅 August 23, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Get Ideas When Writing Articles

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/ideas-when-writing-articles/ ]

It might seem that it’s impossible to get ideas for your articles. And it is.

You go completely blank. Of course, there’s a reason for all this blankness. And just as you can go blank, you have more ideas than you know what to do with.

Can this really be possible? Can you really have tons of ideas? Yes, you can.

Two Psychological Techniques To Creating An Irresistible Product/Service (And Increase Sales)

📅 August 16, 2016 | View in Gmail

The Two Psychological Techniques To Creating An Irresistible Product/Service

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/irresistible-product-techniques/ ]

Isn’t it a pain creating a new product? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, it seems impossible to make your product stand out. But is there a way to make your product/service irresistible—and without looking cheesy?

Why We Struggle to Write a Book: 3 Structural Reasons

📅 August 09, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why We Struggle To Write A Book

(To read this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/struggle-write-reasons/ ]

When you sit down to write content for a book, you wonder why the sound of hitting your head is so very loud.

The more you sit down, the harder it seems.

And yet, there’s a reason—three actually.

The Headline Course 2016: Bookings open in 30 minutes

📅 August 06, 2016 | View in Gmail

In 30 minutes from now (give or take a few minutes), the Headlines Course for 2016 will open.

So why all this fuss? Unlike other marketers that take hundreds, even thousands of people on their courses, we take just 25.

Announcing! Headlines Course: How To Write Amazingly Powerful Headlines (Every Single Time)

📅 August 02, 2016 | View in Gmail

Here’s a little test.

I’m going to write three lines. And of course, you’ll read those three lines. Then you’ll tell me which of the lines work. And which ones don’t.

Ready?

OK, here goes:

I’m going for a walk in the woods tonight.
The cylist doesn’t cycle very good.
Dinosaurs love yummy chocolate cake.

July 2016

Announcing: Why Every Kid Can Draw At 5 (And Gives Up at 6)

📅 July 30, 2016 | View in Gmail

In my career as a cartoonist, I noticed something interesting.

No matter where you go on the planet, you can find a five year old that is not only capable of drawing, but is eager to draw.

Then, they turn six.

Announcing: The DaVinci Cartooning Course 2016

📅 July 26, 2016 | View in Gmail

“I can’t draw a straight line!”

These aren’t just the words I hear from clients. They’re the words I heard from my wife, Renuka.

You see, Renuka never considered herself to be an artist. After all, no one in her family was known for their art, let alone drawing cartoons. It seemed logical that talent should run in the family, and it was natural for her to feel that cartooning wasn’t really for her.

You should see her now. You really should see her now. Her work is amazing (and you can see it in the 5000bc newsletters and on Facebook).

But is Renuka an exception? The answer lies in the cartooning course itself. I started up this course in 2010, to prove a simple point. I believed that skills are learned, not inborn. And it’s one thing to make a statement. What really matters is proof—beyond any doubt.

And since 2010, we’ve trained dozens of clients to draw

Not just draw doodles, but to draw cartoons of such a high calibre that in 6 months they’re being considered to be a “professional”.
They’ve gone on to drawing cartoons for their blogs and articles.
They’ve published their own business books (with cartoons) and some of them have even gone on to teach cartooning.

“I can’t draw a straight line!” It’s a phrase we use and it slows us down. It hampers our growth. It nails us to the floor. If you’ve ever considered that you’d like to draw—and draw cartoons, this is your chance to escape from that line.

So what is the qualification needed? You don’t need to know drawing at all. In fact, if you are pretty hopeless at any kind of drawing, in barely six months the results are astounding.

And yes, it’s that time of the year again. We have opened the registrations for the DaVinci 2016 Course. But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JwZONKDG0dEtt1&b=gsN99DYW8QAAuwFk9EzOWA (The early bird offer ends on 31 July 2016)

Warm regards, Sean P.S. Since 2010, over 145 students have done this course and becomes cartoonists in their own right. It’s your time now.

Get your pencils ready. It’s time to draw! (The early bird offer ends on 31 July 2016) http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JwZONKDG0dEtt1&b=gsN99DYW8QAAuwFk9EzOWA

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zEwMHMwMTIw=

Two Special Announcements: The Cartooning Course + How to Write 200 Brilliant Headlines

📅 July 23, 2016 | View in Gmail

Just two short announcements today.

The Da Vinci Cartooning Online Course (Registrations open July 26 at 3 pm Eastern (US) 2016)

Can anyone draw? Sounds like a ridiculous question, eh? You’ve been told (and told yourself) time and time again, that you couldn’t draw a straight line. Well get this: Cartoonists don’t draw straight lines. They draw circles and squares and triangles and they get amazing work out. The proof, they say, is in the pudding. And this pudding (the Da Vinci Course) has been proven to be amazing to turn anyone, yes anyone, into a solid cartoonist. And you can see amazing results in just six months.

If you’ve ever wanted to illustrate your own books, ebooks, or even your blog, this is the opportunity. We’ve had over 145+ people on this course. People who believed they couldn’t draw. And you can read their own stories at the link below. But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. http://www.psychotactics.com/davinci/ (On 26 July, 2016 at 3:00 pm Eastern (USA) we will be opening up registration for the 2016 batch )

Announcing: The Headline Online Course 2016 (8 Weeks)

If you’ve ever needed to write headlines, you know what a pain it is. Then, of course, some genius marketer tells you that you have to write 200 headlines to get one great headline. But what if they were wrong? What if you could write 200 headlines brilliantly? And what if you could do them in a fraction of the time that you’re taking right now? And what if your headline could then attract customers, just like you intended?

You’ll discover that you can write headlines as easily as you can write an email Just as you can write 10 lines in an email, you can turn out 10 brilliant headlines—and guarantee that every single one is a winner.

Sounds hard to believe? Read the page below and judge for yourself. Registration opens 6 August 2016 at 3:00 pm Eastern (USA). But in the meantime judge for yourself.

Participants Experience http://www.psychotactics.com/HeadlineTestimonials.pdf Course Details http://www.psychotactics.com/headlines-course

Warm regards, Sean

P.S. DaVinci Course—Registrations open July 26 at 3 pm Eastern (US) Headlines Course—Registrations open 6 August 2016 at 3:00 pm Eastern (US)

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

📅 July 19, 2016 | View in Gmail

Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

(To read this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IhWF_vWsudEtt1&b=rCh5NO7_FQYluTU0npWImQ ]

In Tokyo, under the Ginza railway station, there is a famous restaurant run by Jiro.

Free Goodies: How To Stand Out From Your Competition

📅 July 16, 2016 | View in Gmail

This is a reminder in case you missed last weeks email

Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to not be me-too?

What would it be like to stand out from the competition in a way that customers choose you over everyone else? And what if you were to raise your prices, and they still kept coming?

That’s what uniqueness can do to your product or service. Yet most of us seem to know what makes our product or service better than competition.

But the customer doesn’t know. So they go elsewhere. Some cheaper. Somewhere crappier. But they don’t come to you in the droves you’ve imagined.

Presenting: Uniqueness Goodies (Yup, FREE Goodies!) Everyone tells you that uniqueness is important, but no one tells you how to work through the uniqueness minefield.

Until now, that is.. You will get access to articles, audio and video.

Even if you don’t like video, I would recommend you watch the videos. They are just 15 minutes. Your understanding of uniqueness will change dramatically after you watch these detailed videos and reading the articles.

Here is the sequence of what to expect in the coming weeks Free Goodie No. 1: Uniqueness: Why We Get It Wrong Free Goodie No. 2: Getting to Uniqueness Part 1 & 2 Free Goodie No. 3: Uniqueness: The Importance of the Mundane and the Seemingly Uninteresting Free Goodie No. 4: Uniqueness mistakes and how to avoid them Free Goodie No. 5: Uniqueness: The Difference (and Resemblance) Between Uniqueness and the Other Red Bags Free Goodie No. 6: Uniqueness: Do You Need To Carve Out a Uniqueness For ‘Every’ Product or Service?

How to get the goodies? Have a look at this page for all the details: Uniqueness Free Goodies [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J.UWS4780dEtt1&b=hE73mpN7oeI4zoh9hTekQg ]

Regards Sean

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zEwMHMxMnAw=

How a Magic Moment Encourages Prospects to Become Client

📅 July 12, 2016 | View in Gmail

Psychotactics How A Magic Moment Encourages Prospects To Become Client (To read this article online click on the cartoon) The first time I converted prospects to clients, I had no clue what I was doing

Announcing: How To Stand Out From Your Competition: Free Goodies

📅 July 09, 2016 | View in Gmail

Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to not be me-too?

What would it be like to stand out from the competition in a way that customers choose you over everyone else? And what if you were to raise your prices, and they still kept coming?

That’s what uniqueness can do to your product or service. Yet most of us seem to know what makes our product or service better than competition.

But the customer doesn’t know. So they go elsewhere. Some cheaper. Somewhere crappier. But they don’t come to you in the droves you’ve imagined.

Presenting: Uniqueness Goodies (Yup, FREE Goodies!) Everyone tells you that uniqueness is important, but no one tells you how to work through the uniqueness minefield.

Until now, that is.. You will get access to articles, audio and video.

How to get the goodies? Have a look at this page for all the details: Uniqueness Free Goodies [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J_ITiVhO0dEtt1&b=s0Q89sE5mlw4f2mn52vgAw ]

Regards Sean D’Souza

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zEwMHMxMHAw=

My apologies about the typos

📅 July 05, 2016 | View in Gmail

My apologies about the typos

If you read today’s newsletter, you’d have found no fewer than six typos. This kind of “sloppiness” is unprecedented, and readers wrote in to say that it doesn’t read like my work at all.

What I forgot to mention was this: The newsletter was a transcript and we’d assumed that (for the most part) there would be no typos. It’s easy to pass on the blame on to someone else, but we shouldn’t have sent the transcript without a thorough check.

My apologies once again. And thanks to those of you who wrote in and let me know.

Warm regards, Sean

Privacy and Spam Policy

I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling

📅 July 05, 2016 | View in Gmail

Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNDI8YiR4dEtt1&b=nqcT4LbJYFWO1RevvIP9TA ]

Storytelling elements and secrets are hiding in plain sight Storytelling has a lot of guidelines and rules. And storytellers can’t always explain what they’re doing? And yet, they’re incredibly powerful. For instance, the concept of “anticipation” before the “problem”. Continue reading to find out how to tell riveting stories.

I was about 2 years old when I first had a bout of convulsions

It didn’t start up as convulsions. I was standing there on the balcony, looking out on the road, and then I fell off the stool that I was standing on. As the story goes, I ran to my mother.

She noticed that I was having convulsions, and she panicked. Now, panic would be the wrong word to use because what she did next was bundled me in her arms and ran with me to the hospital.

To put you in the frame of mind of what India was when I was growing up, there were no phones or most people didn’t have phones. They didn’t have cars. You probably had a scooter if you were well off.

That’s just how things were back then. What she had to do was run a distance of 2 kilometers, maybe 3 kilometers to get to the nearest hospital. When she got to the hospital, they wouldn’t admit me because I had meningitis and the hospital was not in the position to deal with cases of meningitis.

Somehow, she managed to get them to admit me.

At that point in time, they asked for the mother. Now, my mother was very young at that point in time and they assumed that she was somehow the sister. They said, “No. No. No. You have to get the mother.” This is very odd in India because people tend to get married very early in India and yet they were insisting that they had to have the mother before they could go ahead with anything.

There I was, not doing so well and the hospital authorities wouldn’t go ahead without dealing with the mother. Now, she convinced them but once they admitted me, there was one more problem. The doctor wasn’t so sure that I would survive the meningitis. He told my parents, and by that point, my father was there as well. He said, “I have to tell you this. Your son will either die or he’ll go mad.”

What you just heard was the story of my youth. The question is, why did you keep listening? Why did the story work? What is it that caused you to pay attention and not move away from the story?

In this article, we’re going to cover storytelling elements

How to Avoid Boring Articles? The core of avoiding boring articles is to be able to tell stories, but stories are useful for presentations. They’re useful for books. They’re useful for webinars.

They’re useful for pretty much everything. What happens is most of us load up our information with facts and figures, and those are very tiring but stories, they encapsulate everything. We’re going to learn how to create stories that are very powerful.

The 3 elements of storytelling are

The Wall
The Reconnect
The Anticipation

Element 1: The Wall Every afternoon, every weekday, I go through the same routine. I pick up my niece from school. She’s now 11, that’s Marsha. We speak about stuff in the car. We do multiplication tables.

Recently, we’ve been doing storytelling. I usually when I asked her, “Tell me of story about what happened in the weekend.” She goes, “Nothing.” Then I say, “What happened in class?” She goes, “Nothing.”

This is the interesting part. You think that there’s nothing happening in your life, but there is a lot happening all the time. Then, we have to zero in onto one little thing and make it interesting, just about anything becomes interesting in the way you dealt it.

I said, “Tell me about your piano class on Saturday.”

Her little face brightens up and the smile comes on, and she goes, “I didn’t practice before going to piano class on Saturday. Then when I got to the piano class, I was really afraid because I thought I would the play the piece really badly. But as it appears, I played quite well.

In fact, I played it so well that the piano teacher said, ‘I’m going to put you on a more advanced piece.’ Of course, once she gave me the advanced piece, I couldn’t play it. She said, ‘No. No. No. No. No. You’re playing it in the wrong key.’ I should try to play in the right key, but it didn’t worked.”

The piano teacher gave her another chance. Of course, she was not playing the piece well, so they went back to the old piece, which is what she had practice. Marsha was quite happily playing her old piece, but playing it by ear, not reading the notes. Happy as a luck when she looked at the corner of the room and there was her mother.

According to Marsha, her mother was glaring at her because Marsha hadn’t improved and she was back to square one. How could the day have been worse for Marsha?

Now, that was a really short story. Why would you hook in to the story?

The reason the story works is because there were these little blips along the way, what we call the wall. What is the wall? The wall is … Think of it as like a heart monitor. The heart monitor, when it’s absolutely flat, will go “Beeeep.” There is no sound. Then when the heart is beating, it will “Dub dub, dub dub, dub dub.”

There is this little spike that jumps in every now and then, and that creates a wall. That creates that fact that you know that your heart is actually working. This is what happens in storytelling. Most people tell a story in a very boring fashion. The reason why they tell that is because there story would just go from one end to the other without the spikes.

What were the spikes in Marsha’s story?

The first spike was the fact that she was afraid she hadn’t practiced. That got your attention. Then she went on to a new problem, which is that she had to go there to the class and then play a new piece.

Then when she couldn’t play that new piece, she ran into a whole bunch of problems. She was thrown back to the old piece, which was a good thing, at least, to Marsha’s eyes but bad thing in the mother’s eyes, which is why the mother was glaring at her from the corner of the room. Then as Marsha finished the story, she says, “How could the day get worse?”

This is a perfect, little story just told from one end to the other with all of these little blips, these little blips, the other wall. The other wall that you have to climb across so you can get into the alley and there’s a wall there and you have to climb over that wall to get to the other side. This is what creates interest.

The wall can be an obstacle. It can be something funny. It can be something unusual.

As long as it changes the pace of the story, it becomes the wall because you now have to get over that wall onto the other side before the story can continue. More stories don’t run that way.

For instance, if we look at Marsha’s story, we could say, “We went to piano class. On the way, I almost slipped in a banana peel, but then I recovered because I wasn’t feeling so well. Anyway, I got to the class and I played my piece. Then, I played the second piece.”

You can see where the story is going, but at one point in time, when she slipped in the banana peel, you got that spike in your head. Even though you might not have thought about it at the time, there was that spike and you see the spike everywhere.

What’s more important is the spike has been with you right since you heard your first story being read to you as a kid.

If you look at something like Red Riding Hood, it’s a very simple story. The girl goes to her grandmother’s house and she’s got this bag of goodies that her mother has packed for the grandmother. What happens along the way? Red Riding Hood runs into the wolf. Before that, there was no problem at all. The forest was not that intimidating.

She got flowers along the way. Then, along came the wolf. The wolf creates the spike in the story. Now, this is a wall that she has to get over. She has to solve that problem.

If you look at all the stories that you heard or have told your kids, you will find a consistency in this wall, this obstacle, which means that we have to create stories with these spikes, with these obstacles. Then, we have to climb over these obstacles or rather take the reader or the listener across the obstacle and then to the other side.

Here’s what I do with Marsha.

I make her sit down with a sheet of paper. Then I get her to draw a line across.

At the starting point, she has, say, maybe she’s going to piano class. The ending point is whatever happens at the end. In between, I get her to draw little dots or little spikes, whatever you want to call them, and she has to put in those obstacles. As soon as she puts in those obstacles, we fill in the rest later.

The point is once you identify those obstacles, you are able to turn out far better stories because now what you’ve done is you have created that bounce, you have created an obstacle, you have created a wall, and of course, people have to then go over it.

I started this article with a story about meningitis. I didn’t spend time explaining to you how I was looking out of the window. I went straight into the bounce, straight into the wall. I had convulsions. I fell down. I then had to run to my mother. You have been thrown right in the middle of this bounce. Of course, the bounce didn’t stop until we got to the hospital because now you’re thinking, “Okay, things are going to get okay.”

Then, we have another wall.

They won’t admit me to the hospital. Then, we get over that wall. Now, they were asking for the mother because they don’t believe that my mother was the mother, that they thought that she was the sister. Then, when all of those problems have been resolved, the doctor says the chances are not good.

What we have of these bounces all along the way, these walls all along the way, and you have to cross over, get over these walls to create a great story.

This is just the first element of storytelling. Let’s move to the second element.

Element 2: The Reconnect What is the reconnect? Right at the end of the previous section, when I was talking about the wall, I went right back to the story of meningitis. Immediately, your brain went from wherever it was right back to that original story. This is what storytellers use very effectively.

They use the reconnect. They connect back to something they told you a while ago.

It’s very powerful because that creates a bounce of its own. It takes you from where you are to where you used to be. If you’re to watch the movie Star Wars, there is this concept called the force. It’s used the force.

Luke used the force. How many times does the word force show up in Star Wars?

Apparently, more than 16 times. There you are in the cinema or watching the movie on a DVD or maybe on your computer, but you run into this concept of the force. Every time that reference to the force shows up and you don’t really notice it, but it just shows up, it takes you back to wherever you originally heard it or saw it.

Why is this reconnection so cool? The first thing is that often, it makes you feel very intelligent. The story is set up in a way that you know what is coming. When it does arrive, it makes you feel extremely intelligent. That’s what storytelling is about. It’s about making the reader feel a lot happier or a lot sadder, that they use to feel.

You can feel that happiness or sadness as I edge into the meningitis story. You know what is coming next. You know how that story ended. It makes you feel very intelligent. It makes the reader or the listener feel very intelligent.

The second thing it does is it creates bounce. It bounces you back to wherever you were, and that creates that spike. It’s doing a dual job, but it does one more thing. It closes a loop.

Notice what happened with my story. I can close that loop. I told you that the doctor said I would die or go mad. The loop wasn’t closed. What you can do is if you’re reconnecting at some point, you can close that loop. It’s very trendy to keep the loop open, but it drives people crazy.

The other day, I was on my walk and I was listening to an audio book about the brain. This author was talking about how he was at a David Attenborough conference. He was sitting there with someone else. They were having a discussion. Then he went into the discussion. About 20 minutes later, I’m going, “What did David Attenborough had to do with it?”

He never closed that loop, and he will never close that loop. It will leave that gap in my brain, and that’s not a good thing. You want to create that disconnect, but then you want to reconnect later, you want to close that loop.

That is the power of the reconnect. Let’s move on to the third element.

Element 3: The Anticipation What is anticipation and why it’s so critical in storytelling? We were doing our workshop in Campbell, California around the year 2006. One of the participants stood up.

She was going to tell her story. She told us that her mother was very, very beautiful. She also told us that her sister was a lot like her mother. She then went on to tell us how her father would take photographs, but photographs of the mother and the sister.

Notice how we haven’t completed that story. We haven’t really told you what comes next, but the anticipation is killing because you know what comes next. This is the beauty of anticipation. You create anticipation knowing fully well that you’re not leaving any gaps, but that the client, the listener, your reader is filling in the story, that 10%.

This is what Anil Dharker told me when I was growing up and I was just starting out in my cartooning career.

Anil was the editor of a newspaper called Mid-day. I was drawing cartoons for that newspaper.

One day, he came up to me and he says, “Sean, you’re giving too much away. You need to get the customer, the reader to anticipate that 10%. You’re giving away 90% of the story, but you are getting them to anticipate the 10% because readers and listeners and clients are very intelligent. What you should do is leave out the bits. Don’t give the entire story.”

You reconnect, but you don’t tell the entire story upfront either.

We’re taking the example, you got the story about the meningitis. You’ve got the story about how I got admitted to hospital. What happened next, you don’t know the rest to that story. That gap hasn’t been closed and yet you’re intelligent enough to figure out that there was an ending and how that ending shows up, that we’ll find out.

The reason why we have anticipation is because it creates suspense, it creates unknowing suspense.

When you say the boy got on the bus, he would never get off. What you’re doing is you’re going into the brain of the customer and they can see something bad unfolding. When I told you about that father that never took photographs of one of the daughters, you could see that insecurity building up. You could see that loneliness, that detachment.

No one had to explain that you, but you can do this very simply by saying, “I woke up expecting it to be a great day.” Within those few words, you have already created anticipation. The reader knows, the listener knows that it’s not going to be a great day.

How is it going to unfold?

These are the lines that you have to put in your speech, in your presentation, in your writing because when you put in these lines, they create that pause, they create that white space, they create that breathing space. It allows the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next.

How is it going to twist and turn?

In Marsha’s story, where she talks about just how she went to piano class, she could say, “I thought it was going to be a very bad day.” Immediately, your mind goes forward to, “Wait, she said bad day but she didn’t sound like it was going to be a bad day.

Did it turn out to be a bad day or not?” When she got to the piano class and she was able to play, now you’re relaxing. Then she puts in the other spike, and she goes, “I played that piece really well.”

That created another problem for me.

You notice what’s happening, the anticipation is setting you up for that spike, the problem that comes next.

This is what you have to do when you’re writing great stories

You have to get the reader in the framework, in that frame of mind so that they know that something is going to change. You’re creating anticipation. You’re creating that space for the reader and the listener to fill in the gaps in the head. That makes them again feel very intelligent. It also sets it up for that spike that we talked about in the first section.

Summary What we’ve covered are the three elements of storytelling.

The Wall. The wall creates those spikes. It creates that drama. It creates all of those blips that cause you to pay attention to the story.
The second thing we looked at was the reconnect. How we start of something at the beginning; then somewhere in the middle, we connect; and then, we connect at the end, and there are these connections all over.
Of course, that takes us to anticipation, which is that moment that tells you that something is going to change. It creates the suspense. It’s very, very powerful in storytelling. It’s this breathing space, this quiet just before the storm.

Storytelling is incredibly important. A lot of us leave out storytelling.

We give facts and figures. This is why most books and presentation and webinars are so boring. The reason why you find the Brain Audit so interesting is the number of stories and analogies and examples. It reminds you of what you learned weeks, months, years after you learned it.

In the end, statistics don’t sell. The story, the emotion that’s built in within that story, and a story well told is what sells a product or a service.

You know how I started this episode with the doctor saying that I would die or go mad.

I didn’t die.

Special Announcements: Coming Soon!

