In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray! 

When you're so focused on a sales page, it's easy to forget that that sales page/landing page is just one tiny step in the whole sequence. There's a sequence that precedes the landing page. Most of us that create products or services ignore that sequence. We assume the product or service alone should have the spotlight. Which, as you're probably guessing, is a mistake. You need all the steps that come before the landing page. The landing page is the event? What comes before? Let's find out in this episode on the steps involved in creating an awesome buildup.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How do you create a build up for your product?
Part 2: Why you have to create a ‘moment in time’ for every product?
Part 3: What is the one biggest reason our product launch fails?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources

Something cool to read: Why “Failure” Is Just A Pre-Sell For Success
More cool reading: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours
The Irresistibility Factor: A complete summary of this three part podcast.

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What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 3 of 3

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Build Up

“You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing children’s books?”

These were the words Joanne Kathleen—better known as J.K. Rowling heard from her agent when she first put forward the idea of Harry Potter. By 1999, Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. But how you take a phenomenon and make it even more phenomenal? You put it in a cage—that’s what you do!

At Waterstone’s in Birmingham, the third in the series, “Prisoner of Azkaban” was in a cage guarded by two mannequins dressed like Men in Black. The kids—and their harried parents—could see the book, but they couldn’t get at it. All over the globe, a similar rollout was in progress to create a build up for a particular moment in time. That moment was the release of the next Harry Potter book.

Let’s assume our products and services don’t have the cult-status of Harry Potter

In such a case, how are you supposed to create this moment where you get clients to sign up for a product or service? The wrong way to have a launch is to shout, “Surprise” and present your product or service to the client. The right way to do it would be to create a build up. A build up that may have started weeks, months, even years ago.

When you see a Psychotactics course sell out in less than an hour, there’s something important you don’t see

You don’t see the pre-sell in action. And yet if you were to read this article, you’ll spot the fact that the Article Writing Course is coming back around June next year. You’ll also get notifications of the fact that this extremely popular course is getting a big upgrade. It’s Version 2.0 of the course with brand new notes, audio and assignments. Bit by bit the information trickles out, with very few specifics until the date gets closer.

Build up is critical for both products and services

If you’re a web designer, and you sit around waiting for something to happen, well, something might happen. But it’s also likely that nothing might happen as well. That clients don’t come rushing to you. If you’re a copywriter, it’s the same scenario. You’re waiting and hoping, and hope is a pretty iffy strategy. When you look around you, the biggest names in the business don’t play the game with iffiness in mind. If the big new Bond movie is coming out, you’ll hear about it for weeks in advance. You’ll see videos on YouTube, magazines splashed with the actors from the Bond movie. They’ll be eating, drinking, be on the brink of affairs, separation—and who knows what else! But they’re building up for the event.

To make something—anything— irresistible, you have to create a moment in time

Like a lunar eclipse that causes everyone to dust off their telescopes at the precise time, you have to control the build up. Bit by bit the information needs to peter out from you to your clients. Almost without exception, clients should know of your product or service—and the day of the launch. It’s this rigour that allows a product or service to become an “instant success”.

Pre-sell involves buildup and the biggest reason for failure are that we’re too trigger-happy.

We expect to launch something and then it needs to take off like a rocket. And yes, there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large you’re going to struggle a lot if you don’t go through the steps of pre-sell and build up. It’s the patience and planning that counts.

The steps to a launch are:

1) Work on a date of the launch well into the future
2) Create steps along the way—and what you’re going to drip feed to your clients.
3) Keep adding different elements until the clients get caught up in the fever of the product or service. That’s when the product or service becomes irresistible.

This brings us to the end of the three elements that make your product or service irresistible.

So let’s summarise:  The Irresistibility Factor?A Complete Summary

In the last three episodes we considered what makes a product or service irresistible. In this episode we tidy up things with a complete summary. Hooray!
http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/69a_Irresistible_Offer_Summary.mp3

Still reading? Have a look at #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish) 

 

When we think of exclusivity, we often see sales pages that seem to have these ticking clocks. They're creating urgency by forcing our hand. And as small business owners, we often buy into that urgency. Yet, you don't need to resort to these cheap gimmicks when you have the twin factors of exclusivity. So how do you use these twin factors to your advantage. Here's Part 2 in a series of 3 on "How to Create the Irresistibility Factor".

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: The Power of Product Exclusivity
Part 2: The Benefit of Working with Smaller Numbers
Part 3: The Myth that you have to be Big to be Successful
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game

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What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 2 of 3

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The Power of Exclusivity

There’s an anecdotal story about the late Gary Halbert.

