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Monday, December 3, 2012

Escaping From The Matrix

What really changed things for me was escaping from the matrix, so I would like to offer you an opportunity to take the Red Pill in this post.

You might remember the choice that Neo faced in the movie The Matrix. He is offered the option of taking the Red Pill or the Blue Pill. If he chose to take the Blue Pill, he would wake up in his present reality having forgotten all about the experience. If he chooses the Red Pill, he awakens from his slumber, escapes the matrix and experiences reality for the first time.

Because he is seeking truth, Neo takes the Red Pill. The reality he discovers is completely different from his experience within the matrix. It is something for which is entirely unprepared.

There will be some who read this post who will forget all about it, perhaps putting it down to the ramblings of some insane marketer who needs his bumps feeling. That's really all you need to do to take the Blue Pill. When you refuse to wake up to reality, you condemn yourself to be ever searching for the answer. The answer will never come to you, in the form that you expect, and your search will be an eternal quest for that other pill - the Magic Pill. But there are only two pills available: The Red Pill or The Blue Pill.

So are you ready to take the Red Pill? No. OK, go ahead, hit the Back Button and return to your normality. The thing is, you genuinely may not really be ready for the Red Pill.

When you take the Red Pill, you wake up and you see reality for what it is. You will probably be unprepared for it. It will probably not be what you expect. When you realise that you have been living under an illusion and pursuing a quest that ultimately leads to disappointment, you may also feel angry. But at least you will have your eyes opened.

Reality is that people have needs and the people who are making money on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter, are busy attending to those needs. Did you see the truth there? No? You see how easy it is to miss it? But we are concerned with the Red Pill here, so let me explain a bit more. Let's look at those needs. We'll use Maslow. It's a pretty good statement of the needs of the human condition. According to Maslow's Hierarchy, all human being have the following needs:

Biological and Physiological needs - Food, Water, Shelter etc Safety Needs - Security, Stability, Protection etc Belongingness and Love needs - Love, Friendship, Companionship etc Esteem Needs - Self Worth, Status, Mastery etc Self-Actualization Needs - Life Purpose, Self Fulfilment, Growth etc

These common human needs drive our behaviour, so we are always looking for some solution that allows us to fulfil our current needs and progress to the next level; the next set of needs.

Let's take making money as an example. Why do people want to make money? That may sound like a silly question, but it's not. It is a good question to contemplate if you are selling, or attempting to sell make money type products. The answer is that money is a transferrable resource, so in a well-developed society, money is required in order to attend to those needs. That's what drives people to search for that Magic Pill. But they never find the Magic Pill, so their quest never ends.

The same is true of many other markets. Take for example weight-loss. Why do people want to lose weight? Because it makes them feel better about themselves (Esteem Need) and it, perhaps, helps to attract other people to them (Belongingness/Love Need). But their lifestyle dictates that they will always be fatter than they want to be, so they will always be in search of the Magic Pill which, as we know, does not exist.

In other markets, the problem may be more of a one-off; for example, the get your ex back niche. Why do people want to get their ex's back? Because of their need for love and companionship. Why did they drive their partner away? Well, there may be many reasons, but a common one is infidelity; and that's another way of saying that it was an unexpected consequence of attending to a physiological need. There may be some people who offend repeatedly, but generally, for most people, this is probably a one-off problem. Nevertheless, we can see how understanding human needs is a key to understanding behaviour.

Now, if you want to profit from this post, you need to wake up and stop that search for the Magic Pill if you are still looking. Instead, try to figure out how you can help other people who are engaged in a quest to find a solution to one of their basic human needs. The people making money are those who are doing that. They are providing value in the form of goods or services that specifically address those needs.

There are good and bad products all over the web. The good products provide value by solving a specific problem that is difficult to solve. To understand what these problems are, you generally need to become a part of the market yourself. But when you know what they are, you can make money very easily by solving a particular, difficult to solve problem.

Remember where we started? Red Pill or Blue Pill - right? If you take the Red Pill, you wake up, stop searching for a solution that does not exist and instead, start creating products and/or services that genuinely address specific problems, that provide real value and benefit other people.

