Taking a pause.  What would life be like if we never took one? 

Maddening I would say.

I had a deepened realization of this as I was Twittering this morning at twitter.com/ebizmom.  I had been feeling disoriented for the past few weeks, but especially after some minor day surgery a week ago.

"Feels like I lost footing and can't remember what I was doing",  and I wrote that  "Sometimes, it's important to just breathe deeply and relax when things are cloudy and even a little 'out of order'. Letting the dust settle", and  "The most important symbol in music is the PAUSE, and pausing when speaking is THE most powerful strategy to use. And so it is with life."

As I ate my mid-morning snack, I couldn't stop thinking about the Pause and it's importance in our lives, even for all life, and how we unconsciously use the pause every day.   We would go insane without taking a pause every now and then, so in this sense, the Pause is the most important word in the dictionary, and the most important thing, the one thing we all need to learn how to purposely use in our lives. Even in software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes, according to Wikipedia.

In my humble opinion, the Pause can be used to attain fantastic goals, like Peace of Mind, Love, Friendship, and Financial Freedom.

We take pauses every day.  But a lot of the pauses that we take are unconscious; they have become automatic.

We need to learn to take conscious pauses when we breathe, eat, play and work.

A great speaker takes pauses in strategic places to emphasize a point, and so do the greatest of salespersons.

The music that moves us the most uses pauses very effectively. 

It's called Fermata.  This word is very similar to ferment: to stir up or seethe with excitment.

We become more exciting and build expectation when we take a pause, even though the taking of the pause itself is relaxing.

We need to rest. Give ourselves a chance to release the past and heal. To become whole.

In poetry it's called Prosody; the study of poetic metre and the art of versification.

Without the Pause, there is no Beauty. There is no Music. There is no poetry.

Prosody is also the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

To take a pause means to take a short break; a temporary stop.

Taking a pause lets the dust settle, but it also helps build momentum and excitement.

Taking a few deep breathes clears my muddled thoughts and helps me focus better. 

In this sense, the Pause is meditation.

To stop.  To reflect. To consider. To remember what's important.

To breathe.

It only takes a few moments. Just a few breathes, and we can change our lives.

Go in a new direction. Or decide to continue on a chosen path with new-found direction and purpose.

So, take a conscious Pause, and breathe.

Angela Wickenberg

 

I joined Facebook a short while ago and was invited to join a group that was studying  the

psychology of Facebook!  I thought it was going to be interesting and useful and that turned out to be very true.

A representative of the BBC wrote an article, which I am sharing here.  I'll write something a little bit later

when I have time to focus on it.  Here is my Facebook profile:  You can be my friend there, if you wish:

http://profile.to/angelawickenberg/

My Twitter profile is twitter.com/EbizMom

which I update several times a day directly from my Facebook account.

Anyway, here's the article:

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, in San Francisco

Students prepare to learn the secrets of Facebook

A group of students at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley have turned their attention towards a unique course that blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology.

The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

He says: "When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion."

Professor Fogg says the pivotal moment came when he watched an application on the site go from "literally zero to more than a million users in a week".

He recalls that it was to do with music sharing and buying tickets and that that was when he had his "oh my gosh moment". It was quickly followed by a light bulb moment.

"Where on earth could you get a million customers in a week? That was when I said 'I want to learn more about this' and I thought the best way was to teach a class and look at how persuasion happens."

Usual coterie

It's Thursday afternoon and the sun is splitting the sky above the adobe-coloured Cordura Hall, the venue for Professor Fogg's Psychology of Facebook course. Outside there's a rag tag collection of people dodging the searing heat.

Alongside the usual coterie of students is an older crowd known simply as "visitors". These people are an assortment of entrepreneurs, angel investors, business heads and myself the only journalist.

Facebook right now stands out from the crowd. Can they continue? Professor B Fogg, Standford University

As we wait for the technology to click into place that allows another 700 students to tune in online, Professor Fogg declares that his goal is to help everyone to become a world class expert on the psychology of Facebook.

