I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

Truth be told, there’s a little more to success in internet marketing than what you might have read. In fact, there’s a lot more. The reality of it may sting a little. Be patient, it does get better.

The Dreaded Day Job

If Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth) is accurate in his description of the typical entrepreneur then your aspirations toward success in business may indicate that you are already a highly skilled technician. While Gerber sets his sights on helping you achieve your dream of entrepreneurship, today I’m going to attempt to build a bridge between that dream and the reality of your rent (which is probably due tomorrow and you’re devoting your valuable time to reading my blog…).

What’s the bridge? Well, it’s a Day Job. And they aren’t as easy to come by today as they have been in days past. At least that’s what the media suggests.

I actually think it’s a sellers market, if you know how to sell yourself. What’s that? Did I just drift back into IM land when I’m supposed to be talking about getting a “real” job? Nope. Not exactly. Well, maybe there’s more overlap than you originally thought.

Make Money Today

I’m really excited about your ambition to be wildly successful. I really am. However, if you realize that you just need to fall back to plan B for a while and catch up on some bills, there is ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME in getting a day job to get you there. You might find that it actually propels you forward!

This video of a presentation I did should shed some light on it. Depending on interest I may do an in depth series on each point I cover in this presentation. Please leave comments below telling me what you think.

He understood the universal constant in life that you get what you pay for. In entrepreneurship this is especially true. The harder you work, the more you are likely to accomplish. But it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that aimless busy work is productive work. The fact is that if you don’t have an objective (aka, A GOAL) then you might easily keep yourself busy, but never really make any progress.

I have to confess that for most of my life I HATED Goals. For example, consider a sales goal. If I make a goal to sell X dollars worth of some product, that’s nice, but I really don’t have control over whether I meet my goal or not.

I have no control over whether I reach a goal

Before you head off to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am, hear me out. What I mean is that my ability to reach the goal is dependent on someone else making a decision to give me their money in exchange for my product or service. It’s his decision to buy, regardless of how persuasive I might be. I simply cannot make that decision for him.

So in reality, I don’t have any control over whether someone makes the decision to purchase from me or not. The same is true for getting optins on a website, visitors to a web page, donations for a cause, etc. Most goals worth setting depend on external factors, and those are always out of our hands.

I think that’s why goals always depressed me. I could make any goal in the world, but I felt so powerless to reach it. In my twenties I had an epiphany on the subject of goals that was really empowering. Even though I didn’t find a way to hypnotize my prospects to buy something from me or control those pesky external factors, I did discover a way to reassign my personal accountability away from the goal by splitting the goal setting process into two categories: Goals and Commitments.

How a Commitment is different than a Goal?

The epiphany came when I realized how goals differ from commitments. A commitment is something that I have absolute control over (at least relatively). For example, If I decide to do publish 20 comments on my facebook page, that’s not a goal, it’s a commitment. It’s completely within my power to accomplish it and doesn’t rely on anyone else making a decision. Sure there are external factors, but they aren’t related to human decision. They’re things like internet connectivity or my car starting. If I’ve really made a commitment I can find an internet connection at a starbucks and take the bus if my car breaks down.

The same decision independence is true for creating 20 backlinks, dialing 20 phone numbers, knocking 20 doors, etc. It’s key to understand that following through with these commitments doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll speak with 20 people, since I can’t force someone to pickup the phone or answer the door.

The point is that a commitment is something I can say that I will do and the only person that can prevent me from doing it is myself. I think you’ll see in just a minute why this is so powerful…

More than a semantic argument. It’s empowering

I promise that I’m not trying to make some coy play on a semantic difference between two words (goal and commitment). Quite the opposite is true. I’m trying to provide a separation between two very distinct mental states. Splitting goal setting into two parts, one over which I have complete control and another over which I have very little control, empowers me to make a plan with specific action items that I know I can get done. Have a look at this diagram to see what I mean.

You might have noticed that I actually put a third component as a precursor to a Goal. The Object of Desire is a slippery devil. In many cases it can be hidden, forgotten and even deceptive. Think about it this way: What value is there in Green paper or small metal discs? None really. You see, it’s not the money we value. It’s the stuff that we can get with the money that we value.

We don’t really want $1,000, or even $1,000,000. What we want is the car, or the house or the freedom from debt or the once in a lifetime vacation… I think you get the idea. So when you set a goal to make X dollars in sales, it’s important to allow your mind to travel in two directions at once. You want to make sure that you know why you want to reach that goal (your object of desire) and what steps are most likely to help you reach it (the commitments you make).