The DaVinci Cartooning Course: Starts 22 Aug. 2016 If you thought: “I can’t draw a straight line,” this is the course for you. That’s because cartooning involves mostly wobbly lines. Plus you have a lot of fun on this course. Click here for more details here http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNDI8YiR4dEtt1&b=j.wggZMopW8KzD8YXZByDQ
The Headlines Course: 6 Sept- 28 Oct 2016 Like all Psychotactics courses, you don’t just get information. You get a skill. Everyone, without exception, becomes an awesome headline writer. Judge for yourself: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNDI8YiR4dEtt1&b=sMN8kftvMNQMjIlHIKxNkQ [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNDI8YiR4dEtt1&b=YNZL1aBUQip1j73HrqMroA ]e

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How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results

📅 July 02, 2016 | View in Gmail

Whenever you run into tips on productivity it’s always this earth shaking advice You’re advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life.

In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks

June 2016

Last Day for Special Offer: Website Components-How to Create Compelling Pages on Your Website + Special Bonus

📅 June 28, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

Just a quick reminder in case you missed the earlier email.

When you buy Website Components-How To Create Compelling Pages On Your Website on the 25th, 26th, 27th or 28th June 2016, you’ll also get a Special Bonus - ‘How To Maximise The Power Of Bonuses’ (worth $45) absolutely free.

Special Offer: Website Components-How to Create Compelling Pages on Your Website + Special Bonus (Valued at $45)

📅 June 25, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

The Fear Of Pricing (And How To Overcome It)

📅 June 21, 2016 | View in Gmail

The Fear Of Increasing Your Pricing (And How To Overcome It)

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=ljhgzGGtuyz58bXwok_cdQ ]

Imagine you’re in New Zealand right now.

And you’re about to jump off a bridge—with a bungee cord, of course. What can you feel in your gut?

Yup, fear.

But how do you know it’s fear? And more importantly what would you need to do to get rid of the fear?

Remember the fear you had when you first rode a bicycle?

You probably don’t, but the fear existed. It exists when you’re learning to drive a car, going for a first date, and there’s even a trace of that fear when you first land a new job or show up on vacation in a city you’ve never visited before. The moment you are dealing with the unknown, the fear surges to the surface.

And yet you’re on auto pilot if you’re visiting that city for the twentieth time

Bicycles don’t scare you as much as they should. And driving to the supermarket while juggling a mobile phone isn’t something you do, but you’ll sneak in a call or text anyway.

Pricing brings the same sense of queasiness to our systems

And the way we justify it, it by burying the fear. We bring our “woo-woo” systems to the surface and say we’ll know the price is right based on our “gut instinct”. But what if your gut is just good ol’ fear? Because you know it is, don’t you? And the only way we can prove this point is to take something that you own and try to sell it.

What’s the gut instinct for selling your house?

There’s zero gut instinct in play the moment you have to sell something that is already known. If all the houses in your area are selling at $500,000, would you listen to your gut instinct and sell at $300,000? Never mind that three years ago, you bought the house at a lower price. You still want to sell at $500,000, don’t you? And if you can, you’ll happily accept $550,000 or $600,000.

A client of mine used this gut instinct in his business

He works hard—much too hard to earn what he’s worth. And the reason why he’s struggling so much, is because his pricing is based on gut instinct. He has to put those products and services on sale, on his website. And when he puts those prices up, he feels like he’s in the middle of New Dehli, and needs to find his hotel.

He can’t speak the language and though there are helpful folks around, he’s not quite sure. His brain is racing for a situation that’s a lot less stressful. A vacation closer to home, perhaps.

There’s no such thing as “gut instinct” in pricing

We’ve used a dartboard to price our products and services for well over 12 years. It’s a method where you put your prices on a dartboard, and you find some darts. Then you throw them on the board. And you have your pricing. If that sounds flippant, well, yes, it is. But it’s a lot less flippant than using your “gut instinct”.

Take for instance, the cartooning course. We started the course at no charge (if you felt like it, you gift an Amazon voucher). That course was $500 the next year, and today it’s priced at almost $1000 (for about 20 weeks). The Photoshop course (to help you colour your artwork) is just 4 weeks and costs $500. The article writing course goes for 12 weeks and hovers at $3000. The headlines course goes for 10 weeks and costs $800.

Want more?

The book on “Testimonial Secrets” has 125 pages and costs $45. The same applies for any course, product or service. No matter where you look, there’s no logic to the pricing at all. And yet there’s fear.

Every time we’ve raised the prices there’s enormous fear

When we raised the price of the Article Writing Course, we moved it from $1,500—to where it is today at $3,000. How do you know how much is too much? When we sold the Protégé course at $10,000, how would we know if it was overpriced or if we were underselling ourselves?

The answer lies in fear. You make these price decisions in a vacuum—dart-board style. And this is scary. Even if you’re comparing yourself with the marketplace, the client is not doing the same tour of the marketplace before settling on your product.

The only way out of this fear is to keep pushing yourself out of the comfort zone

You read about the cartooning course we conducted, right? Why offer it free? My clients already know that I’m a good teacher. They already know I’m a good cartoonist. They also know that they should be paying a substantial fee for something that’s going to take them on a six-month journey. And yet, I was unsure—fearful, even. So yes, you can let the fear get a hold of you. And yes, you can price as low as your “gut” will tell you.

But remember, your “gut instinct” is your comfort zone

It’s the lowest possible price you can afford to charge. Once you’ve listened to your gut, it’s time to move upwards. Raise your prices bit by bit, or in large chunks. As you get amazing testimonials, get more confident about your ability to deliver, you need to stop looking towards the “gut” and start looking up at the dart board.

And yes, this brings us full circle to our summary

Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100). There’s no basis for this crazy figures. Use whatever you like. If you missed this newsletter click here to read part one. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=l98Y.d7qMunHx2zwdJL0MA ]

Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut. Nope. You never could. That’s just fear talking. And once you’ve sold a product or service at a higher price, you’ll feel the price is just right—until you have to raise the prices again. Raise it anyway.

You know how you had to suffer wearing those coats because your parents thought you’d get a cold? Well, the same suffering can bring you down with myths in pricing. Stay clear of the myths, and you’ll find that you can get better prices for your products and services every single time.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

As a former Business Development Director, I had access to the best. I studied sales systems, methodologies, attended dozens of marketing conferences and read even more books.

There has been nothing more groundbreaking in my understanding of sales and marketing than ‘The Brain Audit’. This book took me by the hand, guiding me step-by-step into the mind of the customer, answering the “why” and “how” to questions I’ve wrestled with for years.

If I could only own one book on sales and marketing, it be ‘The Brain Audit’. The principles are timeless, making this book just as relevant today as it will be decades from now.”

A. Christensen, USA Judge for yourself if The Brain Audit is for you. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=qe9zBdEKhN7upImGEYaYUw ]

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Testimonial Secrets How to get meaningful testimonials, without needing to ‘bribe anyone’ for it. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=f6hbxkBgUarnsr89f7ZFYw ]

Article Writing How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=9QvwRch1QyHd12jkxwjhzw ]

Design Clarity How to put sanity into your design with some really simple tweaks [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=D4naTEQ6YSH6LuQmH2vBuw ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies

NEW! Audio and Text: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response (In iTunes look for episode 96) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=OxcKFvGxpHstrZijLUFAkg ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=SoLjP6P2r5.I84ePnKbjXA ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=00qbgPmdYbPhERht6z8CKA ] |http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=lfOYi9hOodBJqZr14qmN4g Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmULDbBU8dEtt1&b=aWRQn117Ub8rYGhPWotuLg ]

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Announcing: How to avoid attracting bad clients every time (The power of the six critical questions)

📅 June 18, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

Nothing bugs you more than a painful client. A client who hassles you at every step of the way. A client who won’t pay on time. A client who takes up so much of your energy that you get drained.

I used to have clients like that And then at some point I stopped getting bad clients. Every single one of our clients were helpful, kind and extremely co-operative.

Work became a joy instead of a painful exercise And after a lot of digging, I found out the reason for the change.

If you’ve ever struggled to get consistently good clients (or detailed testimonials for that matter) then you’ll find that this knowledge is more than just common sense. It’s a bit of strategy you can’t do without.

Judge for yourself at: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=Ixy9shDvCdEtt1&b=lSCJChNrgYRrokGRubAU7Q

Regards Sean P.S. This is what Cornelia Luethi has to say “Business owners are often too scared to ask for testimonials” I’ve been using Testimonials as a marketing tool for years - and I didn’t think there was much left for me to learn about testimonial techniques. Especially so after reading those powerful “six questions” in the Brain Audit.

After reading The Secret Life Of Testimonials, I learnt how to get more authentic and dramatic testimonials with great impact. And—most importantly—how to use them to maximum advantage. Sean shares all kinds of layout and formatting secrets so that the message is visually stunning as well as a good read.

What I found really useful is how Sean de-constructs various testimonials, showing you the parts where they fail, and thereby enabling you to create testimonials that work a whole lot better.

I particularly liked the run-down on how to create video testimonials as that’s something I’ve been thinking of doing, but wasn’t sure how to get started and how to approach it. Plus there are some great ideas on how to get testimonials using online media.

I’d definitely recommend The Secret Life Of Testimonials. Testimonials are absolutely vital for sales conversions, but business owners are often too scared to ask for testimonials, and don’t know how to use them effectively. In this book, you’ll learn how to get great testimonials - and with confidence.

Cornelia Luethi FX Marketing, Auckland, New Zealand Judge for yourself http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=Ixy9shDvCdEtt1&b=lSCJChNrgYRrokGRubAU7Q

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain (And When Not To)

📅 June 11, 2016 | View in Gmail

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We’ve been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop.

How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner? Should you give up? Or should you persist?

Join us as we explore three key areas of perseverance Part 1: The link between failure and perseverance Part 2: Is there a way to know when to stop? Part 3: Why perseverance could do with a coach

#90: Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 90 in iTunes) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=o295IzYY89C7Eh7zAj30QA ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=eYTY340CoxG5TigdNLaRDQ ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=aCMN7sne_9WBXQ3aOBstlA ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to these two top podcasts

#85a: How To Design A Successful Sequential Landing Page Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 85a on iTunes). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=o295IzYY89C7Eh7zAj30QA ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=eYTY340CoxG5TigdNLaRDQ ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=5qbD.GhHVOQrd6Tduq4Atw ] |

#96: The 17 Question Testimonial System: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 96 on iTunes). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=o295IzYY89C7Eh7zAj30QA ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=eYTY340CoxG5TigdNLaRDQ ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=2raisWScbBG7ZzF3TKMTSQ ] |

Here is a simple link http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JGJQO9LrCdEtt1&b=mug701pwWHfBFypYdOP6QQ

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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May 2016

Last Day: How to Join 5000bc (Without Being On The Waiting List!)

📅 May 31, 2016 | View in Gmail

Today’s the last day to join 5000bc before we put up the waiting list yet again. After then only a limited number will be able to join every month.

If you’re a business owner, you know how lonely it can be in your world. And having a community to talk to, to work with and bounce your ideas off, is incredibly valuable.

The motto of 5000bc is: be kind, be helpful, or begone.

If you are looking for a community that simply slap each other on the back, are always promoting themselves, then 5000bc is not for you.

What you’ll find in 5000bc is solid information, but more importantly, solid help. Help from me (yes, I’m around 20-30 times a day, answering questions in great detail) and other members who pitch in and help.

There’s an old African saying: If you want go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. And yes, if you go with a helpful group, you enjoy the journey.

Yes, it’s the last day to join before the waiting list goes up, so get in the community and let’s go far.

Here’s the link http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JT4UWaabmdEtt1&b=LQD7fpTd3BATTAGPBjnwDw

Warm regards, s- P.S. See you in 5000bc. This offer expires on 31 May 2016 (12 pm Eastern US). http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JT4UWaabmdEtt1&b=LQD7fpTd3BATTAGPBjnwDw

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Escalate Your Path To Greatness

📅 May 24, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Do You Escalate Your Path To Greatness?

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=Ir4aB_tOGdEtt1&b=UlDyiMGi_ZSElN1Pq_TeNw ]

When Jim Collins wrote “Good To Great”, he did talk a fair bit about the Hedgehog Principle. But what he stresses more on, is quite another concept called “Preserving the Core and Stimulating Progress”.

Why does this concept matter so much? And how do you combine the Hedgehog Principle with this concept? And where does the big, hairy, audacious goal fit in with everything? This article shows you how to tie all the elements together in a neat little bundle.

Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress

Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.

“I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all.

They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo.

It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it?

We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky.

Sadly that’s not the only problem

Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves:

What’s our core?

The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”.

Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.

The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress.

This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions.

When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future.

Take Nokia for instance

You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future.

They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s.

And then they got stuck in a loop They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft.

To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves

What’s the core of our business.
What do we stand for?

What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done.

The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that.

I thought I knew a lot about podcasts

After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done.

Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day

I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop.

But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future.

Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow

Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three.

And this is what you’ll have to do as well.

Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion.

The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else.

Which, interestingly, takes us to next element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag).

The BHAG

Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement.

So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG.

He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill.

Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease.

But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly?

It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner.

A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella.

Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger.

Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units.

But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans

His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality.

And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola.

At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too

The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table.

But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible.

Starbucks had a BHAG too

It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you?

The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again.

Every business should have a BHAG.

Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible.

And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do! Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better.

Better—it’s a great place to be!

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Before I bought the book I thought there would be too many ideas I’d heard before.

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The feature I liked best—The realization that the best stories are about something you are 80% familiar with, you can anticipate, and then WHAM – the new 20% hits you.

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Free from Psychotactics: The $2500 Brain Alchemy Marketing Strategy Workshop

📅 May 20, 2016 | View in Gmail

If someone stood on the corner and gave you $25, wouldn’t you be suspicious?But what if they gave you $250? Or $1000? Would you raise your eyebrows? Even avoid that person?

It depends on the person, right? Well that person happens to be me. And I’m not giving away $50 or even $1000, but instead a home study version of a workshop worth a chunky $2500.

Is there a catch? Is there an upsell? Is there some cross sell? Is there some ulterior motive?

The answer is categorically no. No up sell. No cross sell. No sneaky tricks.

And yes, there’s a perfectly good reason why we’re giving away the workshop. And you can read it and judge for yourself at:

And the link http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JSN..ubrddEtt1&b=aGcPnoJBX6wHFvN0ciumqw

Warm regards from Kiwi country…

Sean P.S. It’s free. But only for the next seven weeks.

P.P. S. If you already have The Brain Alchemy MasterClass and prefer NOT TO receive follow up emails, go to this link and enter your details. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JSN..ubrddEtt1&b=LcdHsHSjaEEKmu4HJG_6bg

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Three Interesting Writing Strategies

📅 May 17, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiqG8TGptdEtt1&b=aNxcNYkHh7s5W4GPIGJQnw ])

Why do we struggle to write? The ONE word? What’s that? And why does it play such an incredibly important part in article writing? That’s what we explore in this second part of what I’ve learned in article writing.

ALMOST half of the goals scored in football—or soccer—are virtually random! So says Martin Lames of the Technical University of Munich.

Raphael Honigstein’s new book, “Das Reboot” talks about the non-random side of football. It talks about how a well-prepared team can rise from the depths and win the match, even the tournament. And especially if that team is Germany—which is considered to be a world-class team, but was at the bottom of the football heap in 2000.

Germany’s randomness arose from complacency

In the European Championships in 2000, they failed to win a single game—and even lost to the English team (which was considered pretty terrible in the first place). And yet, 14 years later, Germany would rout Brazil 7-1 and make its way to the ultimate prize defeating Argentina in the World Cup final.

What Germany did—and did effectively—was reduce the randomness. Right after the 2000 Euro disaster, Germany’s top professional clubs were ordered to set up academies—and this was a considerable cost to the clubs, so they actively resisted the directive. Ten years later, this move proved to be a boon saving the clubs millions of dollars in transfer fees, because more than half the players in the top division were academy graduates.

In short, the moment they got rid of their randomness, the German team started to see results. A similar concept applies to article writing.

When we sit down to write, we often get into a state of randomness

And you know it’s random because you can’t sum up the article in one word or one idea. The moment you have one idea—it becomes that wall around your article. You know exactly what you’re going to write about, what are the sub-topics under that main topic—and how to get the stories and case studies to support the piece.

For instance, this section is about why the article can’t be random. Instead of starting the article with a boring line that says: “The worst thing you can do is write a random article”, the article starts with a story of disaster—well, a disaster for the German football team, anyway.

Yet, most writers never sit down and write down their one word because they’re not sure if it’s the right word

There is no right word. The word is what you want to communicate. In the introduction, the story was about the journey. Well, that’s where the story of Isambard Brunel came to light. The second part was about the coach—and we ran right into Wolfgang Amadeus’ father—Johann Leopold Mozart. The third part was about why writing for yourself is so very hard, and the two female conductors told their story.

And finally, we have the story of randomness—and the German football team.

When you have a single word to focus on—or a single idea—it’s not hard to get stories But it also forces you to stay within the parameters of that single word. I have to stay within the walls of randomness as this part of the article unfolds. It becomes my binding agent. And ironically, the one word can be picked randomly.

The one word in this piece could have been completely different. It could have been about “binding”—and the story would be different; the angle different. It could have been about “boundaries” and yet again we’d see different stories and a different angle?

But isn’t it cheating to decide one word and then write an article?

No, it’s not. Put yourself in the shoes of noted author and TV personality, David Attenborough. Do you think the TV crew goes into the jungle, finds whatever footage they can find, before returning to write the script? That would be a nightmare because you’d have to go through hundreds of mismatched shots to build a coherent documentary.

As radio personality Ira Glass describes: “You write the story, and then you go out and ask the questions. You have the idea in your mind; the questions down on paper long before you get to the person you’re interviewing. That way you get a coherent structure. And the same concept applies to article writing.

If you simply sit down to write an article, you’re doing what a lot of crummy writers do

Sure, you can pick the one word or one idea randomly, but that becomes your binding agent; your wall; your barrier. Now you have focus. The direction of your article is no longer random. You follow the lead of the one word, and your article isn’t a mish-mash of ideas thrown randomly on paper.

You become like the German football association-focused and getting results every single time!

So let’s summarise what we’ve learned.

Article writing is a journey. And you can limp into the harbour or arrive in great shape. To sail into the harbour in glory, I’ve learned three things over the years. The first is you need a coach—this can be a course, a book, a workshop—but you need that coach. And that coach needs to be a teacher, not a preacher. Then you need an editor. Everyone needs an editor. I have five or six—but even a single editor makes a world of a difference.
The second element is one of writing for yourself. It’s a head banging, frustrating process. The best way out of this mess is to get questions. I get questions from clients in 5000bc, from e-mails, from consulting, from almost everywhere. But they’re not random questions on the Internet. They’re from a person—a person I know—and this makes all the difference.

I don’t have a cocktail party in my brain because I’m focused on answering the questions of the client. My entire mood, mode and method changes when I’m focused on them, instead of myself.

And finally, we have the one word. Without the one word, you’re in random land. Define what you want to say in a word, and then look for examples that fit that word. The only thing that’s random is the choice of the one word itself. You can choose any word or idea, but once you do, everything in the article must align to that one word or idea.

And that’s what I’ve learned—three things I know about article writing. That it’s a journey—and Isambard Brunel would have been proud to be on this crazy, exhilarating journey!

You can also listen to or read: Part 1: Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiqG8TGptdEtt1&b=YyLfSrxcLZ7w9OR.Ry12lg ]

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Before I bought the book I thought there would be too many ideas I’d heard before.

The feature I liked best—The realization that the best stories are about something you are 80% familiar with, you can anticipate, and then WHAM – the new 20% hits you.

Debbie Newhouse USA Find out more here: Story Telling Mini Series [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiqG8TGptdEtt1&b=db0w0FHEh8ip0gBsUgqPrA ]

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About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies Audio and Text Report- Can A Small Business Achieve Greatness? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiqG8TGptdEtt1&b=n6Y2_WfFISCq3gPm15.hlQ ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiqG8TGptdEtt1&b=wLmaWQAELSAZqdJJfjQ51A ]

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Privacy and Spam Policy

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How to Win The Resistance Game And More…

📅 May 13, 2016 | View in Gmail

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?

Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.

Join us as we explore Part 1: How to deal with pressure Part 2: Why we hate making mistakes Part 3: The struggle of working along

#87: Can Resistance be Beaten? Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 86 in iTunes) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=FBo3_VrpHvz6hBZVKyFP5g ]|

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#86: The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 85 on iTunes). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=Wlx.GF0uCLJhVZrW9s7hHw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=G4LAhh0OMAIfO5bkS.jhxg ] | Read or Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=hyig6et2BEletk03O_K65Q ] |

Warm regards, Sean P.S. You’re probably already binge-listening to the “Three Month Vacation” podcasts. Some of our best clients come from people just like you—those who tell their friends about us. That’s why it would be really cool if you could tell a friend about The Three Month Vacation Podcast. Here is a simple link: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JeeLRntsBdEtt1&b=LEUVLHXm9fylgB8K9PLFrA

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

PO Box 36461 Auckland Auckland 1330 NEW ZEALAND

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Last Day For Special Offer—Dartboard Pricing + Special Bonuses ( worth $49)

📅 May 10, 2016 | View in Gmail

Just a reminder, in case you missed the last email.

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th May 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Dartboard? As in darts and a dartboard? Yes, exactly!

So is pricing simple? Sure it is. You don’t need a book to figure out pricing.

A simple dart board and some prices on the board would solve your problem in a matter of minutes.

The price itself is of little consequence What matters is all the stuff around the price.

And in this three-part pricing series, you’ll understand

The Psychology of Pricing (What Causes Us To Buy)
The Method of Raising Prices (And The Mistakes To Avoid)
Creating and Managing Price Expectations

No boring pricing models No ugh complication. Just a simple, step-by-step system that walks you through exactly what you have to do.

And the Special Bonus: 5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully This booklet is tiny—only 24 pages. However, it very systematically takes you through the five steps that are required to start up any new project successfully. • Why you shouldn’t get scared of your competition. • Why brand analysis comes before everything else. • Why personality is critical in your business. • What is the most important thing when starting up a project?

Here’s the page. Judge for yourself. (This special offer ends 10 May 2016—US Eastern) http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNTHGDzZVdEtt1&b=AeGQ0hTaVfCA9wg5qocLJg

Regards Sean P.S. This series does gives you the overview of how to go about pricing, and then gets to the brass tacks. You can literally copy the model (and you should) and have it up on your website, in your presentation or brochures.

Have a look and make a decision based on what you read. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNTHGDzZVdEtt1&b=AeGQ0hTaVfCA9wg5qocLJg [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JNTHGDzZVdEtt1&b=AeGQ0hTaVfCA9wg5qocLJg ](This special offer ends 10 May 2016—US Eastern)

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Special Offer: Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers + Special Bonus Valued at $49

📅 May 07, 2016 | View in Gmail

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th May 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Dartboard? As in darts and a dartboard? Yes, exactly!

So is pricing simple? Sure it is. You don’t need a book to figure out pricing.

A simple dart board and some prices on the board would solve your problem in a matter of minutes.

The price itself is of little consequence What matters is all the stuff around the price.

And in this three-part pricing series, you’ll understand

The Psychology of Pricing (What Causes Us To Buy)
The Method of Raising Prices (And The Mistakes To Avoid)
Creating and Managing Price Expectations

No boring pricing models No ugh complication. Just a simple, step-by-step system that walks you through exactly what you have to do.

Here’s the page. Judge for yourself. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=Jt7cH13JVdEtt1&b=THv08odvLSvgB8E9trGAAg

Have a look and make a decision based on what you read. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=Jt7cH13JVdEtt1&b=THv08odvLSvgB8E9trGAAg (This special offer is only valid until 10 May 2016)

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing

📅 May 03, 2016 | View in Gmail

Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon)

Who is considered the second greatest British person of all time?

