Selling Hope from the Third World

Charities are always an interesting study for marketers, because all they sell is good feelings.

For the most part, donors don’t get anything in return for their donations. Nothing commensurate with the amount of money they’re spending, anyway.

World Vision does a remarkably good job in the marketing department and I’m gonna show you a few things they’ve sent me. Here’s an envelope we got the other day:

How many letters do you ever get from Ghana? This one sure stood out in the mail pile. It’s guaranteed to get opened, dontcha think?

Let me show you what’s inside:

If you were to ask most garden-variety marketers what you get when you sponsor a World Vision kid in Ghana, they’re likely to say, “The satisfaction of knowing that your thirty dollars a month is feeding a child in Africa.”

The astute marketer creates a different answer: “You get a personal, hand-written letter from the child’s family twice a year, and the sense of personal connection to an exotic person in a faraway land.”

That’s the Alchemy Factor at play. Never mind the fact that it’s rather expensive to do all this extra stuff. Having people onsite who administrate the writing of letters to thousands of sponsors, that’s a lot of hard work and it doesn’t come free.

But it pays off. It puts World Vision head and shoulders above most of their rivals. It brings a boatload of new donors; people show this stuff to their friends, they often hang letters on their refrigerators, and it makes the idea “stick” a whole lot longer. And frankly too, it jacks up the guilt if the donor considers canceling.

You’ll notice, this is not the first time I’ve talked about the power of a hand-written note. And what could be a better testimonial to the effectiveness of World Vision’s work, than a letter like this?

The Skeptical and the Hopeful

There are two kinds of people in your audience you need to especially consider when you write copy and collect testimonials.

1) The Skeptic. The guy who ain’t going to believe a thing unless he actually walks on the water for himself.

2) The Hopeful. The guy who is yearning so badly for a solution to his ugly, horrible, desperate problem that he’s hungry and thirsty for salvation in any form.

Sometimes these two kinds of people are the same person. When we roll those two guys into one, we have someone who looks at your testimonials with a jaundiced eye, checking for any sign that somebody’s making something up. Do these ring true? Do they sound like real people? Do they all sound like the same guy wrote them? If I wanted to check these people out would I ever be able to?

He asks all those questions.

But… once he gets an affirmative answer to those questions, he can’t unglue himself from your sales page. He’s been looking, hunting, searching, fantasizing for so long… he reads testimonial after testimonial, drinking in the hope.

He places the order almost feeling as though his problem will begin solving itself almost as soon as the transaction is approved.

And then he can’t wait to get it, open it, read it, devour it.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to provide so much proof, so much tangible evidence of the power of your solution – and so much anticipation – that this guy feels a wave of satisfaction flowing through his body as soon as he gets done placing the order on your website.

Google Slap II: Death Of the Squeeze Page?

Jonathan Mizel coined the term NamesqueezeTM and as a matter of fact Jonathan’s got a trademark on the term. I love it. As a matter of fact, Jonathan, I love you. (In a non-sexual way, of course.)

A squeeze page is a page where people click on a link and come to your site and they’ve only got two choices: Opt in, or leave.

If you want the simplest, most direct possible way to find out if your visitors are willing to play ball, this is it. I’ve been using Squeeze pages for at least four years now and they’re great.

Only problem is, Google doesn’t like ‘em. (Not exactly anyway.) The non-buying, nonopting- in members of John Q. Public don’t like them all that well either, and as of last July and again in November, Google is putting the Squeeze on Squeeze pages.

Or so it seems. Actually there’s a bit more to it than that.

It really doesn’t have all that much to do with Squeeze pages per se, though I will return to that point in a moment. What Google really doesn’t like is one-page websites.

Google wants quality and quantity of content.

And they make this judgment more on the basis of your entire site than the landing page itself. If you get slapped and they’re forcing you to bid $5.00 a click for 30 cent keywords, it’s your whole site that got slapped, not just one page.