Example: get 200 unique visits per day for keyword “xyz”

Let’s say you wanted to get 200 unique visitors per day from organic search results to a page on your website each day. There are some things over which you have complete control. These include getting a specific number of backlinks to your website every day, choosing a keyword that gives you a plausible chance of success, creating optimized content for the target page, etc.

There are also many things you can’t control, such as whether those backlinks stick, whether the search engines find and index those links, whether the search engines give you improved SERP results for those keywords. While you can increase your chances of getting clickthroughs by writing a good page title and including appropriate meta description details, you really don’t even have control over whether people click on your site even if you get the search engines to put it in the top spot.

So to reach the goal of getting 200 unique visitors a day to a web page, you make commitments to create backlinks and produce the best optimized content you can on the target page.

Now, going back upstream, it’s just as important to make sure you understand what your Object of Desire is. For example, you might be stroking your ego (think “coolest guy on the planet” wars) or you might be interested in saving someone’s life (think “donate children’s hospital”). The better you understand and the more you can shape your Object of Desire, the better prioritized your Goals will be and the more motivated you’ll be to follow through with your commitments!

Your game plan and the Feedback Loop

The strategy then is to identify a goal, followed immediately by creating a specific list of commitments that you have power to act on independently. The commitments you make should have a direct correlation to your goal. Now hold yourself accountable for completing your commitments, which you have power over, not whether you reach your goal, which you don’t have power over.

As time passes you end up with data that will either confirm or invalidate the usefulness of the tasks you’ve committed to do in terms of how they relate to your goal. If the data is positive, then you stay the course and continue on with your daily commitments. If the data is negative, you don’t have to change your goal, but you can instead change your commitments to see if another approach will work. There’s a chance that you’ll end up changing your goal, but it will be based on data, not whim.

This is called a feedback loop. As you change the input (your commitments), you observe the output (realization (or not) of your goal). Depending on the output, you may change the input. You might also adjust the desired output if a set of inputs is unable to help you achieve the desired output.

Throughout all of this, try your hardest to be honest with yourself about your real object of desire and let that understanding guide you to set the goals most consistent with what you want most. You might snicker when I say “be honest with yourself”, but the deeper you look to figure out what your real object of desire is, the more likely you are to be surprised by it.

Free Yourself!

Stop living as a hostage to Goals that you don’t have any power over. Instead get scientific and separate your goal setting process into two parts: Goals and Commitments. Then follow through with your commitments to reach your goals! Best of luck.

If you pay close attention to what some of the more public copywriters of our era have to say about high quality sales copy, you’ll hear phrases like ‘mint your own money‘ and ‘grab them by the throat and force them to buy‘ or ‘2013% increase in conversions‘.

Of course those phrases are typically part of their sales pitch for a copy writing course and they’re practicing what they preach. For someone interested in writing better copy, those phrases are so tantilizing that they’re hard to pass by.

Books, methods and formulas

I’ve actually read a number of books on the subject of writing sales copy and most of them are really good. Some of them outline methods that you can follow. Others provide formulas. The best books (in my opinion) are those that give more far reaching perspective on life and the human experience. After all, it’s the human experience that really helps us connect with other people and talk to them about benefits.

One of those ‘human experience’ constants seems to be a play on our own weakness. That might be why the elevator pitch works so well. It boils down to this basic format:

Elevator Pitch

I help Name your ideal prospect
… do Some benefit to them/their business
… even if Play on their biggest weakness

An example elevator pitch would go something like this:

“I help entrepreneurs and start ups build profit generating websites with instant ROI even if they have a small budget and are clueless about where to start.”

This won’t get the attention of big businesses and it plays on the almost universal feelings of budget constraint and “where do I start” that most entrepreneurs feel.

Product Launches (or the sideways sales letter as Jeff Walker calls it) can be another effective method for selling to prospects because it incorporates relationship and authority into the sales process in a way that’s natural to many people.

One of the most helpful revelations about writing good sales copy came as I learned to differentiate Benefits from Features. This is especially true for technical products where the proprietor of the product tends to be excited about all the little features he’s built in and forgets to tell the consumer what emotional benefits those features bring.

But this article isn’t really about how to write good sales copy, is it? There’s one crucial component that even the best copy writing books just miss. I think it might be due to the fact that a seasoned copywriter just does it without thinking. Maybe they imagine that it’s a common sense part of the research phase. Maybe they have said it and I missed it for sooooo long. Whatever the case, it’s a real learning experience when the light finally turns on. What am I talking about?

