While the video may be a bit alarmist, Ryan Diess makes some great points. The Digital Marketer Lab sounds awesome too! Watch the video and tell me what you think.
Altucher wins again with this entertaining article. He gives some really great advice on how to become a better public speaker, which also happens to be great advice for those of us desiring to become better copywriters:
“1) Start off with a joke. This is a must. People need to laugh within the first 30 seconds or else you’re going back to your cubicle at the pencil factory and they will never remember you.
I spend about at least one to two hours before the talk coming up with the first joke because I know that’s what starts off the good feelings for the rest of the talk. I usually make it relevant to the locale and the topic or the news (Tomorrow’s joke starts off: “True story: two days ago I was having dinner with the prime minister of Pakistan and…”) And it actually will be a true story.
2) Get on their level. This has two meanings. I once fell off of a podium while pacing around giving a talk. I was very embarrassed. So now I always get off the podium and explain that I’m afraid to fall off so I’m just going to walk around if that’s ok with everyone. People laugh a little bit and it physically and mentally brings me onto their level.
3) Very important: I very very slightly slur my words. A very small slur. I don’t drink at all. But by slightly slurring my words it’s as if I’m telling my brain I’m a little drunk. When you’re a little drunk you don’t really care what people think of you and you take a few more chances than you would’ve otherwise. It also makes me a bit more brutally honest. And everyone likes a nice drunk!
4) I try to use JUST one word plus one image per page. No more! You think people really want to come to a talk and read a novel? They want to look at funny pictures. At heart, we are all two year olds trying to just stay alive. I’m not saying this in a patronizing way. Its just true.
Here’s one slide from my upcoming talk:
Colorful, topical. It’s the world record bubble creator, so its interesting. And has the flare of magic around it. Given recent events, if I can’t fill up 30 seconds of brilliant insight with this slide then I shouldn’t be doing any public speaking.
5) Try to shock people on each slide. This keeps them awake. They’ve just been jolted with electricity. Like a taser. That hits their brain to keep them awake for another 30 seconds (I say this all because I hate talks and I know I fall asleep every 30 seconds during a talk) Here’s another slide from my upcoming talk:
I then tell people I just bought this house. People are shocked for a brief second (the human mind is conditioned to believe everything it hears). Then I say, “no I didn’t”. And everyone relaxes. All of their muscles relax. The jealousy muscle, the reality muscle, the humor muscle. Everything settles down. Some chuckles. Its obviously not my house. But now we can all move ahead and talk again.
Every day, we all struggle to maintain a balance between taking action, and reading too much. Mark Ling explains his strategy for keeping his inner “info junkie” at bay:
“I try my best to listen to 2 hours of training material per week. Most of this is usually done in the form of listening to audio interviews with marketing experts and audio books. I do this in my car when driving to and from work.
One of the best audio books that I’ve listened to recently is The Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyasaki, I recommend it to everyone. Another fantastic one is ‘Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits’ though I’d only recommend that to people who are already making 6 figures a year online.
If you’re keen to listen to some really good interviews on the topics of driving more traffic to your websites, then I highly recommend you get a copy of Traffic Travis as currently we are including several detailed 90+ minute interviews with some phenomenal traffic generation experts as unadvertised bonuses.
When it comes to reading marketing books (as opposed to listening to audio), I usually find myself skimming them and taking in as much as I can in a 1 to 2 hour sitting. However, if I have a long flight, then I often read a good business book cover to cover.
I also learn from my peers as over my 12 years online, I’ve managed to become friends with many dozens of online millionaires from different niches and I’ve learned a lot from them over the years in private conversations. Networking is fantastic for learning as you learn things that sometimes don’t get shared in courses as not everyone who does well online sells an infoproduct teaching their methods. Of course to successfully network you have to have something to bring to the table too.
I usually find that if you are making online within 10x of what the other person is making, there’s a good chance they’ll want to get to know you better. Otherwise, it is not going to be a mutually beneficial relationship between you.
