Self-Help: A polluted source - makes it hard to turn a profit

Why Self Help is a Polluted Income Source and what makes it hard to turn a profit

Because the most expensive advice is free.

And everyone was born with an opinion to give away.

Also, since everyone has their own world view, everyone has a unique solution to handle any problem in front of them.

So we get 2 or 3 dozen or more articles every week which never pass muster - because they are based on a single, isolated world view and have no credence. You can't believe them because no one else says they are worth anything.

These guru's out there got their credibility by delivering the goods - going out on a limb and being actually entertaining, enlightening, and educational. The best are all three.

And guess what, these are the three points Charles Helflin points out as being the key points you have to have in social media. Yes, being a self help guru is social media governed. Any celebrity status is. No real surprise. Same governs all commerce, all marketing. It's just been hidden under the lack of a feedback loop until the Internet showed up - and evolved.

Solution: quote well-known authors who already made it - become an expert on these guys. You can't just "talk" about the "current fad" in self help. Some subcategories are hotter than others, some are evergreen - like weight loss and depression. But you have to know what you are talking about - and give real, valuable, worthwhile data when you talk. Real solutions for real situations. You have to do this in a style which is entertaining, educational, and enlightening - all three.

Wayne Dyer is a great example of the above paragraph. Dissect a few series of his tapes and you will quickly see that this is sooth.

Over to you.

Some notes on "Emotional Marketing"

Actually, all marketing is emotional. Period. That's how (and the only way) you are reaching your customers.

This is because the majority of this planet's inhabitants (at least the human-kind ones) do not control their mental processes and let their "subconscious" (for lack of a better term) run their lives. The Subconscious is directly connect to the emotions. And any salesperson worth their salt knows that you appeal to the emotions first, get the sale, and then that action is justified to the Analytical in all of us.

And that applies to some 97% of us (more or less). The good news is that reciprocal of this is that percentage which will buy just about anything - they are on automatic emotion - just about 3-5%. This tells you why spam works. You can fool part of the people all the time.

The term "Emotional Marketing" is just another ploy to show how smart someone is - and get sales of their books and services. What I've read from people using this term is that they really don't know the whole background to this subject, but have hit on something which is popular and are milking it for all they can get. They really tell nothing new in what they say and pretty much repeat what has been found out by others.

(Read the "old" texts like "Scientific Advertising" and Collier's letters to see how this is done - as well as Joe Vitale and the crowd he hangs with. Anything with a Vitale testimonial is basically pretty good stuff, from what I've seen...)

Now, lets tear apart how people think and how it applies to marketing.

This started in realizing that the bulk of what I had been following was leading me down an uncertain path. Modern SEO types have been going down the "social media" path, which gives you mainly poor traffic, since it is so flighty. A recent reference to Cutts on blogging says that blogs don't bring quality (read: buyer) traffic, since the people who follow blogs are only interested in the current data. They go two or three posts deep and then leave.

There have been other comments on social media about those points as well. Not "serious" traffic. Comes and leaves quickly - OK for "traffic" but not for subscribers (while I guess you would get about 3-5%...)

That's why I've gone into eBay research. A community full of buyers, or at least shoppers - not just viewers (aka "lookie-loo's"). If you're trying to make money, you want buyers coming to your store. Period. Even a booth at a festival or trade show is there not just to give away stuff, but to get leads - you're always and consistently looking for leads you can turn into sales, and then continue to sell that client.

How does emotion fit into that?

Well, we pretty much think FROM our emotions, even though we repress the hell out of ourselves all the time in this category. Repress? Well, yes. You see, if you don't control something by understanding it and training with it, pretty much the common tool to use is brute force. I didn't say it was right or best or anything, just that most of us simply try to push our emotions down all the time, instead of working to understand why we are having that particular emotion at that particular time.

And, since we do that (I'll spare you the metaphysical reasons and scientific studies that prove it for now) pretty much all the time, someone (nearly anyone who knows one or two tools) can come around and "trigger" any particular response they want. Because these powerful emotions are just sitting there, primed and ready...

