I saw this earlier and I found it quite interesting as well as entertaining. I’ve adapted it for my site by have a go:

Twelve true facts:
1. Your reading my post
2. Now your saying/thinking thats a stupid fact.
4. You didnt notice that i skipped 3.
5. Your checking it now.
6. Your smiling.
7. Your still reading my comment.
8. You know all you have read is true.
10. You didn’t notice that i skipped 9.
11. Your checking it now.
12. You didn’t notice there are only 10 facts

Who says they can’t be mind managed?

I am offering anyone who signs up to my newsletter a FREE copy of possibly the greatest business books ever written, Napoleon Hill’s: Think and Grow Rich. The effect this has had on business people worldwide is phenomenal and has changed the way many of today’s entrepreneurs do business.

The fact that this book is almost a century old and yet holds all of its relevance, proves that this timeless manifesto will forever retain substantial influence.

Whoever reads it and practices what is outlined in the book will forever be indebted to it.

Once again, if your interested in a Free copy of this book, check out the upper right hand column of this blog and subscribe to my mailing list. Then check your email as you will then be given a link to the download page where you can get your free copy.

Enjoy,
Will

I am in the process of writing my first ebook. The ebook came out of my frustration with the whole Need Money To Make Money thing. It is yet to have a name so lets call it.. Book 1. How original.

As some of you may know, in one of my earlier business ventures I spent over 50k developing a product which never took off. 2 years of hard work and frustration led to nothing and I was left demoralised. However a little later I spent $45 and $70 respectively on 2 other projects which have since proved extremely profitable. So why was this?

The problem was I was basing my work on theories developed by people who wanted you to spend a whole heap of money. The theory was that you needed money to create a product in order to make you money. Society makes you believe that this is true and this is the way you have to do things.

Worst of all, individuals now use this as an excuse not to try and get out and do something on their own. Eventually it became the excuse for everyone any anyone who wasn’t where they wanted to be financially. Now this theory has become a viral institution and infected the minds of millions world wide.

Well my aim is to get the message out there and prove that this is not true. Financial freedom does not require you to invest thousands and thousands of dollars before you get going. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to work 18 hour days for the next 20 yrs. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to do anything unethical and I’ll prove it to you.

So this is my little super soft pre-launch. The book isn’t released but if you want to get a FREE copy of my new ebook when it is released then please put your details below and I’ll keep you updated and make sure you know about it first.

Oh an I’ll also throw in a little present when you sign-up . To find out what it is fill the form and check your email!!

My experiment was… how shall I say… a resounding flop. Nothing. Nada. Zero response from the bots. Great way to embarrass myself in front of the readers but hey, knowing me it won’t be the last!

Thanks - blogs.sun.com

I do have a couple things to say more specifically in regards to Twitter. I’m sure anyone using this platform understands how addictive and also how useful it can be. Yet there is a level of frustration of how much SPAM you get on this medium. Also one other frustrating thing is knowing that any time you spend away from your Twitter hub you miss out on plenty of great and valuable resources which would have possibly solved a current problem or issue.

So I have a couple of suggestions.

1. Introduce a user rating – rated by their peers, this rating gives you an idea of what people think of this persons Tweets. Would be simple to implement and would help improve the quality of followers you wish to follow.
2. Have a post rating. At the moment the inclination is to Retweet popular or useful posts. How about implementing a system Like Digg or Reddit where you can vote for your favourite Tweets. You can only see common “Tweeted” Tweets on your sidebar so every morning you get up… have a look at your sidebar and read all the interesting stuff.

What do you guys think?

I have just noticed something with most of my blog posts. Whenever I mention Digg or Twitter I seem to immediately get picked up by some bots which then communicated to a few websites that then link back to me.

So this is just an experiment as I have already referred to Digg and Twitter in the first sentence (and now again!). Lets just see what happens! I’ll let you know how it goes…

There is just way too much jargon out there. With the growth of web 2.0 comes the growth of terminology that we need to get our head around. If ROFL, LOL, IMAL, LMAO are not enough then comes things like tags, Digg this, Stumble that, backlink this, .tv, .me, micro-blogging, clouds, XML and XHTML. C’mon Tweeple!

So the question is, do we really need to complicate things even more? Well of course we do! That’s what Internet people do, they make things simpler and quicker by complicating them. Sort of anyway. They take a simple concept and funk up the name so you need to spend hours researching what it is only to find out you knew what it was all along, however through another term coined by someone else.

Lets take DoFollow and NoFollow links for example. The first time I laid eyes on these terms I thought here we go, another way to drive traffic or optimise your site to get an extra 3 visitors per year or give you brownie points for the search engines (also known as “page rank juice“). I decided to ignore it and move on yet these silly terms kept popping up all over the place. The funny thing is no one ever bothers to explain them, they use the term like its assumed knowledge by dropping them in and moving on. Or if they do explain, they explain them like it was some new uber feature leaving you perplexed and contemplating whether what you have learnt so far needs to be discarded to make way for this new mega-concept.

How about this:

DoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxx.com”>Link</a>

NoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxxx.com“ rel=”nofollow“>Link</a>

DoFollow is a normal link that search engines will regard as a link back to your site. A NoFollow link is a link where a search engine will disregard the link back to your site. DoFollow is better for search engines and page ranks (aka page rank juice). NoFollow not so great for search engines and page ranks. Use NoFollow to ensure best optimisation and value for paid links from your site.