When the BBC did a poll in 2002, they expected somehow that Winston Churchill would be in that top ten list. But there in the second position was someone whose name was reasonably unfamiliar. A name that didn’t belong in this century, nor from the previous century. A man who was born in 1806, somewhat mysteriously found his way to the second spot.

His name? Isambard Kingdom Brunel—one of the most famous engineering minds of all time. And Brunel built a magnificent ship—and it was called the Great Western.

At the time of its construction, the Great Western was the longest ship in the world.

There she sat at 236 feet, with one stunning goal in mind—to cross the Atlantic. The trip was to start from Bristol, in the UK, and terminate in New York city in the United States. The goal was audacious because no one believed in the commercial viability of such a long journey. In 1838, despite many technological developments, shipbuilders presumed that a ship had limited capability. They believed that no ship could carry both—commercial cargo as well as enough fuel—and make the long journey across the Atlantic.

Brunel was a person who thought differently about long journeys

For one, his heart was set on engineering. He developed a theory—a sort of formula that involved the amount a ship could carry and how a ship could be built so that it faced a lot less resistance from the ocean. Armed with his formula he set about building the Great Western, but then added more technological improvements.

Instead of a ship, made mostly of wood. Brunel added bolts; he added diagonal iron reinforcements. He increased the strength of the keel and carried four masts for sails.

And so the ship—the Great Western—embarked on her maiden voyage from Bristol with 610,000 kilos of coal, cargo and seven passengers.

The Great Western on her maiden voyage to New York—powered by steam. A feat never achieved before!

Despite all the plans and engineering, Brunel’s ship hadn’t got off to a great start

In the 1830’s there was a competition to be the first to cross the Atlantic powered by steam alone. The Great Western should have been well on its way, but ran into difficulties before leaving Bristol. There was a fire on the ship, a minor fire, but Brunel was hurt in the fire and wasn’t able to make the journey. As a result of the fire, 50 paying passengers cancelled their trip. Finally, the ship made it out of Bristol’s harbour with just seven people on board. What was worse is that it was four whole days behind it’s competitor—another steam ship called the Sirius.

The Sirius left as scheduled, leaving the fire-stricken Great Western still in dock. Now, the Great Western and her crew were well and truly behind—and Sirius would get all the glory.

But Sirius’ trip was anything but glorious

Along the way to New York, Sirius ran into serious trouble. They started to run out of fuel. Her crew was forced to burn cabin furniture, spare yards—even an entire mast because they ran out of fuel. And they took 19 days to get across the Atlantic. The Great Western, in comparison, arrived like the queen of the seas. She took just 15 days and five hours and with a third—that’s almost 200,000 tons of coal to spare.

This is a story about journeys—a writing journey, in particular.

I didn’t want to write. My story is one of being nudged and pushed into writing. When we started out Millionbucks (yes, that was our pathetic first shot at a brand name), I was writing for a fledging portal called MarketingProfs. Back in 2000, everyone was a fledging—and there wasn’t as much content online, as there is at this moment in time. Which is why the founder of MarketingProfs, Allen Weiss, would e-mail me and ask me for an article.

This meant I had to write. I didn’t want to write, but I didn’t have much of an option. We were new in the business—and had just moved to New Zealand. The only way I could get any credibility in the marketplace was to get better known.

And how you can have two sets of people—one battling almost vainly against the headwinds, while the other reaches its destination with amazing grace. When you embark on the task of writing, the headwinds start almost immediately. I know because I ran smack into trouble when I started writing articles.

Every article was a chore; something I detested and yet I persisted. Over the years, I’ve learned that sheer determination and persistence is not enough. That engineering and planning make a big difference to the journey.

And on that journey, there are three elements that stand out…

Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness

Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial

Whenever the topic of a child-genius is brought up, one name rises above them all: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This kid, we are told, was a prodigy. Before the age of six, he was already composing music.

Most kids barely are barely finding their way around school at this age.

And yet, we are told, Mozart was already competent at playing the piano and the violin. He’s also rumoured to have transcribed entire scores of music on a single hearing. How much of this is true, and how much was stage-craft, we’ll never know. But one thing we know for certain—Mozart had a coach.

You don’t think of a coach when you hear the name of Mozart, do you?

Yet, Mozart’s coach was his dad—Johann Georg Leopold Mozart. And Leopold Mozart wasn’t your average-let’s-play-music-dad. He was already a famous author on violin playing and celebrated enough to be the deputy director of music to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Plus there was Nannerl, Mozart’s sister. When Nannerl was just seven, her father decided to give her piano lessons because he believed she was gifted. So there was Mozart—baby Mozart—surrounded by all these incredible musicians—but primarily—coaches.

Without coaching, you can go far—but it takes a lot of time

When you read studies that quote the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery, what fails to emerge is the factor of mistakes. As a beginner, you’re expected to make mistakes. You aren’t aware when or where you’re making the mistakes. All you feel is this frustration—this resistance that ships often felt back in the day of Isambard Brunel. Something is wrong with the engineering, but you’re not sure what to fix.

And if you can’t figure out where the mistake lies, the journey ends up with furniture and masts being burnt up—so that you can complete some sort of journey.

Coaching is valuable—that we already know—what’s hard is knowing how to find a great coach

For me, this process of finding a coach has been streamlined to a single factor: skill vs. information. I call it “preacher vs. teacher”. Is the coach going to give you more information, or is he/she going to give you a skill? Alex Blumberg, ex-Planet Money, now co-founder of Gimlet Media is a coach. How do I know? Because in the world of telling radio stories, Alex doesn’t pound you with needless information. Instead, he has a method, even a formula of sorts. For example, when telling a story, he shows you how to evaluate the story.

Let’s say you’re writing a story about homeless people—how would you use the formula?

The formula runs like this: The story is about X, and it’s interesting because of Y. So the story is about “homeless people” and it’s interesting because “20% of them are college graduates”.

Immediately that stands out from a line that goes like this: The story is about homeless people, and it’s interesting because “many have mental problems”. What Blumberg teaches us is how to eliminate the vagueness and lack of interest in the story. In his courses, he goes about things systematically, taking about editing, music, etc., in the world of podcasting. And you end up not full of information, but with specific skills.

When you look at Mozarts, the Phelps, the Brunels of the world—they all had coaches.

Coaches that enabled them to find their mistakes and move forward. And in article writing, going it your own way is the slowest boat to anywhere. I know because I took that boat. I took that boat in the field of cartooning; in the field of article writing too. And it took me ages to figure out the connectors, the “First 50 Words,” the endings, the beginnings, the structure—all of that misery could have been reduced if I had a coach. A coach that had a system; who would point out the errors—and get me quickly down the road.

To me, of all the skills you have to learn as an entrepreneur, article writing stands out because you have to have a precise structure when writing. You have to be interesting; you have to tell stories; you have to stand out in a sea of content.

Which is why, even today, I will go to workshops, buy a course, read books—because that’s how you get better at what you do.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that without a coach, you’re floundering even when you’re pretty good. To get outstanding at what you do, you have to find Johann Georg Leopold Mozart to help you along.

And you’re going to need not just a coach, but an editor as well

You can be the best writer in the world, and you’re going to need an editor. I have five or six, at the very least; sometimes more. There’s David, Pamela, Teresa, Renuka, Alia, Philip—and Zack (I can hear Zack’s voice here). And every one of these editors come from a different angle; they have a different perspective. They force me to relook at what I’ve written so that I fit their needs. I remember the time I was writing a book, and I’d written more than ¾ of the book when I showed it to Philip.

But Philip wasn’t impressed “All your books, they show me how to do things,” he said. This one is all information. Nice information, but not a lot I can implement.” There’s no use fighting these editors. And I’ve tried. There was a time when I went “hand-to-hand” in a battle with Pamela. She wanted me to chop out two whole pages from my pre-sell book. Those two pages were about how crummy marketers use pre-sell.

Pamela wasn’t interested in reading about the other marketers—even though no names were mentioned. I fought back. I kept it down to a page. She came back and told me to get rid of it. I kept half a page. No dice. I tried a paragraph—and then finally buckled in. Pamela was right all the time, but I couldn’t see it at the start. I was too busy and too in love with what I’d written.

But we’re talking about articles, not books. So would I do this for every article?

Going back in time, yes, it’s what I did for every article. One of our earliest clients, Chris Ellington, would pore through all my work and shred it a bit more than I liked.

It made me a better writer.

But even now, I’ll post a series in 5000bc (our membership site), and there are questions; lots of questions. The questions are a form of edit. They show what’s missing from the series and what needs a repair job. Plus, alongside every article we have a “what bugs me” on the website. So years after an article is written, you can have retrospective feedback.

This is my first learning in article writing

That at all times you need a coach, finding structural mistakes, helping you to get better at the core skill of writing. And then once you’ve written, you need someone to pick out the holes and make the work get to the level it deserves.

Yet, to get to complete the article, you have to write it. And there’s a big barrier in the way. It’s you. You are the barrier.

Why are you the barrier? This takes us to Element 2.

Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided

Simone Young is a world-renowned conductor from Australia. Alondra de la Parra is also a world-class conductor—from the other part of the planet—Mexico. In a BBC podcast interview featuring the two conductors, there is a moment when they describe fear—Fear and anxiety.

Young pipes in first. “I’m always anxious before I get on stage,” she says.”And that’s because I’m thinking about myself. The moment I get on stage, I start thinking about the audience, and my fear goes away.” At which point, de la Parra chimes in. She talks about the “cocktail party” in your brain. About how everyone is seemingly talking about you, and they’re not saying good things. The “cocktail party” chatter never seems to end, or so it seems.

This is what you’d call “writing for yourself”—or at least what I call “writing for myself.”

When I write an article, my first act is to ask a client for a question. If they ask more than one question, I’m a lot happier. If they have a list, I’m the happiest. Why?

Because now I can stop the silly “cocktail party” in my brain. This cocktail party pops up every single time, no matter how good you get at the craft of article writing. Most times, I’m just writing an article, but sometimes that article becomes a book.

Like the time I wrote the book on “Dartboard Pricing”, for instance

I couldn’t figure out whether it was good enough. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy the book when I’d written so many articles and done so many podcasts on the topic. Of course, I knew—I knew it’s an entirely different experience reading a structured book vs. random articles.

But even so, you think about the “cocktail party” a lot.

I had no such trouble when coming up with answers for a future book on “The Three Prong System.”

A client and friend, Paul Wolfe, decided to do a series of three interviews with me on the topic of how I take breaks; how I manage to take a three-month vacation; how we handle vocation and vacation. And Wolfe had a series of questions—some prepared in advance, and some that organically sprouted from the discussion in progress. It’s not like I haven’t tried to write the book before. I’ve created an outline, started on the project and then abandoned it repeatedly. And it’s not because of a lack of skill, either. I can easily write the book—possibly in under a week.

The problem is that I’d have to clamber into my brain to write that book.

When Wolfe asks me the questions, I’m not trying to think about me. I’m thinking about the person asking the question—and occasionally other clients too. And the interview brings up a wealth of information—practical information too! When a client (or interviewer in this case) asks the questions, the cocktail party syndrome disappears, and it’s replaced with a focus on the audience.

To write quickly and write a lot, I need questions—a lot of questions.

But where do we get the questions?

I get most of my questions in 5000bc. Clients ask a ton of questions and get articles in response (yes, I know, it’s a mad system). However, I also get a lot of questions through the podcast, e-mail, through consulting (I rarely consult, but every time I do, it’s amazing). Questions com from chats, after I make a presentation, and through just listening and reading.

What I’ve learned is that I can’t just look for a random person asking a question online. That doesn’t fire me up at all. Instead, I have to have a specific person asking me a specific question. And when I’m writing the answer, I’m thinking of that person. Which is what gets me to talk a walk in those shoes and write with far more fluidity than if I sat down with a blank screen staring back at me.

We all wonder: Hasn’t this question been answered before? Aren’t there fifty thousand and three variations of this question already on the Internet? And the answer is NO. No one is going to answer the question like you do. For instance, there are whole books on the topic of focus. But my angle on focus—and focus in a distracted world—is different.

I take three months off every year, still meet our “fixed revenue” goals and still manage to write books, conduct courses, do workshops, paint, cook—in short, do whatever I want, despite the distractions. So my angle is always going to be unique; my voice is going to be unique. And yours will be too. Your voice, your tone, your language—even the structure of your answer will be different. The question may have been asked a million times before, but the answer—your answer—is different.

And you get questions from many sources, but you have to listen—that’s what I’ve learned.

When others speak, they’re asking you the questions and doing so in many forms. You’ve got to listen, answer those questions and then keep a writing pad right next to you. Why a writing pad and not a recording? Well, have a recording, but the writing pad is vital because it captures the gist of the conversation. Then, while the ideas are still fresh in your head, you sit down and write.

And the orchestra in your brain begins to play.

You may not be a great writer yet. You may struggle as I did.

But even in the middle of that struggle, you’ll notice the emotion. You’ll realise that everyone has gone home from the cocktail party, but you’re not quite alone. You’ve got words on paper.

Writing for yourself is disgustingly difficult.

It’s hard to reach into your brain and work out how to write an article, a report or a book. But write for others and you get the feeling that Young and de la Parra talk about.

Suddenly, you feel free.

======

Remember:

A coach, an editor. They help you along. The client and her questions—they bring out the orchestra in your writing. And there’s the article itself. It is also a guide—a big guide.

Next week we will look at Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Before I bought the book I thought there would be too many ideas I’d heard before. I’ve been a heavy follower of Chip & Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick”, and their philosophies on storytelling that “sticks”. I found that there was a lot to learn beyond what I’d absorbed from “Made to Stick” and its formulas.

The feature I liked best—The realization that the best stories are about something you are 80% familiar with, you can anticipate, and then WHAM – the new 20% hits you.

Debbie Newhouse USA

Find out more here: Story Telling Mini Series

Top-Selling Products Under $50

DartBoard Pricing How to systematically increase prices without losing customers

Article Writing How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines

April 2016

Announcing: Why Most Planning Fails—The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

📅 April 29, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve.

Then suddenly it’s the end of April, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected. And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. And what’s worse is that you’ve read all the books on planning as well.

Aha…here’s a 35 Page Report: The Chaos Planning System

That will help you move ahead. So have a look at this product and judge the value for yourself. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=K1j3YBSbldEtt1&b=U0y1uCQmWuvLGno7G68zbA

Warm regards, Sean P.S. You also get the book—Pronto Learning: Insiders Tips To Speed Up Your Learning http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=K1j3YBSbldEtt1&b=U0y1uCQmWuvLGno7G68zbA

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: If You’ve Been Waiting, You’ve Been Waiting Too Long

📅 April 23, 2016 | View in Gmail

If You’ve Been Waiting, You’ve Been Waiting Too Long

If you ever needed a nudge to come to New Zealand, here’s a big nudge. We’re having a workshop in Queenstown.

Three days Three days of skill, yes real skill. We also have one day in between those days where we show you our favourite food and wine spot.

If you trust the way Psychotactics works, you’ll find that you don’t need a fancy sales page to get all excited about coming to New Zealand.

In fact the page is only six lines long That includes the headline and the bonus. The bonus itself is worth the trip.

We’d love to have you here It’s a longish flight from Europe, but pretty much overnight from California. Make the journey. NZ is worth it. And yes, so is this workshop.

More details at http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J4XBV1ezZdEtt1&b=_BKjL8nC01d._GDWdkcEAQ

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J4XBV1ezZdEtt1&b=WZnZndGOqNronZ1VzheQbQ you in New Zealand, Sean

If you have any questions

Email Me: Here is my question [ renuka@psychotactics.com ].

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Prevent Your Landing Pages From Crashing and Burning

📅 April 19, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Prevent Your Landing Pages From Crashing and Burning

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon)

When you’re at a derby, you notice something interesting.

Every single horse bolts out of the gate all at once. But wait, that is not interesting, is it? That’s what the horses are supposed to do. They are expected to race madly towards the finish line so that they can win the championship. Which is fine for horses, but terrible for landing pages.

On a landing page, the first thing you present your client with is “the biggest problem”.

If you were to treat the landing page like the horse derby, then all the problems would try to outdo each other in the very first paragraph. Like horses thundering towards the finish line, they would all attempt to get ahead of each other.

And this causes a problem for the client looking at your landing page. Suddenly that client is faced with a ton of information hitting him all at once. It’s why clients leave your landing page; they become disoriented, but mostly overwhelmed.

On any sales or landing page – your job is to present the client with the biggest problem.

A client gets interested in your product or service because you’re taking on a specific problem. And it’s that problem that needs to rise to the surface. A landing page is more like a layered cake than horses at the horse derby. There needs to be a sequence of ideas presented one after another based on their importance.

And yet, this restriction causes a real headache, because most products and services solve multiple problems, don’t they?

How do you choose which problem to use? And what do you do with the rest of the problems? Do you just drop them or do use them elsewhere?

That’s what we are about to find out as we go on this journey on isolating the problem. However, it’s not a very long journey. We have three simple steps that will enable us to create a more precise landing page — and one that will get and keep the customers attention. We will find out where the customer gets confused and how to eliminate that confusion.

The three elements we will cover, are

Element 1: How to choose one problem Element 2: Defining why the problem is important Element 3: What to do with the rest of the problems

When I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a pilot. In fact, I can’t remember anyone at school who didn’t want to be a pilot. However, for most of us growing up in India, a trip to the airport was out of the question. This is because air travel was not as frequent or inexpensive as it is at this point in time.

However, on the rare occasions that I did get to the airport, it was fascinating to watch the planes land and take off. But what was most interesting of all, was how the planes circled the airport.

Planes circle for a reason; Air-traffic controllers exists for a reason.

You too are an air-traffic controller when it comes to your landing page. In fact, it’s pretty ironic that it’s called a landing page in the first place, isn’t it?

Ironic, because so many of us are more than keen on making sure all those planes land at the very same time. Circling planes don’t run out of fuel in a hurry, so why not let them circle a bit while you get the most one plane safely on the tarmac!

So what are the “planes”, anyway?

The “planes” are simply the problems you’re presenting to the client. When we say problems, a negative connotation pops to mind, doesn’t it? But that’s what you’re doing on your landing—you’re bringing to light the biggest problem so that you get the attention of the client. For instance, Let’s take the headline from the product on pricing – called “dartboard pricing”.

The headline reads like this: How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers?

Did you notice the “problem” in the headline? You can feel the pain of not raising prices, can’t you? You know that you would like to raise your prices, but are holding back because you are not sure how your clients will react.

It’s possible that you will lose some of them, or maybe the entire clientele will walk out in droves. What we have done in the headline — and that little bit of explanation — is define the main “problem”. When you read that headline, it seems pretty straightforward, and you can feel the emotion and get the point.

However, you can only get the point when you look at it from the air traffic control system tower.

When you sit down to write your headline, you are suddenly faced with all these circling “planes”, and feel the need to land all of them together. An inexperienced writer will try and bring out all the problems within the first few lines — or within the first paragraph itself. As you can tell from “an air traffic controller point of view,” this is a recipe for disaster.

Element 1: The first thing we have to do is to decide which “problem” is the most powerful of them all.

It’s only the most evocative problem that will get the attention of the customer. But how do we know what is interesting to the customer? The way we go about this exercise, is to list all the solutions — or the bullet points together. We now have a bunch of bullet points or feature is that we can work through.

Let’s take an example of a product that I use for recording my podcast.

If you decide to do any recording, you’re going to get a sort of echo. When you sit in a restaurant and find it extremely noisy, what you’re experiencing is the amazing ability of sound to bounce off surfaces. And to reduce the noise factor, you have to have some elements that absorb sound. A tall shelf of books behind you helps. The uneven nature of the books seems to absorb a fair amount of bounced sound. To avoid sounding like you’re recording in the bathtub, you have to either put foam tiles on your walls (like they do in professional studios) or have some noise reduction system.

My Google search led me to Harlan Hogan’s Porta-Booth-Pro

Yes, it costs a whopping $350 to buy the Porta-Booth, but hey, I would rather cook a six-course meal for two weeks in a row than put a nail in the wall. To get some foam tiles, put them up, worry about disfiguring the wall—and getting random results—that didn’t sound like my idea of fun. So I got the Porta Booth. But wait, this isn’t a story of why I bought the Porta-Booth. What we’re looking at is how the benefits and features can be turned around to help you create your headline—and your first few paragraphs of text.

When we look at the Porta-Booth-Pro on Amazon, it reads like a lot of Amazon pages

There are a few bullet points and you have to make a decision to buy a $350 product based on these bullet points. And like horses at the derby, all four (or five) bullet points seem to dart out simultaneously. Let’s take a look at the Amazon page and see what we find.

– Rugged 600 denier fabric / Only 7 pounds / Air travels as checked or carry-on luggage – 120% larger than the Porta-Booth Plus / Unique sonic stage “Auditorium” design. – All interior surfaces treated with Auralex Acoustics Studiofoam #1 choice recording pros worldwide – 2 way zippered bottom and rear slots for shot-gun mics cables boom arms. Corner straps add rigidity – Anti-sway strap & Booth Lifter for boom arm mounting. Assembles in seconds just close two zippers.

Notice the derby syndrome? What are you going to choose as a prospective client? If you’ve already decided the problem that needs solving, it’s still hard to figure out which of the bullet points remotely get your attention. If you look closely, it’s part of the third bullet point—and slinking at the back of the sentence.

So let me light up the importance of the third point for you. It says #1 choice of recording pros worldwide.

That’s it? That’s all that’s required to get the attention of the customer?

When you look closely, you realise what is happening when that specific solution or benefit is turned into a problem.

As a solution or bullet point, the fact that it’s a number one choice of recording professionals worldwide doesn’t stand out. But when you turn it into a problem, it immediately gets the attention of the prospective client.

The problem would read like this: when you’re on the road, do you end up in the closet trying to get a great recording?

The subhead would be: when you’re a voice-over artist, only the best sound will do for a recording studio.

We’ve all tried to reduce the noise by propping up pillows, searching desperately for rooms with thick curtains and occasionally even clambering into the closet. All of these techniques work, but there are terribly inconvenient when you are a professional. Instead, the Porta-booth Is like the equivalent of a mobile recording studio, reducing all those unwanted sounds and annoyances.

However, even a very quiet room—and this applies to homes and apartments, too—can sound like a “big, boomy box” to your microphone, instead of the tight sound booth quality we are used to in purpose-built studios. That’s because in addition to picking up the sound of your voice directly, the microphone also “hears” the ambient sound of the entire space. And this becomes the room from “hell”.

Instead of battling with pillows and getting stuck in dark closets, here’s what many professionals do on the road—they take their studio as carry-on luggage—no matter where they go.

See how different you feel about that very same bullet?

The Problem—the biggest problem is the key to getting the client’s attention.

Yet, how do you choose the biggest problem?

Most of us are too close to our product or service and in many cases, can’t see why clients choose us. We think we know—and that’s what we put on our sales page, but often (more often than not) we’re hopelessly wrong. For instance, let’s look at the page on ‘Black Belt Presentations’.

That’s an extremely powerful product because it shows you why you fall asleep when most presenters get on stage. It shows you how to design your slides, how to control the audience, how to structure your presentation—and yet, look at the headline.

The biggest problem says: When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off?

Then the subhead says: (It’s rough enough to have to speak to an audience, but aren’t you always in awe of presenters who can bring the room to life? How do you create presentations that enthral, hold and move an audience to action)?

Notice how excited you were by that headline and sub-head?

It’s not exciting, is it? Because instead of doing a target profile interview; instead of going out there and understanding what clients want, we’ve continued to sell the product as if everyone is doing predestinations on stage. And yes, for years since its release, the product has been bought by people doing presentations.

