I’m a huge fan of TED! I recently stumbled across this great TED talk given by Seth Godin. He talks about what it takes to stand out in your market.
I love how it almost all comes down to how remarkable your product or service is. Is it worth making a remark about? Are your customers going to tell their friends and family? Watch the video below and give us your two cents!
I found this information to be helpful. I’ve been wondering lately how best to structure the content for my upcoming info products. Is there a particular framework that you like to use with your info products? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
“An information product or program often uses a combination of frameworks. Here are six of the most common (there certainly may be variations on the themes below):
Problem/Solution. State a problem and then present solutions to the problem. The Magic of Conflict: Turning Your Life of Work into a Work of Art by Thomas F. Crum is written in this framework. He presents a number of problems that people face in their life and at work and presents solutions to those problems using the philosophical principles of the martial art of aikido.
Numerical. Create your product as a series of keys or lessons. A well-known example of this would be Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Chronological. Some products need to be presented in a particular order because that is the only way it would make sense. As I mentioned above, Step A must come before Step B, as in Your Pregnancy Week by Week by Glade B. Curtis and Judith Schuler... ” [Read More]
I stumbled across this really great essay on Paul Graham’s website that is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA. The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but I find his method of “hacking” the corporate world to be great advice for any young, motivated 20 something who is feeling a bit hopeless due to today’s plummeting job market:
“The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it’s so low that it has disappeared into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn’t cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you’re prepared to live on ramen.
The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before.
The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I’m not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience.
Market Rate
I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.
Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds. [1]
Till now the problem has always been that it’s difficult to pick them out. Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time, would try to invest in Microsoft. But which would have then? How many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was Bill Gates?
It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you’re young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you’re smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you’re going to get a lot of false positives.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn’t get swelled heads.
I stumbled across this great article the other day and just had to share it with you all. I know it’s hard to believe that something as small as your headline can have such a huge impact on your bottom line, but it’s about time you started believing. Your headline can indeed make our break your offer.
“They say that if your web site has a bad opening headline you’ll loose over 50% of your visitors in the first few seconds after they arrive at your home page. Headlines are the most important part of a web page, but what constitutes a good headline?
In today’s article I’m going to list the top 12 best direct response headlines ever created. How do I know these are the top 12 headlines ever? Simple. I read this article. I’ve written quite a few headlines over the last few years. Some worked and some didn’t. The headlines below have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of products over the last 50 years, and best of all you can adapt each of these headlines to suit your own business.
1.‘They laughed when I sat down at the piano – but when I started to play!’
This is *the* most popular headline of all time. It has been used in direct marketing to sell millions of dollars worth of products, but what is it about this headline that makes people keep reading? I think it’s the anticipation. As a reader you ask yourself ‘well, what happened when he sat down at the piano? Did they like what he played? What song did he play?’. This makes you want to keep reading to see exactly what ‘they’ did when ‘he’ started to play the piano. Can you use anticipation to build curiosity in your headline?
2. ‘They grinned when the waiter spoke to me in French – but their laughter changed to amazement at my reply.’
Again, the use of anticipation. ‘What was her reply?’ you ask yourself. ‘If they didn’t think she could speak French, then what country was she from?’. When I see this headline I picture a group of mature aged women sitting around at a fancy restaurant with a waiter by the side of the lady who replied in French. How can you use visual imagery to create a killer headline for your web site?
3. ‘Do you make these mistakes in English?’
When I was writing our most recent newsletter I decided to give this headline a try. ‘Do You Make These Mistakes When Attracting New Clients?’ is the headline I chose. The headline is followed by a paragraph about our web master secrets email course. I think when you see this headline you immediately ask yourself ‘What mistakes is he talking about? What if they are costing me and my business money?’ This headline is easy to flip and use for business. Can you flip it?
4. ‘Can You Spot These 10 Decorating Sins?’
Similar to headline #3, this headline provokes thoughts of embarrassment. Obviously this headline would’ve been used in craft magazines targeted to female homemakers, but what you do you think the inner monologue of a reader would have been when she saw this headline? ‘Decorating sins? I’ve spent so much time decorating the family home. I hope I haven’t committed any of these decorating sins. Let me read on just to make sure.’ What ‘sins’ might your potential customers be committing? Can you use this headline on your web site or in an article?
Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time really. The more webmasters see how crucial Facebook is to their online presence, the more demand there will be for “likes”. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of companies popping up offering just that. Facebook fans for sale!
At the price many of these companies are charging, I can’t imagine these being real people liking your page. Even if you look at it as a strategy to simply get the ball rolling, there are better ways to get “likes”, and from real people at that. See my blog post here to find out how I was able to get 100 REAL “likes” in less than 24 hours.
“In our experiment, we decided to buy 1000 Facebook fans for an Australian fan page, and 2000 Facebook fans for a United Kingdom fan page.
Within days, we began to receive new fans, as promised. But there were some problems.
1. We paid extra for the “targeted fans” option, and clearly specified that we wanted Australian fans and United Kingdom fans respectively. However, it became clear early on that all fans were from the USA. When we replied to SocialKik.com to ask them why we weren’t getting geographically targeted fans, they did not reply. Unfortunately this did not improve and we ended up with almost exclusively USA fans.
2. Some of the “fans” began to leave weird comments on our fan pages. Things like “hello” or “i feel bad today”. That’s no big deal, but the thing is, some fans made identical comments on both of our fan pages. This leads us to suspect that many of the fans (or at least the ones that comment) are either junk profiles, or perhaps paid to join our page and comment. Why else would they join both pages and make the same weird/random comment on both of our seperate fan pages?
3. The fans don’t interact, or seem interested at all. This is no big drama, as we expected this. We can’t be exactly sure how SocialKik.com find the fans, but you can be pretty sure that they’re not joining your fan page because they are genuinely interested. So don’t expect much out of the fans, it’s really more about boosting numbers.
4. We had some issues getting the fans in the promised amount of time. For our UK page we were told that we would get 2000 fans in 21 days. In fact it took several months to get that number of fans, and only after several emails and complaints that it was taking so long.“
