timjamesbrennan.com

Show Notes:-

This show was originally recorded on Monday 7th April 2008 at 8:30pm EST.

00:06 This show is dedicated to the memory of Gary Halbert, who passed away one year ago tomorrow. Rest in peace, alpha shit weasel (as he affectionately referred to himself).

03:55 Welcome to our new home at thirtydaychallenge.tv. As you might have noticed we have moved from justin.tv to ustream.tv.

04:19 I’ve been doing a lot of live testing and later on in the show I will be talking about my findings. There are three major transmission environments, and each of them has some positives and some negatives.

4:42 Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Gary Halbert passing, so I wanted to show you some of my favourite Gary Halbert lessons.

5:03 Twitter has become hot, hot, hot, and dare I say it, but I told you so. I want to talk about some testing on Twitter we have been doing in the lab.

6:02 The show is structured with content, lessons, news etc of the week in the first part, and then in the second part we turn off the recording and we go into questions and answers. Not only do you get to ask me questions, but you can see from the chat window we have a who’s who of internet marketing in the 30dc world – so there’s a lot of people here who can help. One of the awesome things (about ustream.tv) is that I can bring you on live. If you want to do that, you do need to have headphones, and you have to feel comfortable with your webcam. We can also use the chat window for questions and answers.

7:08 Finally, we will have the after show section which is completely without merit.

7:48 Some of you will have already noticed some of the benefits of Ustream. The quality of the picture and the sound will be much better. You also will have noticed that you get proper sound from (pre-recorded) videos as well.

9:28 One of the things that has been going on a lot this week, especially on April Fool’s day, were a lot of links that went to a YouTube video of Rick Asley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. If there’s one video from the 80s that should be dead and buried, it should be that. This is basically a prank that has gone around in the Web 2.0 world. (Referring to chat) That’s right “Rick Rolled”. A lot of people have been sending their video streams, their podcast streams, their tv shows, etc to this Rick Asley video and it may have happened to you. I have posted that Frank Ucayali video, and as internet marketers I suspect that we should try our own version of being “Rick Rolled” - called “Uc-Rolling”. I posted up a Twitter message saying “Check out this new video on the 30 dc”. When you click on the link you instead go to the Rick Asley video. I just wanted to explain this internet phenom.

11:41 This photo (of Gary Halbert) was actually taken from the very last public appearance that Gary ever made. It was, I’m very proud to say, from Frank and my Underachiever conference in 2006. Gary, as some of you may or may not know, was a huge, huge influence on me. I actually lived with the great man in Miami. What I got out of that wild experience was not only the “hows” of how the greatest copy writer the world has ever seen worked, but it also gave me an insight into the little things, the mechanics. That was what made a huge impression.

12:39 For those who don’t know Gary Halbert at all, Gary is in my opinion just the greatest copy writer of all time. Fortunately, the Gary Halbert newsletters are available on line and they are completely free. One of the best possible copywriting educations that you can get is to go right back to the start from newsletter one and just go through them. There are so many great pieces of information buried in there – it’s just totally brilliant. If there’s just one set of newsletters that I can point you to it’s the Boron newsletters. These were actually written when Gary was in prison for mail fraud. He told me that he didn’t deserve to go to jail for that, but there was plenty in the past that he did deserve to go to jail for, so it probably added up.

14:10 Gary wrote a series of letters to his son, Bond, from jail. These letters are the most extraordinary letters that I’ve ever seen. I want to show you one of my treasured possessions. This is not the original, but it is one of a few bound copies that Gary had made up which is the actual hand written version. It’s one of my most treasured possessions.  This to me is unbelievable.

16:11 This content is available to you online. It’s an extraordinary education. It was written for direct marketing, but it is also applicable online.

16:34 There’s one particular lesson that I want to bring you today which is one of my absolute favourites that I did last year – “Golden Nuggets”. Golden Nuggets is such an incredible strategy, because if there’s a mistake that people make when starting the 30dc or internet marketing, it’s that they only get into a topic to a certain degree. They don’t really understand it. This is something that Gary was brilliant at doing, and John Carlton today is brilliant at doing it, and I like to think that I’m pretty good at it too. This strategy some academics out there might recognise as study, but there’s a certain way to it… a physical element to it.

17:54 My book recommendation of the week is “The Back of the Napkin” by Dan Roam, which is absolutely brilliant. Seriously, this is one to get. What’s fascinating to me is that it’s a major element of what Gary did with the Golden Nugget method.

18:49 **The Golden Nugget Method – How To Become An Expert In 48 hours** (presentation made in iWork Keynote) I wanted to add a voice recording to the Golden Nugget pdf which I produced – it’s a great way of using one created piece of content and reformatting it for different distribution methods.

19:23 I wanted to teach you about The Golden Nugget Method, which Julie jokes, “Hey Ed, that’s just good studying”, but it’s always nice to give something a good title. You may not have the time right now, but you should try to read one newsletter a day.

20:37 Don’t let the fact that Gary did time put you off reading it. I think I’ve learnt from my mistakes than any successes, it’s just the fact of life. In fact for anyone that’s successful, I can guarantee one thing - they’ve made more mistakes than you. They’re not afraid to make mistakes.