But the world has changed in the sense that many of us do webinars. We do podcasts, don’t we? And ‘Black Belt Presentations’ is perfect for both—but more so for webinars. A reliable webinar software like GotoMeeting costs over $250 a year, and yet if your presentation isn’t amazing, what have you lost? You’ve lost the money you pay for the software, the time, the effort—and all because your presentation isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.

Now webinars aren’t news

They’ve been around for ages. Many of our clients could tell me right off that they rarely, if ever, get on stage. Yet, they’re likely to give a webinar to a client or be part of a webinar series. And guess what? The lack of focus in that headline and sub-head—it’s not only causing us to sell less product but also depriving you—the client—of increasing your sales, improving your credibility.

And how did I figure out that the headline needs to be changed?

I got an e-mail from a client. He told me how he used it for his webinar and how it got the audience to respond amazingly well. And there I am, trying to procrastinate. I know I should get to changing that headline; that sub-heads; the first paragraph—andI’m betting you have the same affliction. You want to put off talking to your client and then making those quick changes.

But we’re circling the airport, aren’t we? We still haven’t got to the point where you know how to pick the biggest problem. So how do you do that? How do you pick the biggest problem, the sub-head and the first few paragraphs of your text?

The answer as we know—doesn’t lie with you

It lies with the client—your best client—or possibly any random person. How on earth does this make sense? It makes sense to approach a great client, but why approach a random person? What would you expect to find with any random person?

So we have dealt with Element 1: How to choose one problem. Tune in next week as we look at Part 2— What’s one of the biggest “rookie mistakes” when putting a landing page together?

Announcing—Why Most Planning Fails: The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

📅 April 16, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve.

Then suddenly it’s the new year again, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected. And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals.

And what’s worse is that you’ve read all the books on planning as well.

Aha…here’s a 35 Page Report: The Chaos Planning System

That will help you move ahead. So have a look at this product and judge the value for yourself. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IzXnVMuPddEtt1&b=aKRVQAq6_5IZkhAoCkefaw

Warm regards, Sean P.S. You also get the book—Pronto Learning: Insiders Tips To Speed Up Your Learning http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IzXnVMuPddEtt1&b=aKRVQAq6_5IZkhAoCkefaw

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Beat Inertia And Why Logic Doesn’t Work

📅 April 12, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Beat Inertia And Why Logic Doesn’t Work

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JOT1A.W1ddEtt1&b=FRS8I9NmlyQXB6mUZtfnmg ]

Imagine you had two loans to pay back

Loan A was $100,000 at 19% interest per annum. Loan B was $200 at 1% interest. Which loan would you pay back first? Loan A or Loan B? If you chose Loan A, then almost every financial consultant on the planet would agree with you.

Except Dave Ramsey

To everyone, but Dave, the logic is clear. Loan A has a much higher rate of interest. Logically you should pay back the higher rate of interest first. But as you’d expect, Dave disagrees.

That’s because Dave understands inertia better than most other financial consultants So what is inertia? I learned a funny definition in physics class at school. It went like this: A body in the state of rest or motion is inertia.

Hah, that made me laugh. How can you be stuck and moving, and still be in the same state? But apparently that’s how inertia works. And this is Dave’s advice to people who are struggling with debt.

First list all the debts on a piece of paper

All debts need to go down. Student loans, credit card, mortgage, blah, blah. Then you need to rearrange the loans based on the size of the loan. So the smallest loan goes right at the top and the biggest one right at the bottom.

And everything else in between (depending on the size of the loan). And then he instructs you to pay only the minimum payment on every debt—with one exception. After the minimum payments were made, every available dollar needs to be put towards the first debt on the list.

Incredible as it may sound, Dave is telling you to wipe out that tiny, itty-bitty $200 debt with the pathetic interest, instead of taking on the painful big amount/big interest debt.

Logically it makes no sense

But your brain doesn’t always work logically when it comes to inertia. While you’re lounging on the sofa, watching endless and pointless political debates on TV, your logic is telling to get off your butt. It’s telling you that the debates are endless (and did we say, pointless?).

Your logic is also telling you that you should be doing some work or exercise instead of engaging in mindless drivel. So logic doesn’t work. And the same applies to the debt.

When Dave’s clients wipe out the first debt it’s not necessarily logical, but it creates a factor of momentum. First the $200 is wiped out. Then the $350. Then the $800. And so on, right up to the ‘monsta’ $100,000.

The motion is what matters

A body in a state of rest or motion is inertia. And going from rest to a state of motion is impossible if you decide to take on the biggest task first.

Logic tells you that you should fix your website right now. Logic tells you that you should write that 300 page book. But Dave would say, “Go brush your teeth first.” That simple act of doing something—anything at all—gets you off your caboose and into another state of inertia: a state of motion.

So if you need to get something done, fool yourself

-Don’t go for a 60 minute walk. Instead put on your shoes and decide to walk for just 7 minutes. -Don’t try to write a complete article. Just write for 14 minutes. Then stop. -Avoid trying to clean the entire bathroom. Just attack the sink.

These tiny bits help you get to the bigger bits. Because even as you go for the 7 minute walk, you know very well that you’re not going to turn around in 7 minutes.

You’ll go longer and further. But the goal always needs to be 7 minutes or 14 minutes or the $200 debt. The itty-bitty bits are important, more important in fact, than the bigger goals.

When people say they feel inertia, they mostly refer to a state of laziness

Of not wanting to do anything at all. But as my physics teacher would tell you: “There’s inertia and there’s inertia.” And to get from one stage to another, you need to make the list in descending order of importance. Then attack the list.

And as Dave would say: Start small.

Acknowledgements Dave Ramsey’s ‘Snowball Debt’ and ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath.

P.S. Yes I know. You’re headed to Google these names, aren’t you? You think you’ll find out more about this book and this method of reducing debt, aren’t you?

But you already have the tools You have a piece of paper. You have a pencil or pen. And you have the methodology. So don’t muck around. Get to work. You need to change that state of inertia right now.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Before I bought the Brain Audit Kit, I was hesitant because I already own several classics on marketing & advertising (Scientific Advertising, Robert Collier Letter Books, Tested Advertising Methods, etc.) and expected the same fundamentals rehashed in a more modern voice.

After reading the book, I’m glad I bought it because it filled in all the gaps in my knowledge, clarified some contradictions in my mind, and presented a clear structure on how customers really make buying decisions.

My favorite chapter was #3: Target Profile. Sean breaks down why the much-used ‘target audience’ is not as effective as many marketers think.

Stephano Kim, Copywriter Seattle, WA, USA Judge for yourself: The Brain Audit [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JOT1A.W1ddEtt1&b=Z2ADsF77alPRKfzS7HA96w ] Top-Selling Products Under $50

Why Do Most Planns Fails? Find Out The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JOT1A.W1ddEtt1&b=ks4CKaArBVT053qSiCBM7g ]

DartBoard Pricing: How to systematically increase prices without losing customers [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JOT1A.W1ddEtt1&b=4TuB0AOEnpuA8IDCntyyGg ]

Article Writing: How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JOT1A.W1ddEtt1&b=29_PPFPWLZCDQVkX5lMRKA ]

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Announcing: How To Put That Zing-Kapow In Your Articles (With StoryTelling )

📅 April 09, 2016 | View in Gmail

Storytelling seems to be the rage these days. And yet, it’s not new at all. It’s been around for thousands of years.

What’s more, it’s not even alien to us. Even as a three-year old, you can tell when a story is really cool and when it’s just plain boring.

But it’s not just the story that’s important. It’s a story well-told.

A well-told story is like a well-told joke. It has zing. And kapow! So what are the elements of a well-told story? Why have they been playing hide and seek with us for so long?

Find out right here in this three-part series on Storytelling! You’ll love it. It’s full of cartoons, precise advice—and yes, the zing! That’s what you’ll learn: how to create the zing.

So have a look right away. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=K2MAbV2JBdEtt1&b=a3GC4eiTBesaX5YJBcbP_Q

Regards, Sean

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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The Resistance Game: Can Resistance be Beaten?

📅 April 05, 2016 | View in Gmail

The Resistance Game: Can Resistance be Beaten?

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=q6kUQc5Azj_0.FcOMmblVA ]

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives

We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance?

Resistance loves a loner

Because loners have limited energy.

They start out on a project, all excited about what’s about to unfold. Then, for some reason or the other, they lose their way. And that’s when resistance gangs up on the loner big time. It’s not much of a fight.

The loner is already exhausted. One tiny tap on the head from resistance, and the loner falls into a heap on the floor. But this miserably one-sided bout could be avoided with the understanding of group work.

In Africa there’s a saying:

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. And resistance detests groups. And there are several reasons why a group helps you get a project done with far more efficiency and a lower failure rate.

So how do groups help?

Release of Pressure
Exponential Learning
Support
Release of Pressure

The toughest part of a project is dealing with the pressure. And a release of that pressure is needed to give you a breather. When you rant and rave alone, it’s kinda depressing. When you’re suffering alone, you think it’s something to do with your talent, or your genes, or that you’re a loser (yes, everyone feels super-lousy often enough).

And having someone to just listen to your rant is amazing therapy. You rant, you’ve been heard and now it’s time to get back to work, because you have a ton of mistakes to make, and learning to look forward to.

Exponential learning

Mistake making is frowned in our society. We love to get things right the first time. And yet all of us know that it’s impossible to learn without making a ton of mistakes on any project, no matter how familiar we are with the project. The problem is that mistake-making, instructive as it is, is also terribly depressing.

When you’re going round in concentric circles, your exhaustion builds up rapidly. However when you’re in a group, you learn from someone else’s mistakes, thus getting a bit of respite from the exhaustion factor.

When a group shares its learning and mistakes, everyone learns and everyone gets a little samba in their steps because you’re not just learning, but it’s exponential learning. You’re learning from four-five mistakes every day, and guess what? Most of those mistakes aren’t yours.

The third factor is just one of support

While resistance can take on a loner, it’s a lot harder to take on a group. If someone falls, there’s usually someone to pick you up. If someone is struggling, there’s someone to help. If someone has questions, there are answers that help you move along.

Working by yourself, you not only miss the ongoing support, but the struggle wears you out. And inevitably you give up.

Now this kind of group support doesn’t necessarily work for all kinds of projects

Sometimes the project is just to clean your desk. You could do with ranting and group support, but it’s an overkill. Besides it probably takes under an hour to get even the messiest desk tidy.

But if this seemingly mundane desk has to go on over a longer period of say, six to eight months, then you definitely need the power of the group.

In fact at Psychotactics, groups form a critical part of the project experience

If we take just the Copywriting Course for instance, the three months of learning and implementation are physically exhausting. If you were to try and replicate the same pace by yourself, you’d give up in a week or less.

But with a group, 75-80% make it to the finish line. When you consider the sheer intensity of the Copywriting Course, you should have the figures the other way around (namely 75% should fail to make it to the end). And yet it’s the group that helps you through.

But how do you work with projects where the group doesn’t have a common goal?

Admittedly it’s harder to pull off a project where everyone is headed in different directions. When the African saying suggested you go a lot further with a group, they were indeed suggesting the group had a common goal.

And if everyone in the group isn’t headed towards the same deadline, or using similar tools etc., then they have nothing in common. Then it’s relatively easier for the group to be counterproductive, as no one is learning from group-mistakes, and everyone has their own agenda.

It’s important for the group to set out a common agenda and at least have some common guidelines. So even if you have ten different writers, writing ten different types of books, they should ‘meet’ online every day and post their learning for the day, as well as a minimum of 800 words.

If they’re a group working on a gardening project, there needs to be the shared learning, the shared support moments, and shared implementation.

But don’t you need the right group for things to work?

Yes, having the right group is important. But how do you choose the right group? Groups need to be chosen primarily on the basis of attitude. Which is why for instance, at Psychotactics, we call our courses the World’s Toughest Courses.

This weeds out the excuse-makers and ensures that you get the cream of the attitude crop. And just as you get a great group, you can also get a lousy group. Then whining, whingeing and depression will be constant, and progress will be impossible. So just having a group isn’t enough.

You need to put in some filters to ensure that at least 75% (or more) of your group will make it to the finish line. And it’s a bit of work putting a group together, but hey it’s a lot less work than starting endless projects only to see them go up in flames.

Resistance likes fires

All this namby-pamby, touchy-feely stuff makes resistance look really bad. If prefers the loner. And most projects are done by loners. And resistance is happy. Now it can wield it’s little finger and push you over.

And resistance laughs and walks away contentedly.

Click below to listen to #87: The Resistance Game—Can Resistance be Beaten? iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=HlMv3fpywgq6mktwDBXT.A ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=x9T0ld4PDEXYh.9et5B5BQ ] | Website [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=q6kUQc5Azj_0.FcOMmblVA ] |

Product Offers: Links you should visit

Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just for the ‘organised’ people? So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected.

And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. How do you stop it from happening yet again?

Find out if Chaos Planning is for you. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=q1tsa6QRFg1OAU6YiKbg9Q ]

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The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy (And Why They Don’t) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=o1c5s_AbUql86VOtwDpSYg ]

DartBoard Pricing: How to systematically increase prices without losing customers? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=Yiyt1q9WnBzo84fvMsdfRg ]

Story Telling Series: How to have that zing in your articles—to catch the attention of the reader and keep them interested? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=X2h2cZUO_YmKXhWSPCE_OA ]

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Free Goodies NEW! Audio and Text: The Three Month Vacation- It’s time you got a real break—every year—without any drop in income. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=0SWkN1VKb2BBh0maxTnJlQ ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=J7dBak9WRdEtt1&b=CdpCNJC2inLVbWL39GFg4w ]

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Why Clients Don’t Buy ( Understanding The Elements of Risk)

📅 April 02, 2016 | View in Gmail

If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be “risk”.

When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there’s a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision.

What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute?

In this series, we examine how the “big boy” risk dominates the buying process. We then learn how to remove those barriers that cause risk.

Join us as we explore Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service Part 3: How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk

81: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)

Listen to or read this episode here. (Look for episode 81 in iTunes) iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=4KNK8BBU6EJbwzy_s_7fGw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=F7AvtPoey0Wrad9TDTxM_w ] | Read [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=lnVxDMpLDYEtKcrxu_0DuA ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to these two irresistible podcasts.

#Episode 82: Part 2: How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction In this episode on risk, we take a forensic look at what happens when you release a new version of your product or service. Is it still the same product or service? Or is the risk magnified many times over? And how do you overcome such an unwarranted risk? Why do clients hesitate like crazy when they are about to buy?

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 82 on iTunes). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=4KNK8BBU6EJbwzy_s_7fGw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=34qfrEx.5bwYgn38WdgDkg ] | Read [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=JkrpjhJSl3xacc5jvH1aCw ] |

#Episode 86a:The Secret Life Of Feedback—And Why It’s The Key To Repeat Clients Most of us are like crazy chickens, focused solely on attraction and conversion. We fail to see the biggest resource in our business—returning clients. If you’re able to keep your existing clients and they buy everything in sight, you may never need new clients again.

But what magic spell would cause them to buy everything in sight? Incredibly, the answer is “feedback”.

Listen or read this episode here. (Look for episode 86 on iTunes). iTunes [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=4KNK8BBU6EJbwzy_s_7fGw ] | Android [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=8XBr995MvEFMhIHj2VFHOg ] | Read [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=1QVU7o_qYIDG9n33GH7KpQ ] |

Warm regards from autumn, Sean P.S. You’re probably already binge-listening to all the “Three Month Vacation” podcasts. If you are, let me know how you find it—and send questions. If you aren’t, then it’s time to binge-listen. Look for it on iTunes or Stitcher (and yes, there are transcripts too). iTunes: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=hxwxHEPObisn1ps75Lj85A [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=4KNK8BBU6EJbwzy_s_7fGw ] Android: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=DgMAGYu2DlaAeHc.n05fFw [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=P8B4NIh_.tvV3gJdv1maqQ ] Website: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=OM0ErjuI0AsVubjYzJZJAQ [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JlgLubQo_dEtt1&b=.YKpcJk_FYjuyHC03elHEA ]

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zIzMbMyszEw=

March 2016

The Secret Life Of Feedback—And Why It’s The Key To Repeat Clients

📅 March 29, 2016 | View in Gmail

The Secret Life Of Feedback—And Why It’s The Key To Repeat Clients

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=8eXSB8hh_fUZewZ0EzHOUQ ]

I’d been driving for about 5 years before I got to Auckland, New Zealand.

When we moved here, however, my Indian driving license wasn’t valid and I had to sit for both the written and driving test. And I failed the first driving test within minutes. We barely got on the road, and down a slope when the assessor failed me. Ten minutes later, we were back where we started. As you’d expect, I was perplexed and wanted to know what I’d done wrong.

He wouldn’t tell me. “I’m not supposed to tell you what you’ve done wrong,” he said brusquely. “You’re supposed to drive correctly and when you make an error, I note the error and fail you, if necessary. And you’ve failed this test.”

This is often how we feel when clients won’t give us feedback on our products, services or courses.

But whose fault is it? Is it the client’s fault or ours? In most cases, we’re at fault, and this is because of a primary reason. We fail to figure out the difference between testimonials and feedback. We use the words interchangeably, and it gives the client the feeling they’re supposed to praise you all the time.

Praise is hard, because you want to reserve it for special occasions and anyway a constant stream of praise feels worthless. So the first task is to separate the concept of testimonials from feedback. The client should know clearly—and unequivocally—that they’re not praising you, but giving you feedback. Then, they should know that you’re going to do something with the feedback.

So how do you get feedback? And when do you get feedback?

Let’s take a look at three main areas of feedback and see how we can ensure we get the feedback that we need.

The three areas are:

The safety issue—and reward issue
The implementation issue
The specificity of your questions
Let’s start off with the safety—and reward

There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly”. It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art.

Then something quite amazing happens. The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback. One by one they pipe up, with their critiques, so Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy.

They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft. Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own.

And yet this article isn’t about whether we can draw butterflies or not, is it? Instead it’s about safety. The reason why those kids walked Austin through every one of those five subsequent drafts, is because they felt safe. So what made them feel safe? And how do you get your clients to feel safe?

Incredibly that safety didn’t start on the day of the Austin butterfly demonstration. It started long before the teacher walked into the room. Safety needs to be created miles before you get to your destination.

So what do we do on Psychotactics?

Notice the “What Bugs Me” on every page of the website? That “bug” is designed to create safety. Yet, you’ve seen organisations ask for feedback before. Why does that bug bring in over 200 clients writing to us every single year (that’s about 2500 bugs since we started).

The answer lies in the statement that accompanies the bug. The statement says: We’ll give a reward of $50 for the best bug of the month. Have we been diligent about this reward? No, I can’t say that we’ve been super-diligent in doling out the reward. But at a primary level, 99% of the clients aren’t interested in the reward at all. They’re just interested in us fixing the problem.

We have something similar in our membership site at 5000bc. The moment you get into the Cave (which is our forum) you are faced with a question thats says: What makes you unsafe in 5000bc? And even a casual glance at that post-—and it is a post in the forum—shows you that members have vented their feelings and there’s been an immediate response.

When you get on an online course, like the information products course, you have an Ask Sean—again in the forum, as well as the ability to contact us at any point in time. But contacting us can be a little intimidating.

It’s easier to ask the question in the Ask Sean post. When you examine the posts, you’ll find that clients aren’t always asking questions. They’re often giving a bit of feedback and mostly testing the waters. Is it safe to give feedback? When I answer the question, I’m always aware of everyone watching. When you treat one person with disdain (no matter what the issue) you create a factor of lack of safety.

Without safety you’re not going to get feedback—not the feedback you’re looking for, at least.

The clients aren’t exactly looking for rewards either. Those kids in the classroom weren’t getting any candy for their feedback. Their candy came in the form of change. Their opinions were valued and they were instantly rewarded with another draft. When they made suggestions, another draft showed up. They wanted to be heard, to see change.

And this takes us to our second part: The implementation The Article Writing Course has been held since around the year 2006—and in the early years, we’d have three or four batches a year—now we have just one. This means we’ve had several hundred clients on this immersion course—and several hundred chunks of feedback.

Why chunks? Because at the end of every course, we reserve a whole day—as part of the assignment—to get feedback. But why do clients give feedback? They do, because of the first reason: safety. They also want to make the course better—just like the kids in the classroom.

The reward is the ability to be part of the change. It’s been almost 10 years. We should have stopped getting feedback by now, don’t you think? I mean how much feedback can you get on a course?

And yet here is a sample of last year’s feedback—in brief Action: Go over all the material and remove elements or testimonials that are confusing. Action: Go over the autoresponders and fix them. Action: Reconstruct the syllabus to move from learning components to actually writing complete articles. Action: The weeks that aren’t part of the main course need to be treated as “starters” or “dessert”. Action: Create Level 2 Course Action: Fix the notes. Action: I could, however, mention how the 55 minute club works—in the sales letter. Action: Be clear that the connectors are sub-heads and sign posting. Action: Review all instructions to make sure there’s no inconsistency. And consistent language. Action: Get writers to post their goals on the forum. Action: Syllabus goes first. Action: Feedback: What do they specifically look at?

Notice what you just read? It was an action list, based on a feedback list.

The clients came up with this immense list of things to be fixed—and spelt it out in great detail. We then compiled the list, and put in the action plan to fix the elements that needed fixing. Almost as soon as the clients came up with the feedback, we demonstrated we were not just asking for feedback, but we were going to take action—and we wrote what action needs to be taken.

The same applies to any feedback we get off the “what bugs me”

You probably heard about Rosa, didn’t you? If you didn’t here’s the story. Rosa goes and buys a product off our website. It’s the “Dartboard Pricing” series and she loves it, but has something to say. She says I need to have the books in ePub. Now this is a tiny nightmare, isn’t it?

Because while it’s relatively easy to transform books into ePub, our books are filled with cartoons and captions. Those cartoons and captions need specific coding and yes, the nightmare is revealing itself, isn’t it?

But we got in touch with Rosa, said we’d work on it and then we posted Rosa’s feedback in the podcast. And shortly after, another podcast listener said he’d do the job (I’ll give you the link to this ePub genius at the end of this piece).

So he set about the task of fixing the books—one by one—but first worked on Rosa’s request. This week, I wrote to Rosa and told her we had not only taken her seriously, but we were going to send out the PDFs and the ePub documents, so she could happily read on her tablet or phone.

Do you think Rosa feels safe? Do you think she’s bound to give feedback again? Do you think she was rewarded, both by the initial response as well as the implementation?

But what if you can’t implement something?

Take for example, the courses we hold offline—at workshops such as the one in Amsterdam, or Vancouver or Nashville. The workshops are designed not t give you information, but to give you skill. Clients come up with all sorts of feedback, even during the workshop.

At the storytelling workshop in Amsterdam, Ellen—one of the participants, suggested a walking group. “We walk in the Netherlands”, she said. Now, if you get to our workshop, you’ll notice you’re not in the room a lot. That’s because you learn the least in the room.

We get groups to leave the room and sit by the pool, by the stair, in the lobby—just about anywhere they wish to sit and discuss the assignment they’ve been given. And yet, here was Ellen talking about “walking groups”. So we sent them off for a walk. And half of them took our advice, while half chose to sit instead.

So yay, the feedback went like clockwork, but it’s not always so hunky-dory—this implementation bit—is it?

And when you can’t change things, you head off the objections off at the pass. For instance, if you look at the feedback we got from the last course was “Sean is handling too many projects at once”.

Now that’s like saying “fire is hot”. The reason you’re even reading this article is because I like to write articles, but I also like to paint, cook, take photos, dance, learn languages, mentor my niece—and take a nap in the afternoon (that’s a project too, you know).

So what would you do with such feedback, especially when you know nothing is going to change?

I mean I handle projects but then I know what to keep and what to drop. Yet, the perception may exist and a client that’s going through a rough patch may find an easy target—me—the guy with ten million projects.

