I was checking out my friend Scott Bourne’s blog this morning and just about spat my orange juice all over my computer monitor.
Why? Because Scott — who’s the smartest, savviest and most successful man working in the podcasting and online media space — had some embarrassingly good things to say about the most recent issue of HWW.
Check it out at Don’t Just Talk To Your Audience – Tell Them Stories – OnlineMediaTips.com
Just finished getting settled into the new HWW central diggs. And I just looked at my to-do list. It’s going to be a long week.
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I’ve been trying to get through to Comcast for the last day and a half to cancel my service.
They’ve got a great customer retention plan.
It goes like this.
I call.
I get the automated system.
I hit the button to cancel my service.
I get a busy signal.
Repeat.
Brilliant!
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I’ve had a couple of folks ask about “The Brain Tumor Story” that didn’t quite make it into my Next Internet Millionaire audition video.
So here it is. Names have been changed to keep me from getting angry comments.
Several years back I found myself working as a greeting card writer for a little company here in Seattle. The worst thing possible had happened to the owners, Paul and Gilly–who had originally owned a photography business but then got suckered into making greeting cards: they won an award.
You see, right after 9/11 they’d come out with a series of terribly cute, terribly patriotic greeting cards. You know, pictures of little kids dressed up like minute men with billowing flags behind them. That sort of thing.
They’d taken their patriotic cards to the big greeting card show in New York and, riding a wave of patriotic sentiment, had one the greeting card industry’s equivalent of the Oscar.
Poor saps. They never recovered.
They came dashing back to Seattle all excited that they were going to make buckets of cash turning all their old (and rather good) photos into greeting cards. They sunk their savings into printing up a bunch of cards, hired on staff (including a certain bald-headed writer), rented office space and even opened a little shop to show off their wares.
And they were miserable.
I know they were miserable because I spent 7 long months trekking down the hill to their shop and bearing the brunt of that misery. In fact, it was while working for these folks that I first learned the real meaning of the “Sunday Night Dreads:” that sick, nauseous feeling that bubbles up out of your stomach late Sunday night when you know you’ve got five long days of hell ahead of you.
But it was a job. It (barely) paid the bills. And I hadn’t quite figured out that I had the heart and the lazy habits of an entrepreneur.
Like I said, though, Paul and Gilly were miserable, angry people (or at least Gilly was. Paul was sort of quiet.) They yelled at the staff a lot. They fired people often. They got constant calls from the Washington Unemployment office saying that yet another former employee had complained about it being a “hostile work environment.”
And they taught me a heck of a lot about how *not* to run a business.
But 7 months into my tenure writing weird and funny greeting cards (the writing was actually kind of fun. It was like niche-marketing boot camp) I came shuffling into work on a Monday morning to find out I didn’t have a job anymore.
The money wasn’t coming in.
They couldn’t afford my meager salary.
But if some deals came in they’d hire me back.
The whole thing knocked the wind out of me and sent my blood pressure to the sky.
I mean, I hated the job, but it kept me in ramen noodles and yoga mats and I even got to go eat at the Spaghetti Factory every couple of weeks.
Anyway, they let me go.
I padded over to my computer, forwarded every message in my inbox over to Gilly and went home to sign up for unemployment and figure out what the heck to do with my life.
A week later, I logged into my old work email account just to see if anything had come in that Gilly needed to see.
I figured she’d never think to log in. I was trying to be nice.
And when I logged in, I saw a message that I wasn’t meant to see.
Because instead of emailing one of the manufacturers representatives way out in the middle of the country, Gilly had emailed me. Here’s what she said:
“Dear Jean,
Sorry we took so long getting back to you. Chris has had to take a leave of absence, first because of his soon-to-be-wife’s West Nile Virus, but now because of his own upcoming MRI.”
And then it went on a bit to talk about business.
Me? I picked my jaw up off the floor and called my then girlfriend.
We talked like this:
Me: “Honey, do you have West Nile virus?”
Her: “Um. No. Though I do have a cold”
Me: “Are we getting married?”
Her: “Oh, I hope not. I’m not sure I like you that much.”
Me: “Do I have a brain tumor?”
Her: “Well, your skull is kind of big. I guess there could be anything in there.”
And then my mind went pop.
And I haven’t had a job where I’ve had to go to an office and work for somebody since.
So that’s my brain tumor story and the reason I’m self employed.
What’s yours?
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Joe Criso was kind enough to point out that videos for Joel Comm’s “Next Internet Millionaire” show are up. You can see mine (in which I resemble nothing so much as a bespectacled ogre) over at This Lovely And Delicious Link
Go check it out. Have a laugh. Unfortunately, it looks like they cut out the good part, which was this funny story I told about my old boss telling people I had a brain tumor instead of saying she laid me off. Lame.
