• Zeus controlled the elusive lightning of the heavens.
• Hades controlled gold and the underworld.
• Poseidon controlled the ephemeral water covering most the planet.

• Lightning is SEO (aka) organic, it’s free as rain, very powerful if you get right..and damn ellusive to catch.
• Gold is Paid Traffic, get it right buy your way anywhere, get it wrong and you endup broke in Hades, with no easy way out.
• Water is Social Media, always changing, always flowing, everywhere.

This could be Epic Traffic..

1. Find hot targeted prospects using Twitter Search
2. Get your offers in front of them PROPERLY then drive traffic.

See..Jim Henson was totally right, puppets aren’t just for kids.

I got a kick out of this parody of Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins. If you know them it will make you smile with the accuracy. Clearly an inside job… Got the blond hair, inside phrases and everything.

And it was done by an insider..at least partly. It’s Mike Koenigs’s team who is also based in San Diego.

Xraying this, I want you to take away from this video other than it’s funny. Funny is serious business.

1) Look and copy at the format in your own videos: Opening Branding animated element, clearly visible and readable logo in the top form a subtle call to action to click over to the site and find out more. Engaging content that is likely to be passed around. This *IS* an ad, but this is all under the radar because it’s been wrapped up in entainment.

To be honest, puppetry is probably much easier to shoot than live video outdoors and requires no makeup. You don’t have to look good on camera and you don’t even have to wear clothes. You can use any puppets you like.

2) Video quality and video scripting counts. Entertain + Inform and that takes having people who live and breathe this stuff. If you don’t do it, get someone who can. You don’t have to have fulltime people you should start thinking how to outsource this work on an as needed basis.

3) production values in the IM space are rapidly starting to approach that of TV. Just think 5 years go, video was nowhere, now it’s replaced most serious sales letters. At home hardly anybody watches normal TV on old “Tube” sets, I know because when I walk around my neighborhood in LA I see these old TV’s sitting on the curb right next to the flat screen box ready to be garbage collected. I hope your sales pages are in there too.

4) production needs teams of people, like that video was brought to you by Mike Koenigs’s “new” company which has at least 7 people to do the writing shooting, creative etc. How many people do you have in your team?

P.s. If you like adult puppets check out the ADULT improv + telepuppetry called Puppet Up. Puppets + Alcohol + No Holds Barred

P.P.S. If you like puppets you might also like a cartoon of Frank my team created. with Kung FU Surfing Action

I just got some disappointing news.

One of my favorite best bang for the buck, no bullshit gurus just had his IM training site taken down, not because of what he did do -which was create great content-, but rather what he *didn’t* do.

He’s was heading towards doing a a launch soon, of his killer ’self contained stealth traffic system’.  To get the ball rolling he ran a contest with a killer prize, with the scoring determined by number of comments, tweets, links found etc.  Pretty brilliant traffic generation technique.

This got the competition blazing hot, and well some like to use *EVERY* trick in the book to win.

Some started spamming forums, ppc etc, which lead to complaints, which lead to the hosting provider shutting down Keith’s account, and ALL the brilliant posts, content, comments with it.  Which really sucks as I was learning quite a bit from going back in time, and also from the community of readers I was starting to get to know and like.  Thankfully I did take good notes so I haven’t lost everything.   That and the recent announcement from Jeff Walker that he’s taking down the Product Launch Formula 2.0 site so he can relaunch it has also made me wonder how much these purchases are really just 1 year or less subscriptions.   In all honesty here it is a year later, and I still haven’t gotten past module 2.0.

While I generally trust Keith, one of my biggest questions is what will happen in the course I and several others were in and which was paid for, and wasn’t compeleted before the site was taken down, quite the opposite we were just getting into the good stuff on traffic from multiple sources which Keith had graciously decided to expand on.

They were using the site both as a blog and a membership site for the paid content, which was a mixed bag in my opinion.   When you have a active blog of say a post a day, it becomes easy to get sidtracked with all the content.  Even if I love the content and the pitches, I feel it fair if you’ve paid admission to get a  distraction and pitch free zone, so I can focus on the learning.

So really while Keith didn’t do anything wrong, it’s what he didn’t do which I guess is the lesson to all, in VERY being clear.