But this is no one trick pony according to the Professor. "What we learn here isn't just relevant to Facebook. The psychology that drives Facebook relates to other online success stories, including those blockbusters yet to be invented."

"There is something enduring about what we are studying," he declares, "whereas if you are learning how to programme a Facebook application, that then could change in 30 days from now. In fact it probably will; so that knowledge breaks."

Dissects aspect

Each week the class dissects an aspect of Facebook and looks at the way it works, the psychology behind it and what impression users are trying to convey. The gamut runs from examining status updates to news feeds and from poking to writing comments.

Today the focus is on the use of profile pictures, the photograph on the front page of every Facebook entry.

The discussion is led by Psychology Senior Richard Barton, who maintains Facebook's high strike rate in this area has to do with the default picture it puts up if you don't post your own.

"Who wants a question mark in place of their face and what questions does that raise about you? Like, why are you on Facebook? And so basically Facebook sets up an environment where your friends do the persuading to get you to post a picture."

Professor Fogg contends this is at the heart of Facebook's achievements.

"What they're tapping into are some fundamental drivers and it makes it easy to satisfy those drives. Things like the need to be socially accepted and the flip side is to not be rejected."

Class experiment

The other strand to Professor Fogg's persuasion theory has to do with motivation and outcomes, questioning why users post a certain type of picture and why they constantly change them or not.

How does the Facebook 'question mark' persuade users?

To illustrate his point he conducts a class experiment asking people to write out how they want to be regarded based purely on their profile mugshot.

The findings are revealing:

"Fun, outgoing, nature loving."

"I was too lazy to rotate my picture and then I had the idea that if I left it you would think I was cool and good looking." "I'm hot."

"I want to remind my children that I was young once."

"Make people think about peace."

"Web 2.0 revolutionary and world traveller."

Professor Fogg says this random sample proves that behind even the innocent act of posting a profile picture, the psychology of persuasion in managing your image or the impression you give off is at play.

And he stresses that albeit unconsciously, Facebook's unbridled success lies in getting users to to do the work for them with friends persuading friends to post pictures, comments, or upload applications.

"I would say they were lucky and have been responsive to users but I don't think they are persuasion masterminds."

Straightforward tools

While luck might have played its part in turning Facebook into a major force in social networking, the entrepreneurs attending this course are looking for straightforward tools to help their businesses hit the jackpot.

Rob Ross has developed the Footsies application for Facebook and is working on others. For him the course is a portal into how he can make his business more relevant.

He says: "This opens a door that has not been opened before. This is going to change the game."

Student Roman David agrees: "It's beyond dollars and cents. That is part of it but its also where the opportunities are for entrepreneurs and about how the world is changing."

Professor Fogg says while his class is about trying to understand what makes Facebook tick, the people behind the site have a similar task to ensure it remains a dominant player.

"Facebook right now stands out from the crowd. Can they continue? So far with its fifty million plus users they're doing a pretty good job."

"He's just a natural." How many times have you heard someone say that in order to explain somebody else's greatness? This "explanation" derives from the commonplace belief that certain individuals have an innate gift that the rest of us didn't get and never will.  There's just a slight problem with this belief: it's wrong!

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by some noted researchers totally debunks the myth of "the natural."* Studies by more than 100 scientists consistently and overwhelmingly proved this astonishing truth: experts are always made, not born.

Moreover, the studies show that the greats in any field do something that the average ones don't: they achieve their greatness through hours, days, and years of always practicing deliberately. Golfing great Ben Hogan once said, "While I am practicing I am also trying to develop my powers of concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball."**

These researchers say that when most people practice, they just focus on the things they already know how to do. That's why, for example, an average salesperson makes the same easy calls over and over—and still calls it "selling." But a great salesperson, on the other hand, deliberately works at what he or she currently can't do well. And the research shows that this continual, deliberate effort is the distinguishing factor between the good and the great.

