As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

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.

As I asked questions and drilled deeper with them on this point, I discovered that they got the method of gathering and scoring survey results from Glenn Livingston.  In fact, you can sign up on his email list and get a scoring sheet that tells you how he mathematically calculates the value of each response to help you isolate the hyper responders that are most likely to give you the pulse on your niche.

Before I get into all the details, here’s a quick download that will help you see a birds eye view of the process:

Critical Questions

The basics of his survey method center on the following questions

• What’s your single most important question about ___ ?
• What happened today in particular to make you sit down and search for ____ ?
• How difficult was it for you to find a good answer for the above while searching today? (Not at all, somewhat, very)
• Specifically, what would finding an answer to this problem mean to you?  How would this affect your life?

The first three “critical questions”, as he refers to them, can give you a lot of information about your niche.  Some insights include commercial intent, availability of existing solutions, triggers and events that prompt people to search for solutions.

Perhaps the most interesting is the fourth question.  When the first three responses score well, the fourth question can give you the actual sales copy.  Answers to the last question are almost sure to be loaded with emotional benefits that someone wants to get from a potential solution.

You might notice that this approach is a lot different that the typical approach.  Usually multiple choice questions are used to increase response and facilitate scoring.  The big problem with multiple choice questions, as opposed to the open ended questions mentioned above, is that you impose your best guess on the respondent and end up with their best choice from the listed options.  With open ended questions you get the raw meat of what they really want.

Process

Let’s turn out attention to the functional details of how to survey.  There are several things you’ll need to figure out before you start directing traffic to your survey.  Here’s a short list:

• Copy or video that will sell someone on taking the survey
• The actual survey mechanism
• Thank you page
• Viral inviter and social media share

The idea here is that you want to give someone a reason to take your survey and then attempt to maximize the traffic you get by inviting them to share it with their friends.

Here’s what I used for my latest survey:

• Video
• Survey Gizmo
• Thank you with direct download links
• OpenInviter

Before starting my survey I did research and made some guesses about what my audience would want (you need a starting point).  I then created a script for my video that I thought would appeal to them and get them to take my survey.  For my survey I identified my traffic source which enabled me to draw some conclusions about them and use those in my video (e.g. they were very frugle).  I decided to make the video as a voice over with images and text.  I went through my script and recorded it about a dozen times until I felt like it flowed pretty smooth.  By the way, I recorded each time I went through it and listened to it.  This helped me to eliminate things from the script that didn’t work and to put things in that did work.  Once I felt like I had it mostly where I wanted it, I slept on it overnight.

The next day I recorded it a couple more times and ended up with the master audio track that I wanted to use.  I then moved into my video editing program (this doesn’t need to be fancy) and started to add in the images and text.  I should mention here that you could just as easily create a powerpoint/keynote presentation that would have the text and images that you wanted and use a screen recorder program, like camtasia, jing, screenflow, etc. and have the video and audio in one go.  The free video editors like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie will also work just fine for this.

I used images from the site http://www.sxc.hu and http://www.istockphoto.com throughout my video.  While I was creating the video I just downloaded the images with the watermark on them and replaced them later with the images that I decided to purchase.  I also used pretty basic fonts with simple bold to highlight what I thought were the most compelling points.

The entire process took me between six and eight hours and I ended up with just over two minutes of video.  That might sound a little crazy, but the more time you spend, the more likely you are to effectively communicate with your audience.

It’s also worth mentioning that I hosted the video file and splash image on amazon S3 to reduce the risk that a visitor to my site would have any trouble or delay watching it. This essentially reduced the risk that a traffic spike would slow down my site or the survey.  This is always good practice, especially when you go to the expense of buying traffic.  You don’t want people to leave because they couldn’t load the survey.

Survey (service or self hosted?)

As I mentioned above I used http://www.surveygizmo.com to design and capture my survey.  I have used the open source LimeSurvey software in the past, and it is powerful, but it’s not very user friendly.  Self hosting would also require my server to do more work, which might slow down the survey if I got a large bit of traffic all at once.  Since the services and self hosted options have roughly the same features, it was really a choice of which would be easier and keep the survey responsive.  I chose Survey Gizmo.