I don’t know the full scope of the damage, but it really drives home to me the need to 1) sandbox and 2) have backups/fallbacks. But I totally can appreciate how this is easy to put on the sideburner as how often do these sort of things happen?

From his email he says he’s working with the hosting provider but they are ..rightfully.. pissed so may not give the site back.    Damn good thing this wasn’t his primary business!  I’m guessing if he were using one of the various automated blog backups it would have been easier to get another hosting provider and the site moved over.  Using dnsmadeeasy I can usually have a site switched over to a backup provide almost instantaneously (great for launches!!!)

Sandboxed the  premium content site from the main blog would have helped,  at least Iwould hope that if one site were taken down it wouldn’t destroy all the others.  But I don’t know yet all the ins and out of hosting providers and how vindictive they are. Google will ban you for life for one bad account, I certainly hope we aren’t headed into a “you need a license to host a website on the internet”  too.

I was intending to do a better job of explaining why Keith is so damn cool, and his approaches so stealth cutting edge, but I’m very busy trying to get more useful things, and now…until he figures out the site or an alternative, kinda doesn’t matter, as I can’t send you anywhere.

Le Sigh.

I got asked today by Christian (aka PPCNinja) about what I thought of the Magic Bullet Conference in San Diego this last weekend.

It’s been so busy this week that I haven’t really had time to think about it.  This video (shown in the opening part) does convey the feel of it. Well polished, with So Cal hip hop flare.

Overview of the Magic Bullet Seminar San Deigo

It was my first major affiliate conference so had nothing to compare it to.

These sorts of events have a lot of elements to it.  The content presented, the world class speakers with their various niches, the various gurus who show up to see them. The people of like minds who have spent $2k to use the software, live and breathe this stuff,

Personally It was a very worthwhile event.  I enjoyed most all of it, except got about 13 hours of sleep over the days, and had to use an alarm clock, not used to that…  but totally worth it

There could have been no talks and it still would have been worthwhile. I met SOO many people which I doubt I could ever meet on the web.  The material I learned gave a good balance of stuff I can use right now and more importantly where some of the brightest minds see the industry -and us with it- are going.

The Magic Bullet Seminar Speakers and Material

The seminar covered the arc of from the very basics, to stuff so advanced you needed an NDA to hear about it.  There were no punches really held back on some black hat sort of material that become necessary evils in parts of the game to succeed.

Mindset Matters

They started with a heaping of mindset, which bordered on new agey at times..clearly the Mind Movies are working.  I found this interesting becuase it was not money focused, and also because for the  creative and techy types I normally hang with,  there is an intrinsic force mindset is almost never the issue.   Quite the opposite, creative types, have no problem with drive it’s the pragmatics of doing the work which isn’t creative and fun.

Part of the intial arguments was just being “present” moment by moment.  Here I also had a disconnect. I’m rarely present. I’d rather be thinking of where I’m going next, the possibilities, and my goals. Especially when I’m driving for 3hours stuck in traffic with 3 hours of sleep.

Here’s a good story and a snapshot into my life.

The Magic Bullet Seminar started on a Friday early, and went late Saturday (Party!).  I live in Los Angeles and had planned on getting down to San Diego the night before as the hostel I stay at was a block away from the Hard Rock cafe.  I like hostels as they are cheap, and I meet interesting people there. I don’t really understand spending $200/night at these sorts of events, if you’re not planning on being in the room at all.

Late night and bad morning

Anyway, I have been trying to start up 2 new businesses in the last couple weeks, one the Local Business on Web, and I had promised a demo video and proposition to my first prospect.  The video was well done given I started on it finished it in about 3 hours all the way from script,. slides, image research and voice over.  I got done with that about 2am.

My other business is focused on amazon affiliate stuff and I have been in an excellent course from by SEO “free traffic” Keith Baxter who is one of my most favorite gurus.  He was gave a presentation at the Magic Bullet seminar and gave a preview that afternoon on “stealth traffic system” or “self contained traffic system”  finally understanding the power of his approach involving Wordpress MU, I had a hard time not imagining the possibilities.  I gave him some notes on his preview and he really seemed to like the changes I suggested.