Google’s looking for a variety of pages that an “organic search engine bot” considers to be real, original content. Not search engine spam, not pilfered from some other site. As Bryan Todd mentioned to me when the July Google Slap hit, Google now expects AdWords advertisers to have a rudimentary understanding of Search Engine Optimization.

What does that mean? The following email from Glenn Livingston sums it up quite nicely:

“Just FYI, in case you’re still gathering info … I beat Google’s royal behind today:

- Added a site map, with a link to it of course

- Added a few low key outbound links to high page rank sites (very bottom of page)

- Removed the bullets from the penalized pages, and textualized them

- Added more SEO stuff (keyword rich anchor tags)

- Broke up my email articles and installed them throughout the site, linked into the

sitemap Nothing dramatic … seems like they just tightened up the changes from round 1.

The thing is, WITH these changes, my quality score is better than it ever was (I’ve now got 2 cent minimums on keywords which never had them, and that’s without any traffic coming through, strictly from the spider food).”

Don’t forget that with most of these changes, while some people loudly lose, others quietly win. I talked to a number of people whose ads shot up to the top after this latest change. Of course some people benefitted, because some of their competitors disappeared.

Now that landing page is part of the quality score, it actually provides a potential ADVANTAGE to smart advertisers who do it right.

Just as with writing a hyper-relevant ad that gets high click through, you can now improve your position and reduce your ad costs when you do what Google wants. And even if it DOES reduce opt in rates, you get compensated for this by the reduced click costs. It’s not just a matter of minimum bids, … the quality score is a continuum which influences your position, # of clicks, etc., even when you ARE bidding above the minimum.”

Having been through several rounds of this, and knowing that more are coming (as Google’s senior staff has assured me), this is what I’ve seen:

-The average ‘man on the street’ Google advertiser thinks that Google is just trying to shake him down for more money, every six months or so.

-Marketers who truly understand Relevance – who create sites that are so sticky that nobody wants to click the BACK button – continue to do better and better. When Google introduced Quality Score a year and a half ago, my tuned-in Renaissance Club Members got cheaper clicks. When Google Slap happened this past summer, they got more clicks for less. When Google Slap happened two weeks ago, they got even more.

Losers lose. Winners win. And the winners who win the biggest are the ones who stay plugged into reliable information sources. If you cultivate that habit, you’re always ahead of the pack. The changes accrue in your favor.

The Amazing Power of GREAT Testimonials

Any marketing guru worth his salt tells you, you should have testimonials.

From time to time I encounter people whose testimonials are fake. It’s probably more common than most of us suspect.

If a person can’t tell whether a testimonial is real or fake, that in itself is a problem. Is it possible to have testimonials that people know are not fake? Most certainly. Make them verifiable. Provide material evidence, even if it means scanned images of documents. Make your testimonials so well documented that nobody can doubt them.

Wanna see a GREAT testimonial page? Check this out:

http://corporateturnaround.com/testimonials.html

This is worth visiting on your browser. On the lower part of the page you see thumbnails of scans of testimonial letters from satisfied clients.

If you mouse over any of them, a little window pops up, summarizing the client’s situation:

“Landscaping – Amount of debt: $114,190.66 Number of creditors: 12 ”

Then you can click on the window and see the individual letters.

As you can see, the identity of the client is blurred out. But notice everything else you can see – the mouseover that tells you how much debt they have; the date stamp on the fax; the extremely detailed account of what happened to the client.

I didn’t ask but I’m quite sure that this letter didn’t just appear unsolicited. Corporate Turnaround undoubtedly has a strategy for eliciting these testimonials.

Let’s dig into some of the meat of getting and using good testimonials:

How do you get testimonials in the first place?

Normally, you have to ask.

Especially if you are in an information-driven business, i.e., if you do anything that remotely resembles what I do, testimonial collecting is one of your regular part-time jobs.