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The 7 Truths About Information Products

Information (products):-

1) The Internet is about 'search' and search is 100% about information. Some of it is - 'where is this location?' and 'what time is the movie?' - but most of it is - "how do I do...?"something, The biggest search term is "how to". The next biggest is "information on..." Information makes the Internet flow. If people want info - there must be a supply provided.

2) The fallacy is that information is always in the hands of the few, the PhD's the professors, the university scholars or the big organizations who 'know this stuff'. Its not true and never been true. Think of all the courses and classes at community centers, all the self published books and manuals that litter the landscape.Then there's the small hobbyist magazines, and pamphlets. These are people with skills and knowledge, probably no PhD, probably not a university professor, just someone with a particular knowledge or skill. The challenge before the advent of the internet was to find the market that wanted that particular, perhaps minor, perhaps not, piece of information.

With the Internet whatever it is you have a specific knowledge of - someone somewhere is looking for that information.

3) But you say -"All the niche markets are full, all the info products have been made, everybody is just repeating themselves" - which is true and not true. In the LARGE scheme of things, there is nothing new ever. But that doesn't mean it has been said every way possible, explained in all the best ways, or more importantly that information has not been conveyed in your particular voice.

In the BIG niches - health, diet, dating and 'how to make money on the internet' - it is the same old, same old, until it's not. Until someone comes a long with a different way of packaging the info, or a different slant, or an appeal to a particular segment - how to date poodles for instance, or how to diet using only products from Antarctica (Joking don't try these at home)

4) If you are going to give information, as a marketable item - lay it out logically, lay it out immediately so it is easily accessible, and don't pad to make it seem Bigger. Is the information 'true' is all that matters. See a typical Seth Godin blog post- for the clarity and simplicity.

5) NOW HERE"S the KEY- you HAVE something you have done or learned that has value to others. Now maybe not a lot of others, maybe not life changing - but something, and remember, the internet is a marketplace of information seekers.

6) Does that mean you are guaranteed to make money with everything you think up? - No. But it does mean - if you are 'true' with the information, and express it in your voice, it will be unique and valuable. If its valuable to many - you can make money. If valuable to a few - you will have provided a service.

7) Where's the downside? The Internet is largely a free entry marketplace. There is nothing else bigger. There's no middle men. It only seeks information. You, despite yourself have information- so start -write some things down, things you have an interest in, things you find fascinating, a hobby, a sport, a calling, an area you may have researched and were never able to follow-up on, but you have the information.

There may not be a market? But if there is then its just a question of how big, and are they willing to pay anything?

When was the last time - just who you are - could possibly produce a business?

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Creating Info Products - 7 Steps to Creating an Emotional Connection With Your Products

When you are creating info products, you might feel anxiety or confusion because of not knowing how to go about doing it. The best way to take care of this problem is to have an organized system that you can count on to create your products time after time. In this article, I'll present a logical, repeatable system that you can use to create all of your information products.

1. Research and Outlining

Here you'll gather the information you need to make your product. You can go to the library, look at magazines and trade journals, and places on the Internet. Once you get enough information, you'll put important bits on 3X5 index cards until you have enough to get started with your product.

2. Introduction

In this section of the product, you'll be welcoming the reader and you should state the benefits the reader will get from your product.

3. State your customer's problem

When you start to creating info products, be sure to do what you can to get the reader emotionally involved with the product. This is going to increase their engagement with the material, and it will ultimately end up improving their experience. One of the most effective methods to accomplish this is to use an impact point. You can do this by using a problem, or by showing the reader how to take advantage of an excellent opportunity. Using a problem is the ideal way to get the reader emotionally involved. And mentioning a great opportunity they might be able to take advantage of is also a great way to get the reader emotionally involved.

4. Promise your reader to give the solution

Now, you'll be promising the reader the solution to whatever problem they have. This is where you make it perfectly clear that you are the right person to help them with their problem and that they've come to the right place.

5. Give the solution

This is the foundation of your product. Here, you're going to give step by step instructions for getting the desired end result. This step should be easy if you organized your information into an outline at the beginning, with each part of the outline matching up with the sequence in which you'll be creating the product, and each step by step instruction of the outline coming in its right place.