For example, if you are making $10 per week online, then it’s hard to get regular contact with someone who is making $1 million per year. They are making 100000 times more than you are. Once you get over 2k a week, you’ll find you will have significant knowledge to bring to the table and it’s easy to make friends with other successful people.
In the meantime, if you get yourself making $100 a week online, then it’s not so hard to get to know others who are making a full time living, say $800-1000 a week. You will have learnt the ropes and will have moved from beginner newbie to advanced newbie.
If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it, I’m just offering my thoughts based on how I’ve seen relationships in business be formed over the years. It is very hard for a good relationship to form based on one person only giving and the other person only taking. If you want to get to know successful people, then you need to get yourself on the path to becoming one yourself.
The allure of passive income is great! Which is why network marketing (aka Multi-Level Marketing “MLM”) companies can become really popular. While it’s true that most MLM companies have unoriginal products that are of poor quality products, and aren’t worth your time. Pre-launch MLM companies are especially bad, and you should avoid them at all cost.
Marketer Ted Hunsaker writes:
“Everyday there is a new MLM company going into pre-launch. Most People who get started in pre launch companies are miss lead. They are told that the best companies to get into are ground floor opportunities and that they need to get in before everyone else does.
The statistics of start up MLM companies is not very promising. About 95 percent of them will not make it to their 5th anniversary. Only a hand full of them have made it past the 10 year mark. There are only a few that I know that have made it past 10 years.
Most startup companies will fail because they have poor management and lousy overpriced products that no one wants to buy. For example in one juice MLM, it costs over $100 for a month supply of juice. No one wants to buy something that they could buy for the fraction of the price at the supermarket. The only reason they would buy it is for the requirements of running that business.
That juice company was doing well in their first five years, but now they are falling apart and most of those reps are seeing their commissions checks getting smaller and smaller each month. This is because many people have been cutting back on their expenses due to the recent economic melt down and are finding more affordable companies to be involved in.
If the company has poor management, then they will have a hard time keeping the company in tact and paying commissions to their reps. Most of those companies are started by people who were involved in other MLM companies instead of people who have had real world business experience.
Instead of getting started with a pre lauch company, you should consider companies that have solid track records, affordable products that people would use even if they did not grow the business and solid management. It is recommended that you look into companies that are at least 5 years old and that have products that are reasonably priced especially if the products are those that people use on a daily basis. In addition, the management should have experience in large fortune 500 companies like Proctor and Gamble. Not a management team with just MLM experience.”
This could get very interesting for both advertisers and consumers alike. This just may open a whole world of opportunities especially if you’re in the fashion industry.
TechCrunch reports:
“So what is Stipple now? Well, there’s still the people-tagging element for sure. And that’s still really cool. If you tag a person in a photo on the web, you can enter their Twitter name or Facebook name and then anyone can see their most recent updates as overlays on that picture. But the much bigger idea is that Stipple is teaming up with photo services, fashion brands, publishers, and others to possibly alter the way people browse and buy things on the web.
Think of it this way: right now when someone is browsing the web and they see a shirt they like on a random photo, they probably resort to doing a Google search for something similar. Or maybe they open the website of their favorite store to see if they have anything to match that look. But what Stipple offers is a way for each photo to show you exactly what piece of clothing the person in the photo is wearing — to show you who makes it, how much it costs, etc. And it allows you to “Want” it (save it to look at later) or “Shop” for it via two overlay buttons right on the picture itself.
It’s an idea that clearly resonates with web browsers. How do I know? Because Stipple co-founder and CEO Rey Flemings had some data to share with us. Stipple has actually been serving these product dots (the overlay used to show an area of the picture contains more information) for a while now — enough for over 10 million data points. He says that people mouse over a photo with a dot 46 percent of the time. And those users touch the product dot 12.48 percent of the time — that’s actually more than people use the people dot (4.9 percent of the time).
Think about that for a second. That mousing over the dot is basically an ad impression — with a strong level of intent. And it’s happening 12.48 percent of the time on Stipple-tagged images. Further, 1.75 percent are clicking the Want button. While 1.9 percent are clicking the Shop button. Advertisers would kill for those types of rates…”