The simplest way to get testimonials is to simply ASK for them. It could be as simple as sending an e-mail that says, “You bought X and I was wondering how it’s working out for you?” This could even be inserted into an autoresponder.

Cool tip: Make a screen shot of the e-mail when you receive it and insert the screen shot into your sales page. Like this:

See how lifelike this testimonial is? That’s cuz it is real-life. The genuine article.

Many times people do not feel capable of writing “great testimonials.” Furthermore many won’t take any kind of initiative even if they do feel capable. So what you do is, you talk to them on the phone. They tell you how happy they are, and you say “Hey, would you mind if I write down what you just said and e-mail it to you for your approval to use on our website?” Many times people will be just fine with that.

Testimonials come in all shapes and sizes. Most of the time they include irrelevant details or meandering statements. You may want to trim them down to their essential message. I always put the most succinct testimonials in prominent places and leave the longer, story-telling type testimonials to secondary space.

Yes, they’ve got Privacy Concerns: Many times clients do not want their personal or business information revealed to the public, yet it is precisely your ability to help them with personal/business problems that you are trying to prove. In the case of my own business, most people wouldn’t care if I put their telephone number right on the testimonial but they usually do NOT want people to know what their website is, because of competitors.

Every market has different issues. There is usually some kind of information people want withheld. You need to respect whatever that is, but the antidote is to include any other kind of information that would indicate this is a real person.

Let’s say you sell something that helps people with a sexual problem or something really personal. Obviously they don’t want their last name on it. However, a testimonial signed “Gary S., Bakersfield California” has zero credibility. But here’s what you could do:

<Testimonial>

Sincerely,

Gary S.

Welder, age 59

Bakersfield, CA

Suffered from scrotal expansion dysfunction for 12½ years

Received via e-mail Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Testimonials should squarely and specifically address common buyer objections. And if your product has a great strength / Achilles heel combination, the testimonial should address that too.

Remember, it’s perfectly OK and quite desirable if the testimonials repel the wrong kind of buyer.

You don’t want ’em anyway.

Most peoples’ testimonials subtly communicate that the product is not outstanding, superb and over-delivers, but more like “Wow, this product was really, really okay.” Hey… if you can’t get glowing, rave review testimonials then either you’re in a commodity business (like a $69/night hotel, which hardly anybody’s going to write rave reviews about) or your product is just kind of mediocre.

If your product is mediocre – change it. Use some alchemy to re-invent it.

Testimonial Contests can be wonderfully effective, especially if you have a product that people actively participate in. I hold contests in my coaching programs and give away very cool prizes. Last time I gave away some Mac notebook computers and some iPods. I spent a ton of money on prizes. But it spurred the participants to work their butts off and achieve stellar results … and then prove it to me in writing.

Mechanical Aspects of Marketing vs Alchemy

The mechanical ingredients of marketing are:

• Any Tool: E-mail, AdWords, Search Engine Optimization, Popups, Video

• Any Media: The Internet, Mail, TV, Radio

• Any Hirable Skill: Copywriting, website development, product development, customer service, fulfillment

Mechanical things alone only assemble an ordinary business. Adjustments to these things only achieve incremental improvements.

But alchemy opens up a different dimension entirely. Alchemy is:

• Multiplying the fundamental economics of your business

• Selling results, not procedures

• Astute blending of “open” (publicly available or standard) vs. “proprietary” (secret sauce)

• Re-defining the problem or product

Alchemy usually comes to you in a flash of inspiration. It’s best learned by example. Andthe essence of alchemy is identifying inner emotional and system efficiencies and crafting hooks that push those primal buttons.

The late, great Gary Halbert created alchemy for a new perfume promotion, with little more than an intriguing headline in a full-page ad in the Los Angeles newspaper:

“Tova Borgnine Swears Under Oath That Her New Perfume Does Not Contain An Illegal Sexual Stimulant”

As a result reporters and gawkers alike packed Tova’s premiere party at an L.A. hotel ballroom, to receive free samples and hear her make a public statement about it. Brilliant.