That client may not have any idea that I’m not dancing right now, or I’ve put my Japanese and photography on hold. They’re working off a supposition—their perception. And to make sure this problem doesn’t arise, we head it off at the pass. I bring it up early in the course, or the book, or the workshop.

It’s on a slide, or in an introductory page, or somewhere it cannot be missed. And it needs to be repeated several times, so it sinks in, because not everyone sees or understands everything the first time around.

If you cannot or will not implement something and you have your reasons for it, you need to be very clear why you’re avoiding that course of action. Rosa’s suggestions were doable, and we went ahead with the plan, but it’s also quite a task to convert every book on the site to ePub.

If this were the case, and we couldn’t fix every PDF, we’d just have to head off the objection before the client bought the product.

However, to get back on track—the implementation is what matters Implementation creates safety. Implementation tells your client that they matter. That their opinion is important.

And if you can’t fix it, at least put out an action plan, so they can see that you’re hard at work. Then cross out the elements as we’re doing with this new Article Writing Course. Will we be 100% successful? No we won’t but we’ll keep at things until they get fixed. And then we’ll have another big list to go through.

Summary:

So we looked at safety and reward.
Then we had a long dive into implementation and at least the need to communicate with the client; the importance of having an action plan.

Next week we will look at—3) The specificity of your questions.

To listen to this episode click here: Feedback Secrets [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=8eXSB8hh_fUZewZ0EzHOUQ ]

Product Offers: Links you should visit

My favorite chapter was #3: Target Profile. Sean breaks down why the much-used ‘target audience’ is not as effective as many marketers think.

Stephano Kim, Copywriter Seattle, WA, USA Judge for yourself: The Brain Audit [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=FeCLRlTctidoo1Rbaz8Ndw ]

Top-Selling Products Under $50

DartBoard Pricing: How to systematically raise prices without losing customers? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=twQSmsjBkcaJrdpsKxxmNw ]

Story Telling Series How to have that zing in your articles—to catch the attention of the reader and keep them interested? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=chnnITPhO7ribZwcD_KApw ]

Article Writing How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JmE3_uNj_dEtt1&b=tNQ8dxoZmwfxCZGkOvZvtQ ]

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Announcement: How To Put That Zing-Kapow In Your Articles ( With StoryTelling)

📅 March 26, 2016 | View in Gmail

Storytelling seems to be the rage these days. And yet, it’s not new at all. It’s been around for thousands of years.

What’s more, it’s not even alien to us. Even as a three-year old, you can tell when a story is really cool and when it’s just plain boring.

But it’s not just the story that’s important. It’s a story well-told.

A well-told story is like a well-told joke. It has zing. And kapow! So what are the elements of a well-told story? Why have they been playing hide and seek with us for so long?

Find out right here in this three-part series on Storytelling! You’ll love it. It’s full of cartoons, precise advice—and yes, the zing! That’s what you’ll learn: how to create the zing.

So have a look right away. http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=K4wNZjWs_dEtt1&b=SemSMyI72Qa13X5obJ2dRg

Regards, Sean

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?TExsbIwstKxszJzMzKxMtEa0zIzMTEzMjAw=

3 Incredibly Precise Steps To Get Advance Testimonials From Clients

📅 March 22, 2016 | View in Gmail

3 Incredibly Precise Steps To Get Advance Testimonials From Clients

(To read and listen to this article online click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=q.E54oeyiXPcD8vg5lmbxw ]

As spring arrives in British Columbia and Alaska, something amazing happens.

The grizzly bear comes out of its hibernation. All through the winter, it has been high up in the mountains where there’s lots of snow, and it’s relatively easy to hibernate in the snow. Now it’s time to feed, but there’s no food up here, so it has to make its way down to the coast. It’s all about timing.

It’s all about planning. It has to get there just in time for the salmon run.

It might seem to us that the bear just shows up, but usually, a mother bear will have some cubs with her as she makes her way down the mountain, so it’s not just a matter of showing up but also making sure that the testimonials make it, because the cub mortality rate is very high.

Over half of the cubs die every year. The bear has to wake up from its hibernation, makes its way down the mountain, make sure the cubs are all fine, or at least as fine as they could be, and then get in position for the salmon run which will happen at a fixed time, provided the rains come.

All of this requires an enormous amount of time and anticipation, and we have to do exactly the same thing. We have to act like bears when we want to get our testimonials, because if we don’t anticipate and we don’t plan, then nothing happens.

It’s all about timing. It’s all about being there at the right time, at the right moment. Or is it?

Most of us think that testimonials are only available for us once the project is complete. It doesn’t have to be like that. The project can be very incomplete before you starting to get testimonials.

Let’s just explore these elements of where you can get testimonials

The first point of getting a testimonial, or getting an agreement for a testimonial, is before the project even begins.
The second point is the in-progress testimonial.
Finally, you can get a testimonial right on the tail end of the project.

In all three instances, the project hasn’t been completed, and you’re getting a testimonial, or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Let’s explore all three of them one by one.

In one of my first jobs as a consultant, I didn’t have any testimonials

So I had to get the testimonial in advance, or, at least, get the agreement for the testimonial. Here’s what I did. When we sat down to work out the project, we worked out the scope of the project.

And then at the tail end of the discussion I turned to the person and said, “If this project works out exactly as you planned, as we planned, can I get a really good testimonial?” Of course the client is anticipating the fact that the job will be done really well, and so they will give you a really good testimonial.

Just by asking this little question at the starting point, it makes a huge difference to how you get the testimonial at the end. When someone has already agreed to something, there is more of a likelihood of them giving a testimonial.

When they have not agreed to something, and at the end you say, “Can I have a testimonial?” the chances are diminished. The first instance is always to look at where can I get an agreement. At first, it seems like this is only consulting-based, but it works just as well if you’re doing a workshop, just as well if you’re writing a book.

If you’re writing a book

Say for instance you’re writing a book, and you have graphs in the book. The client or the prospect client can look at those graphs and agree to a testimonial in advance. Same things apply to the workshop. What you’re really doing is setting the whole benchmark.

You’re getting the client ready and prepared. Not every client is ready when you just finished the project, but if you’ve put it in right at the start as part of the agreement, the chances are much higher. You’re like that bear sitting there not on some river any place on the planet, but specifically in British Columbia.

You’re waiting for the salmon, so you’re setting it up in advance. You’re setting up your position in advance. This is a very critical step, especially when you’re starting out, and you don’t have much of a reputation.

This takes us to the second point, which is the in-progress testimonial.

Often when I’m writing a book or creating a course, I don’t have testimonials for the product in advance. Now, I still have to write the sales letter. I still have to send out some kind of testimonials.

What do you do? You have the in-progress testimonial. In this case, the customer doesn’t look at the complete picture but looks at the part of the picture.

Let’s take an example of the book that I wrote—Dartboard Pricing

It consists of three different sections. Say I finished the section on sequential pricing, which shows you how prices go up and they go down. The customer doesn’t really need to read the entire book.

They could just read about sequential pricing, and then they could give you a testimonial that went into a lot of detail about sequential pricing.

Now surprisingly, this kind of testimonial is often better than a testimonial that just talks about the entire project.

This is the kind of testimonial that focuses on one aspect, and it gets the prospective reader or the prospective client to then get excited or interested in that one aspect. Instead of the entire project, now you’re starting to get interested in just how does this sequential pricing work. How does it relate to Karate?

Why do prices go up and come down, and do we do that for all our products, all our services, all of our training? How do you use all the three different aspects of sequential pricing simultaneously? What is a doorway?

Even right now as I’m speaking to you, you’re getting interested because what we’re covering are elements of that section of sequential pricing.

It’s often easier for a customer to tackle a small section and talk about why that section works than the complete experience. By the time you’re finished with the complete experience it almost becomes abstract in a way. There’s so much stuff to consider, so much stuff to implement. When you deal with a smaller sequence, you’re able to explain that in greater detail.

This is the in-progress kind of testimonial that you can get

A customer doesn’t need to go through a whole year of your consulting practice. They don’t have to go through your entire book, and they don’t have to go through the entire course.

In fact, when you come to a Psychotactics workshop you will see that on day one there are some people who are giving a testimonial, on day two another batch, and on day three a third batch.

Now, not only is this smart in terms of planning, because you can’t do all of them back to back.

It’s too tiring for you in the first instance. More importantly, you can get the customers to talk about that specific moment, that specific section, that specific segment. You can do this for a book or a workshop or consulting. This is the second type of testimonial, which is the in-progress testimonial. Notice we haven’t reached the end of the course.

We haven’t reached the end of the book. We haven’t reached the end of the consulting program, and yet, you’re getting testimonials that are better in some respects than the testimonials you get right at the end.

As we’re progressing through this testimonial bit, right at the start we could get the testimonial or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Then the in-progress testimonial. This is very powerful, so pay attention to it and use it.

This takes us to the third part which is how to get a testimonial right at the end of a project, not after the project, but right at the end.

How do you get a testimonial right at the end of the project?

In every Psychotactics course, I have an entire week where the customers will give feedback, and this is brutal feedback, believe me. They also give a testimonial. They’re finished with their feedback. They’ve got it out of their system, and now they move to giving the testimonial. This is part of the assignment. We’re not done.

Now the mistake that you can make, and I’ve made this mistake, is to treat it as part of the whole system. Supposing this is a 12-week course and you say in week number 12 you’re going to give your feedback and testimonial.

Obviously that won’t go down too well. If it’s a 12-week course, people expect 12 weeks of instructions and then the 13th week to be one of testimonial or whatever you want them to do.

We do this in our eBooks as well

We put in a little email link in the last chapter and people write to us from the chapter. For example: When the pricing book was launched, few days later customers started writing in.

Now be aware that we send the email anyway

If your customers are part of a list, and you have them on the list, then you should send them an auto-responder that asks them specifically for their testimonial. In effect, we have four spots where we can ask them for the testimonial, but what are the three main spots that we covered today?

Let’s just summarise

The first instance where you can bring up the testimonial is at the starting point when you’re sitting down with the client when they’re buying into your consulting or your training, and you can ask them whether they would give a testimonial at the end. This agreement makes a big difference.
The second point is the in-progress testimonial, which I think is the most powerful of all because it focuses on a specific bit.
Finally, we have the testimonial you get at the end, not after, but at the end, where you tag on a little assignment that the customer can do or should do as part of their whole exercise. Most customers agree to this. There’s no problem getting this. It’s the waiting after the project that’s a problem.

Yes, you can send an email, or you can request for a testimonial after the project is over, but that’s the harder testimonial to get. That’s the kind of testimonial that most of us try for. You’re like a bear sitting and waiting for the salmon after the season is over. It’s much harder to do that. You want to be there getting those salmon, those testimonials, as they leap up through that salmon run, not after.

Now let’s say you have a product and you already have a few testimonials.

Should you go through this exercise every time with all your customers? The answer is yes.

There are two reasons why

The first is, a customer is explaining their mindset in the testimonial, so if the testimonial is done right, you will get an insight into your product, a completely different insight from all of those other customers. This is very powerful for you.

It’s very enabling, but it also shows you what customers are looking for and what they’re not looking for, because then you can go and fix it. All of our products, all of our services, they’re all versions, at least at Psychotactics.

When you go to the next workshop, when you go to do the next course when you read the next version of the book, it’s always better, and it’s because of these testimonials. It’s because of the feedback that we get.

That’s the first thing, that it enables you to look into the customer’s mind from a completely different perspective.

The second thing is that when a customer goes through a good experience, they actually want to say thank you, and they want to say thank you in a meaningful way. The testimonial is a meaningful way. It is their way of saying thank you for all the trouble you’ve taken. The testimonial is a way of saying thank you. It also ratifies that they have made a good decision by investing in you. You definitely want to have that testimonial in even if you’ve got a million other testimonials.

Testimonials can be organised and planned for—and should be.

Make sure you don’t miss out on your “salmon” because you didn’t plan just right.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

My favorite chapter was #3: Target Profile. Sean breaks down why the much-used ‘target audience’ is not as effective as many marketers think.

Stephano Kim, Copywriter Seattle, WA, USA Judge for yourself: The Brain Audit [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=4ZyCaVMkBbxrgGFhI.K2Hw ]

Top-Selling Products Under $50

DartBoard Pricing: How to systematically raise prices without losing customers? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=v86_Z.KhVgg8WMX.SPwM9A ]

Website Series: Most website-based books talk about usability and design, but often all you really want is a way to be able to write the important pages. Find out the system here. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=eWztyqZl.HslZa2pMSYDyw ]

Testimonial Secrets: How to get meaningful testimonials, without needing to ‘bribe anyone’ for it. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=UF5zbAeNsD6BG8tzwAVm2Q ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies What Are The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) Click To Listen [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=gAcVmyBidetH.PYlJ8JRCg ] | To Read [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=0nlz9F0gdDJ.Re2QwfiIyQ ] |

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Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=ST.KYit7Z1_KuE8je4a0Mw Resources I recommend: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=K0TJINc4OG0ioP402jOu0g Where do you start: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=hTGVv0nTfysB2ePSQ9in0w Three Month Vacation: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JAWXX2mNZdEtt1&b=A6yOEljjP8FlI7VGGsWIlQ

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Why Not Everyone Can Get The “Self Study” of the Article Writing Course 2.0

📅 March 19, 2016 | View in Gmail

If you’ve been on the newsletter, you probably know that the Article Writing Course (the live online version) sold out in 24 hours.

There is, however, a self-study (and it’s a limited edition) only available for two weeks in 2016. However, it’s not a course you can just buy, so if you’re interested, please continue reading:

The Conditions: Condition 1: You have to first get on a waiting list (see link below). Condition 2: We are manually approving you. (see approval conditions below). Condition 3: You’ll need to make the payment once you are approved.

About the approval process: We understand that not everyone will want to go through three barriers just to get a product, and that’s fine with us. However, we will be approving you based on your previous transactions with us. If you have a good history with us you will get to Stage 3/Condition 3. Expect an e-mail within 72 hours of getting on the list if you’re approved.

About the course: This article writing course is not about hundreds of pages of notes, endless videos and audio. You’ll be given precisely what you need to get a high level of confidence—and skill—in article writing. This course is not about even more information—it’s about skill.

The rollout stage for the course material April 25: Stage 1 (The entire set of notes) May 2: Stage 2 (Audio version of notes—just voiceover, no add on music). May 16: Additional supplementary goodies.

This course isn’t for everyone. If you think it’s for you, here’s the link to read about the course and get on the waiting list. Click here for details: Article Writing Self Study [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=IiG8CoxwpdEtt1&b=PIR96WTltD3c_uLd2i49bA ] And yes, like all self-study courses, you have our “smiley guarantee”.

Warm regards, s- P.S. Just a clarification about the audio. On our podcasts we have a ton of music in the background. This audio will have a bit of music at the start and end—and a few for transitions. However, 95% of it will just be a voiceover (that’s me talking to you on audio). P.P.S. If you have any other questions, please e-mail me [ sean@psychotactics.com ].

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction

📅 March 15, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction

(To read or listen to this article click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=PgWBHi6kTMrm0u8eOMM1dA ]

If you’ve ever seen a Bollywood film (Hindi movies from India), you’ll notice there’s a lot of music and dancing.

And a film release in India is like movie releases anywhere in the world of cinema. Trailers, interviews with the actors, publicity and the hoopla. It’s all part of the strategy to ensure that the movie is a stunning success. While back in 1964, a movie would be release six to eight weeks before the film release. However, by the 1990s, the music was being released three months or more—before the official launch of the movie.

But what’s the link between risk and pre-release of the music?

Since most Hindi movies are musicals, the songs are the primary reason most people go to the cinema. If the songs are catchy—and become hits, the movie’s success is guaranteed.

When you look at it, an overwhelming number of Hindi movies have a similar plot. There’s a good guy, a bad guy, a romance between the hero and heroine—and lots of dancing and singing. There’s so little variation in scripts that the only risk for the moviegoer is—will I be entertained? When they listen to the songs in advance, the risk is removed. Pre-sell reigns supreme and the movie is a super hit!

So what is pre-sell?

Pre-sell doesn’t involve sales at all. In fact, it’s a systematic dispensation of information. A simple example of pre-sell would be a wedding being held next summer. At first, there’s no information at all. Then, one day the bride and groom-to-be announce they’re going to get married. And now we have a countdown of sorts.

There are announcements along the way and events. What you’re getting is a drip feed of information that goes all the way to the wedding day itself. The reason you and everyone else shows up on the day—and at the event, is because of pre-sell.

When you pre-sell, there’s limited risk because the very act of pre-sell is drip, drip, drip

One of the biggest reasons why clients don’t buy is because they feel pressure. They feel they’re about to make a decision they could regret. And it’s more than likely their brains have been drummed with messages of “sleep on it, sleep on it, sleep on it”. In most cases, sleeping on anger may help a great deal. If you’re irritated and angry, it’s a jolly good idea to sleep on it.

However, when buying a product, or service, the information rarely changes from one day to the next. What holds clients back, most of the time, is the fear of making a decision they’ll regret.

The run up to anything reduces this pressure

Take for instance the 2017 workshop in New Zealand. It’s in beautiful Queenstown—in the South Island. Now you may have heard of the beauty of New Zealand, but you go south, and it rocks.

Queenstown is incredibly beautiful, has stunning views, and there’s one more thing you have to do when you’re in Queenstown. You need to take the road to Glenorchy. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been on the planet, and no matter how many amazing things you’ve seen—the road to Glenorchy is breathtaking.

What you just heard was a pitch for 2017

But it didn’t sound like a pitch, did it? And the reason it doesn’t sound quite that way is because approximately 275 odd days stand between now and the workshop. As the workshop is mentioned more often, you start to feel this urge to visit the last stop before Antarctica—yes, New Zealand.

You think, well, it’s now or never. Sure it’s going to be a long trip. Sure it’s going to cost a small fortune, but it’s a workshop—and you think—well, I can write it off as a business expense.

What are the chances of me visiting New Zealand and finding a business reason to do so?

In your head, you’re selling the event to yourself. Now make no mistake. This place called Queenstown is no mirage. It doesn’t matter how many pictures and videos you see—it will still blow your socks off. And because of the distance between the event and your decision, you feel no risk, only great expectations. Pre-sell is the best way to sell a product or service

At Psychotactics, we roll out a pre-sell for almost every product or service. There’s the pre-sell right before a course or product launch—like the one we did for the Article Writing Course. But there’s also the long pre-sell.

If you were on the Psychotactics list, you would have received a simple chart that gave you details about all our courses and products for the year. That too—it’s a pre-sell. And the moment a course finishes, alumni are encouraged to post their experiences of the course in our membership site at 5000bc.

The pre-sell for the next year’s course starts almost the second the previous one has finished.

What’s interesting to note is that no details are mentioned. No prices, no dates—it’s all pretty vague. So yes, you know about Queenstown, and you know about New Zealand. And you know there’s a workshop, but you don’t know the month or the name of the workshop or even how much it will cost.

And yet, notice how you want to find out more—even if you have no plans of getting to New Zealand

That’s what pre-sell does: It reduces risk like crazy simply because it’s way out there in future-land. It has this feeling of being risk-free and what it’s doing is creating a slow but steady percolation of information. No pressure, no hard-sell, but just this tiny little snippet of information coming your way.

It’s the way Hindi movies make their way to the launch date.
It’s how weddings attract a full house when a simple Sunday lunch can be a problem.
It’s how most of the products and services are sold by us at Psychotactics. It’s also the reason clients sign up so quickly.

Once you’ve been given information in bits and pieces, you don’t need any more. The risk has left the building, and you’re ready to buy!

Product Offers: Links you should visit

My favorite chapter was #3: Target Profile. Sean breaks down why the much-used ‘target audience’ is not as effective as many marketers think.

Stephano Kim, Copywriter Seattle, WA, USA Judge for yourself: The Brain Audit [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=vHHw_.t.9AdaYnFSI1rg3Q ]

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Critical Website Components How to design pages that helps customers find their way around and do what you want them to do. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=BvEGns1dSqbjz8KXzqwZAQ ]

Testimonial Secrets How to get meaningful testimonials, without needing to ‘bribe anyone’ for it. [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=Ov8LS2oxMvJhQ4dm_Ywe0A ]

Story Telling Series How to have that zing in your articles—to catch the attention of the reader and keep them interested? [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=_raUaPzi6z.ria6GddBBbQ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies Audio and Text: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=EM8gK.pRC_UDrGYhEDRqHA ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=7zf.50x0ePR06DJYnVYGdA ]

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=J_9zJ85IKbGVuWYT_7b6WQ Resources I recommend: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=Qzh8inx79fkS8QnKvhtOlg Where do you start: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=Uk1ADoz43aZdbzJ8cKhvBQ Three Month Vacation: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JHzPXUbEZdEtt1&b=KY6Vw.LoSUpCWJFq.Z_2Rw

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Announcing: How To Avoid Attracting Bad Clients Every Time

📅 March 12, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

Nothing bugs you more than a painful client. A client who hassles you at every step of the way. A client who won’t pay on time. A client who takes up so much of your energy that you get drained.

I used to have clients like that And then at some point I stopped getting bad clients. Every single one of our clients were helpful, kind and extremely co-operative.

Work became a joy instead of a painful exercise And after a lot of digging, I found out the reason for the change.

Judge for yourself at: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=ItbNPlEOtdEtt1&b=397m.KNnrVJjUxXKE_d4fA

What I found really useful is how Sean de-constructs various testimonials, showing you the parts where they fail, and thereby enabling you to create testimonials that work a whole lot better.

Cornelia Luethi FX Marketing, Auckland, New Zealand Judge for yourself http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=ItbNPlEOtdEtt1&b=397m.KNnrVJjUxXKE_d4fA

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Why Ending Your Prices with “9” Won’t Sell More Product

📅 March 08, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why Ending Your Prices with “9” Won’t Sell More Product

(To read this article online, click on the cartoon) [ http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=K1GxKCEW7dEtt1&b=2im7Df_SAn49Oip8vB9yPQ ]

Why Ending Your Prices with “9” Won’t Sell More Product There’s one reason why you should sell with the price ending in a 9. That reason is to increase your profit.

If I sell at at $39, instead of $37, I will make two additional dollars per sale, which means that over time I will earn a lot more, just because of those few dollars.

But does it sell more product? The question is better answered based on the product itself. For instance, what is the price of that vacation you’ve been eyeing? The answer may end in a 9, but do you care? No, you don’t, because if you’ve set your mind on buying a product or service, the price becomes totally irrelevant.

The key factor that everyone fails to discuss in the whole pricing game is that when someone is doing all these experiments at big stores like Target, we fail to realise that most of us aren’t a megastore like Target. We’re selling a very individual, very customised product or service.

And in such a case, the core isn’t to think of the pricing as a 9 or a 7, but to make the client drool over your product.

Take for example the Psychotactics article writing course What price is it at right now? It’s currently priced at $2899. So that proves that 9 works, right? No it doesn’t. The course could be priced at $3,244, or $2567. Or even $2993.22 (Yes, 22 cents). Would it make a difference to the sign ups to the course? Would you get more clients at the higher fee or the lower fee? Would they sign up at 9 or .22?

The answer becomes totally irrelevant for most businesses The only reason why the client buys into your product or service is because they want to buy it. Our course sells out in fewer than 26 hours. In some cases, less than an hour. Once or twice,even as few as 26 minutes.

We are so focused on the pricing that we forget that it’s mostly irrelevant And we know this to be true because of how we buy houses, or Coke for that matter. A house may cost $499,000. Or $477,000. Or $458,999. So why aren’t we buying the cheapest house? The answer is simple, isn’t it? You don’t buy a product simply because of the price. You look at the value.