Here's where most of the sales gimmicks come in, and also explains why a formulaic sales page tends to work much better than just 3-5%. If people were basically analytical, then they'd start seeing the patterns and become immune to them. (Which has happened with most commercials - one phrase, "the louder they are, the stupider they think you are" explains more than you think and they know.) So when you see "limited time offer" and "P.S. Satisfaction Guaranteed", you are looking at working gimmicks.

OK, why do these marketing gimmicks work, then?

Short answer, repeated from above: There is the conscious and the subconscious - and basically, the subconscious is more powerful in most people, because we aren't trained to deal with it. The subconscious thinks in terms of emotions, while the conscious is far more (but not completely) logical and analytical. If the subconscious is in control, then any emotional appeal will ultimately win out.

With me so far?

Now, I've earlier gone over Maslow and Cialdini. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (or Pyramid) states and defines what the actual needs and wants of humankind are. Cialdini approaches this from hard look at what persuades people - and defines the key emotional arguments which tend to work nearly every single time.

Where these cross is: People think emotionally pretty much all the way up Maslow's pyramid - right up to the tip - almost. When people have all their actual physical needs taken care of, then they start looking at Why they are acting the way they do. Which explains why most of our philosophical progress has been done by the rich and retired (or those on secure government pensions in universities) they no longer have to work for a living to have everything they need provided. And so they can sit and think.

Now "thinking" has earned some derision because most people think from their emotions. And the sum of this is often circular thought, due to all the various feedback loops which exist in the emotional habits we carry around. These various mental habits are as myriad as we have people on this planet, since no two are the same.

Example might be: a person fears women, loves the color red, adores fresh brownies, but hates anything thats dark and wet. So a female cook giving him brownies hot out of the oven, with red M&M's on top - but still doughy in the middle - that person doesn't know what to thing of what's being handed over. Trust her, no - but are those brownies laced with something good or bad? This just stirs around and around.

If the fear wins out, our subject might refuse the brownies - but wanting to be polite, might taste them. And then put them on the side of their plate, saying they were too full from the meal to enjoy them fully - and looking at that gooey center suspiciously. There's nothing wrong with the brownies or the cook, but the emotional thinking involved casts a shadow over everything - because that dessert was dark, wet, and served by a female.

It's called "being irrational," but when we look at most of what goes for "rational" thought in our modern society, we find that label really strained.

For instance, given a complete layout of how government operates best, how economics works, the success and failure of various government programs - you'd think we could have more consensus in this country. Why does there continue to be this constant (news-driven) controversy between the two major (and several minor) political parties?

For instance, Dems have recently gotten elected several candidates who "stole a page from the Republican play book" - meaning those who favored gun rights, lower taxes, and fiscal responsibility. Now, I could see that people would logically favor more and better government where you live in cities and depend on central control of power, water, sewage, garbage collection, and other services.

In suburban and rural areas, things are more independent and people tend to want their own choice about things. People in cities might want to give up a larger chunk of their income in return for a more efficient system, particularly to handle crime. In the country, perhaps you recycle your own waste with a compactor and can burn the rest or take it to the dump once a month far more cheaply. You get your water from a well and like to hunt in season. While you certainly don't mind paying for roads, you want to see how they are spending what you give them.

The differences are that in the metropolitan areas, people tend to want systems maintained which deal with the larger numbers of people in smaller areas. In rural areas, people are more independent and are used to figuring things out for themselves.

In both cases, they tend to elect people just like them and so preserve their quality of life. "Tax and spend" Democrats vs. "Less taxes, less government" Republicans. (Of course this changed in the last few years, as we had both sides spending money without seeming restraint - the only difference was that one side increased revenue by lowering taxes, obviously not enough.)

And you can tell I live in a rural area...

Now, back to emotional thinking.