So, what does it take to become adept at deliberate practice? We think it's not only having the right tools or techniques, it's also having the right mindset in the first place. You have to have your mind focused in order to apply the techniques you've learned.

If you find that you are:

1. Not practicing your skills regularly (like you tell yourself you are going to do)

2. Not able to perform "live" as you do when you are practicing.

3. Fearful (not your full self while prospecting).

4. Not stretching and constantly improving.

Then it is likely that you are experiencing subconscious blocks.   These subconscious blocks can fight your conscious efforts every step of the way.

This is common, and probably the main reason why most beginning sales professionals and network marketers fail.  However, there are things you can do.

Through extensive experience, we have found that the safest, fastest, and most effective way to overcome these blocks is through hypnosis. Now, we're not talking about that fakery you've seen in B-movies. Clinical hypnosis is a proven technique that has been approved by both the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association since the 1950s.

Hypnosis helps you uninstall those blocks and install a mindset that facilitates—not blocks—your desire to become the performer you know you can be.  When you achieve this type of alignment, you find that deliberate practice becomes just something that you do, and you get better and better every day.

This of course means a direct and tangible benefit to your income, your financial freedom, and your options in life.

Finding a qualified psychologist who understands how to use hypnosis to help you in your sales or network marketing career can be difficult and extremely expensive.  A great option is use a home study audio hypnosis program created by a known commodity.  

We believe the cream of the crop is a program created by Dr. Peter Lambrou, one of the country's best-known sales psychologists (and a former successful salesperson himself).  Dr. Lambrou is also the Chair of Psychology at Scripps Memorial Hospital (a major research facility).

 The program is published by The Hypnosis Network, a company that works only with licensed mental-health professionals like Dr. Lambrou.  And this company is so sure of the effectiveness of its programs that it gives you a one-year money-back guarantee. Check it out at http://www.hypnosisnetwork.com/hypnosis/sales_prospecting.php

* The Making of an Expert, Harvard Business Review, July—August 2007, authors K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely.

**Golf Digest, November 2006.

Hi - found this great article in Early To Rise - read and get wise!

By Tim Ferriss

I just landed back in CA from a long overdue mini-retirement through London, Scotland, Sardinia, Slovak Republic, Austria, Amsterdam, and Japan.

Some unpleasant surprises awaited me when I checked in on the evil e-mail inbox. Why?

I let them happen.

I always do.

Here are just a few of the goodies that awaited me this time:

• One of our fulfillment companies has been shut down due to the president's death, causing a 20%+ loss in monthly orders and requiring an emergency shift of all Web design and order processing.

• Missed radio and magazine appearances and upset would-be interviewers.

• More than a dozen lost joint-venture partnership opportunities.

It's not that I go out of my way to irritate people - not at all - but I recognize one critical fact: Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen. This is a skill we want to cultivate.

What did I get in exchange for temporarily putting on blinders and taking a few glancing blows?

• I followed the Rugby World Cup in Europe and was able to watch the New Zealand All Blacks live, a dream I've had for the last 5 years.

• I was able to shoot every gun I've ever dreamed of firing since brainwashing myself with Commando. Bless the Slovak Republic and their paramilitaries.

• I was able to film a television series pilot in Japan, a lifelong dream and the most fun I've had in months, if not years.

• I met with my Japanese publisher, Seishisha (Tel: 03-5574-8511) and had media interviews in Tokyo, where The 4-Hour Workweek is now #1 in several of the largest chains.

• I took a complete 10-day media fast and felt like I'd had a two-year vacation from computers.

• I attended the Tokyo International Film Festival and hung out with one of my heroes, the producer of the Planet Earth television series.

Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you're liberated in a way that few people ever know.

Just remember: If you don't have attention, you don't have time. Did I have time to check e-mail and voicemail? Sure. It might take 10 minutes. Did I have the attention to risk fishing for crises in those 10 minutes? Not at all.