The house that cost $40,000 more is in the prestigious school district. It’s on the “right side of the road” and fifteen feet closer to the beach. This means it’s not only valuable to you, but in the future the resale value (and speed of resale) is always going to be higher than the house on the “wrong side of the tracks”. The value is what clients cluster towards, not the price, and certainly not the 9.

The same applies to Coke (which I don’t drink, by the way) But look at a can of Coke. Do you know how much it costs? Ha, ha, Coke Inc. fooled you, fooled me and fooled everyone else. They sell the massive bottle (2 litres) for about $2.50.

And the tiny can, that’s priced at $2.99. Ha, ha, indeed. The value of the can is far greater than the value of the massive bottle, isn’t it? So hey, Coke still prices the can at $2.99 (and that’s a 9), but would you care that much if it were priced at $2.77 or $2.35? You want to drink those sugary liquid, so you buy it.

The value is what matters, not the price. And with most businesses, the reason why they price with the 9 hovering around the end is because they’re convinced that the 9 plays a role. And it probably does with massive chains like Target. But does it really matter with your business?

The answer is categorically, no. We’ve tried it, you see. We’ve sold products, courses and workshops at Psychotactics since the year 2000. We’ve priced the same workshop at different prices (yes, we’re crazy). A workshop was priced at $1500, $800, $677, $359—all the crazy permutations you can think of. So which workshop got the quickest response?

The answer is there was no winner. All the workshops filled quickly, so quickly in fact, that we had to take the pages down in a few hours.

This proves one point, and one point alone We’re all focused on the price. And the price doesn’t matter, in most situations. We all buy irrationally, and buy because of the perceived value of the product.

Does 9 work? Yes, it does.

But I’ll tell you what works better: better value. Because you can re-tag all your prices down to 9 and you’ll find that you’re not really selling any more products or services. And on the other hand, you can create great products and services and put any old number on them, and they’ll sell like hotcakes.

Article Writing Course 2016: Who will be the lucky “one”?

📅 March 05, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

Yes, we literally have ONE seat left. If you want to be the ONE that signs up for this year’s course, you’ll need to get to the page below.

The page link: (If you can’t see the payment link, refresh the page) http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JxY8UCr6xdEtt1&b=s6dA98i5RnTcs8hRDv9VTw

Best of luck getting on board, S-

P.P.S. If you’re having any trouble Email me, Skype me at “psychotoon” or send me a message on Facebook. My details are below. You can also safely call me if you need to, as it will be 9am on Saturday here in NZ, and at least today, I will be at my computer for an hour or so.

How to connect with me Email: sean@psychotactics.com Facebook: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JxY8UCr6xdEtt1&b=ZOUhFDP.xduBFgpYw1B9tw Skype: psychotoon Phone: 64 9 449 0009

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Why Lack of Depth In Article Writing Drives Us All Crazy

📅 March 01, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why Lack of Depth In Article Writing Drives Us All Crazy

In the year 2003, I did something incredibly silly. I started a membership site called 5000bc. And one of the first announcements I made on 5000bc was to tell the clients I’d write five articles a week.

There was just one problem I had been struggling to write even a single article a week. At the time, we were sending out the Psychotactics Newsletter just twice a month, and it would take a bit of head-banging to get two articles out of the door. Nonetheless, I made the promise of five articles a week based on my experience as a cartoonist.

You see, before I became a marketer, I was a cartoonist and one of my specialties was drawing comic strips—kinda like Calvin and Hobbes.

For months, I’d been badgering the editors of two newspapers to run my comic strips They mostly ignored me—and one day they didn’t. Almost like a conspiracy, both of them agreed to run the comic strips. Now I had to do two separate comic strips, five days a week—that’s a whopping ten comic strips a week.

I thought I was going to be in a lot of trouble But I wasn’t. I found the experience to be quite the opposite. When I needed to draw a cartoon now and then, I’d struggle like crazy. The moment I had this punishing routine, I found ideas popping out of almost everywhere. Which is about the same experience I had in 5000bc (yes, the membership site).

I found writing an article a day sped up my writing like crazy. Since I had no option and made this crazy promise, I had to work out a system to write—and write well.

To write well, you can’t stay at the top level of articles—you have to go deep Think about it for a while. Let’s say you’re writing on the topic of “triggers in marketing”. That’s a pretty top-level topic. If you jump onto any search engine and look up triggers, you’ll get some mundane “3-steps to create triggers” or something just as pathetic.

That’s because top-level writing is well, pretty vague. It’s when you go down a level, possibly two levels that you start to see the magic.

But go down a few levels and you get the following:

How to make a trigger memorable—for ten years or more
Why the lack of specifics keeps your trigger vague—and boring
How to use the power of contrast to create mind-blowing trigger statements Article writing—exquisite article writing—it’s about depth

Taking a topic and heading way down into cave-land. That’s when you realise you can write articles about topics no one has ever thought of—ever dreamt of. You’re so excited about writing articles that you can’t help yourself.

Five articles a week—just five articles a week—it seems insane to restrict yourself to creating so little information.

February 2016

Announcing: The Secret to Becoming an Expert in Your Customer’s Eyes?

📅 February 27, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

How do you become an expert in your customer’s eyes? How do you become the person the customer most wants to work with? How do you then increase prices 500% and still have customers wanting to work with you?

To understand how this unusual situation occurs, let me tell you a story I was a cartoonist by profession. Then one fine day, I decided to get into ‘marketing.’

Now tell me honestly Would you hire a cartoonist to show you how to attract customers? Would you hire a cartoonist to show you how to improve your website? Would you hire a cartoonist for anything—but—to draw cartoons?

Why would you? I wouldn’t.

And that was the uphill battle I faced: No one knew me as an expert. Now it didn’t matter how many times I looked in the mirror and called myself an expert.

I still wasn’t getting any respect, let alone pesos in the bank. And it drove me crazy.

But there’s always a way out of crazy-land So here’s what I did. I started writing articles. And it was painful writing those articles. I’d write one article after slaving over it for two days. And then sometimes after two days, I’d trash the article and start all over again.

Did I say there’s a way out of crazy-land? Well, it sure didn’t seem so, because this article-writing-jazz was driving me loco.

But here’s what I found too. That there were systems. And techniques. Techniques that enabled me to write faster. That enabled me to make an article almost like a movie. That enabled me to see a pattern as to which articles would go down the gurgler, and which articles would get lapped up by the readers.

That there were certain articles, when published, that got customers to my website in droves. I’d wake up, and suddenly there were fifty, or a hundred new subscribers.

Sometimes as many as two hundred or more.

And then as the weeks and months passed, I started getting calls Calls to help customers with their website (um, after I wrote a website-based article).

And then emails. To help customers to help them attract clients (um, again, it was an article that did the job).

You’re guessing what crossed my mind, eh? Not only were the articles pulling in customers to the Psychotactics website, but these customers were asking me to work with them.

Me, a cartoonist, work with them?

I have to say, I was scared out my wits. (For two whole years actually). But after two years of writing articles (and I just wrote about 20 articles in the first two years), even I began to see a trend.

I figured I could go nuts and cold-call… Or I could sit at my computer and write an article. And have a customer call. (Ooh, I did like the sound of that phone ringing).

But you have to remember this was back in the year 2002-2004. Back then, the Internet was a bit of a novelty. People doled out their email addresses like peanuts. Today it’s not that easy to have two hundred people stream through your website. Which means that it’s not enough to just write an article.

There are squillions of articles on the Internet today And those articles are competing with audio. And video. And heck knows what else.

So the questions do cross your mind

How do I write so that my clients actually read my articles above all that noise?
How do I write, if I struggle to put a paragraph together?
Is there a ticket out of crazy-land? Can I really become an expert in my client’s eyes?

There indeed is a ticket And if you’ve been putting off writing, because you think it’s hard, well, it’s time to get that ticket out of crazy-land.

Information (um, Article Writing) creates expertise Ask every author on Amazon.com Ask every top consultant. Ask every top trainer. And ask a cartoonist.

Free Goodies: Don’t take my word for it. Judge for yourself. Get some solid methods to write better articles at this link. Don’t wait. This link won’t stay up forever. :) Free Goodies: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JjJpieRvodEtt1&b=e84eL92ymZOJXr4fFGYA4Q

Sean P.S. The goodies are free.

We don’t accept more than 25 on the course. It’s intense. It’s tough. We open registration on Saturday 5th March, at 3 pm Eastern (US). The course fills up incredibly quickly (often in matter of hours). Make sure you put at least a couple of alarms so you don’t miss out.

Here is the sales page with all the details about the course. (The ‘Buy Now’ button will appear on the 5th March) http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=KQnf2&m=JjJpieRvodEtt1&b=oTVSrzipVknFYauZqzljPA

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How Do You Make Your Trigger Statement Memorable 100% Of The Time

📅 February 23, 2016 | View in Gmail

How Do You Make Your Trigger Statement Memorable 100% Of The Time

(To read this article online, click on the cartoon) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/trigger-statement/ ]

“30 Seconds. Just spray and walk away”. In New Zealand, right before the brand “30 seconds” came along, there may have been dozens of mould and moss removers. So why did “30 seconds” stand out? Ok, it’s time to cover your eyes for a few seconds and try to recall what “30 seconds” asks you to do. You remembered it, didn’t you? All you needed to do was “spray and walk away”.

Why did that line stick in your head? You didn’t have to think of the words; that’s why. You already had a similar line in your head long before you heard that particular tagline. When the announcer says, “spray and walk away”, he’s using everyday language. The ordinary language means there’s not a lot to remember. And this “nothing to remember” bit—it’s important from a brain point of view.

Whenever we hear something—like a phone number, for instance—we can keep in our working memory However, unless we repeat the number several times—or assign some logic to the number, we’re soon unable to remember it at all. Take my old library card for instance. The number is 1000203674956. Try remembering that number! But I do, because I was sick of having to dig into my wallet, go through a bunch of cards and find the library card number. So I worked hard at breaking it up into chunks of 1000-2036-74956. However, no matter how I explain the logic of how I remember it, you will find it hard to remember.

We don’t have the luxury of clients trying to remember what we’ve just said So we have to use everyday, spoken language. Let’s take an example of the Psychotactics headline course. What’s the promise? Get a greater number of clickthroughs for your headline. Ok, close your eyes again. You remember the line, don’t you? So will you remember the line about a year from today? And that’s because the headline isn’t the same as the tagline. A headline can differ from a tagline because a tagline is designed to get you to remember, where as a headline is intended to get you to get to the next line. Their purpose is different.

So when we look at the headline for The Brain Audit, it’s “Have you seen your customer back out of a deal at the very last minute?” That seems pretty readable—and it does its job for a headline. But what’s the tagline for The Brain Audit? It’s on the cover of the book if you look at the sub-head. It states: Why Customers buy (and why they don’t). Now try remembering that line a year from now. It’s not that hard to remember, is it? The headline of a client backing away of the “deal” seems a bit bendy to remember, but the “why customers buy…” sticks in your head.

When you’re creating a trigger statement, you may find the headline works just fine as a trigger But in most cases, the headline doesn’t hold water for a long period. It works to get you to read more. It keeps you interested, but the sheer length and complexity of a headline causes drop out over time. Taglines, on the other hand, are designed to be short—and memorable. And for this reason alone, they need to be in everyday, spoken language. Something that the client has already encountered before and possibly experienced many times over.

So how do you get to this everyday, spoken language? It’s not as hard as you think—all you have to do is speak out the words. Let’s say you’re in the business of selling mould removers, your line would be: “I wish I could just “spray and walk away.” That’s the key—did you notice it? Say, “I wish I could just—and then fill in the blanks.

Let’s take a few examples starting with “I wish I could…” – learn how to influence others without hard sell – learn how to take stunning pictures—without a big, fancy camera – learn how to peel garlic without endless fiddling – learn to make Indian food using just five spices – learn to write articles that don’t end up in an article-graveyard

Notice how easy it is to remember those lines? They seem to be like taglines, but they’re just ordinary every day lines. They’re statements, you and I would make when we felt we needed to get to an end point; when we felt we desperately needed to solve a problem. What’s interesting, however, is a good tagline has two parts. The first part is the wish for the end point, but the second part of the tagline is the removal of the barrier.

Let’s look at the barrier, shall we? – hard sell – big, fancy camera – endless fiddling – many spices – article-graveyard.

If you took the taglines as they were, they seemed pretty good, but once you added some contrast, it gave the lines a life of its own And all we did was use, “without” or “using” or “don’t end up”. You could use other terms, but you should start with these—and “without” is a great starting point. That way your tagline looks like this: Learn how to (______________) without (______________________) That’s everyday language. That’s language you can understand.

And yes, a tagline is different from a headline Simply because of its memorability factor. It’s not that a tagline can’t be used as a headline. However, if you can’t remember the headline ten months from now, then it’s a headline, not a tagline. A tagline is so simple, yet so well put together that it comes across as something you and I would say every day.

But wait, the “just spray and walk away” didn’t have the barrier, did it?” No, it didn’t. And sometimes you can get away with a tagline that doesn’t explicitly mention the barrier. The barrier creates contrast and makes the tagline more interesting. My advice would be to put the barrier wherever you can.

And keep it simple. Taglines like simplicity. It makes them memorable for years to come.

Announcing: The Article Writing Course—2016 registrations open on 5 March (3 pm Eastern US). Make sure you set your alarm. How to stop knocking on client’s doors, and get them to call you instead (Learn why articles do a far superior job of attracting the clients you want–and how the right articles make you the expert in your field) Free Goodies [ http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/ ] Detail about the course [ http://www.psychotactics.com/article-writing-course-how-to-write-articles/ ]

Product Offers: Links you should visit

“How do you get people to sign up to your mailing list without holding a gun to their head? And without being annoying.”

I recommend this product to anybody who is unsure about what works on a website and how to bring text, and visuals together. The Website Components Series will be especially useful if you want to understand how to get people on your mailing list in a non-sleazy gun-to-your-head kind of way. Elfriede Krauth Amsterdam, The Netherlands Judge for yourself: Website Components [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/websites-that-workinternet-marketing-psychological-secrets/ ]

Top Selling Products Under $50

Testimonial Secrets: Powerful Techniques to Get Better Clients-And Sales [ http://www.psychotactics.com/testimonialsecrets ] Story Telling Series: How to suck your audience right in, in a matter of seconds [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-telling ] Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done [ http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Remember to share this article As long as you leave it intact and do not alter it in anyway. All links must remain in the article. No textual amendments permitted. Psychotactics Ltd. All rights reserved.

Free Goodies New! Audio and Text: The Three Month Vacation—How to get there without a drop in income. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/ ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://psychotactics.com/ ]

Privacy and Spam Policy I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Other Resources and Tools Three Month Vacation Podcast: “The Myth of the Four-Hour Work Week” and more. [ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 ] Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Recommended Resources:http://www.psychotactics.com/resources Where do you start: http://www.psychotactics.com/products Contact me: sean@psychotactics.com Important: You are subscribed to the Free Psychotactics Newsletter.’ If you un-subscribe from this letter, you won’t receive any goodies, offers, or newsletters in future. If you’re getting duplicate newsletters, email us and we’ll make sure you get just one copy. Email renuka@psychotactics.com

Psychotactics Products

Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t [ http://www.psychotactics.com/the-brain-audit-marketing-strategy-and-structure ]

How to create a warmer, friendlier and trusting experience for your website visitor [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/websites-that-workinternet-marketing-psychological-secrets/ ]

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing! How To Become An Expert In Your Industry: Article-Writing Course

📅 February 20, 2016 | View in Gmail

Imagine you had a fairy godmother. And she gave you one wish: The wish of ‘perceived expertise’. This ‘perceived expertise’, means that your customers would look at you and say: “There goes the expert in the field. I only want to work with her/him.”

I had such a godmother. And I got a wish from that fairy godmother in the year 2002.

You see I’d just started up my consultancy in marketing I’d moved from India to New Zealand. No one knew me in these parts. No one knew if I was good at what I did. Or just plain useless. And what was worse, was I wasn’t quite sure either.

Then one day, that fairy godmother whizzed into the room “Write articles,” she said. “Write articles?” I echoed. “What good are articles going to do for me?” I thought condescendingly.

But as fairy godmothers go, they can read your thoughts And so there I was, um, writing articles. And remember, I didn’t even know my subject well enough. To me, marketing was a whole new world.

But then something magical happened. Something I just didn’t expect. When I sat down to write, I started to get ideas. Ideas that I didn’t know existed in my head. And as I read more books (both business and non-business books), I got even more ideas.

When I put those ideas on my website, and put up a little ‘Subscribe’ link right at the very bottom—I started getting subscribers.

I wasn’t even selling anything online (or offline for that matter) And there I was..ahem…building an audience. An audience that wanted to listen what I had to say. An audience that went from just friends and family, to a chunky hundred people. Then a thousand. And it kept growing.

I wasn’t doing any advertising No publicity. Heck, I barely knew how to do my own marketing. Yet these articles were like a magnet. They pulled people from every part of the world to my…um…pretty crappy website (you should have seen it in the year 2002). And offline, I was starting to get inquiries too.

“Can you give us some advice on these marketing matters?” they said “Can you train our staff?” they said. Can you do this, and can you do that. And on and on it went. But articles were hard work for me It would take me two days to write a single article. And I’d curse and struggle. And to write one article a month was a big achievement for me.

But hey, I did have a fairy godmother And fairy godmothers grant wishes, so I took her up on the wish. “Make me write great articles that captivate. And show me how to write them at high speed (so I don’t have to spend two days over a single article)” I said to her.

“Article writing is about structure”, she said “Structure and drama,” she continued. “Structure and drama and the ‘next step’,” she crescendoed. “Drama pulls you in. Structure keeps you there. And then the next action gets your client to move to the next step.” And just like that I learned how to write articles. And now it’s your turn.

Will you let me be your fairy um…godmother? Do you want to learn how to spot drama? Learn how to spot structure? And understand how to use the power of the next step?

Well, ask and you shall receive. But hey, there are no magic wands here. You’ve actually got to go to the link below. And there you’ll be taken to a page with instructions. Instructions on how to get some free goodies. Goodies to drama, structure, and the next step.

So, tah-dah, here’s the link: Free Goodies: Article Writing [ http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/ ] See you on the other side! :)

Sean P.S. The goodies are free.

P.P.S. Start. Stop. Start. Stop. The biggest frustration with writing is it drives you crazy. Yet writing is a “language” like everything else. Learn the structure and you can learn to write without the frustration. Registrations open on 5 March at 3 pm Eastern (US). Set your alarms. http://www.psychotactics.com/article-writing-course-how-to-write-articles/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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How To Take Your Small Business To Greatness: Good to Great

📅 February 16, 2016 | View in Gmail

How To Take Your Small Business To Greatness: Good to Great

(To read or listen to this article online, click on the cartoon. This is quite a long article, but make the time to read it now, as it may change the way you do business. It sure turned our business around.)

Around the autumn of 1890, Daniel Burnham was given a project.

Burnham was an architect—an extremely well known architect—in Chicago. And he’d been given a job like no other. He was expected to turn a boggy square mile into what would be the spotlight of the world. He was put in charge of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

He just had one tiny problem—the Eiffel Tower.

On March 31, 1889, Paris had had it’s own Exposition. And it quickly surpassed the Washington Monument to become the then tallest man-made structure in the world. Burhnam had the unenviable job of surpassing the hoopla around the Eiffel Tower, but no one had a clue what to do.

“Make no little plans”, he said to his team of engineers, but they could come up with little to rival the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower. Of course there were proposals: a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in chairs (pretty much like today’s bungee jumping). And Eiffel himself proposed an idea for the Chicago exposition—a bigger tower than the one in Paris.

How could the Chicago Exposition outshine the now most famous monument in the world—the Eiffel Tower? It seemed almost impossible to come up with something that would rival the French monument. An engineer called Ferris has the answer.

The ideas were going nowhere and the Chicagoans were pulling their hair out, when a 33 year old engineer from Pittsburgh came up with an idea: how about a huge revolving steel wheel? He came up with sketches, added additional specifications and then shared the idea with Burnham.

But Burnham was not impressed.

The slender rods of the wheel were too fragile. It would be madness to carry people to a height taller than the Statue of Liberty in such a fragile wheel. But Burnham wasn’t just dealing with any ol’ engineer.

He was dealing with George Washington Gale Ferris Jr—who would forever be associated with the Ferris wheel. Ferris was so convinced his idea would work that he spent $25,000 of his own money, hired more engineers and recruited investors. And consider that $25,000 would be worth over $650,000 in today’s money.

Over a 100,000 parts went into the Ferris wheel. And an 89,320 pound axle had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air. On June 21, 1893 when it was launched, it was a stunning success. As the exposition went through the next three week, more than 1.4 million paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride.

George Washington Gale Ferris had literally reinvented the wheel.

The year we moved to New Zealand, I had to reinvent my own wheel. You see, I wasn’t in marketing. I had no plans of being in marketing. I was already an established cartoonist back in Mumbai, India and when I moved to New Zealand I pretty much expected to continue to draw cartoons.

In fact I was so determined to take that cartoon career forward, that when we moved I had over 100 kilos worth of books shipped. These were no ordinary books. These were the books on graphic design and cartooning that I’d accumulated over the years. Plus, there were brochures. Before I left India, I had no idea what New Zealand held for me.

So I printed business cards—as you do

But also lavish four colour brochures, postcards and yes, stationery that I could use when I got to New Zealand. All of this material had to be shipped by air—not by sea—because I was in a big hurry to get going in this new country.

Yet, almost a year later, I had to reinvent what I was doing—and it was all because of one book.

That book, “Good to Great” has sold over 2.5 million hardcover copies. But more importantly, it was the catalyst in my own reinvention. In 2000 as I got on a plane back to India (I had to go back and tidy up things I’d left undone), I had loads of time to read the book and mull over the ideas. And as I’ve mentioned before in articles and podcasts, I realised that I would never reach my greatness in cartooning.

To me, the pinnacle of cartooning was the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. If I couldn’t get up to those lofty heights, it wasn’t feeding my greatness appetite. And so I turned to something I was getting exceedingly good at doing—creating taglines for small businesses. Without realising it, I was wandering down the aisle of marketing.

The book—and that 19 hour flight—it did it for me. It put me on my quest for what I’d consider my “greatness journey”.

But just as it set the benchmarks, it also raised a ton of questions.

Are there benchmarks to know that you’re moving from good to great? How do you know what you’re choosing will end up being great? With all the stories of greatness bouncing around Apple, Boeing, Disney and Walmart, how can a small business owner get to greatness, without becoming big and dominant?

Big questions—and it’s best to keep the answers simple. Deep, yet simple.

Let’s take a trip and explore the three core elements required to get your own Ferris wheel going—even when the odds seem stacked against you.

The three elements we’ll cover are:

The Hedgehog Principle Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG.

Avis—the car rental company—was pretty much in the doldrums.

Back in 1961, it was losing $3.2 million a year and there seemed to be no way to beat the domination of their biggest rival—Hertz. And the two companies had been at each others throats since the mid-1940s, when Air Force officer, Warren Avis created a niche out of thin air.

As he travelled around, Warren Avis realized that most car companies were downtown—not a very convenient place to get a car if you just flew into a city. Business travel was growing steadily and many executives would touch down, rent a car, drive to their meetings and drop the car back at the airport on the very same day.

Hertz was not impressed

They continued to run their rental car business downtown, as if Avis didn’t exist. Yet, over time, they found Avis gobbling up chunks of their business. It seemed logical to simply replicate what Avis had done. With this move, Hertz signalled the start of the rivalry that exists to this day.

But then, along came 1962 and an creative agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). The copywriter team of Paula Greene and Helmut Krone created an advertising campaign that would take Avis from losing $3.2 million to earning $1.2 million. What’s more, it would rock Hertz’ smugness to its very core.

