Have you ever seen fairy lights on a Christmas tree? Each bulb is connected to each other. Yet if one bulb fuses… The next one seems to fail. And then the chain seems to break. So if you started out with five hundred lights on your Christmas tree, the failure of one bulb could take […]
The Concept of Spinning Plates
Most people want to do everything. They want to do blogs, websites, video, Twitter, Facebook and add another twenty thousand things to that list. What’s worse is that they get bad advice. People giving advice tell you, you should branch out, do different things. And that you if you do different things, you can become […]
Why Photographs Should Never Have A ‘Problem’
When we look at a photograph, we start seeing ourselves, even without meaning to do so. This is why you can never put a ‘problem’ in your photograph. But how can that be true? When you see the newspaper photos, they always seem to have something that’s blown up, or burnt down, or something that […]
Why Negative Feedback Is A Gift
How can negative feedback be a gift? That sound ridiculous. Because no matter if a customer is screaming at you, or whispering their irritation in your ear, the feedback still rankles. And jolts. And you feel like defending yourself. But remember, feedback is never personal. We just take it personally. When a person says: your […]
A Year Called July
July was always the worst month of the year for me! In the years 1997, 1998, 1999, I dreaded July. Because you see, back then I wasn’t in marketing—I was a cartoonist. And somehow in July all the cartooning work mysteriously dried up. The phone would stop ringing. And it would stay dead no matter what […]
Why Profit Is a Poor Indicator of Your Business Worth
Most companies benchmark their business on revenue earned. Which is stupid, eh? I mean revenue means nothing if you don’t benchmark the actual profit. But is it stupid to benchmark profit as well? Yes, it is. Because gross revenues and profit are a nice-to-have but not critical indicator. The most critical indicator in a business […]
Why We Fail: An Understanding of Momentum
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day […]
How To Treat A Guest: The Stupidity of Autoresponders
Let’s say you have a dinner party. You send out invitations. You arrange for the catering. You have the finest wine. And when the guest knocks on the door, what do you do? You send your ‘personalised robot’ to say hi and welcome the guest through the doors, right? Just like you do with your […]
How to Increase Your Prices: Yes-Yes Factor
You’re probably moaning about how you can’t increase prices. The Yes-Yes is a systematic way to makes prices work for you. We’ve tested …this Yes-Yes Factor across products and services for the past 6 years. It doesn’t matter what the price (and we’ve tested products/services from $50-$10,000): It just works. And the only reason it […]
Pricing Between Home Study and Live Courses
How do you price a home study version of your course? Do you offer it at a 10% discount?Or 20% discount?Or 50% discount? How about a 0% discount instead?First of all, if you’re creating discounts, you’re plainly silly. You can generate just as much traffic and conversion to your products and services, without giving a […]