Here’s the embarrasing part

I’m talking about writing the best sales copy in the world for a non-market and wondering what went wrong. It might be more accurate to say writing sales copy, videos and other materials over and over and over for a market that just won’t buy or doesn’t exist.

About 10 years ago I created a website for my running: Maintain Fit Exercise Log. The more time (and money)I invested in the site, the more convinced I was that it was going to be the next big thing. I spent hours of my life (days, weeks and months really) on that “product” confident that the next change would excite the masses and bring in the traffic (and the revenue).

When I finally realized that it was a non-market, I felt both cheated and liberated at the same time. At last I was free to let this beast die and divert my time and attention to new markets for testing. But I’m sure some will ask me to clarify what I mean by a non-market.

Or more specifically, how can you know if you’ve got a non-market? My introduction to this idea of a non-market came when I watched The Magnificent Symphony of Four Parts in 2008. Ed Dale effectively convinced me that I had taken the wrong approach on just about every business I had ever started. Here are two summary points that serve as a good indicator that you’ve got a non-market.

• No competition
• No mature companies/no commercial options

Unfortunately, most people skip this initial research phase when they have a new idea. Instead of figuring out whether there’s a market, whether they can get traffic and whether that traffic will convert, they hole themselves up in the basement and frantically work on developing a product. That’s what I did with Maintain Fit.

The sales copy surprise

When I finally stopped working on any project for which there wasn’t a definite market, I started to see some really worthwhile progress. The traffic was easier to get. The relationships I was forming were more meaningful. The deal flow increased.

What surprised me most of all is that Even Bad Copy Will Sell, if there’s a market. As I tested more and more things, I became exhausted trying to follow the sales copy methods, formulas and models. I finally stopped trying to write sales copy and instead I just wrote what came to me. Was it good sales copy. No, not particularly. But to my surprise it resonated with people and I made sales!

Hopefully, if I’ve motivated you to do anything, it is to Stop tweaking your sales copy for non-markets! If you’ve got a project/business/idea that just isn’t getting traction and you’ve “tried everything”, maybe your idea isn’t really that good after all. Go back to Ed Dale’s advice from 2008 (he covers this every year in The Challenge) and reverse your process.

Research -> Traffic -> Conversions -> Product!

That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

He was describing the mindset of the opposing parties in the revolutionary war. War seems ever present in our world, whether you look at nations, or, as Steven Pressfield puts it in the War of Art. Whether in your mind or on the ground there are two beliefs that prevent us from establishing realistic expectations.

First, he points out, is the belief that the conflict will be short. Second is the belief that the moral superiority of ones position will bring success. As it turns out, they’re both lies, and they may even keep you from achieving your highest priority goals. Let’s have a closer look.

The conflict would be short

I’ll relate this first point to marketing your products on the internet. Many entrepreneurs (myself included) harbor the belief that some innovation, tactic, campaign or other mechanism will bring them fast and effective results. The only problem is that they just haven’t found it yet.

These people understand that you can’t plant a seed one evening and expect to wake up the next day to a blossoming fruitful tree. They know that you have to water it and wait. Even after it starts to grow you have to nurse it and harden it until it has strong roots. So why do they think that somehow their business will blossom overnight?

It is simply not realistic to expect that any one tactic, product or offer will shorten the road to a thriving, successful business. Just like a seed, it requires the investment of time and effort. And even then, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and you have to plant another seed or even change the ground where you’re planting it.

Did you know that to plant an orchard takes years? Literally. After you finally get trees growing, you have to pluck all the fruit off of them for the first three years, while you continue weeding, fertilizing and pruning. That doesn’t include the years before that bringing the tree from a seed, to sapling and on to the point where you could plant it in the orchard.

From a seed, you might be five or six years out before you get a piece of fruit that you can actually eat. Sure you can shortcut that and let the fruit grow sooner, but you actually decrease the lifetime output and effectiveness of the tree. By taking too soon, you limit your overall returns.

The conflict will not be short.

Raw Undisciplined Recruits vs. Veteran British Soldiers

The next mental plague that threatened the continental army from the outset was the belief that untrained, undisciplined militia could triumph over well trained, well equipped British regulars, simply because the virtue of the cause that inspired them was morally superior.

However appealing this argument may have sounded, the fact of the matter is that discipline, training, equipment and compensation play an enormous role in the potency of an attack (or even a defense).