Some more examples of alchemy:

• Cirque du Soleil: The famous Canadian acrobatic circus show was begun in a business that had no need or desire for another “circus”. Who goes to the circus anymore, after all? They didn’t go after the deadbeat circus crowd though. They didn’t analyze the market and come up with something just a little better that was just a little cheaper. They created an entirely new experience with a range of artistic expression never seen in an ordinary circus. The target: Adult and corporate clients willing to spend many times more money for a premium entertainment experience. $90 circus tickets, anyone? They’re lining up for ’em in Vegas.

• Apple’s iPhone: I’ve written more than once about how Microsoft created a “tar baby” with Windows, luring you into using Outlook for your e-mail, Internet Explorer for your browser, plunking down good money for MS Office and maybe a whole bunch of other items as well.

Apple has done the same thing with the iPod and the foundation was iTunes. The iPhone and peoples’ craving for a single device that does everything at once is an extension of the iTunes concept. Whoever said a cell phone has to be a commodity? Nobody else’s do-it-all cell phone triggered such an avalanche of excitement and free PR.

• Any Decent Trade Organization or Online Community: I bring this up because every industry and group of people with a common interest can represent enormous value as soon as someone creates a community. Community based on shared interest is the most essential, simplest form of alchemy that there is. If you’re looking for a brilliant business idea, maybe you just need to form an association. In B-to-B it can be slow to start but it can also be a surprisingly profitable longterm play. If one out of ever five or ten businesses in your industry belongs to your association, there’s money in that list. Membership and community based websites – like Flickr, Wikipedia, MySpace, eBay – do the same thing in a less formal way. What are these properties worth and what influence do they wield? Even if you’re a tiny little guy or gal, you can create a community within a tiny niche. Or even within one of these sites.

The Alchemy Formula (from Blue Ocean Strategy) – Ask yourself these questions:

1. What elements should be reduced well below what’s considered normal in this market?

2. What factors should be raised well above what’s considered normal in this market?

3. What is everybody used to putting up with that should be eliminated in this market?

4. What is nobody offering that somebody ought to make available in this market?

I’m constantly struck by how often the formula is: #2 is price and it can be raised to 2X to 10X what is normal and customary, as long as it comes with some luxury and pampering.

In the hotel business, if the rooms are $69 a night they come with free breakfast, free wi-fi and free long distance. If the rooms are $269 a night, breakfast is $24.95, wi-fi is $14.95 per day and long distance is a buck a minute.

No matter what the economy is like, there’s always somebody staying at the Ritz-Carlton.

“Make the Strange Familiar…. And Make the Familiar Strange.”

Such is the secret of copywriting, and even more important, the very positioning of products and crafting of offers. Joe Vitale once pointed out that people will pay good money for a change in emotional state. If they’re happy, they wanna be sad. If they’re sad, they wanna be angry. If they’re angry, they want to laugh.

The crafting of offers is Alchemy. Turning lead into gold.

Smashing Through The Black Wall of Fear

Marcus is eleven, and I just took him to father/son camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

8 hours north of Chicago, nearly in Canada. Years ago Marcus’ younger sister Drea lived with us for three months as our foster daughter. Marcus (a.k.a. “Tank”) became my buddy from the inner city and has been ever since.

So here we are with no electricity, no running water, 3 days on the Tahquamenon river and every day we do some daring activity like pole-climbing or the ropes course.

The ropes course is 25 feet above the ground and even though Marcus had a helmet, climbing gear and able assistants at every side, he was totally intimidated.

The first section was a sort of horizontal rope ladder that sorely tested his balance and stability. At long last he made it across. But then the next section was a tightrope walk on a single cable…. That’s when Marcus lost it.

He looked down at the ground far below and shook with terror. “I’m afraid of heights!”