You'd think that any party, in order to get a majority, would have to reflect the wishes of its electorate. And the Democratic party has a unity problem right now, just as the Republicans did. There were "liberal" Republicans elected and in the fold, as the "Blue-Dog" (conservative) Democrats have recently been elected into Congress. Liberal ideas of more government (which requires more taxes to pay for more social programs) conflicts with ideas of less government and so less taxes required and people can make up their own mind about what to do with what they earn.

If you disagree with me above, you can check your own feelings out as you read the above. See if you can take a completely "analytical" approach to anything regarding these four subjects: Death, Taxes, Politics, Religion. Most people are afraid of Death and hate Taxes. Few people can agree on Politics and will argue (or have snide comments in private) with anyone in opposition. Religion has been historically and modernly the cause of more wars than any other "cause". (And the first point where people first discovered it was a small, interconnected world, was when you saw during World War II that God was on both sides at once - or at least each side thought so...)

Our use of this in Marketing is very simple: appeal to people's emotions and then they will figure out how it "makes logical sense" to them. That's why you push benefits instead of features. People want to know how your product will make them feel good, not anything else.

Price is emotional.

People will pay what they think it's worth to them. Meaning: how will it make them feel. If they get something cheap, they know it's cheap. If you sell an exclusive seminar with a top-notch guru who will help them get financial security or independence - or help them find their "mojo" or keep their health longer, etc. All the italicized words are emotional in context.

I could go on and on with examples. They are simply too easy to find.

But there's a secret to this - and it's been known for ages...

OK, now outside of a few self help authors, most people don't want you to find out that you can think for yourself and bring your emotions under your own control. One reason is to control you, but probably more that they don't want their own emotional world rattled. People expect people to act like them. Meaning, repress your emotions and try to act "sane" like the rest of us.

Nope. Doesn't work that way. Those few who do actually figure out how to work with their emotions instead of for their emotions are the ones who actually control the vast majority (several authors have this as high as 97%) of the world's wealth. Now, before you go off onto some emotional rant about how this is obviously a great and hidden conspiracy, let me tell you that the secrets of how to work with your emotions and how to develop and control wealth have been written up over and over and over, by author after author after author - all through our history and through probably all the religions on this planet (probably, only because I haven't had time yet to study them all, nor has anyone else).

The Bible tells you how to do this in both the Old and New Testaments. Older than that, these "secrets" were printed in the Vedas and told in oral tradition for thousands of years before that. Our oldest philosophical legacy - Huna - is very exact in what has finally been published about this ancient belief-system.

Modernly, it's been published through "The Secret" DVD and earlier, by Earl Nightingale and his "Strangest Secret." Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Stephen Covey, all these authors have studied, written, and published time and again about how to get this data and get a grip on your own emotional world - and become a roaring success in everything you do.

There is a caveat here - and probably the kicker to the whole subject: you can't exploit this data, even if you figure it all out. Because the universe is set up with one very exact rule of reciprocity. It's called the Golden Rule, but it's also known as the Law of Attraction, among other things. Simply - if you try to cheat someone else, to profit at their expense, YOU are the one who is going to wind up cheated and have an expensive lesson.

How are all these people, these few, getting insanely rich? By helping others to improve their lives, by giving a great service or product and requiring that people pay what they feel it's worth. They are constantly working to improve the world's condition - and are paid very highly to do so. Those people who know this secret and aren't rich are living very nice, quiet, peaceful lives and have everything they want - but this is by their own choice.

More marketing notes - how to use this emotional stuff...

Back to marketing - lets go over some of the rest of these notes I worked out during my day job session this weekend:

• All demand (all needs and wants) are predicted by Maslow's Pyramid.
• People associate objects with their feelings. This is all there is to "positioning" and "association" and "hot buttons."
• Marketing is simply finding what objects people want (and buy), then supplying that demand.
• Emotions are "hard-wired" through social training, partially stemming from genetics, but more due to family, schools, and pop culture pressures throughout our lives.
• Any emotional training you have had, any mental habit, can be undone and retrained.
• Emotions are a limited band, however, which don't apply to the pinnacle of Maslow's Pyramid - you simply have "out-grown" them up there.
• Drugs bring back the physical response that emotions cause on the body - and so act in reverse; addicts are those who can't control or repress their emotions enough to live responsible lives.