3 hours came quickly.   My roommate as cool and as absolutely brilliant as he is,  is also crazy (as in institutionalized 2 times), and as I was trying to get out the door, asked if he could use my video camera and lighting gear..perfect timing. Grrr.

Getting to my car I find a parking ticket and then my car wouldn’t start initially and I was near out of gas.

I finally get on the road and about midway through Orange County I hit the sea of red lights of morning rush hour.

Amazingly none of that registered on my radar!

precisely as I wasn’t present.  I was buoyed by the  excited about the Seminar and meeting some people live I have grown to like, the mental freedom from completed many major milestones with a free slate the next few days and the euphoria of learning a powerful traffic source that I could use in any of my businesses. There was a whirlwind of what I wanted, being replayed over an over again blinding me.

During the open mic, they got a question about this from a guy who has the goal of making 50K a month and can’t really stay present.

I understood completely, and I gave him my approach,

A head full of info so much that you can’t decide isn’t always a bad thing.

I can’t tell you how many times that i’ve done something counter intuitive only to get there and find what something I wasn’t intending to do but needed to do in the first place

so often I trust my intuition.

In the end as long as you are moving forward to your goals, at a reasonable rate, then you win sooner or later!

I think of it like so, if you’re willing to sacrifice a few months or years to get freedom for the rest of your life, it’s okay if you don’t fully remember every waking moment of every day.

Affiliate Mindset

basically the first part was put by Amish eloquently:  “Live it,  breath it, see it, smell it, taste it, shit it“, to be get ahead of the average you have to be obsessed about this stuff.

They also pointed out that the best things happen offline. So get off your ass and go to live events. Networking and in particular the Media Buying is largely a negotiation game.  The sales staff wants money, if they don’t know you they’ll charge you sucker tax/retail. If they like you the will charge wholesale…or even give you free.

I admit that negotiation isn’t what I consider fun.  I was raised in a small family where bickering and bartering wasn’t a part of the culture.  As an engineer I don’t think that way as  Engineering frequently involves hard costs and hard constraints (e.g. budget bridges don’t stand up long) isn’t negotiable.

Business Mindset

Business Mindset was next,  primarily setting Smart goals

• S = specific (e.g. having a campaign of $25/day each week, test 3 new offers each day, setup one campaign  on TrafficVance and Yahoo every day)
• M = measurable
• A = achievable  (obviously if your not signed up for TrafficVance that’s not possible)
• R = realistic (no pink unicorns)
• T = time for completion (e.g. when will you be done)

Here again I found myself disagreeing.  Realistic? Fuck that. You need to have compelling goals to get you past all the shit that life can and will throw in your way.  Entrepreneurs in particular have to deal with moving mountains and occasionally having them fall on top on you.   It’s only after the price for freedom has been paid that a second life begins, one of immense possibility.

I’ve often remarked that being in business feels alot like a video game.  Just when I think I’ve won the level, I was tired at step 8 of 10, and wasted at step 9, and I make it to step 10, some other big boss comes up on the horizon and I have to dig in even deeper to go to step 11. It’s only because I know that a few years in this game can fundamentally reshape every aspect of my life.  Realistically what other options do you have to make such massive passive income and time, location freedom as net connected jobs?

Frank Kern – “Bad Muthafucker ” but retiring from IM.

This was a fun presentation.  Frank could easily be a cult leader or a televangelist.  Wouldn’t be surprised to see him on TV in the near future, if I actually owned a TV.

He said he was given the options of talking on 1) weed ‘n bitches 2) fancy cars 3) launches, but instead he decided to come clean and kinda say good bye to the IM world.

Some of his advice

“Thou Shalt Not Fuck Around”

“Don’t be  Pussy”  – e.g. if Adwords bans you get another account.

Setup your life so that you must succeed…if you fail you’re fucked.  Which is exactly what happened to Frank quitting his credit card business, and when moving to La Jolla,  having a $30K/mo morgage payment!

That was just part one of day 1 and my hands are getting tired so I’m going to wrap it up for now with a post I created earlier.