As tempting as it is to "just check e-mail for one minute," I didn't do it. I know from experience that any problem found in the inbox will linger on the brain for hours or days after you shut down the computer, rendering "free time" useless with preoccupation. It's the worst of states, where you experience neither relaxation nor productivity. Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in between.

Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.

Here are a few questions that can help you put on the productivity blinders and put things in perspective. Even when you're not traveling the world, develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences. If you do force the time but puncture it with distractions, you won't have the attention to appreciate it.

• What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything?

• What is the most urgent thing right now that you feel you "must" or "should" do?

• Can you let the urgent "fail" - even for a day - to get to the next milestone with your potential life-changing tasks?

• What's been on your "to-do" list the longest? Start it first thing in the morning and don't allow interruptions or lunch until you finish.

Will "bad" things happen? Small problems will crop up, yes. A few people will complain and quickly get over it. BUT, the bigger picture items you complete will let you see these for what they are - minutiae and repairable hiccups.

Make this trade a habit. Let the small bad things happen and make the big good things happen.

[Ed. Note: Timothy Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times best-seller, The 4-Hour Workweek. He is the world's top lifestyle blogger - more than 20 million hits per month - at www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog, which details all of his latest experiments and how-to case studies.]

 

 

As marketers, in 2006 and 2007 we saw several "Death of" reports;

First out was Scott Boulch in November 2006 with "The Death Of Adsense."

Scott wrote that within a few days, he had built a list of over 38,000 subscribers.

I don't  know how many subscriptions to his software "thelistvirus" he was able to

get - probably a lot of them.  It was a smart tactic that worked  like money in the bank,

Just a short week or so after, we heard from Mike Filsaime with his

"The Death of Internet Marketing".  He gave away his list building software

and built a list of over 50,000 people. He wrote that in just over 24 hours,

they had over 34,346 people create an account to get the report.

(and he thanked Keith Baxter and Scott Boulch in the email he sent

out to his list for their marketing campaign for Their Death of AdSense

report, inspired him on how to market his own report.  The marketing

method was to pay for the referrals - so as a marketer using this traffic tactic

- it required money to make the money).

Next in line were a series of separate articles and pre-sales pages:

"The Death of Email Marketing", "The Death of Adwords for Affiliates",

"The Death of the Search Engine Spammer", and many spin offs of that theme.

 

Rich Schrefren also came out with a very popular series of reports last year

along the same lines.

Then Simon Leung came out with his "The Death Of Google Adwords" report as a

pre-launch to his adwords products.  I never heard how the campaign went.

 

Just the other day or so ago, I received another "Death of" report. 

The first thought in my mind was "Oh No!  Not another 'Death of' report!".

I had to find out if it was the same kind of information in the report.

The title is "The Death of Information Marketing As We Know It"

Dan Lok writes that he spent close to three months working on his

"Death of" report, which is slightly over 40 pages.

http://www.deathofinformationmarketing.com

Angela Wickenberg

http://e-bizsecretsexposed.com/blog

Jing is free to download,  http://www.jingproject.com,  available for Mac and Windows computers, and (if you register to share your Jing screencasts) comes with a free account on Screencast.com. I was impressed to see that the free account did not expire in 60 days (as it would if you just went to Screencast.com and registered for a free account) but did not expire until 2015). The free account comes with 200MB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth, which seemed generous enough.

If users find they are using Jing to the degree it exceeds the monthly limits, offering up increases in account storage and bandwidth for a fee are necessary to offer this free to everyone.  Offers to upgrade my bandwidth, for a fee  - $21.95 for 100GB. If you choose not to pay, the screencast is just no longer available until the next month’s cycle starts.

I do not blame Techsmith for needing to fund the service, but this should be a caution for anyone hoping to use Jing as a completely free screencast option. If your screencast is large and/or even moderately well viewed, you are likely to need pay the price for the appropriate level of hosting. Do remember that Jing is in beta and Techsmith may well change the terms or provide other alternatives. At this point, if you want to use Jing, another option is to plan on hosting the screencast on your own Web site.