(Sounded like a belief that effortlessly sailed into his brain, dropped in by someone and never questioned.) Just to put one foot on that cable and put his weight on it took all the will he could summon.

When he got his second foot on the cable, panic swallowed him up. He melted into a crying, quivering, sobbing mess. He begged, he pleaded, please, please, let me go back.

But… on the ropes course, you can’t go back. Once you’re on, you have no choice but to finish it.

After awhile this became a real problem. The camp counselors tried to soothe him and reassure him but to no avail. Their experience of helping hundreds of other dads and kids get across meant nothing in comparison to the yawning expanse of terror that lay below that cable.

But then one of the counselors had an idea. She adjusted his harness and physically proved to him how far he would fall if he completely lost control, by making him sit down right there on the high-wire. He couldn’t even fall far enough for his butt to touch that cable. He sat there and realized how low, low actually was.

No matter what happens, Marcus, no matter how bad you screw up, you won’t die. You won’t tumble helplessly to the ground and shatter your bones into pieces. You’ll be OK.

That was the turning point.

He got a hold of himself. He calmed down. He tested and re-tested his harness and realized, hey wait a minute, I can only fall about four feet, not 25. This harness really will hold me up.

He was still terrified – his emotions were still raging in a war with his mind – but he started putting one foot in front of the other and making progress.

I told the camp counselor, “This isn’t one one-hundredth as dangerous as the neighborhood he grew up in, with drive-by shootings and crack dealers on the corner.

“But he doesn’t know that.”

This reign of terror probably lasted 25 minutes. It held up a lot of other campers. But Marcus eventually made it all the way through the ropes course, including the giant rope swing that spans 100 feet (took him a full minute before he was willing to open his eyes).

Somebody at Camp Paradise took notice and decided to give Marcus some recognition. This wouldn’t be a big deal to some of the other boys but it was to Marcus, it was a major victory. Maybe the grandest accomplishment of his 11 years. At dinner the camp director announced that Marcus has triumphed over the ropes course and 120 men and boys gave him a round of applause.

He got high fives the rest of the day, and you should have seen his beaming smile. The most celebrated kid at camp.

I remember watching him during the worst part of the terror, thinking “Man, that’s me, at a whole bunch of different points in my life. This isn’t something that happens to you once in your life at summer camp. The Black Wall of Fear is something that you stare down multiple, multiple times.

Especially if you’re an entrepreneur. And not just in business; The Black Wall of Fear obstructs your path in every sphere of life that matters. There will always be times when the lizard part of your brain is screaming at you, to retreat to safety and sanity.

Hey, isn’t this precisely the thing that keeps millions of people locked in allegedly safe, secure Dilbert Cubes? Laboring miserably under buzzing fluorescent lights… going home to colorless nights washed down with a beer and a bag of Ruffles. Drowning the droning of their dreary, desolate lives with episodes of ‘reality TV.’ Creating products or inventions or dreaming up things and never having the courage to step out and expose them to the harsh light of day.

Hey Marcus, don’t ever forget this – you’re going to confront this same Black Wall of Fear at every important transition of your life. You will always question your sanity and you will always wonder, at some level, if the bottom is going to fall out. If the other shoe is going to drop. If you’re going to tumble to the ground and smash every bone in your body to bits.

Dear friend and subscriber, I only know of ONE way to defeat that black Wall of Fear:

Punch your fist right through it and drive on.

For me, before I could ever do that, I had to sit down, calm myself, get a piece of paper and write down everything that could go wrong. Before I could smash the hole in the wall I had to know what I was afraid of in the first place. In living Technicolor. Or black and white, on that little piece of paper.

You need to do this even if you think the answer is “obvious.” You need to spell out exactly what it is you fear.

A lot of people are afraid to do this because they think it’s going to allow all kinds of negative things to creep into their life. They think it’s not “positive thinking.”