To summarize the affiliate side there was TONS of useful information. Lots of stuff I haven’t been exposed to, e.g. main stream double dipping, different pages for google bot and users. Going anonymous.

Matt’s Hayward and Matt Hill’s  presentations were worth the price of admission.  They are actually closer to the wavelength I operate on.

Networking Galore.

I feel like I’m name dropping, but really it was a small event 500 people of high quality people (think they had to spend $2K at the minimum to get in)

Many of the gurus live in San Diego and Jay and Amish are well connected to them. It started over bagels at breakfast on Friday and then went to the day after the late night party on Saturday night. It’s hard to throw a stick and NOT hit somebody important.

Here’s a list of some of the people I got to talk with.

Hosts: Amish and Jay again (I originally met them at Jeff Johnson’s mastermind).

Frank Kern – this was quite fun.  I was trying to get Amish and Jay to play a funny cartoon of Frank Surfing , but failed.
http://www.troynotes.com/1124/my-prank-of-frank-kern-and-surfing-kern-with-kung-fu-surfing-action/

Jason Moffatt – he was only there to see Frank as far as I know. We’re talking about getting him a surfing animation for himself.

Trey Smith (totally wanted to hear about the  latest pranks planned…especially on John Reese)

Andy Jenkins (I got in on Video Boss and ran into him in the hall to tell him about some of the results I’ve gotten with Video Boss) and then later impromptu speaking lessons for talking to fast.

Keith Baxter - he’s one of my favorite “Gurus”, and first time meeting him live. I got a total kick out of him almost copying verbatim the suggestions I made on his presentation, and him even thanking me.  I still can’t believe he used some of the gags I put in, intending to be goofy e.g. “the only thing I’ll be pitching here is baseballs”..  I’m actually working right now on getting his MU network in place, creating some blog builder tools to automate the process, of keyword ->silo-> blog network .very very excited.

Now I’m seeing if he wants to try out some of the landing page experiments.   Like my belcher button with roll over and sound effects.
http://www.troynotes.com/the-ubb-ultimate-belcher-button-wizard/

Some of the the Mind Movies crew,

Matt Trainer – he and I have similar backgrounds, and connected about me possibly helping him get his “Oh Shit” project scalable on the web.

John Jonas. – he and I disagree on several areas in outsourcing (I run a team of 7 for years and have had poor luck with my philopino fulltimers) but he gave a very rallying presentation and more people need to know about the option, outsourcing is key to my success.   From talking to him now, I at least know more about why we disagree, and it could be that out of the 9 million philipinos, the 4 that I’ve hired and the 3 that I’ve fired  doing my damndest just were bad apples.  What’s odd is that I have so much outsourcing experience and such good rapport and productivity with my other teams I have had a hard time understanding what went wrong.

Jonathan Van Clute – he and I met over a year ago at Perry and Ryan’s conference. He’s a fun techy, even if he overcomplicates tracking pixels   Sitting next to Jon,  at the hard rock party, I ended up meeting Ricky the CTO of keyword country and ended up geeking out about high end web scalability.  Not often I run into software architects.

Eric (E2) on the MBS, very smart kid! and what an amazing position he is in to be have so much at so young, I really am looking forward to getting his presentation on video as he went so fast I couldn’t keep up with my meticulous notetaking, and also seeing what he does.

Also what impressed me is he actually sought me out after the event, gave me personal email to apology from the Magic Bullet crew about the multiple Andy Jenkins interruptions when I asked that question during the speaker Q+A.  I got a similar sentiment from Matt Trainer. While ‘inconsiderate” I didn’t realize people felt so strongly about it.

Royce – the guy running the cameras crew.  Been looking ahead at putting together an event in the next year, and turns out he’s in LA not far from me.  FYI his crew created that cool opening MTV’esque video of Jay and Amish.  I would have sworn that Frank’s video guy did it.

One of  3 or 10 or so affilates on CJ and Yahoo(?).  I didn’t get his name as we were both  pretty buzzed   Thankfully I wasn’t so buzzed that when he left and I discovered his iphone on the bench I was able to run after him (through the crowd, jumping over security lines which got me scolded by security) and get it back to him, as I never got his full name so wouldn’t be able to find him and without his phone he might be hard to call.