6. Summary

Here, you'll summarize the important points in the product that the reader should focus on. This reiterates your desire to look out for your reader, and it makes things more clear and accessible as well.

7. Remind readers of your ability to help them

At this point, you've delivered what you said you would. Now you just need to cement your relationship with the reader through establishing a more personal bond. You do this by showing them that you can help them further in the future if they contact you. This part of creating info products is often left out, but you'll be leaving money on the table if you exclude it, and the customer will lose out as well because they won't know where to get further assistance.

Multi Media Informational Products Boost Earnings

There's no question that informational products are an easy way to generate earnings. Electronic downloads are simple to format and may be produced by anyone who may have a little something to talk about. For an internet marketer, eBooks are a fantastic instrument to help you generate income.

However one of the greatest steps you can take is actually adding more than a single form of media to the sale to boost returns. Why multi-media products boost earnings is simply because even for those people who are big readers, "how-to" illustrations, put in a step-by-step visual guidebook, make it much easier to learn and retain information.

It's much easier for most of us to understand something totally new when it's offered visually. You might understand what you mean inside your eBook if you speak about formatting something or perhaps setting it up on an internet site, however for the novice, all those words and phrases will probably appear to be a different language.

Making use of video tutorials to market your product or service additionally provides you with the advantage of being in a position to include a personal touch. You may also include audio recordings for your buyers which they can download as an MP3 to their player to have on-the-go learning.

Audio courses are yet another strategy to make use of multimedia to boost the amount of income you get. Audio recordings are much more portable and convenient than in the past and with the advance of the iPod as well as other MP3 players, most of us have ways to play audio recordings.

Thankfully, it doesn't require a great deal of complicated software applications to produce high quality audio recordings. You only need a good microphone which connects to your pc or possibly notebook along with recording software, some of which has already been pre-installed on your pc.

Audacity is a free audio editor that actually works across several platforms, making it possible to record all your lessons. Audio recordings are especially nice in the event that you get easily flustered before the video camera. You'll be able to reference a quick outline you've written during an audio recording but without the target audience ever realizing it.

Once you want to make the recording, look for a quiet location. You don't want to end up having to discard a superb recording simply because the microphone picked up the sound of your neighbor's dog barking outside.

When you're through with your recording, listen to the playback meticulously in a single sitting and also make a note of anything which has to be modified or improved. Audacity along with other sound recording applications will let you get rid of lengthy pauses and even unnecessary words and phrases such as 'like' or 'umm' or perhaps any sort of pet phrases which you may have used excessively.

The Video PDF - How To Embed a Video in a PDF File

PDFs are ubiquitous and have been with us for years. What a lot of people don't realize, though, is that video can be embedded within them. This is a great idea, but it's not without its pitfalls. There are some rather serious compatibility issues to consider. If you can control where the files will be played back (for example, it's for internal use within a company and you know that the IT department has a certain version of Adobe Acrobat Player installed on all of the machines), then it might be a serious option. If, however, you're just going to encode some video in a PDF and then release it to the public...well, be prepared to waste a lot of time on customer support. There will be plenty of people calling up complaining that the PDF won't open, or the video won't play back, etc. etc., which is not fun.

It's been possible to embed video in a PDF for a while now, but until recently it always required that an external player also be installed on the user's computer. Universal playback was far from certain due to a whole host of issues from different video formats, systems and software versions. The latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, however, allows you to embed flash video within a PDF, which will play back without having to worry about whether or not a specific player is installed on that computer. Although this is a marked improvement, the system is far from perfect. There are still plenty of ways for your video not to play back. For example, the user has to view the PDF with a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader that supports the video playback functionality. If you encoded something with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 and the user tries to play back that file with an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, the file may not play back. Also, if someone uses another PDF viewer (like Preview on the Mac, for example), the video won't play back there either.

If someone just bought their computer 2 months ago and the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader is already on their computer, then it's not a problem - but if it's a "non technical" user, then something as simple as upgrading their version of Adobe Acrobat Reader can be challenging - which means that they can't view your video content - and if it's a product you've charged for, it will probably result in a return and/or complaint.