My traffic source for this survey was from another blog.  As a result I knew that I wouldn’t have any keyword data associated with each survey response and so I decided to include an initial profiling step in my survey.  I know that Ed Dale has said that each question you include can reduce your overall response rate on a survey.  The reason for the profiling step was to ensure that I ended up with enough data to classify my responses and identify other traffic sources that might be a match for the products I ended up with.

Thank you page

I offered an incentive for taking my survey in the form of free software downloads.  These were linked to directly from my thank you page.  BE CAREFUL.  The incentive that you use will affect your survey responses, for better and worse.

While it may be true that an incentive will increase your response rate, it’s important to realize that if the incentive is too good you may attract unqualified respondents or you might even skew your results with bogus data or duplicate entries.  Remember that you’re looking for the hyper responders.  These are the people that are so desperate to find a solution to their problem that they’ll fill out yoru survey just to talk about their problem.  If folks aren’t interested enough to fill out your survey without the incentive, that might be a really good indication that market demand is weak or that your traffic is lacking in commercial intent.

I know that Joshua Boswell suggested that you use the product you plan to create as the incentive.  So if you were going to produce a set of cooking videos and wanted to purchase traffic on keywords such as “how to cook for your in-laws”, you would explain that you were about to complete a set of videos that would teach you everything you needed to know about cooking for your in-laws, but before you finish it, you need a little more input.  In exchange for taking the survey you’ll give them a free copy of the finished product, up to some number of total copies that you’re willing to give away.

This appears to be a sensible approach, since the incentive will presumably motivate your target customer.  They self qualify in a sense.

Viral inviter

Oh the lure of everyone in the world sharing your stuff with their friends.  In the end, I think there’s a lot of luck to this.  Either way, you can increase your chances of people sharing the offer with their friends in two ways.  The first is to make it easy and automatic.  The second is to provide an incentive to do so.  I do think that incentives to share the survey are different than incentives to take the survey.  In the case of an incentive to share the survey, they’ve already given you their response, so you don’t really skew their results.  The negative to this would be if they invited unqualified respondents just to get the incentive, but then hopefully your survey incentive will work to help those invited self qualify.

For my latest survey I chose to both automate and provide an incentive.  I used the excellent OpenInviter software which allows someone to provide their email address and password and then choose to send the canned message to all of their friends.  Here’s an example of a canned message:

Hey,

I just took a survey and entered a drawing to win a free video MP3 player.  You can still take the survey and be entered to win until midnight on Sunday, February 28th.

I hope one of us wins!

[link to take survey]

I automatically insert the link at the bottom of the email so they can’t fiddle with that, but they can customize the message above if they like.  This script doesn’t capture and store any personal information.  It only uses it to send this one email address.  In my opinion, it would be unethical (and possibly illegal) to do otherwise.

Once they check the boxes next to all of their friends and click send, then the entire survey flow is complete.  It’s also important that you are able to identify traffic that comes from the viral inviter as opposed to traffic from your primary source.  To accomplish this I created a link using Google’s URL builder and the pretty link plugin on blog.  This way the link looked normal, but my analytics kept track of how much viral traffic I got.

Embed in your blog

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how the survey runs and what to ask along the way, we can tackle the question of how to host the survey.  As it turns out, the easiest way (and the way that I do it) is to create a WordPress page and embed the components of the survey there.

The specifics of how to do this will vary slightly depending on whether your used video or copy to “sell” the survey.  If you use video this may still look different depending on whether you self host or use a service.  I prefer to self host my video, but there are times that I use YouTube too.  In the case of YouTube it’s very easy.  You just go to your video page and copy the embed code.  It’s in the little grey box to the right of, or just below your video.  If you’re using copy, just type it in.

In surveygizmo, after you finish setting up your survey you’ll need to click publish.  Scroll down about half way and you’ll find a section entitled “Advanced Publishing – Embedded Surveys”.  They give three options there and recommend the javascript method.  The javascript method may give you trouble when trying to embed into a blog page, so I suggest the iframe option.

Make sure that you switch from Visual to HTML before you paste the embed code.  Another quirk about wordpress is that when you switch from HTML back to Visual, it will often change your code.  This can break the embed.  I recommend you paste the embed code very last and publish with the editor in HTML mode.  If you ever need to edit it either edit in HTML mode or redo the embed code before updating the page.

Do your own survey

That turned out to be a really long post, but I can’t think of anything I would take out.  I could write an entire report on the specific details.  Now that you know the steps involved, go get a free surveygizmo account, create some copy or a quick video and make a survey.  If you get stuck come back and post a comment here.  Happy hunting.