Plus about a dozen other  from all over the world. 2 From London, one from Germany. Australia, several in the US.

I have several of these people email addresses, I wonder if that would have happened if I hadn’t gone.

What’s possibly even  amazing is I’m pretty introverted I rarely talk to anybody but close friends. I really had to go out of my comfort zone to talk so much.  But isn’t that always where success lives? outside the comfort zone?

Well attempted prank.

Frank has pulled some classic pranks over the years, like convincing John Reese that black helicopters were stalking him,  This epic prank on John Reese was caught on video tape at Frank’s “insane” cousin Trey Smith’s blog. It’s hella funny and the production value is staggering for IM.

Since pranks can be fun, if this is the culture, I figured, Why not do something similar to him?

The idea came  to me when at my first internet marketing conference the Mass Control 2.0 seminar in April. I was so clueless about what to talk about.  IPranks abounded, especially on unexpecting speakers, who while watching their slides had “cock” flash on them, frequently causing them to break into laughter.

Seemed fun and easy to pull off.  I have had several years in improv comedy brightening all sorts of audiences lives with no real preparation.  But way more can be done with preparation.  I have friends in video and animation, and games there are tons of options with them in the mix.   It’s quite fun hobby, thinking up evuhl schemes to delight and entertain especially by someone who least expects it.

My first idea was a video that demonstrates Frank’s legendary surfing ability.   He has claimed to be the 11th worst surfer in Southern california, this up from 9th worst 2 years ago.  I storyboarded it and got a favor from my  brilliant animator Ramior Olmos friend and very talented Music designer Ralph Carter get it their time between major gigs, to get a more affordable rate. You can watch the awesome results here (provided you’re not on an ipad that is)

I’ve had a few questions if people can get their own like this, and they answer is, yes, maybe, depends.

The bigger goal was to get that as the preloader to some videos made by friends or a video game that let people surf as Frank.  With the goal of working on the inside, and to get it showed when he was presenting.   I did my best over the year worked inward to the cool people that could make this happen, and this funny animation helped open doors.   But I ran out of time, and it might not have worked out that well.  He’s such a BadAss  that and he doesn’t use slides or notes,…. ever.

On Saturday at the Magic Bullet Seminar was probably my last chance . Frank made an awesome  no holds barred presentation where he used the word “Bad Muthafucker” within the first 30 second, and other colorful words as liberally as table salt.

He said there was no reason to hold back. He’s burning bridges as he is retiring from the IM community for good.  That he has a schedule already of only 3 more live appearances, and that the torch would be passed to someone else. *insert drum roll* you’re guess is as good as mine as to who that will be.

His sights are on new ideas for the offline local business world, probably TV, and to break past the $5 million year cap that all internet marketers apparently seem to hit.

I had my doubts (and still do) but talking to his cousin Trey in the hall confirmed that Frank was “fully out”., even Trey seemed a little surprised.

Recognizing my defeat, I settled for catching Frank in the hall (fighting the crowd) and showing the video on my laptop..just barely before he was wisked away to the safety of the speaker room. I also got a copy through back channels.

If it’s true that Frank is leaving the IM I will be sad to see him go.   He’s one of the gurus I most like watching and reading, so much to learn from.   If nothing else he’s entertaining enough that I have gone through more of his material than other courses.

Amazingly all the material I’ve learned from Frank (he is a genius), such as Results in Advance that he’s presented on multiple times including the Magic Bullet Seminar, was still largely unknown to this crowd of largely affilaties and very powerful tool.  I know he’s remarked in previous presentation with exasperation “how many times can I sell you the same thing over and over again?. Apparently forever, like the olympic flame there needs to be a perpetual Frank Kern.

Hey it’s 2010, maybe we can make an animatronic like Disneyland!

Big thanks to Frank for all you’ve taught me. Core Influence was overly long egocentric, and probably impossible for others to replicate… but it really did completely reshape and potentially save my life.

Troy.

It’s big, it’s ugly, it’s proven to get 35%-320% conversion over other buttons. Odds are you’ve probably seen it…and now the infamous Perry Belcher button is even better.