The point is, don't think you're going to put video into a PDF and never have a problem or issue with it (theoretically, it is possible, but practically speaking, it's unlikely). If you do decide to try this as an info product, my best advice is to be painfully clear with potential buyers. Post a clear warning letting people know that they MUST view the PDF using whatever version of Adobe Acrobat Reader you specify if they want to see the embedded video. This should take care of most of the issues, but there will almost certainly be someone who didn't read your warning (or is a little slow) who will give you problems.

If you do decide to encode video in a PDF, here's how you do it, and some of the issues and variables to be aware of...

First of all, in order to be able to create a PDF with video, you'll need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro. Even if you have Adobe Acrobat (that's the full version of the Adobe Acrobat program and not Acrobat Reader), you'll need to upgrade to the "Pro" version for the video embedding functionality. I recommend working with version 9 or higher.

Second, although you can embed "legacy multimedia content" (in other words, alternate video formats), going with Flash is going to be your best bet (unless you absolutely have to use a certain format for a specific reason). Flash will play back from within the PDF without having to worry about additional (external) players. This means the video has been encoded as Flash and will have.SWF or.FLV as the file name extension.

The way you embed video is: open your PDF (from within Adobe Acrobat Pro), go to Tools > Advanced Editing and select the Movie Tool. Use the tool to draw (drag) a box where you want to put your movie. A dialog box will appear asking you where the movie file is located and giving you several options. Note that you can choose to embed video or have it streaming from somewhere on the Internet. The advantage to streaming is that you can keep your PDF file size down, since the video is coming from somewhere else - and you can update the content anytime, but the disadvantage is that they won't be able to see the video without an active Internet connection, which can be inconvenient. Also, if they have a slow connection, the video may play back very poorly or not at all. It's up to you to weigh the pros and cons to see which option works best for your situation.

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2 Simple Technologies To Create Amazing Products Fast

In this article, I'm going to introduce 2 simple technologies that anyone can use to create amazing information products lightning fast.

One of the things that scares people the most when building an information marketing business is creating products. Creating products can feel like a monumental task, especially if you've never created one before. The reality is that it's actually quite simple once you understand the basics of what to do and how to do it. In fact, once you get over the hurdle of doing it the first time (which is always the most difficult thing to do), you will realize that creating information products is simple and fun.

The first way to create an information product fast is to create an audio recording using audio recording software or audio recording services. You simply use whatever software or service you have, you record the audio track, you edit it if you need to, and then you deliver it however you want to. You can put the audio track on a website, you can put the link in an email, you can put the link on a webpage with all the other audio links, etc.

Lets imagine that you want to create a 6 hour program teaching people how to put together a business plan for their business, and lets say you want to sell this product for $97, which is a fair value. The beautiful part about creating an audio series is that you ONLY need to record for 6 hours total to create a finished product. Just record 1 hour at a time and after 6 recordings, you are done. That's pretty easy to do.

Lets say you provide a weekly call to your people and every week you talk about a different topic. If you record the weekly call, after 1 year, you have 52 hours of content to re-purpose and create products out of. Imagine how much content you would have after 2 years.

To find audio recording products or services, just use Google it. Some recording software, for both Mac and PC, can record right to your computer, then you can upload the recordings to your hosting provider. Other solutions are monthly service solutions that usually will host all of your recordings, they will back them up and they will provide the links you need to deliver the audio tracks.

The second method to create information products lightning fast is to use video recording software. Video recording products are usually 1-time purchases, but they are well worth it. The idea with this method is that you can record what happens on your computer screen, the recording becomes a video and you use the video as your information product.

You will have to know a learn a little more about video editing, but videos are very powerful and people tend to like videos better. Once you've recorded the videos and edited them, you can host them in a few different ways. You can use free services like YouTube and Vimeo, or you can host them yourself with your hosting service provider.

Bottom line is creating information products is very simple to do and it doesn't take as long as you think. If you spend 75% of the time you have per day on driving traffic and the other 25% creating products, there's no reason you can't create one new product per month. Imagine what 12 new products you've created will do for your business.