Vote for me here.
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I’m off to Vegas for the weekend to attend a seminar taught by my friend and mentor Harlan Kilstein. Back in the saddle nice and early on Monday.
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It’s been a little over a week now since I got back from my first ever Armand Morin’s Big Seminar in Atlanta. This was the 9th of these twice-a-year internet marketing schmooze fests and it seems to me that Armand Morin and crew have refined the whole schtick down to a money-sucking science.
Now first off, I have to say that I have nothing but respect for Armand and the gaggle of marketing superstars who spoke at this 3-day event. Getting to suckle at the wise teats of guys like Joe Polish and Marlon Sanders is worth the (rather hefty) price of admission alone.
And honestly, it was a great trip. I met a ton of verifiably awesome people, pressed flesh with both the well established and up-and-coming in the internet marketing community, did a ridiculous number of free copy critiques (and ended up giving much of the same advice over and over — more of that in another post), and ate way too many complimentary brownies.
And I learned a lot, both about marketing, how to market to marketers and just what happens when you dangle free iPods in the face of a rapid, hyped up crowd:
Things I learned (in no particular order):
* Walking through a completely abandoned mall on a Sunday afternoon is enough to send even the hardiest American consumer into apoplectic fits. Kevin Hill (who writes copy for Russell Brunson) and I clung tight to each other like baby Kangaroos as we shuffled our way through “The Galleria” on our way out into the heat to find food. When even the Subway sandwich shop in a mall is closed up and quiet, you know you’re in trouble. The Galleria will forever be known to us as “The Zombie Ghost Mall” which is probably a nice symbol for a seminar built around selling stuff online.
* If Donna Fox’s piddling career as an author and credit millionaire ever dries up, she’s can totally rock it as a hypnotist’s assistant.
* If you really want to learn something and meet people at an event like this, you need to:
- Have a good, strong handshake.
- Be able to go without sleep for long periods of time.
- Be unafraid to consume large amounts of alcohol until the wee hours of the morning.
- Wear a nice shirt.
* Passing out cards and free copy critique vouchers to several hundred internet marketers is a great way to start conversations with folks. On the downside, if you pepper the whole seminar room with cards, the security at the event will eventually look at you disapprovingly with waggled fingers and Armand will be forced to get up on stage and say that no one else is allowed to paper the room. Live and learn. =-)
* Marlon Sanders is both brilliant and excitable. His “Chop It” tag line will go down in the annals of great pitch tools. By the end of Sunday night everyone in the room had chop, chop, chopped their way through the day, forcing every pitchman to move on down the road and lower their prices.
* Auditioning for Joel Comm’s Next Internet Millionaire is a real hoot. I laid down a couple of minutes of video telling funny stories and trying to be sincere. I don’t think my aud video has been posted yet, but I’ll point you that way when it is. You yourself should NOT audition because, well, I’d really like to go spend two weeks in Colorado.
* Content really is king and is one heck of a selling tool. I watched the bulk of the presentations at the seminar (and wore a hat the whole time. Armand and crew took a cue from Letterman and kept the room cold. My bald head was crying.) Now, the real way that the creators of a seminar like this make money is on the back end. Because of the way their affiliate program is structured, they get about $1000 for each attendee at the Seminar, much of which is spent on food, gifts (iPods and laptop computers, mostly) and the hotel rental. Where the real money is is in the back end. As a presenter at the Big Seminar you’re not just encouraged but are actually expected to go up and pitch, pitch, pitch.
Different presenters handle this in different ways.
Jim Edwards gave a nice little bow to the concept, ducking his head and saying “Ok, I’m going to start my 80 minute pitch now” but instead going off and giving some nice “Why” content explaining why internet webinars are a great way to reach your customer base. Sure, with 20 minutes left, he went into his pitch (which seemed to be a pretty good deal) but by that point it felt like he’d earned it.He was also funny as heck.
Joel Comm opened up with info about his spiffy new internet TV show and then spent a solid hour or more telling us “How” to use Adsense to make money online. Did he give away all the secrets? Nope. But he gave away enough good, solid info that I felt like I legitimately learned something just being in the room.
Some of the other presenters, though (and no, I’m certainly not going to name names) seemed to use their 90 minutes as little more than a hour and a half sales letter.
Now, being in the sales biz myself, I got a kick just out of seeing how they structured their pitch, how they positioned the “real” value of what they were selling versus the “special price for seminar attendees” and all that.
But when I lightly quizzed attendees on what they learned during the presentations most just grinned sheepishly and said “not a thing. Not a damn thing.”
Which I think is dangerous.
Just this morning I finished reading John Reese’s Rebirth Of Internet Marketing (which is worth a download and a read. You also might want to check out Michel Fortin’s “Death of the Sales Letter” which isn’t really about the “death” of the sales letter as much as its evolution.)