How do you take something that well tested and make it better? Watch this short 1 minute video for a preview:

4 ways the Ultimate Belcher Button (U.B.B.) is Better than the original

1) Figure out what you shouldn’t take out .   Start by listening to Perry’s great video on why each element in the Perry Belcher Button is important and how they synergistically work together, don’t change what’s proven to work,  unless you have time and money to do split test 10-100K combinations.   Unlike the others out there I didn’t remove anything that impacts conversions.

2) Make it Interactive: Images are so static..and dead, half the time I can’t tell if it’s clickable or not. It’s nice to be reassured I’m actually over something via clear continous feedback visually and auditorially.    I come from a background of making video games and I demand that buttons be button like, having rollover and press visual states. As this warriors forum post will attest, I’m not alone in knowing these subtle things can increase conversion. so this has nifty liquid rollover effects in the button not possible in CSS and hyperlink also has rollover and hit states.  You can see those in action in the video or by hovering over the opt-in form at the upper right which has a similar button.

Added a rollover green border from the Conversion Doctors tip, possibly because green is associated with go, but also that green and red are opposites so is a good way of reducing page blindness.

3) Put it on a diet: Perry’s Jpeg is bit big at 28KB,  Plain version is 11KB static 16KB (reconfigurable price).  While it’s possible to create something close in css/html, or a stripped down version here they are all missing important features that add to the bottom line, if you’re going to use might as well get the whole thing.   By careful use of Flash not only is it half that size (20KB) it has many more features.

4) Make it scale: jpeg’s and gifs don’t scale well.  Sales buttons need to be able to fit anywhere.  Flash vector graphics and text in the Ultimate Belcher Button can scale cleanly up and down, from tiny to giant:

(not shown in the video) Updated the credit cards to used a cleaned up graphic from http://www.credit-card-logos.com/ which also shaved off some size and reduced the jpg dithering in the original, flash does an okay job smoothing images so these look fine until you make it way bigger…can’t imagine why you’d want to do that.

How do you get the Ultimate Belcher Button?

Well right now you can’t, It’s been built for the the new intellinar service, which I can’t say much about right now as it’s still in stealth mode, but obviously if we’ve gone to this detail to get conversions up on a single button you can imagine how what we are doing to the rest of the service for your sales.

Update: I have a version that works in html and javascript available to my Troynotes Insider members with a video instruction guide. So opt-in on the upper right, and you’ll get a copy in your email, also you’ll get access to updates on it (we are adding sound and paypal).

Oh the new opt-in uses the same style button.

P.S. If I get 30 comments on this post, I’ll make it available to everyone for free.

P.P.S. I tried to let Perry have it, but he has left the IM to focus on his businesses, if so this button is dedicated to the big shiny money getting occasionally rude man who helped me get my start…this button is allot like him

This video interview between Frank Kern and John Reese has been floating around twitter lately, it’s good stuff. and popular:  282 Comments at the time I viewed it. You do need to opt-in to watch it, and I don’t make anything off the opt-in, so if necessary setup a disposable email address and watch it, it’s worthwhile.

John Reese (paraphrased), "My $1Million dollar day, totally beats your $440Million day Tony"

Several Remarkable things happened on the video.

• Frank Kern and John Reese are mostly quiet for once
• John Reese gets to sit on Tony Robbins lap, well the offer was at least made.
• Showdown between John $1Million day vs Tony’s $400Million day.

Frank and John open with the important question,

why do most people fail?

This is like asking why average is so…average.  But it’s a fair question, given that most people eventually learn to walk, to read and basic math. Why is it that people will buy every Internet Marketing product out there, yet not get any results.   Why aren’t there more success stories?

Tony replies: Why is it 70% of people who are diagnosed with lung cancer still continue to smoke? or people disgusted with themselves being overweight reach for the chocolate cake.

Why is it that it takes complete failure before many people discover the right mindset to make it? while people surrounded by tons of resources, surrounded by the right books, the right time, the right people don’t do achieve what it is they desire?

My Take

I’ve been studying this for awhile, interested like the average reasons why people fail to help avoid that as much as possible when I teach as well as to avoid the pitfalls myself (challenging!)