One reason this is so cool is that I was able to use a few hundred dollars worth of technology and perform a live broadcast for all my website members members and have a high quality finished product for members to download.

Example clips

I think it goes without saying that this wasn’t a Late Show quality set with three studio quality camera setup, but it didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars either. First off, let me give you a little clip from the interview. The first clip shows you the quality that was broadcast (cropped down to what I call internet HD 640×360). The second clip shows you the quality of the HD recording I provided for download.

Now for the HD recording

The interview was conducted in the evening and so there was no natural sunlight to filter in. Some minor color correction was performed on the original HD footage before rendering.

Equipment

The single biggest problem I’ve had while recording videos and broadcasting has been lighting.  There are a few ways to overcome lighting problems, but none of them have been easy.  More expensive cameras provide better low light performance.  Expensive lighting can compensate for lower end cameras.  Lucky for you, the inexpensive technology and a trick I’ll show you here, can give you really stunning results on a tight budget.

Here’s a picture of what my front room looked like for my latest internet broadcast.

Here’s the list of equipment that I used to do my broadcast.

• Dell PC (about $500)
• 1.2M DSL connection from Qwest (that’s the standard speed) ($32 per month)
• Logitech® Webcam C500 ($50)
• Kodak Zi8 HD camera ($180)
• Lights on a 2×4 ($20)
• Adobe Flash Media Encoder Live 3 (Free)
• Ustream.tv account (Free)

Lighting

The lighting that I used for this broadcast workout out really well.  I started with a basic bathroom light fixture from Lowe’s (like this one http://bit.ly/doKn9U).  I bought several feet of electrical cord and a plug end.  I then purchased a 2×4 for $1.34.  I also purchased four 100 watt equivalent florescent white bulbs (not soft white since that gives a yellow cast).  After putting it all together I used some saw horses from my garage to make it stand up.

I should say that I’m an electrical engineer and I’m reckless.  Putting something like this together can be dangerous and may represent a fire hazard.  If you’re not comfortable with this then don’t do it.

Since the four bulbs are separated be a fixed distance from each other, you want to keep them far enough away from the subject that they shadows can blur together.  You also want to use a light that can illuminate the background somewhat.  These two techniques will prevent a hard cast shadow from distracting viewers.  In some cases you can also use Styrofoam or some type of translucent cloth to diffuse the light and soften it (not in color, but in terms of shadows).

Since neither of my camera’s supported manual white balance, I’m stuck adjusting the color in software after the fact.  If it’s important to you to have a properly white balanced image for broadcast then you’ll need to spend more on your cameras, although what Logitech calls Right Light technology does a pretty good job of compensating for low light and white balancing correctly.

Setup

The setup is a lot easier than it might seem.  I purchased the webcam and installed it with the standard software that came in the box.  I followed some instructions on ustream’s website and downloaded and installed Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder (let’s just call that FMLE), which enables me to make several tweaks that are very useful.

For example, FMLE allows me to do two things that really improve the quality of the broadcast and provide me with a backup video in case my higher quality camera chokes.  First is that I can send the video into it from my webcam at the optimal image quality for my webcam.  In my case it was the native 1.3 mega pixel frame size of 1024×768.  Doing this reduces image quality loss and reduces the amount of work my computer has to do for the camera.  I can further crop, position and define the adjustments I want to make to prepare the output image for ustream.  In my case I wanted to broadcast at 640×480.  Along with these settings I have the freedom to define my bit rate for both audio and video so that I can be sure my internet connection will accommodate it.

Aside from the video quality settings above, FMLE allows me to record the stream locally, before it goes up to the server.  The file is save in flv format (ready to play on the internet) and doesn’t suffer from any loss due to network speed issues.  In other words, the recording is much higher quality than if I used ustreams record feature.  For some people the quality of this video will be all you need to post to your membership website.  If you are also recording with a higher quality camera, this is a good backup.  The very second you finish your broadcast you also have a finished video ready to view.  You don’t have to convert, render or do any other processing.  Just double click and watch.

As with all of these details, I recommend you play around with FMLE as much as possible beforehand so that you don’t miss something during the broadcast.  Things that you might mess up include not triggering the recording before starting the video stream and choosing a bit rate that broadcasts choppy over your internet connection.  Don’t forget to adjust your power saving and screen saver settings before you start broadcasting.