Now for some practical applications -

In keyword research, look for emotions and objects represented as emotions. Do theme research for keywords used in the text surrounding top-selling items to see what emotions are being called for in the sales copy. HammerTap for eBay is a great tool to discover these words - since you have a very defined approach to what is actually selling out there, what their keywords are and what these are selling for.

Avoid getting traffic for traffic's sake. You have to get an exchange for your bandwidth. Attract buyers, not viewers. Minimally, you want shoppers - who can be converted to buyers and then to lifelong clients. Social media (including blogs) is what started this off. Most of the social media are utterly devoted to servicing peoples' feelings and sensations. This is why they are poor shoppers and worse buyers. These viewers are simply there for the moment.

When Google and other search engines are following social media so closely - they are simply following the money. Advertisers (another addiction) buy so that people will visit their site - and all advertising is based on emotional content. Google is in search of great content - which translates to INFOTAINMENT.

Not so bad, since our recording and movie (and most of the publishing) industries are devoted to satiating people and their emotional "requirements." This is a prime way to capitalize on this problem - give people easier ways to get their emotional lifts. Make them feel safer, better, healthier, more popular, etc. (Like in the cars and trucks we buy. Wouldn't you like electric windows with that CD changer?)

This predicts/explains why information products are such a hit. Instant downloads are perfect, particularly where they are video or audio products. Of course you have to charge for this - but hey, they're valuable aren't they? (eBay currently has the problem of outlawing digital downloads, only because spammers were cutting into their profit margins and diluting their product base. But other solutions are being found...)

Of course your product has to actually help people (or minimally, do no harm...).

Rapid Summary

1. For the vast majority of us, your emotions play no small part in how you think and what you buy. Your reactions practically govern your life. Something advertising has played off for years - ineffectually at best.
2. While you can find authors who will tell you exactly how to get control over your emotional scene, you can still get your marketing accomplished if you know to utilize emotions in your sales copy.
3. And if you want to make fist-loads of money, you'll be looking for products which are emotionally popular as well as high demand/low supply.
4. But your biggest resource will be in finding products which help people to move out from under the cloud of their emotions and start to live life under their own control.

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How to Get New Business Ideas - self help book promotion through social media

When you have the secret genius recipe for Getting New Business Ideas, you want to get the word out.

And that's what I've been doing this week. Took a lot longer than I thought. But the result has been worth it.

Slideshare has some user hurdles I'm just now jumping - and these are the preliminary findings:

• Slidecasts (contain audio) do better than simple Powerpoint. More exposure faster.
  
• Can't be overly long. Ideal is probably around 3 minutes, like a pop song.
• Lots of high-quality visuals, not a great deal of text on each slide.
• Like articles, you need to give valuable data quickly, concisely.
  

Technical details:

• Very active community, so only post your best and final version.
• Means you have to have your audio ready for sync-ing right after you post your slideshare (in order to make a slidecast).
• Links are active, not no-follow - means you get link love from Slideshare when you comment on someone else's creation (or your own). Search engines follow those links.
  
• Google loves Slideshare currently and posts your stuff at the top of their rankings within minutes.

My point with posting this was to get the word out about my new book - but also to help people with what I'd found. (And in the process, tell people that I was available for hire as a genius idea-finder.)

Earlier work was just on YouTube and didn't go anywhere. Here's the video:





As you can see, it's not bad, but isn't the same quality as my later slidecast:

| View | Upload your own

Comparing the two - I've gotten just over 500 views through YouTube on the first video in the month since I posted it. Slideshare has given me over 230 views in 12 hours, with three or four people favoriting it.

Just for grins and giggles - here's the same data (pix and audio) converted to a YouTube video:



Technical How-To's:

In this case, I tried something new, as well as keeping to the established ways of doing things.