Nah, actually it’s the opposite. If all you do is read positive thinking books, you’re an easy mark for the next shyster who comes sauntering along with a seductive story to tell. He’ll exploit your optimism and drive a spear right through your blind spot and take everything that’s not nailed down. Business succeeds in the real world neither by raging optimism nor by sheer determination, but by wise pursuit of opportunity and sensible management of risk.

You map out the bad scenarios. You make yourself a “disaster flow chart.” You create an action plan for every bad scenario.

OK…. You planned on your business turning a profit in three months but it takes nine. What do you do? You get thrown out of your house, where do you live? The line of credit gets denied, where do you go? You move into your sister’s basement and your brother-in-law makes fun of you.

And then…?

And then… the big yellow ball in the sky will still come up the next day and you’ll figure out what to do next. Eventually, you will prevail. And if you think about it now you’ll be calm when it happens. No matter what materializes, it was part of the plan. This is no social crisis, this is just another tricky day for you.

When you get done with this, you’ll see only two or three scenarios you don’t already know how to handle. And… you already have bits and pieces of solutions. Once you’ve got it down on paper you can put your mind to work – “Hey brain, let’s work together and keep our eyes peeled for solutions to this one” and the creative juices flow.

When the student is ready, the teacher is surprisingly likely appear.

You will also find that of most problems that might arise, you have not one but two or three solutions. Resources you had never considered. You may find that the original path towards your goal was riddled with big land mines but there’s another path where the grenades are much smaller.

One more thought before I move on:

There is always a RATIONAL and IRRATIONAL side to fear.

There is the fact that Gravity Kills, and Marcus knows that. It’s good to be nervous when you’re 25 feet in the air. But there’s the irrational side that is terrified even when he’s wired up with a harness with a 4000-pound test cable.

Fear loses its grip on you when you stare down that Irrational Beast. When you finally takethat step forward there’s a calm, it’s like the silence at the center of the hurricane. That silence tells you you’re doing the right thing.

“How I Raised Myself From Misery to Majesty Using the Perry Marshall Method”

Many readers of this newsletter have heard a CD I recorded with Mastermind Club Member Jade Sullivan, “How to Dig Rocks Out of the Cold Hard Ground and Sell Them for Lots Of Money.” Jade tells of his extraordinary success in the price-sensitive, commoditized market of rock and marble for floors and countertops. A study in de-commoditizing a product that most people buy only on price. Mr. Sullivan has now gone on to another equally brutal market and achieved similar success:

“We landed 4 new clients that generated 6.4 million dollars in sales, within six weeks of finishing and the promoting our white paper. We should see additional profit of 80+% THIS YEAR, from those 4 clients. I would have never been able to get these ‘whales’ without a fantastic white paper and I never would have been able to produce our white paper without your guide. Period!

“Let me put it this way… I have never been able to get these large clients to even SPEAK with me, but after they read our white paper, they picked up the phone and called me, for advice. Talk about positioning and power.”

You can download this at www.perrymarshall.com/marketing/forex.pdf. If you have any curiosity about this at all, you should go grab it and print it out. Meanwhile I’d like to mention some things he did well in this masterfully written, clear document. The title and sub-head are good but Jade really engages the readerwhen he says:

After reading this report, you will be able to:

• Identify the six tactics that bankers and brokers use to make additional hidden profit that ends up costing you thousands, per month.

• Transparently see what the bank is charging you, regardless of what they say.

• Show you how to implement proven strategies that will lower the cost of your foreign payments and increase your

margins.

Jade’s approach is not too bombastic, not too academic. It’s just right. He gently and persuasively moves you forward. Throughout the paper, he skillfully strikes the balance of neither over-stating or understating his case. Most copywriters severely underestimate the importance of this. Jade’s audience is making financial decisions and the results of those decisions are very black and white. Forex trades are measured down to the penny, to the hundredth of a percentage point. Understatement may undersell, but when your audience is rigorous, overstatement will murder your results.