If you’ve convinced yourself that your better idea or refined tactic will give you the upper hand against someone who’s willing to slog through three hours of content, create 50 backlinks and make 10 JV calls per day, then you’re fooling yourself. Victory favors the person that puts in the hours and is well trained.

Weekend Warrior’s Fail

Are you a weekend militia man in your business or are you a well trained, highly disciplined British regular. If you think that success will come because you deserve it, or because your idea is better or any way other than discipline and follow through, then you should think again.

The quality of your ideas, your ability to write or even the contacts you have aren’t often the most significant factors in who wins the race. The difference between you and the guy that makes it work often comes down to discipline and work.

Ditch the Two Seductive Illusions

If you really want to win this game, then learn from history and don’t give into these two seductive illusions. The conflict will not be short and you must approach your craft with discipline and training.

P.S.
If you’re looking for a roadmap of exactly what to do, then you should really consider following along with this years Challenge (Ed Dale and his gang). You can find it here: http://www.challenge.co/

Geeky looking actor #2: “Watch me turn this wrigley’s gum wrapper, a AAA battery and some titanium shavings from my laptop case into an instant bypass of this multi-million dollar security system”.

Don’t you love the movies? They rock. Some total stud and a complete geek get together and decide they’re going to save the world by breaking into the pentagon or CIA and getting access to top secret files. There’s actually a good reason these persona’s exist. It’s because you want them to exist.

It’s really a funny quirk about human nature that we tend to think that everyone else has a “secret” or “discovery” that we don’t. That’s why headlines like “1 Secret to a Flat Belly” pop up all over the place. It’s not because they really have a secret, other than do tons of exercise, stop eating like a garbage can and get plenty of sleep. It works because way too many people assume that the hot girl with the sexy abs is eating twinkies and sitting in front of the tube six hours a day, just like us.

Enough about twinkies. What has this got to do with internet marketing technology?

Programmers have to follow the rules

Many people really believe that somewhere in the world there’s an omniscient hacker who can break into computers at will and reads top secret files like I read my email. They really believe that if you know enough about technology then you can control any computer in a matter of minutes. Here’s a news flash for you. HE DOESN’T EXIST!

Yep. Sorry to burst your bubble. Even the guys that design the programming languages understand that there have to be rules. They define how things are ordered, loaded, protected and so on. You might even think about it like gravity. You can sometimes find ways around it (like an airplane), but as soon as the engines cut out you remember really fast that it’s there working like always.

Remember that programmer? Yeah, the one that you wanted to build your website for $300 and you’re always mad that he didn’t get it done just the way you dreamed about it and that it took more than two days time. He has to follow the rules too.

And if you want the guy that can actually perform “miracles”, keep in mind that he’s worth a lot more than $300. Yep, it’s true: you really do get what you pay for.

The “REAL” secret: Quality comes with time and iterations

Another thing that the movies have ruined is the reality of developing through iteration. Since they only have a two minute montage to show you how they break in to the Oval Office or the FBI mainframe before getting back to the story line, it’s easy to think that real programmers should be able to write a perfect program the first time.

That’s not actually true either. In reality, the best software is the result of iterations! Period! This isn’t just limited to programmers. Look at cars, buildings and architecture, plumbing and even your favorite pancake recipe. This applies equally to the creative design process and shopping at the grocery store. It’s a universal constant.

The bottom line is that if you want something to be top quality then you have to plan for iterations. The first revision product is going to be limited, clunky and might even work (with a little skill and luck). Give yourself and your programmer time and budget to get through a couple of iterations if top quality is your goal.

Did I mention the power iterations

Why are iterations on a project so important? For the same reason that a baby’s first step usually isn’t followed by an immediate second step. Even the unbelievable human nervous system requires many, many failures and falls before all the neural connections function well enough together to enable us to walk. That’s not to mention the building up of strength in the legs.

Programmers are the same way. The more iterations you go through on a theme, the easier it becomes. Even to the point that some tasks may go off just like walking. We don’t really think about walking (I mean lift leg, lean forward, place foot, ensure balance, shift weight, lift other foot, etc.). Some programming tasks can get to be that way too, just like walking, but it’s only after many iterations and failures.

Marketers call this split testing

This is actually an old concept in advertising. Direct response marketers call this split testing. Interestingly, many programmers hold a similar myth about the omniscient marketer. They really believe that there’s a sales guy somewhere that can sell anything to anyone, whether or not they have a need or desire for the thing.

