Howdy Yall <–heavy Texan accent.

Right now I’m in Austin, unwinding after the amazing weekend at Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss’s Traffic and Conversion Summit. I wanted to Welcome the new people I met this weekend thanks for dropping by, and for those of you who didn’t go get you a brief update and share a few ninja or is that cowboy tidbits.

If you didn’t make it, sucks to be you.  Probably $25K+ worth of  information were presented this weekend, for some of us next to free, and there were some tips I’ve never heard anywhere including some real doozies submitted by audience members today, that took even Perry and Ryan back.

I’m going to use R+P from now to refer to Big Bear and Little Bear …er little Napolean, er Ryan and Perry.

The No BullSh!t  MiniReview – Traffic Conversion Summit

Sadly this is going to have to be a short review..there isn’t actually a repeat product, and none of you will get to see it, it’s more to let you know what happened.

A 3 day 100% content, pitch free, R+P only event?

That’s how the event was sold.   Definitely some Bullsh!t there.

First there WERE pitches:

• a small 14 person $25K mastermind group P&R are putting together..not aggressively pitched but still a pitch. They should have made that known before hand, it might have been a selling point.
• $200-$300 DVD copies of the 3 days audio and video,  only available to attendees and not for sale uncut…there are some Perry uncut moments which were hella funny. This is a reasonable cost, would prefer download, but I understand.
• a plug for Infusionsoft and a few other vendors, but here it gets tricky…if you use a tool heavily and there’s not any other option on the market, is that a pitch?   R+P have a self proclaimed “frankenstein” approach, I was blown away at how many systems they use.
• The worst pitches actually came from the audience, there should be a no pitch policy from attendees.  Some attendees I thought abused mic privledges..multiple long pitches while up, and religious ones, rambling on, please be respectful.

but on the scale of pitchfestness these almost didn’t register, at say 2-4% .

Perry & Ryan & US in a locked room together… with the lights dimmed.

Second it said only Perry and Ryan would be speaking.  Not true either, there was 1 other standalone speaker on CPV networks (which I’d never heard of…but very cool, if scary if you get wrong) and probably 3-6 other assists, including some enlighting time with Ryan’s implementation team which was somewhat  spontaneous.  There was a good section on offline marketing and some impressive stats when using these approaches effectively.

Drinking from the Firehose 3 days x 9am-7pm…

That’s how it was pitched.  Which immediately triggered, a bit of fear…that’s a lot time and info to focus. A tiny bit of bullsh!t.  We ended at 1pm on Sunday. Got started late.

Still this was true in spirit, there was so much information we went over every day it overflowed, and will still be having a long webinar and a video to cover the things we couldn’t get to today. Like customer stick rate and the mysterious “Weapon”

Sometimes bigger is not better.  My biggest concern about big multiday long seminars is wondering how much of the material that will be retained or can acted on once home.  My experience with most events is the take away is very low, especially if there are multiple fast speakers.   Even if your taking detailed notes as fast as I.

However they did several great tactics definitely worth cloning  in your seminars, to maintain attention and tack comprehension. These I can share, use them!

4 Tips to explode seminar attendees attention and take away.

These are excellent strategies used by R+P.

Eliminate Interference Just like taking off an in an airline. Have them turn off cellphones and laptops, encourage peer pressure so nobody has a laptop open. Email and web surfing are huge attention busters…

Do frequent breaks so people can get their coffee, net, nicotine fix as well as feed them sugar

Prenote Take notes for them ahead of time.  Like use this printout to make taking notes for your audience 4x easier.

they printed out all the slides like this.

With the slide thumbnail on the left and several lines to jot notes on, about 6 per page, amazingly most the slides were perfectly readible at that size. Except for some white text on yellow background which is 100% readable exactly nowhere and drawing lines to point out important features on screenshots.

Give an action item page and hot tips. Basically a single page each for people to summarize key stuff, and keep it from getting lost in 100’s of pages of notes.

They offered relatively low cost unedited versions of the event in a non-downloadable version for attendees which is great. By day 3 my head was already full so I missed a ton.  It would be even better if they had a transcription of the event so it can be skimmed.

Timed Delivery just like coated asprin. One of the most subtle tips is they handed out the printouts  for the section right before the presentation. While this was somewhat a break in the flow it kept people from jumping forward and not paying attention, diminishing overload, and somewhat of an icebreaker when people were handing things out. Same trick works in continuity programs.

Rotate speakers. having multiple speakers with different styles helps keep peoples attention and on long breaks like this, keep people from burning their voice out.  Ryan and Perry are perfect, almost like good cop and bad cop. They play off each other well.

Oh and deliver good content, and allow people to ask questions and raise objections is huge at keeping people’s attention.

The resultant focus was so intense you could hear the audience turn the pages of notes at the same time!

Unanimous Standing Ovations

Perry and Ryan setout to create an unsurpassed value and totally overdeliver and pulled it off into  standing ovation territory.

Standing ovations can be cliche, and generally being contrarian, I don’t feel compelled to join the crowd.  However I’ve put on seminars of this scale and it was amazingly smooth. Most people will not appreciate how hard it is to make it look this easy AND record it AND order stuff.  There were a few camera and remote control glithes, minor details, but they are par for the course.  When it came to thank Perry + Ryan,  and the options were, clap or stand or scream, I chose a and b, and I was one of the first ones up.