Broadcast vs. Download

I usually like to do some editing after a broadcast before I make the video available for download.  Sometimes I’m editing the content to get just the right segments and other times I may just be color correcting and adding a watermark.  Even if I don’t plan to do any editing, I make sure that I’m recording with more than one device, because I’m paranoid.  You should be paranoid too!

In my case, my Logitech C500 produced a great quality video and there were no glitches.  However, my Kodak Zi8 produced an even higher quality HD recording that enabled me to provide both enhanced sound and image quality.  I used Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum to apply basic color correction and to do an overlay that identifies the source of the video.

Starting with a higher quality original also gives me more options when it comes to converting the video for use elsewhere.  For example, the footage from my Zi8 allows me to easily put the interview on a DVD, broadcast it over the internet, upload full HD to youtube and render my self termed “internet half HD” format to my own website.  That’s a lot of flexibility, and the flash video file alone wouldn’t provide me with that.  But if you’re on a real budget then the $50 webcam with FMLE is too good to pass up and give’s very decent quality.

Improvements

As I watch the recording I can see a few things that I would like to improve (aside from my interview style).  The first is the seating and scenery.  Even a fake tree in the corner would have added a lot to the recording.  Nicer chairs or a cool couch and a band to provide a musical sound track would have given this broadcast a considerable bump!  Maybe a new shirt too.

Overall, i put this broadcast together in under an hour (technologically) with only a few hundred dollars of equipment and both me and my members are happy with the result.  As soon as I have some construction and furniture budget I can work on the improvements I mentioned.

As always, please comment below.

As a result, I’ve come up with some rules of thumb that help me determine what makes it on my site. I use these same rules when deciding what to post on other sites too. For me it all comes down to relevance and whether or not anything is being added to the conversation.

Comment Scenarios

Imagine, for example, that you go over to a friends house to watch a live sports event. In an private setting, like his house, he knows you and some comments are mutually understood. For example, let’s suppose you complain about one of the refs and he says something like

“Wow, you said that perfectly. I’m not sure I could have said it that well, but I totally agree with you.”

That may actually add to the conversation, at your friends house. Now, strictly speaking, it adds nothing new and only vaguely supports what your friend said. It doesn’t even say anything about the ref!

Now imagine that you were at a restaurant watching the same game and you make the same comment about the ref. This time, some guy a few tables away says what I quoted above. Already it’s a bit more awkward because you don’t know the guy and his comment doesn’t really add to the conversation. Furthermore, it’s not a natural way to have a conversation.

Natrual conversation

What would be natural? Let’s continue on with the restaurant idea above. The people that are most likely to comment will have both proximity and interest. They’ll be engaged in the game (or at least watching it). If they make a comment it will likely be on topic and add to the conversation. For example, this comment might be more relevant and something that would socially make sense:

“I agree that ref’s a real jerk. He was banned last season for making some bonehead calls during a playoff game and if he’s not careful he’ll get bumped again.”

Whew! Wasn’t that refreshing? I can see how that would really add to the conversation. It’s relevant, on topic and would fit into another social environment.

Now there is a certain appeal to the idea of the one-giant-global-conversation that the social platforms promise, but it doesn’t invalidate the long standing rules of social engagement. If it wouldn’t make sense in a public forum, like a conference or a restaurant or a seminar, then it probably doesn’t make sense online either.

So for blog owners, if the comment doesn’t add relevant, on topic information to the conversation (the conversation is whatever the post talks about), then don’t approve it. For blog commenters, if you really like something on a blog and you have no idea who the blog owner is, do one of two things. If you have something relevant and on topic to add to the conversation then post a comment. If not, do the blog owner a favor and create a link back to his site (e.g. digg, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter, etc.). If it doesn’t add to the conversation on my blog, I won’t approve it.

For fun, here are a few of the non-contributing zeros that have commented on my site just today. This post could go on for years since there’s so much junk. Thank heavens for Akismet.

Garbage comment examples

This comment had a link to a medications for male erection problems. I’m glad he thinks I’m a good writer though.

Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.

This comment might be from someone that really liked what I was writing about. But I have no idea who he is and so his comment lends neither increased credibility nor content to the subject of the post.