There is no omniscient marketer either.

In reality there’s no direct sales guy that can magically whip out the perfect headline in a matter a minutes based purely on his genius. The best copywriters will tell you that research is the key to good copy. I would add that research must be coupled with many iterations of split tests to identify an optimal headline and offer.

Stop the cycle of first version paralysis

Rather than get hung up on why your programmer or marketer friend isn’t able to pull out the hollywood version of the website or sales offer that you need right now to become an instant millionaire, why not just take a stab in the dark and call it a first iteration. If it’s useful then pat yourself on the back and get back to work!

I promise you the next iteration will be even better than the first.

Engineering vs. Programming

By the time I was ready to head to the University and go through the rigors of of getting an “education” I didn’t really want to study programming.  I decided to go much deeper, in fact, and study the atoms inside the processor of the computer.

My degree from the University of Utah is in Electrical Engineering.  During my last year I focused almost exclusively on graduate level courses and lab research in optoelectronics and semiconductor device physics.  Optoelectronics is the study of how semiconductors absorb and emit light.

Microfabrication at the University of Utah

Since the labs at the UofU didn’t have the right equipment to fabricate many optoelectronic devices, I worked on a theoretical device which we called a spinFET.  It’s a type of transistor, which differs from contemporary transistors in one significant way.  Instead of just  manipulating the charge of the electrons that carry current through the device, it would manipulate their spin too.

This opens the door to ultra low power devices that could even be manipulated to exhibit super conductive properties at room temperature.  It could also enable quantum computing and other novel applications of technology that currently aren’t possible.

The Power of Mentors

As with many things in life, success in my research and my passion to succeed in what I studied had everything to do with the talented and willing mentors around me.  My advisor Mark Miller and fellow graduate students Justin Jackson and Divesh Kapoor were awesome!

If none of that made any sense, don’t sweat it.  If you’re curious to know more about it, here’s my senior thesis which provides some of the highlights of my research.

I always look for free stuff first, because I’m cheap and sometimes I get lucky.  There are some surprisingly fantastic software programs around that people have published for one reason or another.  The first one I came across was this freeware software.  After a few minutes working with it I decided that it’s just too hard to use for the low quality output.

I did fiddle around for a while, but I should mention that the point of software is to make something easier and/or quicker.  If I could actually turn my Wheaties box into a believable software box in the amount of time it takes me to use the software then it’s not saving me time (same goes for crashing software too).  I’m pretty ruthless about this rule since once my time goes it’s never coming back.

OK, so next I found a couple of paid versions, and they both look mediocre.  As I was looking at them it seemed that all they saved me was the actual mapping of images onto the correct “face” of the box as a rendered image.  Regardless, there was one that appeared to give a little more value for the money since it incorporated in video.  Many of us have heard the Stomper brothers boys band (as Frank Kern would call Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins) extol the virtues of the judicious use of video to highlight inanimate objects.  If you haven’t seen it go check out My Wedding Favors and look at some of the videos they have.

So I purchased a program to help me create my software boxes and downloaded the full version and started to toy around.  The first disappointment was that it crashed on startup.  This was a bit surprising since the demo I had downloaded didn’t crash.  After a while (maybe 15 minutes) I figured out that I could open it up and let it choose a random template to open and it wouldn’t crash (except for the templates that didn’t install correctly.

Since I couldn’t avoid opening up Photoshop, I got started, and as always, I started away from the computer.  That’s really about the best thing I can do (and it works for plenty of other folks too).  I have to write down what I’m going to do, and then I’m much less likely to get distracted, so here’s my diagram of what I wanted my Photoshop file to look like.

Pretty simple (except I forgot to draw in one side of the box).  So with that I created a Photoshop template and tried using my new software to create some box shots and some videos.  I couldn’t make the software work after an hour.  Either it would crash and I’d lose my work, or it wouldn’t work right, or I couldn’t edit what happened at a particular keyframe, and on and on.  So after crash #5 I gave up on it.

It’s important to mention that even though the software didn’t work for me, the customer service responded quickly to my e-mail and tried to help, but by that point I wasn’t interested in debugging their application or upgrading all of my graphics drivers, open GL, etc.  So I went on to plan #2

My second plan was to attempt to use blender to render it, and even animate it.  After all, I had already done the hard work in Photoshop (which wasn’t all that hard), and I had a decent looking box laid out. If you haven’t heard of blender, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.  It’s a bit daunting at first, but once you get some of the basics down, it’s pretty easy to do basic stuff.