It’s the  things you can’t predict that make going to these events so exciting.  I have  P+R’s stuff already from the solid and cheap get money from google system which has most of their products which I know reasonably well. I expected far less new information. For every hour of material there are onionskins peeled back, revealing of  insights and tactics they never put into courses.  The candid nature of talking about vendors, who’s good bad etc is something that usually costs seriously tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in testing and headaches

I’m pretty sure this would be an IM  event of the year,  how often do you get the peek behind the curtain of guru’s actually making money in action?  Unreserved access for 3 days to interrupt them while presenting with questions.  The use of  the nifty named things like  “The machine”  was just 1 of about 12 specific new invaluable things I learned, each of them alone being worth the trip. I’m so excited to start putting these things into action…and improving on them in a few cases.

One of the shocking and sad things is that this will be the last seminar like this for awhile..possibly ever. Unlike most Guru’s and one of the reasons I like them, is  Perry and Ryan actually make more money of the real niche businesses than the do the IM training business, and since they haven’t touched those businesses in 6 months or more and have many new tricks will be returning to focusing on their biggest money makers and turning of the lights on new product creation for an unknown period of time.

2 Instant Businesses created FOR me in 4 hours.

Talk about Shock and Awe, I basically dropped everything I came to the conference with and came home with  not 1 but 2 *Instant* businesses mostly created for me.   This is how I feel:

Once backends in place, both are easily million dollar a year businesses, and eventually way way more and much better than the products I’ve been working on for awhile.

Friday my top product in development were:

1. Infoproduct Health And Vanity
2. Infoproduct Productivity
3. Infoproduct Weight Loss

Today it looks like

1. New Application
2. New Info product

My mastermind group is going to be so confused shifting gears

This was despite by best efforts at being a wall flower. Counter intuitivelyI ended up landing new amazing connections and new opportunities.

• Intimate Dinner for 2,with the $80 Million Dollar Man. .. and he paid for it. Wait that came out wrong, rather trying to keep things on the cheap while I dump 110% of my funds into products dev. However If I were into believing in Fate, this would be one of those supporting cases.     I got there late the first day opting to take the bus, and of the 300 seats only a couple were left.  Like guided by traffic cops,  I got directed to the right side with a few pointed arms, and waved to sit down next to a fellow we shall name R.  During the breaks we got to talking, turns out we are about the same age in internet marketing.  Existing in parallel universes he in the business world and I in the tech+creative. We hit it off so well, we spent probably 5 hours tag teaming helping each other’s business from our vantage points.  Ironically both of us are not prone to socializing.   I discovered later he runs about a dozen corporations, just one that does $80 million a year spread across paintball to freight logistics, and has a vast amount of passion and experience he loves sharing it.  There were 300 people in that room, talk about luck!
• Instant Business,. R and I got to talking about one of his new projects a Millionaire Support Group, and he got a little stuck trying to market it.  I have several tools in my content creation framework, I pulled out one of my favorites called Aida’s Aces, a checklist system for creating marketing campaigns for personality based businesses which fit perfectly for what he was needing.  I ran through the I’Do’m mindset activator right before, walked him through it and he loved it.  The lightbulb in his head immediately lit up, and he then proceeded to exploded that single nugget it into a massive industry I was kinda blown away.. much as the inventor of post it notes is probably blown away by how many are sold.  Just not something that occurred to me that is a huge business..in addition if he said I’d make it into a product has the network to get it out to them. And creating that product would only take me a couple of weeks due to my high standards.
• How I landed a JV deal with Ryan Deiss with no list, no connections, and no real product. That would totally sound like internet marketing crap but it’s crazily true.   Let me summarize,
  • Saturday morning I had nothing, not even an intention of changing course.
  • Saturday afternoon I had a new idea from using the I’Do’m on the presentation and just listening. Opportunities pop up all the time if you listen for them.
  • Saturday evening I had a viable working prototype…Admitedly this is because I’ve very good at this sort of thing.  I’m going to keep things quiet for now as to what it is.
  • I create a demo video, I took word pad to create some ’slides’ and used Jing to create a short 2 minute video, as real software always breaks in first demo, I swapped between wordpad and the playback to do the title sections no editing other than pausing Jing, how’s that for ghetto?
  • Sunday afternoon I presented the audio version to the crowd in an Ninja tricks section, which got Ryan’s attention, and gave my email out after the benefit had been established.
  • Sunday late afternoon I had both a invitation from Ryan to have him do a mailing for me on it when it’s done, and one of Ryan’s team essentially design the next version of the product for me, use their many products as beta test with me (proof!), and give me a price point.  *BAM*

This shows creating products is easy and doesn’t have to be complicated, just listen to what people *really* want, look for holes in what’s out there or ways to make things better or  faster or easier or cheaper, and can be made inexpensively and in time.  Tap into pain points and enthusiasm of your core audience, interview them, if you ask the right questions and they will often amaze you with the insights of what they want and what they don’t want,

In more potential fun, one of the books at the hostel lending library is perfect for an iphone app. ..and it’s mostly pictures and almost doesn’t make sense as a book.  4 PhD’s created it, free and out of print. Same idea, different medium.

Back to Los Angeles in 12 hours.

At the hostel I’m staying at, Beatles “Come Together” is playing, perfect theme….everything truly is coming together at a far more rapid rate than I had imagined.  Needless to say I’m ecstatic about all that’s transpired.   So I went out to celebrate, Guinness + skeeball, cafe’s, live music, wandering around downtown Austin, so many things to experience

Austin is a weird town, half of it is partying and half of it is closed on Saturday and more so on Sunday.  Wandering in and out of stores, I ended up getting a killer if slightly loud texan shirt as a souvenir.

Heavy rock is everywhere here, the cab driver on the way back had DevilDriver cranked up and pointed me to a video of the largest mosh pit 3500 people and propellor hair spinning (watch it). Tripppy

It feels good to be heading home to LA tomorrow.  Rock on!

Be sure to check out the TroyNotes special report Rock’n Austin 2009