He gives his reader a great criteria for judging traders:

The eight questions you can ask your ‘trader’ to find out his skill level and acumen:

1. What is your background?

2. How long have you been trading Foreign Exchange?

3. What is your risk management philosophy?

4. What trending and timing analysis do you use and why?

5. Are you a sales trader or do you work on the desk?

6. How many clients do you deal with each week and month?

7. Can you provide references that have worked with you since the beginning?

8. What is the oldest reference you have? (this shows long term stability)

Most white papers just leave people hanging, but Jade offers a superb call to action, taking them to a clearly defined next step:

Access Trading International has developed a 20 minute “Foreign Currency Risk Management Audit and Tune-Up” which we conduct over the telephone with you and top staff/team members. What we accomplish in this fast-paced, zero-nonsense session is:

• How to determine and manage your current downside risk

• Research your upside profit potential, based on your risk tolerance

• Mitigate severe overcharges you are currently experiencing

The Tune-Up is conducted by the principal of our company, Jade Sullivan, who has worked with more than 1100 corporations including; Stryker Corporation, ADAC Laboratories and Scotts Corporation.

Please be assured that this consultation will not be a thinly disguised sales presentation; it will consist of the best intelligence Mr. Sullivan can supply in a twenty minute time span. There is no charge for the call, but please be advised that the call must be strictly limited to 20 minutes. The consult will typically take place within 1-2 weeks of your call.

To secure a time for this consultation, please call Jennifer Hudson at (360) 433-0792 or email her at jenh@atifx.com. She will provide you with a diagnostic sheet (consisting of several questions that will need to be answered to maximize our time together) and advise you as to what time slots we make available for the free “Audit and Tune-Up.”

Nearly all businesses are assemblages of many moving parts, but the core of your success will almost always be a collection of very simple mechanisms much like this one, systems that bring clients aboard steadily, day by day. If that’s your highest aim right now, it’s worth whatever it takes.

Perry Marshall

Random Predator vs. Calculated Cicada

There are many ways that you can harness the Cicada example and apply it in your marketplace. In any marketplace.

In real estate it’s this sequence:

Loose credit – more building – more building, more inventory and sales – even looser credit – more building – eventual inventory glut.

Sales peak and head down – more mortgages go bad – banks tighten credit – even less sales, even more inventory, even more foreclosures – no building.

Demand recovers (eventually) – inventory gets sold out – then shortage – then price increases …and on and on it goes.

The same thing, in essence happens in every industry.

High demand/low supply = excitement – which leads to High supply/low demand = tears (depression). Depression leads to low supply – demand catches fire again (eventually) and we’re back to the races.

When we’re in the middle of any one phase, few remember the cyclical nature of the market.

Whatever is in front of them seems like “the way it IS”

“The biggest problem people have is they mistake the finite with the infinite and fail to properly value those few things that actually are infinite.”

-Guru Maharaji McCarthy. AKA Ken.

As bugs go, Cicadas are among the dumbest. Klutzier than moths. They fall on their back and flop around and can’t get up. I was watching this thinking, “Dang, I bet every neuron in their teeny, tiny brains must be devoted to that complicated 17 year reproductive cycle with no room left over for, say, getting along in life.”

No doubt that’s true. But there’s a lesson in that too. If the planning, timing and execution are right, a lot of other things can go wrong and it works anyway. You don’t have to be perfect, so long as you can take everyone else by surprise. If there’s an avalanche of publicity when it launches, it might not matter so much that the clerk at the store is totally incompetent. Take Apple’s iPhone launch that just hit. It was on the front page of almost every newspaper, and hey, if some store is out of stock, it won’t derail Apple’s plans.

Quantity can be a perfectly good substitute for quality, if the conditions are right.