OK, I hear you saying “stop rambling on and on and just tell me how you did it”.  Fine.  Here’s a list:

1. Create photoshop file based on drawing (see above)
2. Visit a free stock photography site (my favorite is www.sxc.hu)
3. Search for a background and choose one that matches your idea
4. Choose some fonts
5. Grab some cheesy UPC image
6. Get a logo (this was a great find today when I searched for leftover logos)
7. Get some screen shots (in the case of software) and some descriptive text.
8. Get some operating system logos (I should probably ask a lawyer about that…)
9. Download some other stock images that decorate the box
10. Assemble it all within the guides setup in photoshop

That’s how I ended up with this:

Remember that I started with the hand drawing and built on to it.  All the images are free and most of the copy was written.  The UPC is canned, since this is a digital download it doesn’t matter.  The fon’t came from a $5 image and I copied a font style and color that I had seen and I liked.

Check!

Now, what about that blender part.  After all, that’s really hard to use blender, right?  Well, it actually is a bit tricky and I spent a little more time re-learning the ins and outs of basic blender editing, but it wasn’t too bad.  Here’s a breakdown of what I had to do in blender to make it happen.

1. Read a bunch of tutorials about basic editing in blender (turns out that many tutorials assume you already know what you came to learn, sigh)…
2. Scale a cube in each of the three axis to create a box the size (proportionally) that I wanted based on my drawing (see above)
3. Change modes so you can select faces on that object
4. use UV Image editor to import your image into blender and map regions of the image to faces on your “box”
5. Apply that new texture to the “box”
6. Render
7. Tweak

So, that got me to a box that had my Photoshop image properly wrapped around it, but it didn’t have the animation.  To get the animation I did this:

1. Add a few lights to the scene and remove the default spotlight.   The spotlight give hard shadows and very bright regions.  I chose regular lamps for this one.
2. Use the position and rotation tools to move the camera and box at specific times and in certain ways.  I even zoom the lens on the camera from 35mm to 45mm when I’m looking at the back of the box.
3. Render and watch.
4. Go back and tweak everything using the IPO curve editor.

So, that’s what got me to the video that you saw above.  I also changed the background from the default blue to white, since I thought it looked better.  Overall I’m pretty pleased.

There are a few things I would keep working on if I had endless time.  I would probably extend the length of the clip to reduce a few points that appear jumpy.  I would figure out how to bevel the box ever so slightly so that it looked a little more realistic.  I might fiddle with the reflectivity of the box and render with a ray tracer to make it look glossy.  Here’s the video again:

So how did I fair for the whole lot of them?  Well first it’s worth pointing out that once the model is done, it’s easy to render hero shots and fiddle with the lighting and environment, and at any resolution that I like.  Here’s an example hero shot for the same box in HD proportions (click on it to show the full size image):

The first blender model took me about three hours, which might seem like a long time (it was longer than I wanted to spend).  But, I created five boxes altogether, and plan to make many more.  Aside from the Photoshop time for each, which I would have spent even with a purchased package, it only took me about 5 minutes to apply the new skin, render the animation, convert to flv and be done.  It was super easy and much more stable and flexible than the first program I purchased.

Now, does it do ebooks?  Sure, if I fiddle for a couple more hours creating the model and figuring it out.  Then, each time I come back to it I have complete blender control (which is saying a lot), and it only takes a few minutes to get a pristine, nearly photo realistic render of exactly what I need.

I’m not sure how many folks are interested in seeing the step by step as I put one together, but if there are enough comments on this post or I get enough responses from my list, then I may actually recored myself making one and send it out.  If you’re not on my list, now’s a great time to get on.  I don’t have anything regular that I send out, but there are occasions.  The sign up is somewhere on this page.

Please comment, tweet, facebook, bookmark and so on for this post if you liked it.  Best of luck.

That’s really too bad since one of the projects I’m working on right now could benefit from some artistic ability.  I’d really love to call on my brother for help (he’s insanely artistic and creative), but he’s also very busy.  So I did what anyone else would do.

I went to you tube to learn to sketch people.  Here’s the video I found:

And here’s my first attempt at copying what someone else is good at. Which, by the way, is the real point of this post. I don’t have to be good at something if I have access to someone else that is good at it. As long as I observe well and take good notes AND MOST OF ALL, I have to do something with what I learn.

Let me know what you think of my first person sketch in the comments below.

how to sketch people - practice from youtube video