From 1963 to 1966, Hertz smug look turned to paralysis

The market share percentage gap between the two car companies shrunk from 61-29 to 49-36. The “We’re only No.2. We try Harder” immediately captured the attention of the public. But why did this “We try harder” campaign really work? When we look at the Hedgehog Concept outlined in “Good to Great”, the answer is more than apparent.

The Hedgehog principle consists of three pertinent questions:

– What can you be the best in the world at? – What drives your economic engine? – What are you deeply passionate about?

Avis could easily answer those questions—but only once it had the new ad campaign going

It was the best in the world at “bending over backwards” to make car customers happy. After all it was only No.2, and couldn’t afford to rest on its laurels. This concept of “trying harder” got the entire company to indeed try harder. And yes, we all know how their bleeding balance sheet made a sharp U-turn into decent profitability.

They got the “best in the world” covered, the “economic engine” was purring away. Only one thing remained—the passion. The “we try harder” might have been just a slogan, but it was a slogan that drove the passion—and if the slogan is right, it often does drive the passion! Avis ticked all the three boxes, and they were well on their way to scaring the heebie-jeebies out of Hertz.

Notice how money—or the economic engine—isn’t really the focus of greatness?

Money is important, that’s for sure. A company gasps and coughs it’s way into oblivion if it can’t fire up that economic engine. And yet, it’s more than clear that for most of us, at least, money is not the driving factor.

All those website owners that show you how their income doubled and quintupled are still sitting on the same sofa; they’re still typing on that same yellowed keyboard. Yes, they may have doubled or quintupled the size of their house or boat, but when money becomes the only focus, there’s no time to enjoy the good stuff in life.

Which is why the “best in the world” journey needs to start with what makes you deliriously happy. It’s the stuff that wakes you up and keeps you going, no matter what. Your work becomes your passion and the complete opposite of trying to outsource everything and doing as little as possible. Money helps enormously in getting you to your goal, but the passion and desire is what’s behind the wheel.

And this is where confusion comes bouncing through the door

When I quit my career in cartooning, I was doing very well indeed. I’d moved to New Zealand and despite being in a brand new market, the profit for the first year was $75,000. Picture me sitting at my computer, drawing cartoons, listening to music and then taking a nap and you get the idea. It wasn’t exactly like I was struggling to put food on the table. Still, the moment you decide you want to change things—the moment I decided I couldn’t beat “Calvin and Hobbes”, I was in trouble.

I’m good at a lot of things. I whizz my way around Photoshop, I can cook exceedingly well, you’ve probably seen my food and travel photos on Facebook—and you’re getting an idea of the looming problem, aren’t you? The moment you can do more than one thing, you’re not sure where to go. The journey to greatness seems to run right into a pool of quicksand.

So how do you get yourself out of this mess and back on track?

I’d decided I didn’t want to do cartooning—at least at that point in time—and I wanted to take this leap into marketing. I didn’t know much about marketing, but that minor detail wasn’t keeping me up at night.

Still, I was in a fog—after all marketing is this big, nameless, faceless profession and I hadn’t a clue what the journey to greatness was going to look like, or whether one existed at all.

And that’s when I ran into a subset of marketing.

A subset is what starts the journey to greatness

My story was quite accidental—as yours may well be. I joined this networking group called BNI. We’d meet every Friday, enjoy breakfast and hand out referrals. And crucial as all this referral giving was to me at the time, one factor was even more pivotal to help me on my journey.

BNI has this strange custom called “the dance”—as in “dancing with a partner”. In this so-called “dance”, you go across to visit another of the members. For instance, I might go and meet the real estate agent at her office. Or another week I might end up talking to the financial planner in the group.

Being new and enjoying this extroverted behaviour, I binged on the “dance”

I started meeting several members of the BNI group in relatively quick succession. They’d tell me what they did—often spending between 10-20 minutes explaining the details.

Then I’d ponder over what they just said, and boil it down to a single line. In effect, I’d given them a tagline—a working tagline that would elicit curiosity and get their prospects interested.

The first time I encapsulated their 20 minute speech into a single line, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing.

Twenty or thirty tagline later, with everyone telling me how “great” I was at taglines, I decided to make that my entry point into marketing. I wasn’t going to be the best in the world at marketing—and no one can ever take such a title.

But I could create a subset. And that’s because a subset is simpler than a well-laid out, world domination plan. Which means that you’re going to make a career out of teaching a program like InDesign, don’t take on every tool bar in the program. Just teach clients how to create an amazing e-book in under an hour.

The Hedgehog Concept

If you’re going to be the best in the world at WordPress sites, you’re headed for chaos.

But take on a subset and you could be the designer that gets clients to their destination in just three steps. Even the all-time greats in the history of mankind—take Michelangelo for instance—he made the statue of David his subset. He was headed towards the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel in time, but to start on that journey of greatness, he had to take on carving just the statue of David.

Once you deal with a subset, passion almost force-feeds you with energy

Avis found its passion once it had the subset of “trying harder” instead of the grand scheme of “trying to do everything”. I found my subset quite by accident while taking on taglines. And the moment you streamline your idea into one tiny bit, you’ll get enormous control over that bit—and the passion faucet will begin to flow.

You’ll read more about the subset, practice it longer and harder and it will take over your life. Which effectively means you’re done with two elements of the Hedgehog principle all at once. You have your passion—thanks to your subset—and it’s put you well and truly on the road to personal and professional greatness.

That leaves just the looming question. Will it drive your economic engine? Will it pay the bills? And how soon?

I didn’t know the answer to that question of the economic engine

In fact, I did something very silly in my quest for “being the best in the world”. I quit cartooning—yup, just like that. One fine day, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cartoons. And then something extremely strange happened. No one called me for a cartoon project any more. Right until that moment I’d been filling that balance sheet with a decent profit, and suddenly I didn’t get a single call or e-mail for another cartoon project.

Be aware that I was drawing stuff for ad agencies, magazine covers, local councils and private clients. And yet, it stopped almost as if I had taken a full page ad in the newspaper that said, “Sean D’Souza doesn’t want to draw cartoons any more. Stop bugging him.”

My dream had come true, but I didn’t have a buffer.

The buffer isn’t just money

It’s also the buffer of knowledge and of confidence. Remember, I wasn’t a marketing guy, I was a cartoonist. That thought stays in your head and seriously undermines your confidence. Getting to the library, stacking up 30 books at a time was top priority.

We’re talking about economic engines here, and knowledge plays a big role in how you get paid. Having the skills to run a business is what allows you to make that engine vroom. I had to teach myself how to write great articles, how to create compelling copy—and yes, how to speak.

That buffer was important for my economic engine, but money played its role too.

I jumped right into marketing and out of a business

I’d spend a chunk of time beefing up on the learning and the skills. But I hadn’t considered the factor that everything takes time to turnaround. It was a rash move, and luckily Renuka had a decent job. That paid the bills, the mortgage and let me fumble forward toward this “greatest in the world” dream.

Um, Renuka also quit her job and joined Psychotactics a few months later, but that buffer was all we needed. We were now on a trajectory to align ourselves with the Hedgehog Principle. Like Michelangelo, we had to carve one David at a time. Like Avis, we had to “try harder” one car at a time. We were passionate about what we did. And the clients started to trickle in.

But the Hedgehog principle itself, isn’t enough

Jim Collins stresses a second more important factor. In fact, he considers this second factor to be the most important of all the material he’s written over the years. It’s called: Preserving the core AND stimulating progress.

Let’s find out just what this means for you and your small business.

The action plan and summary coming in the next episode.

Click here to listen to part 2: Good to Great: How To Escalate The Path To Greatness

Announcing: Free Goodies +Psychotactics 2016 Courses

📅 February 13, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

Do you remember trying to learn a new language?

The word “trying” is important, because most of us never do get

fluency in a language.

And yet, there was one teacher who promised like what seemed impossible.

He promised to teach the guts of a language in an incredibly short time.

“10 hours, you can learn all the tenses; future, past, present”. And then he

went on to demonstrate how he’d teach the language.

In a few short weeks, he’d teach Hollywood stars, the main aspects of

a language—enough to get them to conduct a conversation. His method

was focused and not surprisingly, he accomplished more than any other

language teacher.

His name was Michel Thomas

And Thomas didn’t believe in bad students. There’s no such thing as a bad student.

There’s only a bad teacher. A good teacher has a system and method.

They have pacing and knowledge. And they don’t believe in bad students.

Which means the entire responsibility of the learning

and the teaching depends on the teacher. To learn a language, any

language whether it is to write articles, draw cartoons, or write headlines.

They’re all incredibly similar to learning a language.

And to learn a language, you should ask yourself if you’re getting all these elements:

The presence of the teacher—at all times.
Daily practice.
Not more information—but skill.
The presence of the teacher:

A teacher has to be available through the course—and at all times.

When you’re joining a course, are you dealing with the teacher?

Or are you dealing with some lackeys who have no knowledge? Always ask yourself:

Is the teacher going to be present—all the time—ten times a day, if needed? And that

takes us to the concept of daily practice.

Daily practice:

I used to go to Spanish class once a week. The evening of the course, I’d try to

catch up. Of course, it goes without saying that I’m not fluent in Spanish. A course

needs daily practice. When you do a Psychotactics course, there are no half measures.

You learn by practicing every single day. Our courses are said to be the toughest

in the world, because they’re not la-dee-dah courses. They’re built on the teacher—

and the student showing up every single working day of the week. You do your

assignment at any time of the day (or night) and every assignment is checked

and the mistakes are fixed. If you happen to show up and work on your assignment

ten times a day, it’s fixed ten times a day. That’s how you really learn.

Skill—not more information

We’ve had it up to our eyeballs in information. We don’t believe in the power of

information. We believe in skill. At the start of the course, you set out your goals.

At the end of the course, you need to be able to achieve those goals. Simple as

that.

If you set out to learn about headlines, you should be able to not only write

a great headline, but to be able to spot crappy headlines, tell the person why

they’re hopeless. And you need to be able to fix the headline—no matter what

industry you work with. If you’re in a cartooning course, and can’t draw—well,

you will draw exceedingly well at the end of the course. The same applies to

all our courses. You aren’t buying more information. You’re signing up for a skill.

So ask yourself:

Is the teacher going to be around at “all times”?
Is there daily practice and daily evaluation?
Will I get more information or will I get a skill.

Psychotactics courses are small, and for a reason.

We don’t have 5000 people on a course. Not even 500, or 100 that matter. Courses

have between 35-20 (it depends on the course). That’s it. A tiny group, that gets split up into smaller

groups, so that you finally end up in a group of 6 or 7 at best.

And Psychotactics courses are expensive!

But what would you prefer? More information or a skill?

That’s what Michel Thomas called fluency. That’s what a Psychotactics course

is about.

You’re fluent—no other option is acceptable.

Presenting: Article-Writing Goodies (Yup, the FREE Goodies!)

http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/

Free Goodie No. 1: A mini-booklet that helps you quickly improve your article-writing

Free Goodie No. 2: How to create drama in your article

Free Goodie No. 3: How de-chunking creates powerful focus when writing articles.

Free Goodie No. 4: When structuring, does length of the article matter? And why not?

Free Goodie No. 5: Why do article-writers avoid a super-fast method of writing?

Yes, you will also get to see the details of the Article Writing Online Course which starts

in April 2016. However, the goodies are free.

Click here for the free goodies. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/ ]

(In case the link doesn’t work here is the direct link

http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-live-course-form-how-to-attract-clients-with-your-articles/ ]

Sean

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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The Polaroid Moment—How To Predict If Your Business Is Going To Succeed

📅 February 09, 2016 | View in Gmail

The Polaroid Moment: How To Predict If Your Business Is Going To Succeed

(To read this article online, click on the cartoon)

In 1947, inventor, Edwin Land had a “tiny” issue on his hand Land and his daughter were enjoying their day out, and Land was busy snapping pictures of his daughter. But she’s wasn’t impressed. She wanted Land to show her the pictures he’d been taking with his camera. She wanted to see the images “right now”—and this got Land thinking. What if he could create a camera that would somehow take—and print the picture in a matter of minutes? 200 transistors, dozens of moving mirrors, light sensors, gears and solenoids later, and we had the Polaroid camera—the most amazing camera in the world. But what made the camera so amazing?

The amazing part of the camera is that it got “instant results”

All you did was point, shoot and voila, a tiny little square photo popped out of the camera slot. A few minutes later, you had a print. You—and millions of others of people around the world, created a Polaroid moment. But if you stop for a moment and think about Polaroid, you notice that a Polaroid didn’t take the best pictures; it was restricted in terms of size and format; it didn’t even give you the chance to print copies. And yet, it created an instant solution for the client. For the client, the Polaroid moment is what really matters. And what’s the opposite of the Polaroid moment? Let me digress a bit and tell you about my curry leaf plants.

I had a problem with the curry leaf plants in my backyard

However, curry leaf plants are particularly finicky. They’re summer-loving and don’t take kindly to the cold and frost. Which is why we weren’t terribly surprised when the plants pretty much slept through autumn, winter and spring. Then along came summer, followed by the next summer. Five summers later and the plants—both of them were going nowhere in the hurry.

The moment my father told me to cut the leaves, he became a Polaroid zen master in my eyes. Within days, I started to see results when five years had provided absolutely nothing but frustration.

Your clients aren’t super-impressed with more services and more information

Let’s take a few examples, shall we?

If you’re selling a product like an e-book or course, the Polaroid moment becomes relatively easier. For instance, a client gets to the Psychotactics website, subscribes and gets the Headline Report. 10 minutes later that very client is able to write headlines in three different ways—and know which headline works and which doesn’t. A similar situation unfolds when that client reads The Brain Audit. By the time they read the first three pages of the book, they are suddenly seeing why their marketing doesn’t well as well as it should—and how to fix their communication. In fact, every section of the book keeps hitting you with Polaroid moments—not necessarily more information.

But how do you solve this problem if you’re in a service like sofas, for example?

In every situation, you can’t deal with every problem. Notice Polaroid’s genius? Instead of trying to solve every photographic problem, Edwin Land focused solely on getting an instant photo. The curry leaf plant, the Headline Report, The Brain Audit—all those solutions were designed to solve a single—and often, tiny problem. Avoid trying to solve the entire “fix your garden” problem or “improve your marketing” problem. Instead, focus on a tiny subset. When selling sofas or something big and difficult to comprehend, you bring it down to a subset. Can you eliminate most of the information and focus on a tiny subset? Can we stop focusing on the sofa and focus on just the foam instead? Teach me how to pick a good sofa just based on the foam. That gets me interested as a client, and once that problem is solved, I’m more keen than ever to buy the sofa.

And yet, just creating a Polaroid-like product isn’t enough to generate revenue

You still have to do the marketing. You still have to promote it, deal with clients, etc. You still have to have something that clients are going to buy on a consistent basis. If you build it, they will come, but only if you do all the work that’s needed and then continue to what’s required to keep sales going. Even Polaroid, with all its magic needed to chop and change to avert the bankruptcy in 2001. But this piece isn’t so much about how you promote or sustain your success. Instead, it’s about how to predict if whatever you’re about to do is going to have some positive impact to your business. To make sure you’re on the right track to economic success, ask yourself a few questions.

Ask yourself whether you’re offering too much

Ask yourself if you have far too many features. Ask yourself the question that Edwin Land’s daughter asked him all those years ago: Can we see it right now?

Can we? P.S. What’s the state of the curry plant? It’s doing very well, thank you. Both the plants have gone from their puny state to a medium sized plant. By next summer (yes, it’s summer here in New Zealand), I’m hoping to have two trees! ———————————– Announcement: The 2016 Article Writing Course is coming Yes, it’s coming. It’s the toughest writing course in the world. Registrations are opening on 5 March 2016.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

“Do you want to raise your prices, get better clients, have more fun and remain authentic?”

“Pricing is an inexact science and Sean demonstrates how tightly value is related to price. In these books you will learn how to master the three gorillas of pricing.”

—Jeffrey Eisenberg, USA Find out for yourself: Click here to read more. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/ ]

Top Selling Products Under $50

Sales Pages: How To Write Benefits and Bullets That Speed Up Sales [ http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors ] Article Writing: How To Speed Up Article Writing With Simple Outlines [ http://www.psychotactics.com/learn-how-to-speed-up-article-writing-with-simple-outlines ] Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done [ http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning ] _____________________________ [ http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies New! Audio and Text: Three Incredibly Silly Business Myths (And Why They’re Driving Us Crazy) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ] Report: “Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work)” [ http://www.psychotactics.com/free/headlines-fail/ ]

Privacy and Spam Policy I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics Products

Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/ ]

How you can get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems even at 4:00 am [ http://www.5000bc.com/ ]

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Last Day: How to join 5000bc (Without Being On The Waiting List!)

📅 February 02, 2016 | View in Gmail

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

Today’s the last day to join 5000bc before we put

up the waiting list yet again. After then only a limited number

will be able to join every month.

If you’re a business owner, you know how lonely it can be

in your world.

And having a community to talk to, to work with and bounce

your ideas off, is incredibly valuable.

The motto of 5000bc is: be kind, be helpful, or begone.

If you are looking for a community that simply slap each

other on the back, are always promoting themselves, then

5000bc is not for you.

What you’ll find in 5000bc is solid information, but more

importantly, solid help. Help from me (yes, I’m around 20-30

times a day, answering questions in great detail) and other members

who pitch in and help.

There’s an old African saying:

If you want go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a

group. And yes, if you go with a helpful group, you enjoy the journey.

Yes, it’s the last day to join before the waiting list goes up,

so get in the community and let’s go far.

Here’s the link

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

Warm regards,

P.S. See you in 5000bc.

This offer expires on 2 February 2016 (12 pm Eastern US).

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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January 2016

Announcing: How to join 5000bc (Without Being On The Waiting List!)

📅 January 30, 2016 | View in Gmail

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

You’ve been around the Psychotactics site for a while. And you’ve probably even sneaked a peek at 5000bc (our membership site) and seen that there’s a waiting list.

And for three days we’re bringing down that wall.

And from Saturday 23 January to Tuesday 2 February 2016, you get the chance to join (without being on the waiting list).

The last time we opened up the waiting list was over five months ago. Yup, a long time ago.

But how do you know if 5000bc is the place for you?

You read the testimonials. Do your due diligence and read the testimonials and you’ll see for yourself why our members join—and more importantly why they stay. And how you can be part of that select group as well.

You have to judge for yourself. So take a look at 5000bc right away.

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

We’d love to have you there if you think it’s the right place for you :)

Warm regards,

P.S. Make a decision today based on what you see.

http://www.psychotactics.com/5000bc-3/

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Why Focusing on “One Concept” Helps Create Powerful InfoProducts

📅 January 26, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why Focusing on “One Concept” Helps Create Powerful InfoProducts (From the archives: One of the most read articles of 2015)

(To read this article online, click on the cartoon) I don’t know if you’ve read a watercolour instruction book before.

But no matter which book you read, the instructor will tell you one thing: You need to understand ‘values’. Without ‘values’ in your painting, you will never create a watercolour that is dramatic.

And then you open the book, and guess what?

One page.

One measly page.

One measly page among about 150 pages of the book has been devoted to ‘values’.

So what just happened there?

The instructor told you what was important, and then failed to drive home that importance in greater detail. Why? Because there’s so much to teach that they feel this need to rush from one thing to the next; one concept to the next.

And this is approximately what we tend to do with any training program or infoproduct. We are in such a hurry to create this massive infoproduct, that we fail to understand that one concept needs to get far more mileage than the next.

So why does one concept need to get more importance?

For one, because your clients are plainly confused. When they start learning any new skill or system, it’s like being sloshed around in a whirlpool of information. And the moment, you, the teacher, says: “Hey listen up, this is important!” all the ears perk up. Now the clients know what is important. And they feel a sense of relief.

Instead of being tossed around madly, someone (that someone is you) has taken the trouble to hit the “pause” button and identify what’s important.

When you’re a student, it makes perfect sense to slow down, understand and implement the most important fact. But of course, as the teacher/creator, you’re in no mood to pick just one thing and make it important.

That’s because you think everything is important

And it is. Everything is important.

All that you have to say is important, but ONE thing is more important than everything else.

And if it’s not, it’s your job to drive home that factor of importance. It’s your job to pull out that single element from a tangle of elements-and then drive home why it’s so important for the client to focus on that one point. This not only calms down the client but also gives you the chance to create a solid foundation that you can go back to many times over.

But let’s take an example or two, shall we?

Let’s take the DaVinci cartooning course, for instance (It’s a course we conduct at Psychotactics). When we teach cartooning, it’s easy to get lost in hands, legs, faces, and a ton of other things that you need to teach in cartooning.

But instead we start off with what is called ‘circly circles’. And if you were to speak to anyone who’s done this course, and you asked them what ‘circly circles’ was all about, they would tell you clearly.

They not only understand the importance, but know how to implement it, and know how to fix the problem. What’s happened here is that despite having dozens of elements to choose from, we had to focus on one element and drive that over and over, until it became second nature. And it doesn’t just apply to a course. It can apply to a book or any type of infoproduct as well.

So let’s take another example

In the book called The Brain Audit, (which is about ‘why customers buy and why they don’t) there are seven critical points that need to be considered. But when you read The Brain Audit, it’s quite clear which one gets the most attention. It’s the element called the ‘problem’. What’s interesting is that it’s not even the most important of all the seven elements.

You don’t always have to pick the most important. You just have to pick one and give it the highlight so that you slow down the learner and get them focused. And in The Brain Audit the one element that gets picked, is the ‘problem’. And the message is driven home over and over again.

But how do you pick what’s important?

Because in every infoproduct you’re going to have many elements to choose from…

And in your brain, at least, everything is just as important. Sure it is. There’s no one thing that’s more important than the next. Even in watercolour painting, if you don’t have a ‘focal point’ or don’t have ‘foreground, middle ground and background’, you can still create a crummy picture. But still, one element has to be picked.

Which one is important?

They’re all important. So make a choice. Pick one.

Then make it important.

And highlight its importance drive home the point-in great detail.

And that makes things easy for you, as the creator of the product. And makes things easy for the student as well. It makes your work stand out from the rest. And that’s what you want, right?

Product Offers: Links you should visit

The Brain Audit: Are you losing tons of potential business because you don’t know how the brain works? Read how The Brain Audit can help you (The Brain Audit has over 978 testimonials). [ http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit ]
Are serious about getting your business to the next level in 2015? Have a look at 5000bc. [ http://www.5000bc.com/ ]
How do you create presentations that enthrall, hold and move an audience to action? Find out more… [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/black-belt-presentations ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies: episode 58 Why StoryTelling Loses Intensity Without A Catalyst (audio and transcript) View in iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/58_Catalysts_In_Storytelling.mp3 ] | Website [ http://www.psychotactics.com/story-telling-catalyst/ ] |

Report: Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/free/headlines-fail/ ] Privacy and Spam Policy I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Other Resources and Tools Tell your friends: http://www.psychotactics.com/tell-a-friend Resources I recommend: http://www.psychotactics.com/resources Where do you start: http://www.psychotactics.com/products Three Month Vacation: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

Important: You are subscribed to the Free Psychotactics Newsletter.’ If you un-subscribe from this letter, you won’t receive any goodies, offers, or newsletters in future. If you’re getting duplicate newsletters, email us and we’ll make sure you get just one copy. Email renuka@psychotactics.com

How the Brain Goes Through Decision-Making [ http://www.psychotactics.com/the-brain-audit-marketing-strategy-and-structure ]

Client Attractors: How To Increase Your Web Conversion [ http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors ]

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: Why Bad Testimonials Attract Bad Clients And How To Avoid It

📅 January 23, 2016 | View in Gmail

http://www.psychotactics.com/products/secret-life-of-testimonials-simple-powerful-techniques-to-get-better-clients-and-sales/

Nothing bugs you more than a painful client.