Now why do we need this jargon to clutter up the net? I understand the need to term a “NoFollow” link as it is different to the standard link but why the “DoFollow”? Its a normal link!!! The problem arises when people, bloggers in particular, start refering to forums as DoFollow and NoFollow forums. Or DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. I feel sorry for the NoFollow blogs because they have been branded as “No – Follow” which to the untrained and relatively normal brain means that you “should not follow them”.

I’m calling for simple organic meanings to stay like that, simple and organic. If they are special then sure, name them, but for the basic and clean  terms keep them as is, it’s confusing enough as it is.

The world is a strange place to be in at the moment. The world of marketing seems to be even stranger yet. It appears rationality has simply gone out the window as people panic in times of economic crisis. You see examples of companies doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing and these are run by extremely intelligent people hiring other extremely gifted individuals to form teams, brainstorm, propose and ultimately decide upon the best approach. Yet there is so much crap out there its unbelievable.

Lets talk marketing. The average person (as well as the very average marketer) may think the best thing to do during times of crisis is to simply cut advertising budget and channel remaining funds into known and tested forms of media. Well lets dissect that thinking just a little.

• Times are tough and business is struggling
• Ok we’ll need to cut budget
• The budget’s have been cut so we need to be careful where we spend our money
• Lets spend it on what we did before (you mean the same stuff that got you in this position in the first place right?)
• That’s a great looking ad! (it goes well with your competitors on page 3,7,9,11,17,22 and 33. Well done.)
• Im not sure how the ad performed but it looked good didn’t it? The others keep doing it so it must be working.

Does it seems a little clearer as to why the cut budget and spend safely simply does not work? You may well need to cut your marketing budget but it doesn’t mean you should stick to your usual, often fundamentally flawed ways. Remember those usual ways are exactly what got you (you being the advertiser, not specifically as in you) stuck in the first place! The only way out is to really set yourself apart from the bunch. Be different, act different and think different. Not being different is the exact reason why people stop buying or trying your offering.

Another major problem here is that everyone is trying to target the masses with the key defining feature that bonds this group is that they are simply indifferent however at the same time represent the majority of the purchasing population. They don’t care whether your ad looks great, or how your new football boot is worn by some bloke they could never be. You need to remember that times are tough for the masses, economic and financial crisis hits the masses hard, the same masses you are targeting.

So now tell me the reasoning behind this marketing approach. You are targeting people who don’t really care and don’t have the money to get out and purchase your product. How much money do you want to waste? How many ads do you need to print and display before you realise it’s just not working?

When things are tough those products that are a cut above the rest, those that are amazing and extraordinary will prevail. Why? Because these don’t interest and are unwanted by the masses. The property market in UK, US, and Australia is struggling but what type of property are we talking about here? We are talking about the property for the masses. We are not talking about water front mansions worth several million dollars. For example take Donald Trump, who in mid 2008 during a time when the housing market was in the pits, sold his Florida home for 100 million dollars! The housing crisis we are really talking about are the typical housing prices going down and bringing a large number of people down with them. The whole economic and financial downturn could possibly be attributed to sub-prime mortgages crashing heavily accompanied with the devalued nature of the properties (all be it a slightly abbreviated explanation!). Who were these sub-prime mortgages sold to? The same people who are not buying your products now, the masses.

I don’t believe I’m extraordinarily bright but you don’t have to be. Just think about it. The old ways of marketing and advertising are useless now because the people your advertising to simply don’t care. They don’t buy FHM to look at your ads and use TV commercial breaks to fill up their drink. TV advertising and Magazine advertising once worked because they were different and the alternatives were few and far between. Traditional media requires the diverting of a user’s attention in order to absorb the message you are trying to portray. This doesn’t work anymore! People are immune to ads and subconsciously and consciously tune-out or flick to the next page whenever they are subject to an advertisement. They have seen hundreds and thousands of these before, possibly even millions over their lifetime so why would they pay attention to yours? Do you read all your spam?

So the sad truth is:

1. People don’t care
2. People don’t have the money
3. People don’t even notice.

Yet I look through a popular men’s magazine and I see hundreds of crappy examples selling the same stuff and marketing to these exact people! Amazing.

How do you get around it? Create. Create something that genuinely ads value and will appeal to a dedicated minority, NOT to the masses. Hang on you say, that is where all the people and the money is! If you have just asked this question then please go back to the beginning of this post and read again. Going straight to the masses just puts you in the ‘me too’ category and you will inevitably fail. Even in times of crises, the minority, namely those who like to try new things (innovators and early adopters) will try new things if they believe it ads value to them. Go for the niches and source the ‘’sounding boards’ and target them directly. They are the ones who will be interested in purchasing and if they like it, they will talk about it, hence why I call them ’sounding boards’.

Being different and adding value is the backbone of forming a sound business model. Watching someone acting different, doing well and then joining the group as a ‘me too’ is the recipe for mediocrity and inevitable failure. A perfect example would be Coca Cola moving into the energy drinks market and taking on Red Bull. Red Bull found a niche, offered something different and with value. It was unique in the market and didn’t even taste good but it added value to those who adopted it who then spread the word and the masses eventually came on board (once again an abbreviated story but you get the picture). In comes Coke, brings in Lift plus and Mother, says me too, makes it taste like garbage juice and says gimme my market share. What happens? It fails and it will continue to fail no matter what they try to do. Why? They tried to target the masses who are indifferent and don’t really care to change. “I’ll stick to Red Bull, thanks anyway” say the masses.

The key is to source out a niche, target the early adopters and offer them excellent value. This is how, now only in current economic conditions but from now on, you will be able to create a solid and profitable business model. Become a ‘me too’ and you will become another ‘me too’ scratching your head, waiting in line for your fortnightly government cheque thinking, what went wrong?