“Pretty insightful post. Never thought that it was this simple after all. I had spent a good deal of my time looking for someone to explain this subject clearly and you’re the only one that ever did that. Kudos to you! Keep it up”

I should take this next comment and enter it in the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, unless the spammer found it there in the first place. It adds nothing whatsoever to the (any) conversation, but could seem an admiring reinforcement to any blogger’s post. I hate spam!

“i would not have suspected this was awesome a couple of years back but yet its funny just how time evolves the method by which you see varying creative concepts, many thanks regarding the piece of writing it happens to be pleasing to go through something clever occasionally instead of the usual rubbish mascarading as a blog on the internet, cheers”

Stop comment spam

If you’ve unwittingly (yeah right) been sucked into the idea that leaving flowery, useless comments on blogs and websites is somehow showing kindness to the owners of those sites, just stop. If you have something relevant and on topic to add then by all means, add it. If you’re not sure, ask yourself what you might do if you overheard the conversation in a public place and act accordingly. That’s still not a guarantee that I’ll approve your comment.

Since then I’ve built dozens of websites for companies both large and small. I worked for one other ad agency and I’ve worked as an consultant or small business owner providing web programming services. 10 years of experience creating technology for the internet has allowed me to identify several patterns or stereotypes that clients follow. I also have a pretty strong opinion about who I’m interested in working for and why.

Client Stereotypes

Two client stereotypes I’ve observed include the “do it yourselfer” and the “outsourcer”. The first one is bent on doing everything himself. While the outward appearance is the same for most do it yourselfers, the underlying motivation varies. Here are the two main reasons that someone takes on the do it yourselfer role:

• Don’t have (or want to spend) money to pay someone else to do it (it’s my precious)
• Don’t believe that anyone could really do it as well as they could (I’m the only non-idiot in the world)

I personally lean toward the do it yourselfer role, which is why I don’t really understand the outsourcers very well. The outsourcers are the ones that seem to have ideas, but don’t have any interest in the nitty gritty details. I’m not sure if they just don’t like doing it but they could, or if they don’t really feel like they could do it, but can see that it needs to be done. I suspect there are some who fall on each side.

Each stereotype described above comes with it’s own vision problems. For example, do it yourselfers don’t really understand what other people want. This probably stems from the fact that they don’t *care* what other people want. Outsourcers are really good at knowing what other people want, but they don’t know or care to learn how to get it for them. While oursourcers can identify a need and are usually good at selling it, they don’t always know if what they had produced (the thing they outsourced) actually scratches the itch it was intended to scratch.

Presumed Expertise

Regardless of which stereotype you approximate, every business owner takes on the role of “presumed expert”. For example, the very second you say something like “I have a small business selling switches to turn computer speakers off and on”, it wouldn’t be to outrageous to expect someone to say back “wow, I don’t know a thing about speaker switches. You must be really smart.” POW! You’re an expert!

Who knows if that’s really true or not. If you’re a do it yourselfer then you probably are an expert and you do know a lot about speaker switches. If you’re an oursourcer then you might not know anything more than that there was a need in that market and you found a product and filled the need. In either case, the rest of the world will look to you as an expert, and if they ever have a question about speaker switches, guess who they’re going to ask. That’s right, it’s you. Congratulations!

Web Developers

Let’s turn out attention to the average web developer for a minute. Here you have the ultimate do it yourselfer. He loves open source, he’s thrilled with all the things he doesn’t have to buy because he can make his own or “copy” someone else’s and he hates the idea of parting with any money. He also suffers from the short sighted affliction of “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but look how cool this is…”

So what happens when you put a do it yourselfer together with an outsourcer (this naturally happens all the time)? Well, you get some funny business in translation, and a few more assumptions.

What outsourcers really want

Here’s the deal. I have many outsourcers come to me as a web developer expecting to get a turn key site. They explain that they just want a site that will sell and have all the information it needs. They always want it to be easy to update and change. They want it to look good. They want it to be SEO optimized.

Those are all great things, and they are useful features, but no one on earth buys from a site because it is SEO optimized or looks good, or is easy to change. They buy something because they WANT it and they believe (or trust) that if they give you their money they will GET it. It has zero to do with the technology used to build the site.

So if people make purchases because they WANT something and they TRUST that you can give it to them, what are they really buying? In most cases they’re buying your expertise, or perceived expertise. I think this expertise (and the implicit trust that comes along with it) more or less amounts to what ad agencies call “brand”. A good agency is able to make someone or something look like a leading expert or authority. I know there’s a lot more to brand than that (and everyone has their own idea of brand), but this is a big part of it.