A client who hassles you at every step of the way.

A client who won’t pay on time.

A client who takes up so much of your energy that you get drained.

I used to have clients like that

And then at some point I stopped getting bad clients.

Every single one of our clients were helpful, kind and extremely

co-operative.

Work became a joy instead of a painful exercise.

And after a lot of digging, I found out the reason for the change

If you’ve ever struggled to get consistently good clients (or

detailed testimonials for that matter) then you’ll find that this

knowledge is more than just common sense. It’s a bit of

strategy you can’t do without.

Judge for yourself at:

http://www.psychotactics.com/testimonialsecrets

Regards

Sean

P.S. This is what Cornelia Luethi has to say:

“Business owners are often too scared to ask for testimonials”

I’ve been using Testimonials as a marketing tool for years - and I

didn’t think there was much left for me to learn about testimonial

techniques. Especially so after reading those powerful “six

questions” in the Brain Audit.

After reading The Secret Life Of Testimonials, I learnt how to get

more authentic and dramatic testimonials with great impact.

And—most importantly—how to use them to maximum advantage. Sean

shares all kinds of layout and formatting secrets so that the

message is visually stunning as well as a good read.

What I found really useful is how Sean de-constructs various

testimonials, showing you the parts where they fail, and thereby

enabling you to create testimonials that work a whole lot better.

I particularly liked the run-down on how to create video

testimonials as that’s something I’ve been thinking of doing, but

wasn’t sure how to get started and how to approach it. Plus there

are some great ideas on how to get testimonials using online media.

I’d definitely recommend The Secret Life Of Testimonials.

Testimonials are absolutely vital for sales conversions, but

business owners are often too scared to ask for testimonials, and

don’t know how to use them effectively. In this book, you’ll learn

how to get great testimonials - and with confidence.

Cornelia Luethi

FX Marketing, Auckland, New Zealand

Judge for yourself

http://www.psychotactics.com/testimonialsecrets

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Positioning: The Difference Between Painkillers and Vitamins

📅 January 19, 2016 | View in Gmail

Positioning: The Difference Between Painkillers and Vitamins (From the archives: One of the most read articles of 2015)

(To read this article online, click on the cartoon)

Think about your transaction with Starbucks. You’d think we go there for a coffee, right?

But a coffee could be considered a vitamin-kind of business

You know how vitamins work, right? You are told to take your vitamins. But you can’t always see the results of all of that pill popping. And you can’t even tell if it’s all nonsense, or if it really works. So vitamins become an interesting, yet seemingly weird exercise.

Now compare that with painkillers

Painkillers aren’t a nice-to-have. And when you look around you, you see companies that are vitamin-like. And those that are pain-killers. Starbucks is a decent example. It’s not exactly healthy to drink a ton of coffee, and it’s expensive.

Two tall lattes a day could push up your calories by about 160,600 calories a year. And it’s expensive on the wallet too, heading close to about $3000 a year on coffee alone.

So how does Starbucks make this very expensive vitamin-based exercise into a painkiller?

Painkiller industries are those you can’t do without

This means that the more hooks you get into the customer, the more they’re likely to want to come back time and time again. And Starbucks, at the very core, provided the greatest hook of all: the place to sit around away from home and from the office.

While cafes like Starbucks are a plenty today, the reason they first took off was the space you couldn’t do without. The coffee was better than any other place, or at least different, but it was also the place that provided the painkiller. You were free from the chaos, if only for 15-20 minutes.

While Starbucks was a point of refuge for folks in the West, it’s seen as a point of status in the East

In China, coffee is a bit of a non-entity. For thousands of years, the Chinese have stuck to their tea leaves. Over 70% of the hot drink market is still very much centred around tea. But coffee consumption is growing at 25% per year.

The key to that growth is the young and the trendy. The cafes are where the younger folk hang out. There’s a pain with not being trendy, and so the younger generation flock to cafes.

So what we notice is that there’s a very fine line between vitamins and painkillers

The line lies in the positioning of the product or service. If positioned as a nice-to-have, the product or service may lose traction.

When positioned as a painkiller, the product soon becomes indispensable. The concept of painkiller is tied directly to frequency of consumption. The more you consume, the more you will consume in future.

This means that a coaching service like improving your golf game is a vitamin or a painkiller

And this totally depends on the way you’ve positioned your service. If it’s just about you getting out there and improving how you whack that ball over the green, then it’s fun. It will get you back every now and then.

But if positioning is different, the very same service becomes a painkiller. If the service is positioned as “never losing face in front of your buddies”, it’s now far more competitive, far more interesting to you as an individual.

And this painkiller issue doesn’t prop up when we’re trying to sell our own products or services

As business owners we definitely want to improve the sales of our products or services. So we sit down at our desks and come up with some mundane issue like “getting more customers” or “making more profits”.

And yet, this issue is quickly killed by talking to a client. That client yes a real person (called the “target profile” in The Brain Audit) is instrumental in expressing the difference between a vitamin-based product and a painkiller.

So let’s take an example

When I first started selling the Article Writing Course as a service, my sales pitch was about “writing quickly” or “writing well”. That’s a vitamin. It’s a nice to have, but it’s hard to convince a person to slog for three months to write quickly,or well for that matter.

Then I spoke to the target profile. And the headline morphed into: How to stop knocking on client’s doors, and get them to call you instead. (Learn why articles do a far superior job of attracting the clients you want, and how the right articles make you the expert in your field).

At this point it was no longer a vitamin—it was a painkiller

Most of us detest having to go into yet another meeting to get a client. We hate the marketing, the endless door knocking and it drains us of our energy. Having a client come to us seems like a dream come true.

And to have not just any ol’ client but clients that are perfect matches for you, is almost too good to be true. Now the service isn’t just skirting the issue of vitamins, it’s a must-have. Which is why even though the Article Writing Course is billed as the “Toughest Writing Course in the World”, and is priced well north of $2,500, it sells out in an hour, sometimes less.

The pain is so great, that the client feel compelled to reach out for that painkiller.

But isn’t this a bit over-the-top persuasion?

The reality is that we as humans make decisions based on intense need. We don’t form habits based on some future scenario. This is why, for instance, if a comet were hurtling toward the planet in 2200, we’d be doing nothing. But if that comet was headed here in 10 years, we’d be working our tails off trying to find a solution to deflect it back into space.

Starbucks took what was considered to be a vitamin and turned it into a painkiller

By creating a need for the space, they created a habit. A habit that’s extremely hard to break, no matter how expensive in terms of calories or dollars. And it’s why we go back time and time again.

This insight of positioning your product correctly doesn’t come from sitting at your desk writing endless headlines. It comes from meeting the client and conducting the target profile interview. Every product or service is both a vitamin and a painkiller.

Painkillers work better.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

“I have a business and attracting new customers require a continuous effort. I am always searching for ways to take my business to the next level.”

The Story Telling Mini Series gave me the road map for my web-site

Demet Kitis, Canada Judge for yourself: Story Telling Mini Series [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-telling/ ]

Top Selling Products Under $50

Critical Website Components: How to write compelling content for your key web pages [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/websites-that-workinternet-marketing-psychological-secrets/ ]

[ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-telling ]Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done [ http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning ]

The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t (Available in Different Formats) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies: Episode 59 The Star Trek Method—And Other Ways To Get Over Article-Writing Barriers (audio and transcript) View in iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/59_-_obstacles_to_great_articles_AAC.mp3 ] | Website [ http://www.psychotactics.com/star-trek-method/ ] |

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Privacy and Spam Policy I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics Products

The Story Telling Mini Series” gave me an idea for the road map for my web-site. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/story-telling/ ]

http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors Are you losing tons of potential business because you don’t know how the brain works? Read how The Brain Audit can help you (The Brain Audit has over 978 testimonials). [ http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit ]http://psychotactics.com/products/client-attractors

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: Why Chaos Is Your Buddy (And How To Use Chaos in Planning)

📅 January 16, 2016 | View in Gmail

Most of us detest chaos. But there’s not a day when chaos doesn’t show up and hang around for a good part of the day.

We can ignore chaos, but it won’t go away.

But what if we planned around it? What if we actually took chaos into consideration so that when it shows up—if it shows up—we’re more than prepared and not flustered at all.

As we head into the new year, it’s easy to get stuck into planning. What we really need is chaos planning. Because chaos will show up.

Here’s where you can find how we worked with chaos (and how you can too) http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/

Warm regards, s-

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Why Did You Buy? A Deceivingly Important Question To Ask Clients

📅 January 12, 2016 | View in Gmail

Why Did You Buy? A Deceivingly Important Question To Ask Clients (From the archives: One of the most read articles of 2015)

(To read this article online click on the cartoon)

Whenever we sell a product or service, we forget an important question.

The question: Why did you buy?

So why is this question so very important?

It’s important for several reasons

It validates the purchase decision
It gives you an understanding into the trigger
You can manage expectations better

First let’s start with the purchase decision

Whenever we buy something, we’re usually faced with a bit of buyer’s remorse. This buyer’s remorse kicks in, while higher in a pressure situation, nonetheless shows up in a low-pressure situation as well.

And in asking the client why they bought a product/service or a course, you’re asking them to write down their reasoning.

The purchase moment is very emotional

While all of us give a logical explanation why we bought into a product, the reality is that the purchase is emotion-based.

We know this to be true, because if two people offered exactly the same product/service, you’d choose one over the other, purely on emotion.

But there’s logic too. And when customers write back, they give you both the logic and the emotion. And in doing so, they confirm to themselves that they’ve made the right decision.

It’s one thing to think about making the right choice. When you write it down, you really have to think it through. And that makes a customer more likely to ratify their decision to buy.

This is no doubt good for you, as a seller. However it’s also great for the customer, because once they’re clear about why they bought a product/service, it strengthens their resolve to consume it. And when they consume it, they get greater value from their purchase.

If that were the only reason, that would be reason enough. But there’s a second reason as well and it’s called “the trigger”.

So what’s the trigger all about?

When we write sales copy, we’re not exactly sure which part of the copy resonated most with the customer. And yet, when you get a response from your customers, you’ll find there’s a sort of clumping up towards certain points.

You’ll find over time, that customers seem to be repeating the same thing over and over again. And that “same thing” may well be in your headline. Or it might not.

Take for instance, a book on “how to buy a car”

This marketer was sure that he’d done all the testing possible. But just for the heck of it, decided to ask clients why they bought the book. And there, in the middle of his bullet points, was the prime reason.

They bought the book because he was “showing them how to buy a car at $50 over the dealer’s price”.

That information alone was worth the price of the book many times over.

But the marketer wasn’t aware of the power of that bullet point. Once he was aware, he could take that bullet point and move it to the headline—thus ensuring even greater sales.

And when you ask for the trigger, customers will come up with other reasons too…

For example, when we asked customers why they signed up for the Info-products workshop, here are some of the points.

What should be in our “Company bible’?
How to systematically break that down into information products.
Where do we start?
What’s the process that we can follow?
How do we know what people will pay for and how much they will pay?
What’s the best way to test before we build?
Where to start and stop and how to know when it’s time to break off into a new product?
How to put the information together so it’s helpful and people want more.

I don’t know if you noticed, but that list reads amazingly like bullets

Or potential features and benefits.

And once you have an insight into what the customer really wants, you can go back to your sales page and check if you’ve covered these points.

You would also need to write at least a few e-mails or leaflets to sell your product or service. The points you receive from your client can be the basis of future e-mails and leaflets.

But there’s a third point why “why did you buy?” is important

The third reason is simply to manage expectations

Remember when you visited a foreign country?

You read all the books, saw tons of photos and yet, when you got there, it was somehow different.

I remember going to the Taj Mahal in Agra when I was about 18 years old. I’d seen photos of the Taj, hundreds of times. Yet, when I was there, it was so much bigger, so much fancier than I’d expected.

And your product can be fancier or less fancier than clients expect.

The problem is often not rooted in the content

It’s rooted instead, in the expectations. Once a client gets to the end of a service, or reads through a product and doesn’t find what they want, they feel cheated.

They’ve spent time and money—but mostly a ton of energy. And they’re less likely to be trusting of your products and services in future.

And you really want them to trust you wholeheartedly.

This is why you need to ask the question

The question brings up their needs and you can either head it off at the pass or include it in your material.

Heading it off at the pass, is not easy. You have to let the client know that the results they seek will not be available. And you let them know what they’re going to get, instead.

Often a client is very happy with the fact that you’ve taken the time to speak to them, and whether they decide to go ahead or not, they will retain that positive memory of you in future. And trust will be gained.

However, in many cases, you may not be covering what they seek

If you’re offering a service or physical, you can tag on an extra bonus (though that may not always be possible).

However, if you’re offering information, you don’t have to change your core information structure.

E.g. Let’s say someone has read the book, The Brain Audit [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/ ].

On going through their expectations, you find that they have questions that have not been covered in The Brain Audit.

So do you tweak the book? No, of course, not.

Instead you can tag on with a follow up PDF, audio or video—much like a FAQ (frequently asked questions).

Yup, that will solve the customer’s dilemma and give you the chance to create additional information without having to tamper with your core product or service.

The “why did you buy” question is very important because:

It validates the purchase.
Gives you a ton of selling points and trigger points, that you can use in your sales material.
Helps manage expectations, heading off issues at the pass, or adding bonuses that solve the customers problems.

However, there are exceptions to every rule

You see this sometimes on sites like iTunes or Amazon.

There’s this petty, idiotic customer who wants to pay nothing and wants the world. He’ll say something like, “I’m rating this product as a bad product because it is worth 99 cents, instead of $1.99.

Really?

This kind of petty customer is never going to be the customer you need or want. They will treat the product or service with disdain, ask for too much and you can never, ever manage their expectations.

Of course, you’re welcome to try but it will end in tears—that’s for sure. So avoid these painful customers at all times.

The good customers—the ones that are going to stay around for a while

They will be happy to answer your question about “why” they bought your product or service. And in doing so, you’ll get a bounty of information and goodwill.

Cool, eh?

Be Kind, Be Helpful or Begone: How To Build A Powerful, Community-Driven Membership Website

“The specific feature I liked most about this book was that the information that went into creating this PDF came from actual hands-on experience and not theory or wishful thinking!”

I’d recommend this book to anyone starting or already running a membership site… perhaps even a blog.

Because of Sean’s actual experience running a site and learning through trial and error… He has developed crucial insights into what makes a successful membership site as well as how to make it interesting, consumable and most important of all… participatory for all those who join.

Jeffery Ellis, USA Judge for yourself: How To Build A Powerful, Community-Driven Membership Website [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/membership-site-strategy/ ]

Top Selling Products Under $50

Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done [ http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning ]

Critical Website Components: How to write compelling content for your key web pages [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/websites-that-workinternet-marketing-psychological-secrets/ ]

The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t (Available in Different Formats) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/ ]

About this eZine and your subscription

Free Goodies New! The Three Month Vacation—How to get there without a drop in income. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/ ](Audio and Text)

Report: Why Headlines Fail (And how to create headlines that work) [ http://www.psychotactics.com/free/headlines-fail/ ]

Privacy and Spam Policy I don’t rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You’ll not get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.

Psychotactics Products

Crucial insights into what makes a successful membership site as well as how to make it interesting, consumable and most important of all… participatory for all those who join. [ http://www.psychotactics.com/products/membership-site-strategy/ ]

Are you losing tons of potential business because you don’t know how the brain works? Read how The Brain Audit can help you (The Brain Audit has over 978 testimonials). [ http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit ]

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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Announcing: Why Most Planning Fails: The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

📅 January 09, 2016 | View in Gmail

Hi Seree

So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s the new year again, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected. And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals.

And what’s worse is that you’ve read all the books on planning as well. But they haven’t helped either.

There’s a reason why they haven’t helped. It’s because those books were written by highly organised people. What you need is for someone disorganised to write a book. A book based on chaos. And how chaos is critical to starting out your plan.

Aha…here’s a 35 Page Report:

The Chaos Planning System

That will help you move ahead. So have a look at this product and judge the value for yourself.

http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning

Warm regards, Sean

P.S. You also get the book—Pronto Learning: Insiders Tips To Speed Up Your Learning http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning

Three Incredibly Silly Business Myths (And Why They’re Driving Us Crazy)

📅 January 02, 2016 | View in Gmail

Every year we have one important meeting with our chartered accountant.

We sit down to figure out how much we’ve earned in the previous year.

And to us, it’s no surprise.

If you look at the year 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011—going all the way back

to 2007, it’s almost exactly the same income.

Yes, we earn more or less the same in 2015 as we earned in 2007.

Doesn’t that sound a bit crazy?

Aren’t you supposed to double your income? Or treble it? Or quintuple it?

But is that really the goal of a business?

What was your goal when you started out in business? Did you start out

trying to double your income and go crazy with client acquisition? Where

did we lose the magic of wanting to improve our products

and services? Do we really have to sacrifice the “magic” just to feed our ego?

In this podcast on myths, we learn:

Why doubling or trebling your clients is a problem for most of us.
Why vacation is your friend and how it’s been made the enemy.
How to build your business, so that you don’t become part of the “rat race to riches.”
Why creating magic is far more important for your short-term and long-term satisfaction.
Why the Psychotactics list has just 37,000 people (instead of 350,000) despite being around for 13 years.

Yes, there is a way to have a great life without driving yourself crazy

You can be successful, travel, enjoy life without having to get sucked up in the

madness you see around you. We take three months off in a year, yes every year.

We travel, we live well. So instead of listening to the crazy voices, let’s listen to a

bit of sanity within our own head.

Join us as we explore three big business myths, and destroy them

Myth 1: That your business needs to grow constantly larger
Myth 2: Someday your business will be on auto-pilot
Myth 3: That vacation is the enemy, and that great work is everything.

#70: Three Incredibly Silly Business Myths (And Why They’re Driving Us Crazy)

Listen or read this episode here.

iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/67_Irresistible_Offer_Part_1.mp3 ] | Read [ http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ] |

Once you finish, don’t forget to binge-listen to these two irresistible

podcasts.

#68: How To Create Product Exclusivity: The Twin-Irresistibility Factor

Listen or read this episode here.

iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/68_Irresistible_Offer_Part_2_Exclusivity.mp3 ] | Read [ http://www.psychotactics.com/create-product-exclusivity/ ] |

#69: How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility

Listen or read this episode here.

iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/69_Irresistible_Offer_Part_3_Presell.mp3 ] | Read [ http://www.psychotactics.com/presell-creates-irresistibility/ ] |

#71: How “Doug Hitchcock’s” Goal Setting Worked Wonders—

And Why We Successfully Use It Year After Year

Listen or read this episode here.

iTunes [ http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes ] | Android [ http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/71_Plan_Our_Year_Goal_Setting.mp3 ] | Read [ http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ] |

Warm regards,

Sean

P.S. You’re probably already binge-listening to all the “Three Month Vacation” podcasts.

If you are, let me know how you find it—and send questions. If you aren’t, then it’s time to

binge-listen. Look for it on iTunes or Stitcher (and yes, there are transcripts too).

iTunes: http://www.psychotactics.com/itunes

Android: http://www.psychotactics.com/stitcher

Website: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast

And if you have any problems, please email me-sean@psychotactics.com

Psychotactics, PO Box 36461, Auckland, Auckland 1330, NEW ZEALAND

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December 2016

Announcement: How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

Announcing: How to Turn Average iPhone Photos into Stunning Images

How To Get Stunning Names For Your Information Products and Courses

How To Predict If Your Business Is Going To Succeed: The Polaroid Moment

Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back)

How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

Bookings Open: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention (In Under 30 Seconds): First 50 Words Online Course

How To Write 4000 Word Articles Without Getting Exhausted

Announcing: How To Instantly Get Your Client’s Attention (In Under 30 Seconds)

November 2016

3 Ways To Instantly Get Your Readers Attention (The First Fifty Words)

Coming Soon: How To Start Every Article With Instant Impact

How To Make the Mental Leap From A Job To A Business

Announcing! How To Speed Up Your Sales With Client Attractors

How To Write An Unlikely Bestseller: The Kathy Sierra Story

How To Fight Envy (And Stay Motivated Instead)

How To Write A Sales Page Using The Bottom-Up Method

What I Learned On My Unusual Vacation

October 2016

Announcing: How to Put That Zing Back in Your Articles

How Kicking Angels Help You Grow Your Business

The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)

Last Day: How to get customers to buy, long before they pay: The Art of Pre-Sell

Announcing: How Pre-sell Helped Reduce Frustration by 75%

The 17 Question Testimonial System: How To Ensure You Get an Amazing Client Response

Why Marketing In 2016 is like being in 1920

How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results

Presenting Pre-Sell: How To Get Customers To Buy, Long Before They Pay

September 2016

Three Disaster Stories (And How We Recovered and Soldiered On)

Presenting: How to Put That Zing-Kapow in Your Articles (With StoryTelling)

Article Writing Advice Writers Don’t Want To Hear

How To Make The Mental Leap From a Job Into Entrepreneurship

Last Day For Special Offer—Dartboard Pricing + Special Bonuses ( worth $49)

Just a reminder, in case you missed the last email. ​​​​​​​

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 10th, 11th, 12th or 13th Sept. 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Special Offer: Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers + Special Bonus Valued at $49

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 10th, 11th, 12th or 13th Sept. 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

How to Quickly Get Customers to Consume Your Report (And Come Back for More)

Announcement: Why Most Planning Fails—The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

August 2016

How To Thrive and Succeed In The Midst Of Chaos

How To Get Ideas When Writing Articles: 3 Brilliant Sources

Two Psychological Techniques To Creating An Irresistible Product/Service (And Increase Sales)

Why We Struggle to Write a Book: 3 Structural Reasons

The Headline Course 2016: Bookings open in 30 minutes

Announcing! Headlines Course: How To Write Amazingly Powerful Headlines (Every Single Time)

July 2016

Announcing: Why Every Kid Can Draw At 5 (And Gives Up at 6)

Announcing: The DaVinci Cartooning Course 2016

Two Special Announcements: The Cartooning Course + How to Write 200 Brilliant Headlines

Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

Free Goodies: How To Stand Out From Your Competition

How a Magic Moment Encourages Prospects to Become Client

Announcing: How To Stand Out From Your Competition: Free Goodies

My apologies about the typos

Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling

How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results

June 2016

Last Day for Special Offer: Website Components-How to Create Compelling Pages on Your Website + Special Bonus

Just a quick reminder in case you missed the earlier email.

Special Offer: Website Components-How to Create Compelling Pages on Your Website + Special Bonus (Valued at $45)

The Fear Of Pricing (And How To Overcome It)

Announcing: How to avoid attracting bad clients every time (The power of the six critical questions)

Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain (And When Not To)

May 2016

Last Day: How to Join 5000bc (Without Being On The Waiting List!)

How To Escalate Your Path To Greatness

Free from Psychotactics: The $2500 Brain Alchemy Marketing Strategy Workshop

Three Interesting Writing Strategies

How to Win The Resistance Game And More…

Last Day For Special Offer—Dartboard Pricing + Special Bonuses ( worth $49)

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th May 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Special Offer: Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers + Special Bonus Valued at $49

When you buy Dartboard Pricing-How To Increase Prices Without Losing Customers on the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th May 2016, you’ll also get—‘5-Steps To Starting Up A New Project Successfully’ (worth $49) absolutely free.

Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing

April 2016

Announcing: Why Most Planning Fails—The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning

Announcing: If You’ve Been Waiting, You’ve Been Waiting Too Long

Just a reminder, in case you missed the last email.