New - created this in Corel Draw as it doesn't have to have a template like OpenOffice Impress (or MS Word's PowerPoint). It's an excellent graphic layout tool, though it remains a niche product. CorelDraw outputs direct to PDF, and so can import into Slideshare easily.

Old - learned from my earlier mistakes and held off posting the slideshare until I had the audio online.

Here's that audio from Archive.org:



You'll note that I've got two soundtracks here. This falls under new-based-on-old. I put a short and a longer soundtrack up for the same slides. You see, I sit on a wealth of data on self help, as well as how to create/unleash genius abilities. So the first short version (the popular one) was just to create the overview. The longer one gives the down and dirty of how and why I say what I do.

Now, with those sound tracks posted, I then finished up posting the slideshare and quickly converted it to a slidecast.

Why this sequence? So the initial impression is with sound. Higher value for the visitor experience.

Creating the slideshow was first, but posting it was fourth. Audio posting was third. First was creating a one-page landing page. Second was working out a press release and getting this into my article submitter program.

The web page is the end-point I want people going to. The press release drives people to the slidecast and my websites. But I didn't wait to get all my press release sites contacted before I got the slidecast up and running.

Following all this promotion is this blog post, which I'll social post.

Different from earlier work is the absence of an article to put on the article directories. I'd already posted the "Genius Recipe" so I didn't figure I could revamp it again. (And, spending a week on this slidecast, plus other distractions, has put me behind on other work...)

- - - -

So this about wraps up the scene. Oh yes, a word from our sponsor:

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HOW TO MAKE A GENIUS is as little understood as geniuses themselves.

Genius, as the ancients knew, is completely spiritual in origin. And taking a metaphysical approach to this is where we start making progress in understanding this extreme state of ability (or talents). Basic premise to a book like this is to assemble all the known data on genius (genii) and to publish this as a collection of works.

Want to become a genius?

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Note: contains controversial statements which contradict the best modern authorities.

How to tell about what you know to be true - keyword modifiers and organic SEO

Brought to my attention by SEOSmarty, this is a fascinating piece.

While I bring you the below as immediately useful, there is also more data on the page about what search engines like to find on your page. Bulleted lists, blockquotes - surprise, surprise - just the things people like to read (compare with the copywriting section of An Online Millionaire Plan).

Essentially, usable content is king.

Always back up your social media marketing with sound organic SEO techniques.

How to Grow an Organic Search Ranking using Thematic Search Modifiers | SEO Design Solutions SEO Blog: "The “most searched” obvious keyword modifiers first;

* Company
* Services
* Professional
* Best
* Top
* Leading
* Internet
* Organization
* Marketing
* Business
* Solution
* Online

Then the less obvious “Money Phrases”, such as:

* Rates
* Pricing
* Deals
* Affordable
* Offers
* Packages
* Quality

Then the GEO Specific Local Search Modifiers Such as:

* City Name
* Surrounding Suburbs
* State (including abbreviations NYC, IL, FL, WA, etc.)
* County Name"

How to publish your work - and why we're here...

These plethora of niches, what do they tell us? Of the "many paths up the mountain", you won't know other paths unless you sample them, they won't know of your successes unless you publish broadly and through several venues.

My current ways to post:

Text - for my own use.
Blog - for other subscribers (and I maintain a separate blog for each type of message depending on relative content.)
Static mini-web -
Press release -
Slidecast - much wider approach, and picked up by search engines extremely rapidly
Stumbleupon / social media - much, much, wider way of telling people about something
Video - a pretty saturated medium, but again - wide in ability to let people know

(My blogs all send emails to my gmail account, where they are automatically archived and able to be searched through Desktop Search - so I can find anything I've written. Nice for research, as long as you remember your own keywords...)

Reasons for all this posting? Because others might get some use, some traction, get some lessons from my own learnings.

And I'm here, like the rest of us, to learn and to continue to evolve. But my progress is limited only by how I help others.

Gloom and Doom about "Recession" - not for online retailers...