Gary Halbert was one of the best known direct-mail copywriters on the planet and so he decided to have a copywriting workshop. Even those he charged nose-bleed prices for the workshop, it was absolutely full.

So he hosted a subsequent workshop. That too was full.

He was on a roll, so another workshop was announced. Yes, it was full again.
And then it went quiet.

Deathly quiet, in fact.

You’ve probably figured out the reason why the workshops stopped filling up

My guess was that Gary ran out of people to attend his workshop. But remember this—Gary was super well-known. He had a list of thousands of subscribers. What he ran into was a problem of exclusivity. The workshops were being held at such a high frequency, that it seemed easy enough to put off attending the next workshop, because another one would always show up.

This is why we last had the Psychotactics Headlines course in 2013—then nothing until 2015

The headlines course is extremely popular—and hence full every single time we announce it. It’s not hard to see why, either. As a business owner you’ve got to send out newsletters, possibly make a presentation, write sales letters for your product or service, and if you produce podcasts or webinars—yes, you need headlines. Almost all marketing activity is directly linked to writing great headlines. Instead of guessing whether a headline is outstanding or just average, you know precisely why it works and how to fix it. The question to ask is this: Should you conduct the course on a frequent basis?

The answer depends on whether you want to create exclusivity or not

If you want a product to be exclusive, you have to create scarcity, because scarcity creates exclusivity. This exclusivity is exactly what Studio 54 used to their advantage. It’s what caused people to want to jump that “velvet rope”. There was a sense of desperation to get into Studio 54 night after night. If you don’t or won’t have exclusivity around your product or services, you’re telling clients they can have it at any given time. As you can tell, that lack of exclusivity reduces urgency. The client can come in any ol’ time and get the product or service—and often they do. They put off the purchase until later.

At Psychotactics, we haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel…

Instead we work on just two parameters to create a factor of exclusivity.

1) Reduce frequency
2) Work with small numbers.

Reduce frequency

If you look at the courses we host online (for e.g. the Article Writing Course, headlines course, copywriting course etc), they’re all held with a substantial gap. That gap is at least a year apart. It means if you miss signing up for the course, you have to wait at least a year, sometimes two. There’s no guarantee that the course will be held on a recurring basis, and this creates a factor of exclusivity. Let’s take the Article Writing Course for instance. Let’s just say we’re going to have a course in May next year (and right now we’re in November). When will we have the next course? We don’t know for sure. All we know is it’s not going to be in June, or July, or August—or even in that year.

But won’t that drive clients away to the competition?

There’s always a possibility that the clients would want to learn a skill desperately and hence head elsewhere. And yet, that’s not what a lot of our clients do. They’re clear they want to do the course with us, and so they wait for the announcement and they sign up. As you’re reading this information, you are clearly being pre-sold for the Article Writing Course being held next year. You are aware that there’s a sort of sales pitch in what you’re reading and yet you’re also keen to know why the course is so exclusive.

Why would clients wait?

Why would they pay a hefty fee of $3000 for the privilege? Why would they sign up for something that’s known as the “toughest writing course” in the world? It’s not like clients won’t try the competition. Even if you have the best products or services in the world, the clients will still buy into competitor’s products or services. Yet, we all want something that’s exclusive—something we can’t have.

Make no mistake

Just putting a tag of exclusivity on a product or service isn’t going to help you sell better.Your product or service has to be top-notch. No client is silly enough to spend $3000 on a course. They’re not going to get on a plane, take a whole week off from their work to get to your workshop. They certainly aren’t going to just throw money at whatever product you’re selling, if it’s not top notch. And while all product or services start off a bit less than great, with time they can all become exceedingly good.

That’s when the demand starts

That’s when you need to put a “velvet rope” around the product or the service. The greater the demand the more you’ve got to protect your property. Instead it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to make our product or service easily available. Yet, in some cases, availability is exactly what’s needed. Some products or services may need to be put in place so that clients can get to them at any point in time. These products and services provide a doorway to your business.

In our case, The Brain Audit is the doorway

Prospects find The Brain Audit on Amazon.com or on our site. And once they read it, they go on to buy more “doorway products”. We know this to be true because we track their progress. They’ll buy books such as “The Secret life of Testimonials” or “Chaos Planning” or “Story Telling”. Then they move up to buying more expensive products such “Black Belt Presentations”. But then they hit a wall. To join 5000bc, they can’t just waltz in. They have to pay to be on a waiting list.

Who pays to be on a waiting list?

It’s just $10, but you have to get on the list and then after we check out your history a bit, we let you in after 3-4 weeks. The same applies to any of the workshops or courses. Not only are they less frequent, but our members at 5000bc get the first chance to sign up. There have been numerous occasions where the product or service is sold out before the rest of the list can even have a crack at it.