In my own Marketing microcosm, a number of people have pulled of Cicada-like product launches: Rich Shefren’s series of coaching programs, Brad Fallon’s Stompernet, Chris Carpenter’s renaissance of Google Cash. All of them successful. What I want you to understand is, this can be done in any market. Think of The Secret DVD that took the world by storm earlier this year. They pulled the rabbit out of the hat and no predator can really knock it off at this point.

At some point in the cyclic nature of the world, planet earth will be ripe for a similar smash product. I don’t have any doubt that a person intimately familiar with the self-help biz could identify a series of such smash hits over the last 50 years. The “once in a lifetime” opportunity – the proverbial Pet Rock or Rubik’s Cube – could actually be a cyclic phenomenon, not a one time anomaly. Random to the predator, but planned and calculated by you.

“A Force of Nature”

Let the Wild Rumpus Begin.

-Where The Wild Things Are

On May 22 they showed up.

Suddenly, without warning, they started popping, seemingly out of nowhere. Emerging from holes in the ground. The first day, a smattering. Then more. And more… in days, our entire property, and suburbs for miles around, were swarming with them.

In only a few days, the noise rose to a deafening screech.

Who is this they?

The 17 year cicadas.

Yep, every 17 years, in strips of land through Illinois and Wisconsin, when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees, the cicadas appear. Cicadas are the insects that make that buzzing sound in the trees in the summertime. These particular cicadas have a seventeen-year life cycle. They invisibly feed on tree roots deep in the ground all that time, and suddenly, as though summoned by an invisible command, they burrow from the darkness to the day in unison.

Nymphs crawl out of the ground, shed their shells and winged creatures fly up into the trees. Mating calls begin, a shrill buzz you can hear a quarter mile away. Males and females converge, lay their eggs in the trees. Eggs hatch and hatchlings drop to the ground and the insects dig down into the ground to find a tree root (as far down as ten feet) and the cycle begins again.

For about five weeks you could go nowhere within miles of here without hearing them. The droning, clicking and buzzing raged from early morning till evening. So loud it drowned out conversation.

Soon after they came, the predators showed up too, in full force. Seagulls arriving from Lake Michigan, eating the bugs in our trees. Dragonflies. Bats crossing the evening sky. Squirrels and dogs in the neighborhood having an Old Country Cicada Buffet.

Seventeen is a prime number (there’s a species of 13 year cicadas too, also a prime number) – not divisible by any other number so predators can’t match the time cycle. When the cicadas come, there are so many, the predators cannot even possibly keep up. More stupid, blundering bugs than all the seagulls and dragonflies and bats and squirrels and dogs can conceivably eat.

‘Nother interesting factoid: Once the cicadas started to dwindle, the predators cleaned up fast. The cicadas vanished even faster than they had come. Our neighborhood is quiet once again until 2024 when the Force Of Nature returns.

I hope you see the business parallel to this.

To predators, the appearance of the cicadas is an anomaly, like planets randomly colliding. It isn’t planned for, prepared for, not incorporated into some strategic plan. Just a Nice Big Meal that happened to show up one happy May 22.

To the cicadas, however, it’s a deliberate, strategic, ingenious plan for survival and proliferation. It’s been going on for hundreds, actually hundreds of thousands of years. It’s systematic.

A Force Of Nature.

It always fascinates me how living things manage to adapt to fill every ecological niche, even onceevery- 13 or -17 year niches. DNA – and Nature itself – is profoundly intelligent and resourceful.

As an aside, I have studied this extensively (www.cosmicfingerprints.com) and discovered that this adaptation, this evolution that fills the earth with every imaginable variety of flora and fauna, is not random, not one bit. Contrary to what the biology books would have you believe, by the way. It’s an engineered process.

Pre-programmed to adapt and evolve. Makes Taguchi look like child’s play. Living things succeed no more by accident than you do.

You don’t invest in stocks by throwing darts at a dartboard and neither does nature. Nature is calculated. So too must you be.