If you listen to the news (and I really feel sorry for those who take them seriously), you'll notice that Obama has just inherited a full scale recession and has his vice-president Clinton all over government bail-outs while he reinstitutes FDR's socialist programs...

No, seriously - look, the global economy goes through a recession about every six years or so. And presidents don't cause recessions, they are just the fall guys for it. Recessions are just adjustments. They become Depressions when the government steps in and tries to solve things.

Current problem? Greedy bankers and real estate companies. Situation was over-valued houses and the scam that a house is an "asset" you pay on for 30 years. (Assets make you money, they don't cost you money. A house that is fully paid off is an asset. A rental house or an apartment complex that are bringing in more money than they cost you to maintain are assets.)

What to do? Ride it out. Let a few banks get swallowed up for a fraction of what they're worth. Make some bogus real estate agents go get a real job, instead of scamming people.

How to ride it out? Online marketing and sales. If you hadn't noticed, people are buying more and more online every single year, regardless of the brick-and-mortar folks. Actually, near exponential growth.

Paypal accepts Euros - doesn't it?

Cheaper dollar means Europe can buy more from us. This makes our agricultural products very nice-looking. And so we can quit subsidizing our farmers by paying them to not raise crops. Yes, the stuff we import is going to cost more. So we make more locally - sounds like some jobs are going to be coming back from overseas...

Oh - and what happens with the rest of the planet? Well, they are pretty much tied in with us, so our recession is their recession. The Euro is high right now? Don't look over your shoulder - things balance out over time.

But if you're selling your product through the Internet, especially low-input products like information, you can say, "Recession, what recession?" - because your overseas friends will see incredible value in your now-bargain-priced-in-American-dollars product.

What about all of the gloom and doom stories fretting about the economic slowdown impacting spending on marketing and advertising in general? Hotchkiss said that the increased growth in search marketing is happening at the expense of print magazine advertising, website development and other marketing functions. "It shows that people are looking at reallocation of budgets—we've heard that anecdotally from clients as well," he said.

The North American SEM industry grew to $12.2 billion in 2007, a 30% increase over 2006 spending of $9.4 billion. While the growth rate slowed from the torrid 62% increase in 2006 spending, total spend nonetheless exceeded earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007. And significantly, North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.

The drivers behind the higher estimate are advertiser demand, rising costs of keywords and pay-per-click campaigns, an increase in the number of small-to-midsized businesses using search engine marketing, greater consumer participation in search and increased interest in behavioral and demographic targeting of searchers.

The State Of Search Engine Marketing 2007

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Birth of a Sales Tool - a farce from Fast Company's Chris Dannen

The problem with this piece is that while he touts that Sohn is "reinventing" sales, he is really only paying for qualified leads - which is as old as Rome's 7 Hills. Dannen hasn't done his homework - or is overly enamoured by Sohn.

BUT - the interesting thing to note in this piece is the way it is written. You could actually write such an article and float it into existence under a nom-de-plume and get it rolling around the blogosphere as a buzz in and of itself. The style isn't that much different from a press release married with an interview. The questions are short, the answers long.

Consider this "interview" I did with the "Midwest Journal".

It's just not that hard to do.

But don't buy this guy's claim. He's just re-marketing an old saw for new woodcutters. And the first person he sold was this writer...

The product of his observations -- called Salesconx -- is an online marketplace for sales contacts, where salespeople sell each other contact information about the folks in their Rolodex. Let's say you're a seasoned salesperson; other Salesconx users can pay you a small fee (usually about $100) for an online "introduction" in which you introduce them to one of your contacts. The idea is that every introduction be mutually beneficial; a snowplow salesman, for example, might connect a tire salesman and a truck salesman. Sohn hopes the marketplace will be trustworthy enough that it will allow top salespeople to leave inefficient practices like cold-calling or mass-emailing behind. Think of it as LinkedIn meets eBay.

Birth of a Sales Tool: LinkedIn Meets eBay - CRM - Salesconx - Evan Sohn | Fast Company

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