The more expensive the product or service, the less the frequency of availability.

So yes, you want to start with looking at your product or service

Is it a doorway product? If so, it may not need that tag of exclusivity. But as it goes up in price, create a barrier—create several barriers—and make it exclusive. Even if you have a digital product that should be easily available, you can offer it only once a year and make it exclusive.

This takes us to the second factor: working with small numbers.

Working With Smaller Numbers

A 947 person waiting list.

That’s the Tory 2.0 dress by MM LaFleur. MM. LaFleur is a direct-to-consumer fashion retailer started by a former financial consultant Sarah LaFleur and Zac Posen designer Miyako Nakamura.  At $235 it’s not cheap, but the very fact that you can’t get it right away—that’s causing the waiting list to keep soaring.

The same applied to my Nakaya Naka-ai in Araishu pen

The pen is handcrafted from ebonite and Urushi lacquer, and comes a solid gold 14k nib. I ordered this handcrafted pen from Japan back in May 2014 and it arrived a year and a half later. My wife, Renuka, jokes that there’s some wizened old man in Japan somewhere working day and night bent over the nib. The price? After all the taxes, it hovered close to NZ$1000—for a fountain pen!

And yet, there’s a waiting list.

As if to underline the Japanese connection, here’s a third example

Jiro Ono runs a sushi restaurant under the Ginza railway station in Tokyo. Jiro has been honoured by Michelin—and gets Michelin’s highest three star rating. A meal costs approximately US$380 per person. So how many people would you expect to see at Jiro’s restaurant? A hundred, fifty, thirty—perhaps?

The correct answer is ten.

Night after night only ten diners sit in for a twenty minute meal. So does a restaurant that makes over $1 million a year sound like a good business?

It’s a myth that you have to be big to be successful

In reality, being small—and having small groups as your clients can be as, or even more successful than getting bigger all the time. This in turn creates an enormous amount of exclusivity—and makes your business irresistible. If you’re a woman who’s keen on a superb office dress, you’ll be checking out the Tory 2.0 dress. The foodie in you would want to experience Jiro’s food and the pen—no you can’t have it. There’s only one kind of it on the planet. In short, smaller numbers play a massive role in creating exclusivity.

And this factor of working in smaller numbers has a big, almost-guaranteed benefit

Let’s take the membership site at 5000bc, for example. 5000bc has been running since 2003 and yet it has fewer than 400 members. That may, at first, seem like an awfully small number when you consider that the Psychotactics list runs into several tens of thousands. Yet, that small number is responsible for generating almost 90% our income. The members know the benefit of being a member. They get first access to the courses or workshops. They get personalised attention. Being a member has its privileges both for the client as well as for the person running the membership site. The moment the membership site gets big, it almost always gets hard to handle. There are no personal relationships, everyone is trying to hawk something to someone else and there’s a constant show up of upmanship.

This concept of having smaller numbers applies not just to services, but training as well

At Psychotactics, we may boast that we don’t do joint ventures, affiliates, advertising etc., but why have we been able to get away with this for so long? The reason is because clients keep coming back. On average, if a client does one workshop (at a venue) or one live course online, they come back to do as many as four-five courses, buy several products and services. Even the clients who don’t do many courses, end up doing at least a couple.

I think you know where this line of thinking is going

The smaller numbers cause the product or service to be exclusive. The exclusivity leads to urgency. Add a good helping of lesser frequency and you have an even higher factor of irresistibility kicking in. But more importantly, this tiny number also allows you to pay closer attention to the needs of your clients. And if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not even remotely expecting to rule the world. Your core goal is to live a comfortable, satisfying life; to have really good clients; to have a solid cash flow and money reserves.

But you can have your cake and eat it too

All your products and services don’t need to be out of reach. Some products may be produced in larger numbers. You may choose to have some events with 500 people—while others are just for 25. Not everything needs to be small, but you can put a ring around some products or services and decide to keep them small forever. Or, like Jiro Ono, you may decide you never want to have 11 people for dinner.

Smaller numbers work magnificently well to create a factor of exclusivity

You get to live your life on your terms—and because you have such small numbers your product or service is always in demand.

Go smaller, not bigger. Reduce frequency, don’t increase. These are the keys to creating a real exclusivity for your product or service.

This takes us to the third element: Build Up

Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 3 and 3.

How do you make your product or service irresistible? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, can you use simple techniques to create a great offer? This episode shows you two psychological methods that we can't turn down?as humans. We love both the buffet and the specialty. No matter if you're a small business or a big one, you can use these techniques and increase your product and service sales. 