• We live in a remarkable age, and that is part of the problem. Escapism, pleasure or at least complacency is ubiquitous and cheap.   Why work when the evening news or a great movie is on?  Why save/wait when the credit card isn’t maxed out.        I’m no different, like this eve instead of working on the billion things that would make more sense to do, I overslept and watched Harry Potter in the 2nd run theater. It was fun, at least more than imagining a gun to my head as John and Frank suggest as a motivational tool. It’s not the right path, but it’s a easy seductive path.
• Change is impossible,  not quite true but any rapid change tends to bounce right back.  There is a built in momentum in our lives.   The invisible habit fence that surrounds our comfort zone. This is why if you want to change you have to break the daily routine.  Like going on a trip, cutting out things (e.g. no internet, TV, cell for a week). Try it, it’s amazing.
• Attention is the most precious substance in the universe. It’s just not very prioritized well, there are so many things that FEEL important that just aren’t when given space.  This is why batching things is so critical,  only then is the trivial many is given perspective when standing next important few. Try batching your time today like only checking twitter once and email 2 times a day.

There are darker reasons to why people fail online.

• Most gurus know a lot, but … not how to teach. Frank in his videos even admits he doesn’t know what he’s doing consciously most the time, which makes it hard to follow.
• Most courses aren’t replicateable. For a variety of reasons.  I know as I have a hard time learning, things must make sense or I just won’t do them.   Some are simple, the instructions are filled with holes, it’s not possible to do them.   Other times the info has changed, what worked yesterday doesn’t.  If chapter 1 didn’t work it’s hard to justify getting into chapter 3. At the far end, some of the work is too advanced. Kern is a marketing genius, and has a lifetime of experience and routines, every guru I’ve met is a collection of almost superhuman daily habits, that are impossible to follow more than a few steps.
• The material is beyond reach .  In a fantasy world anybody who is 5′ can be an olympian basketball champion, in reality we all have different strengths that don’t always match with what’s required.   Might be we don’t have the emotional chops to empathize with the audience to connect with them. Might be not having the prowess to either manage or build on the internet.  People will still try driving with these blindspots.
• The IM industry is filled with bullshit .  Filled with hype, false promises, and people will fall for it at first. It’s almost necessary, as IM products in order to sell crank up the pitch as he who shouts louder seems to win. Anyway when a product fails to live up the hype, people drop the product, but rarely ask for a refund in.  It could be that the product has 2-3 amazing tidbits but if people can’t get past the dissapointment of the hype it doesn’t matter.
• Overload. Starting from ground zero, there is at least a 3-6 month road to walk daily in order to master just the basics, in addition to actually getting things done.  I know despite making time for it i haven’t finished courses I bought 3 months ago! and now the gurus have already relaunched them with updates…it never seems to end, so it’s impossible if you’re trying to master everything to get started.
• Most courses aren’t replicatible. I know as I have a hard time learning, things must make sense or I just won’t do them.

Tony Robbins caught Frank Kern telling a story THIS big

The Steps to make it

You really you should watch the video to find this out. I simply can’t do it justice in words the passion Tony pours into the message.   Here are some of the first ones mentioned:

• Why it is important but it has to be why you are doing it, and that will depend greatly on where you are presently at. From desparation at Rock bottom to desire to change the world of multi millionaire, everybody has their own reasons for taking the next step. Why is it important for you to do it right now?
• Daily ritual and Peak state practice: getting one into a peak state is critical, rather than relying upon the few ounces willpower. Getting that peak state is the momentum of a bowling ball, knocking down whatever in your way…to the point you don’t even notice hitting them. It’s a skill that must be practiced. Like I have a sound track and youtube playlist that ‘gets my mojo going’, it’s the same 3 songs, but I never grow tired of them.
• Raising standards, Tony talks about how happy he was with his castle until he hung out with a billionaire and used that for comparison. How might you raise your standards?
• Immersion. hanging out with hungry and positive people (seriously how I get my latest product going so quickly…if no other reasons than peer pressure!).

If you enjoyed this you should check out The 5 Guiding Stars to a Dramatically Better Life.

TroyNotes, straight shooting in brand spakin' new Texan shirt...you should see the size of the belt buckle

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

The Texan sized organizational system

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…

3 days of tasty information overload

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.