Unfortunately, the ease of using Jing to produce and share a screencast gets lost if you want to try this approach. It is still easy to record and save, but Jing just saves a single .swf Flash file. While you can just upload the .swf and point to it with a link, it gets more difficult to embed it on a page with a site’s navigation features, branding, commentary, and other content. One solution, which may not work in all browsers, was to build a page and then use the following code to embed the .swf:

<object classid=“clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000? width=“627? height=“391?>
  <param name=“movie” value=“FILENAME.swf”>
  <param name=“quality” value=“high”>
  <param name=“bgcolor” value=“#FFFFFF”>
  <embed src=“FILENAME.swf” quality=“high” bgcolor=“#FFFFFF”

width=“627? height=“391? type=“application/x-shockwave-flash”></embed></object>

Note that the width and height elements need to be set in two places, and you need to know what those dimensions are.  You can see this backup version hosted on this site, but producing a page like this took much more time than using Camtasia Studio, Captive, Wink, or other screencasting software that produces both an .swf and the HTML page container.

Screencast.com is the ideal hosting solution for Jing because it’s designed specifically for high-fidelity screen content and won’t distort your media when being viewed. That being said, we also have learned that sharing has a broader definition. We have started work on extending our sharing options outside of just Screencast.com. With those additional sharing options, you’ll be able to get the URL or embed code returned as well - making everything you described above dead simple to do with Jing.

How To Use Jing:

“Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”

“Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which we are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.”
Screencast.com? What is that?

Screencast.com is a web hosting service from TechSmith Corporation. It’s a premier hosting service specifically made for screen video content. It does not change or diminish the resolution of your content. It provides detailed permissions that you can administer so you control who can access your media and you retain ownership of the media you upload. Screencast.com serves as the web hosting backend to the Jing Project, enabling TechSmith to provide you with instant hosting and sharing of your content.
Who can participate?

Anyone may use Jing.

And It’s free for now!

Here’s the deal; Jing isn’t a product right now—it’s a project to figure out whether it fills a need or provides a useful service. They're asking for both your participation and feedback on this concept. As they learn what you want from this, they’ll have a better idea what the pricing and business model might look like in the future.

Uses of Jing

Jing on Flickr
Jing on Skype
Jing for Tech Support and Forums
Jing and Product Demos

I think many schools would have a good use of Jing to write instructions, explanations and tutorials.  Many students might be able to use Jing to enhance their reports.

Here's the link to Jing again:  http://www.jingproject.com

Angela Wickenberg

The guys at Hexatrack show exactly how to make $45,000 in two days with their new free tool, Hexatrack. 

Here's a link to the video:

Here's the play-by-play breakdown of what they did: 

1. They identified an interesting, timely offer on the CommissionJunction affiliate network with a payout of $15.00 per conversion.
2. The offer was centered around a main keyword; let's say it was a 2-word keyphrase which we'll call the "seed keyword."
3. They "dropped the seed" into the HexaTrack keyword spy tool, which yielded a few dozen "short tail" keywords used by our competitors at the time. If  competitors are using these keywords, they can't be all wrong!
4. They prepared to spend some money in Google Adwords and uploaded these short tail keywords to a new Adwords campaign. ("Short-tail keywords" are named so because they contain the seed keyword plus one additional word, or two at the most.)
5. Then they began running these "short tail" keywords as "broad matches"… i.e. if a user searches Google for a phrase that is identical with the short-tail phrase, it's a match… but more importantly, if the Google user's phrase contains the short tail phrase, it's a match as well!
    

   Are you following on why they were running their first list of spyed-out keywords in broad match mode?   For example, if the keyword we were paying for was "life insurance", and a Google user searched for "capital life insurance," our ad would still successfully display on Google, because "capital life insurance" contains the phrase "life insurance". Thus, it's a broad match!

   Here's the kicker… (important!)
   

6. Whenever a conversion happened (sale, lead) HexaTrack would detect the actual keyword that the user entered into Google at the time… which is not ne