In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Buffet vs. Specialty Principle
Part 2: How Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy
Part 3: What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service?

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

 

 

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What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 1 of 3

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Imagine you’re Frank Sinatra.

No matter where you go on the planet, people know of you.

Doors open magically for you.
People can’t help but gape in wonder as you show up at an event.
So imagine a place where the great Frank Sinatra can’t enter.

It’s inconceivable, isn’t it?

And yet it happened. When Frank showed up at Studio 54, he was turned away. So was the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia’s son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys. Even the famous movie star, Jack Nicholson was unable to enter on opening night.

Studio 54 was like no other place in New York

From the moment it opened its 11,000-square-foot dance floor, it was packed with celebrities dying to get in. Olivia Newton-John, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, Tine Turner—you get the idea—they were just some of the visitors to Studio 54. Almost every night since it opened its doors on April 26, 1977, it was packed to its capacity—almost 2000 people a night. If you considered yourself cool, you wanted to get into Studio 54—but there was no guarantee you’d get in.

There was someone stopping the flow…

This someone was at the door Studio 54 night after night. He’d show up at the door at 11:30 pm and get on a step stool above the crowd. He’d pick who could get into the club that night—and who was to be turned away. His name is Steve Rubell, part-owner and the person who made sure the Studio was one of the most irresistible places in New York!

So what made Studio 54 so irresistible, when there were so many cool places in New York at the time? And what makes any product or service irresistible, even without star power? Let’s take a look at three core elements.

• Buffet vs. Specialty
• Exclusivity
• Build Up

 

Buffet vs. Specialty Principle

If you were to go to Lynda.com you’d be faced with a buffet.

On Lynda.com there are hundreds of tutorials on software, business and creative skills. In 2004 alone, there were over 100 courses on the site. And that course number has gone up exponentially. For the past few years, Lynda.com been adding more than 18 hours of content, almost every single day of the year. That means you’re likely to run into thousands of hours of tutorials topics such as Photoshop, computer animation, 3-D animation, photography—in all about 224,413 tutorials to date.

That’s a huge buffet, don’t you agree?

And as humans, we’re primed for buffets. We love the “eat all you want” concept and it’s even better if the “food” is of an extremely high quality. This means that a potential client of Lynda.com can access all their content for just $250 a year. Immediately you see why this kind of deal is incredibly irresistible. If you decide to learn a program like InDesign, you can easily do so, because there are at least a dozen courses on InDesign alone. If you want to learn to work with WordPress, hey, there’s a mountain of video instruction already in place. No matter where you look, the volume and quality of content tantalises you.

Which brings us to our first principle—the buffet principle

If you’re offering your clients an enormous amount of something, they’re instantly drawn towards it, whether they can consume it or not. When given a buffet option, few of us can stop ourselves from feeling the need to buy the product or service.

When you look at 5000bc.com, you get a buffet option

5000bc is the membership site at Psychotactics.com. The moment you get to the sales page at 5000bc, there’s a feeling of a ton of information at 5000bc. There are cumulatively, hundreds of articles on topics such as copywriting, web design, branding, lead generation etc. Which is why most clients tend to sign up to the membership site at 5000bc.

It’s more than likely they’ve been a subscriber at Psychotactics for a while, bought and read The Brain Audit, possibly even bought some other books from Psychotactics—and then they’re exposed to 5000bc. And the buffet concept kicks in. At $259 a year (remarkably similar to Lynda.com), clients can get not only a ton of curated content, but also have the opportunity to ask me dozens of questions—some of which are answered within hours, if not minutes. This concept of a buffet becomes impossible to resist, and has been the main factor in attracting clients to 5000bc since it started way back in 2003.

Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy

The magazine, Vanity Fair, describes it as the “giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse of beautiful people, endless cocaine and every kind of sex. Once you were within the velvet ropes, you were exposed to raunchiness, debauchery and creativity of an unimaginable scale.

“It felt like you were going to a new place every night,” says Kevin Haley, then a model, now a Hollywood decorator. “And you were, because they changed it all the time for the parties. Remember the Dolly Parton party? It was like a little farm with bales of hay and live farm animals—pigs and goats and sheep. The designer Karl Lagerfield’s party: an 18th century paty with busboys dressed up as courtiers, powdered wigs and then—a live reggae concert at 3 am in the morning. Another night might bring Bianca Jagger popping out of a birthday cake. Some nights might bring in a sea of glitter, another night Lady Godiva on a horse—or Hell’s Angels on Harleys on the dance floor.