Effective prenoted slide thumbnails and room to write notes on the side

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:

Playing Texan sized guitar, in Austin music capital

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

Truly wierd seeing tie dye shirts in Texas and not Berkeley

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

be happier than this dog, download the TroyNotes special report

Fast facts:

Name: Perry Belcher

Perry Belcher in his Spiderman Action stance, and power Einstein shirt. This man is Dangerous! His sales funnel (web) has captured $80-$100Million in sales!

Age: 50’s?

Started In Internet Marketing: About 20 second after it was possible.

Time to Make 1st Million: done it several times in different industries.

Worth:?

Estimated Yearly Income: 2 million* (reset to $0 2007ish)

List Size: ?

Location: Austin, TX

Dogs or Cats: guessing dogs…big ones.

Fun Facts

• won a 1965 Lincoln off of Frank Kern, for being the top Mass Control affiliate
• owns like 10 guitars and is so good he can play them all at the same time
• Has a luxury yacht (okay it’s a beat up boat he got for a few hundred dollars)
• once lost everything to the Feds, yet kept going.
• has shirts so loud they have been known to blind people.
• has sold just about everything, including hot dog carts.
• not related to Perry Marshall.
• recently retired from IM training of all sorts (deleted his twitter of 100K users!/100K year!)

Products

• Social Media Matrix
• Social Media Mastery
• Get Money From Google (with Ryan Deiss)
• 13 Email Secrets (with Ryan Deiss)

Ninja Skills

• Entertaining and Informative Content
• importing
• Social Media (130K followers in 9 months)
• Breadth of Experience, he’s sold live, jewelry and even hot dog carts

Team size

~12-20*

Official Sites

• social media mastery matrix
• official  site

Check out all the other GuruCards

Note: none of this is official or endorsed by the real Perry Belcher
* estimated

If you are confused by Twitter, Facebook and want to understand how to leverage Social Media to get more traffic and leads, you should pay attention.

Imagine amazing success: owning the cars and house of your dreams, $30Million a year in just one business, then losing it all. ..start by having policeman show up at your door, all your assets seized, cars taken away, businesses doors locked up!   That exactly happened to Perry, listen to his story first hand here:

http://perrybelchersuccess.com/78/perry-belcher-clean/

That video,  by the way is an awesome use of the C in the A.C.E.S. method or generating user trust. Kudos to Perry, and what support from the community, at the time of this writing over 150 comments!

From $0 to $100K month in under a year

So if you were in Perry’s situation, what would you do?

Since he had to start all over, there wasn’t much money to focus on expensive PPC or difficult SEO.  So Perry focused on low cost social media, and built it up to about $100K/month w in under a year, without spending anything on PPC or complicated SEO.    Most -even major gurus- don’t make anything on Social Media at all.  This shows you if you know what your doing you can achieve amazing things.

This is Perry's Master Social Media Deathgrip.

Perry will be sharing his secrets in his new course: Social Media Matrix.

There is already some great prelaunch content 2 videos and 2 PDF mindmaps.   As typical Perry tried everything to see what the boundaries were.  That research (which even got him banned from Facebook for a bit) has taken about a year to put together.

Unlike the crowded PPC and SEO markets, social media, is still in the early infancy, so it’s a great time to get in.

Perry knows a ton aobut direct marketing.  I’ve already learned a lot from information that he and Ryan Deiss have shared across their many IM related products at reasonable costs.  I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting Perry live at Frank Kern’s SD pitchfest ..er seminar.

There I got access to an earlier version of the course, the course itself was typical Perry Belcher. Entertaining, a bit unorganized and under produced (from my tastes) but delivering solid actionable information, which you can use with solid results. This version should be even better.

…all using free traffic

If you are interested in using social media to get free traffic, you should check out the free launch content, if you know nothing about social media it will get you started,  and get in on the early list.

http://www.socialmediamatrixreport.com/

P.S.   Frank Kern had a similar reset happen, which is a great warning on how to pick markets and properly make disclaimers!!
[[mailto:info@example.org email me]]
[http://mediawiki.org]
[[http://mediawiki.org]]
(perry belcher)