Outsourcing Expertise aka: The Big Web Blunder

Unfortunately, what I see happen all to often is that the presumed expert will try to outsource the entire task of creating a web site (outsourcers sometimes call this a web presence). Rather than provide the content for their new site one of two things will happen.

The first thing that could happen is rooted in the oursourcer’s misunderstanding about communication on the internet.  He thinks that it’s fundamentally different from communication in the “real world”. In this case he says to the web developer, “you’re the web expert, just build it how you think it should be and tell me if you need anything”. The problem with this approach is that the web developer knows nothing about the market or why the outsourcer chose it in the first place. This effectively amounts to outsourcing expertise to a non-expert in a subject. The results will be reflected in the inability of the site to convert visitors into paying customers.

The other, slightly better, possibility is that he has the web developer setup a site that he can populate, but he either doesn’t want to or doesn’t have time to publish the content that would establish him (his site) as an expert. So the site gets built but no expert establishing content ever makes it up there and the result is little to no traffic and dismal conversions.

Ad agencies and copywriters

About the only way I can see to get around this is exactly what direct response marketers have done for decades. I think that the better ad agencies and copywriters are effective at one special skill that makes them unique. They can suck the essence of the expert right out of your brain and present it to the consumer effectively. As long as the expert status correlates to a real WANT in the consumer’s mind, conversions are likely to follow. I’ve heard that the real secret to writing sales copy is research, research, research (and then a little research on top of that).

The biggest disappointment to most people is they can’t afford to hire a really good ad agency (and a fancy office does not an ad agency make) or a star copywriter for their projects.

Write the copy yourself

While outsourcing is a very important skill (and one that I’m getting much better at myself), the essence of what you’re trying to communicate needs to come from you. You are the expert. If people buy your product/service it’s because they trust you. So maybe in just this one thing you need to let go of the idea of farming out the copy and write for yourself.

A lot of people complain that writing isn’t fun or that it’s difficult. That might be true, but think back on any heroic, prolific or influential character in history and ask yourself “could they write?” In some cases, like presidents of the United States of America, they have speech writers. And if you can afford a presidential level speech writer, and let him suck those pearls out of your head and put them in writing, then you’re set. Otherwise, you’ll have to be like the rest of us and write your own speeches. That’s not to say that you have to build and operate the press that reproduces them (or the website that publishes them).

My conclusion: Don’t expect the a temp worker, or your web developer or some other vendor or employee to be able to produce expert worthy content for you. That’s one thing that you should always own. And don’t get fooled into believing that communication on the internet is any different than communication anywhere else. Words is words!

To answer the question of structure, offer and content I’ve put together the video and a PDF below showing one of my favorite models. I’ve seen components of this model used tons of times by loads of people, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single diagram that outlines the entire process and helps you plan your content, email lists and so on. I hope this is useful. Here’s the video:

Click the full-screen button on the video so you can follow along better…

In this video and PDF I can’t possibly tell you everything you need to do, but here are some of the most important concepts to keep in mind.

• List segmentation is crucial (separate lists for prospects and buyers (thanks Jeff Walker))
• Free content should be an extract of the most valuable gems you offer in your paid content (thanks Eben Pagan and John Reese)
• your autoresponder sequence should focus on consumption of your content, whether paid or free
• Use downsell and retention (before you go) sales letters to increase margin

Download the PDF here:

My current favorite platform for membership websites is WordPress using MemberWing and Aweber. It’s a no brainer for me since I can have a new membership website up and running in an hour, with all the bells and whistles.

There are other models that I can put together if there’s enough interest. This one is super easy and can work very well since it uses reciprocity by giving them access up front to your best material and reducing their risk since they get to see some of the content before buying. One other model that I really like is the 30-day free trail, or $1 trail. Frank Kern is a master of that model and I recommend you follow one of his launches to get an idea. Mike Filsaime is also fantastic at the upsell/downsell on offers like this.

After you’ve watched the video and read through the PDF, let me know what you think and if you have any questions by posting a comment below.

Since you are so into the good old USA, I wanted to sing you the National Anthem. I really hope you like it. I’m looking forward to talking with you on the phone soon.

Daniel