Ironically, the buffet-concept represents just one way to create an irresistible offer.
The other way is the exact opposite—where you take away everything and create a specialty offer.

Remember Lynda.com where you get over 200,000 tutorials?

Remember the price? Yes, it’s $250 a year. And yet, at Psychotactics we sell an InDesign course that’s $269.

It’s not an entire course in InDesign. It’s not even a partial course. All the course promises is ONE thing. It shows you how to create an e-book in InDesign in less than an hour. If you were to learn a course in InDesign, you’re likely to take at least 18 hours—and that’s the first time around. It’s likely you’d have to go through the entire course (or at least part of the course) a second time. And then when you’re ready to create your snazzy e-book, you have to work out which part of InDesign will help you get the result you seek. It’s not inconceivable to spend 40-50 hours just to get your e-book going.

Now the specialty offer makes a huge difference to the client

Instead of wading through hours of material, they get right to the point. And this specialty concept applies to more than just courses or training. A phone. Most of us want smartphones that have all the bells and whistles. But what if you want just a cell phone that makes calls? The Doro Phone Easy 626 does just what you’d expect a cell phone to do—it makes calls. Like the InDesign course, it’s not meant for everyone, but just a smaller audience that finds it irresistible.

What does this mean for you when you’re selling a product or service?

It means you can have your cake and eat it too. When we sell the book, The Brain Audit, it is akin to a buffet (like most books). It has several chapters and spans 180 pages. Yet, elements of The Brain Audit are then isolated. For instance, one of the elements, uniqueness, is a complete course. Another element, testimonial is a 100+ page book. Clients who buy The Brain Audit are extremely satisfied with the content and applications. However, when they want to go deeper on an isolated topic, they will buy the other products as well.

Studio 54 catered to almost 2000 people a night—yet there was isolation in place

If you were part of the select few, you could go down to the basement. The basement was essentially a storage area connected by zigzagging passageways. The in-crowd was in the basement, away from the party upstairs, mostly talking through the night and drinking bottles of a vodka brand— Stolichnaya.

Even if you’re no Studio 54, you can have a smörgåsbord of goodies while at the same time putting a velvet rope over other product or services. And since we’re talking about buffets, a restaurant could have the buffet, while at the same time offering a special meal for just a tiny audience. A website designer could put together a website with all the bells and whistles—then create a service or product that was very niche and hence, irresistible.

To be irresistible, you don’t have to choose between buffet and specialty items

In reality a specialty item is easier to put together (because it’s less stuff, rather than more). In the grand scheme of things, it’s also easier to market as it has a clear point of focus. While we’ll look at all three elements: buffet/specialty, exclusivity and build up, it’s important to note that specialty is a great starting point. So start small—and charge more.

This takes us to the second element: Exclusivity.

Have a look here—for the continuation on How To Make Your Product or Service Irresistible: Part 2 and 3.

Success is good. Focus is good. Until it’s bad.

Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business.

So what’s the option? Surely it can’t be distraction?

Actually it’s a mix of both that’s required. Using the concept of “spinning plates”, you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction.

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Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

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Once upon a time in New York’s Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle.

You’ve probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I’ve kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife’s nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out.

He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn’t ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep.

When he wakes up, it’s pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it’s rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away.

This is often what happens in business, especially if you’ve got a successful business.

You get a blind spot.

You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else.

Now, almost instantly you’re wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what’s the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that’s what this episode is all about. It’s about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot.

In this episode we’re going to explore three elements.

• First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect.
• The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus.
• The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time?

 

Let’s start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect.

If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They’ve just shut off their comments.

Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they’ve decided that they’re big enough they don’t need the comments, but that’s not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place.

Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level?

The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It’s embarrassing, so they have to turn it off.

Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing.

If you made a successful out of blogging

Or Facebook or any other medium, then it’s very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, “Hey, podcasting is a big thing.” You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you’re doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot.

This is true even for us at Psychotactics.

We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot.

We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We’ve had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly.

Of course we send out a newsletter weekly.

We’ve done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We’re able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It’s great focus,” and it is.

But the ecosystem is connected.

When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we’d get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we’d get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We’re talking about really big blogs.

You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It’s not true anymore. They’ve had to relook their strategy; we’ve had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you’ve got to be watching for what’s happening around you.

This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you.

The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, “Hey, here’s a new method,” they just put the word new, improved, and we’re off like a bullet. It’s almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does.

It’s the same thing for business.

If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you’re doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they’re very tough. They’re very tough for me. They’re very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I’m on my feet for three days.

I never sit down. I’m always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I’ve already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they’re just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long.

If you want to make a success of anything you’re going to have to be willing to be there for the long run

But as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective.

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