In John’s report (and John is a very smart and successful guy with great hair) he drills in the point that if you want to sell to someone in today’s over saturated mediaplace, you need to give them tremendous value and legitimately killer content.
Which means give away the good stuff so that you can sell the great stuff. Which is a principle I tend to agree with. If you’re on my hardworking words mailing list you know that I try to only send out valuable info that will either improve your marketing or get you thinking in an interesting way.
What bugged me about many of the presentations I saw (and again, these are folks I respect) was that they were almost to a T holding back the good stuff in order to get the audience into a rabid buying state. In almost every case I could feel the mood shift in the room as soon as the speaker started talking about what they were selling. Pencils went down. Eyes wandered. Daydreams came crashing in.
Now, I don’t have any scientific data to back myself up, but I’m willing to bet that the presenters who sold the best at the Seminar were the ones who gave it away; the ones who had legit content out on display and who’s up-sell products and coaching groups were positioned as the next step in getting a powerful concept to work for you.
Whew. That’s enough for now. I’ll log in later and throw a few pictures from the seminar up.
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Hey folks. Sorry for the radio silence. It’s been busy times here at HWW central. I spent 4 days last week in Atlanta for the Big Seminar and then had to come back and keep my head down catching up on projects.
I’ll be checking in with thoughts on the Big Seminar, video marketing and the art of the handshake later, but for now, you can pop over to haddadink.com to see a few small changes and improvements I’ve made to my site. Chief among them? A harrowing tale of how I almost got killed by a semi-truck a few years back (delivered in delicious audio form) and some downright nifty new testimonials from happy clients.
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Kurt Vonnegut died today at the age of 84. He was a cantankerous drunk, a depressive, a former PR man and one heck of a writer. He’s also, along with the great departed Douglas Adams, the reason I got into this whole writing for a living thing in the first place. I devoured Kurt’s books as a college kid, burning through the bulk of them in one summer and chewing on the rest as I found them in softback. My Senior project back in college was taking his book Timequake and turning it into an extremely strange screenplay about a kid in Boston trying to turn Timequake into a screenplay (Charlie Kaufman totally ripped me off for “Adaptation.”)
I even met Kurt once. This was down in Los Angeles at a big, pretty building on Wilshire Avenue. The place was outside, but it had heated floors and good appetizers and, frail, shaggy-haired and drunk, Vonnegut shambled up to the podium and told us all stories that we’d all already read in a lot of his previous interviews. Afterwards I got to go over and shake his hand. We locked eyes for a second. Or I locked eyes and he just sort of stared blurry at me from the booze. I loved him.
(Tangentially, this is the same night I got bumped into by Leonard Nimoy. “Spock” must have been a Vonnegut fan too. We brushed shoulders as he pushed his way past down the line. He did not give me the Vulcan death grip.)
Thanks Kurt. I hope you went quick and painless and with few regrets.
c
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Hey folks,
I just put up a post on the Biznik blog about why I think working hourly is dumb, dumb, dumb. Check it out: Why I don’t work hourly–and neither should you
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I had that naked dream last night. You know the one. It’s the dream where you’re at a business meeting or giving a speech or going to meet your sweetheart’s parents and suddenly, out of nowhere you realize that you’re completely and utterly nude.
Naked. Exposed. Vulnerable. (And, depending on your climate and the time of year, maybe a little bit cold.)
Now, everyone I know has had this dream or at least a variation of it. (Personally, I’ve had it a bunch of times. For me it’s right up there with the “It’s finals week in college and I suddenly realize that I forgot to go to my advanced theoretical mathematics class all semester and–oh, dear god–it’s taught by Mr. Tite who taught math at my highschool, lived with his mother and had an amazing hairpiece and–sweet jebus–I’m so ashamed at myself and there’s no way I’m getting out of this without failing. Gah!” dream. What, you haven’t had that one?)
But I’ve always found the terror and shame the naked dream brings up to be pretty fascinating. What is it about being honestly and truly who you are that sends us all into red-faced fits? And why does the concept of naked, brutal honesty make most business owners look like they want to hold their breath until they turn dead?
This month’s issue of Wired is all about exposure. The cover features that cute (But not too cute. This girl’s cuteness exists in the realm of relative reality, as opposed to most Hollywood women types who are sort of scary and look like they could be used as flotation devices) girl from The Office smiling coyly. She’s got her hip kicked out to the side and is wearing a sharp suit. Except the suit is just a cover, literally. Turn the page and you see that our cute girl from the office is, *gasp* exposed in a completely PG way.
Anyway, the article is a good read. The basic gist? Be honest to your customers, expose your flaws, start a conversation and you’ll have folks lining up for your services like zombies at a brain buffet.
Give it a read.
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