21:02 Gary was a huge inspiration to me, he was very kind to me, and I went to live with him in Miami while he was teaching me the ropes. This newsletter really is absolutely brilliant. It’s completely free, and a big thank you to his sons, Kevin and Bond for continuing the site and continue it going.

21:30 As you’ll learn over the course of the rest of this month, content is everything. That’s going to be your job from now on – creating content or paying someone to do so. It’s the most important skill and I learnt all my chops right here.

21:59 Gary came up with this strategy to help write Direct Mail letters, but the technique applies to anytime you’re going to be creating content, whether you’re doing an interview or recording something like I am now, or writing a blog post. It’s just the degree to which you go.

22:17 People ask me, “How can you continuous talk about all of this stuff?” The truth is, it’s because of the study elements. I’ve already shown you my Bloglines secret and effectively what I’m doing every day is Golden Nugget theory. I’m looking round the net; everything makes me go, “Oh wow!” or “That’s interesting”, I make a note of it. It’s the act of physically recording that note and believe it or not I actually use a Moleskin notepad. You can also you Google Notebook, which you can cut and paste things. Which ever way you do it, the important thing is to do it.

23:19 When we started doing all this niche marketing, we grabbed those 3”x5” index cards and every single time we saw something we would write it down. Gary did it for headlines, “Wow-facts”, or anything makes you stop and go “Huh?” or “Interesting!”

19:49 As we go forward, you’ve got your phrases and you need to produce content for those. That can freak people out a bit, but I’m going to show you how to make it really fun. Some of you might be flashing back to school assignments and thinking about how horrendous they were. Folks, they were horrendous because of the way they were taught; it’s a crime that it’s still taught in that way. It’s a real shame, because it’s a joy to do. I used to hate it and now I love it. You should love it too, because it’s the thing that will set you apart down the track.

24:46 First of all, I want you to type your phrase into Google. Look at the top 10 sites (20 is better), and I want you to take heaps of notes. You should put one idea on each of the 3×5 cards so you are able to “fondle those facts” as Gary put it.

25:29 The reason people have so much problem with reports is that they just don’t have the information to hand. Writer’s block is caused by a lack of information. Another great book that I love is “Story” by Robert McKee which talks about screenwriting. Robert McKee is a very surly gentlemen as a general rule, but the book is still worth learning from. He talks about it in very frank language that writer’s block is caused by a lack of information, and nothing that a day spent doing golden nuggets won’t fix.

26:22 I want you to adopt a state of curiousness, because that is the state that will make you money. It is our natural state to sort, judge, and edit at the wrong times – something that is so badly taught in our schools.

27:17 The other thing I want you to do is join all the mailing list for the sites in the top 10 results. You may want to set up a Gmail account especially for doing this.

28:07 Bottom line is that as you take these notes your brain will start to sort it and work through it. A key thing is that if you take a break, then when you come back all of a sudden it just flows and you can just write. The best writers, Steven King, Amy Tan, Tolkien, Hemingway…. it’s very rare for them to have a specific idea of what’s going on. Steven King used to start of with nothing more than an idea, like what would happen if cars ate people? (Christine)… what happens if a dog goes bad? – (Cujo)… or what happens if you spill pig’s blood on a sophomore? (Carrie) – the rest of the story came out of that little idea.

29:19 The hook, the catch, everything that’s important about any piece of content that you write will magically appear.

29:52 Make sure you have your Bloglines setup. Your Firefox browser should default to Bloglines when you click the orange button in the address field. Subscribe to those blog feeds like I showed you and read them and take notes as I did with speed reading – it’s really, really important.

26:20 99% of people will just sit there passively reading Bloglines. There are two sorts of piles in your brain. One pile is like my desk at the moment, stuff is just thrown on it. You can find stuff, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot of time. The mere act of you taking active notes activates the part of the brain that acts like a filing cabinet. If you’re going to read it, why not take three extra seconds and make information 100 times more useful?

31:35 Make sure you do a search on FaceBook, Google Groups, MySpace, Yahoo, for the phrase. In most cases you might not find a group for your specific phrase so you’ll have to go to the core market. For example with “Free Speed Reading” you may have to look for “Speed Reading” groups. If it was “Sausage Making Tips”, the core market would be “Sausage Making”.

32:15 Reading is not enough – you must take notes.

32:30 There is a sort of part 2 to this which we’ll explain as we go through this next week of the challenge. At the moment I want you to be storing stuff in your filing cabinets, and then I’ll show you how to bring it out of the filing cabinets effortlessly and easily. If you always thought, “Oh, I can never create content”, I have had a 100% success rate with people who have followed these instructions. It just works, because its how your brain works.

33:01 If you market the way the internet works and use your brain the way it’s been designed to work, it’s funny how much easier things are.

34:48 I don’t know if you’ve been following Twitter, but if you have you might have seen that we had a big announcement. It is the peer to peer social bookmarking, and it’s been extraordinarily successful. We only put this out via Twitter for the first few days, but we’ve had 5917 people sign up.

35:59 In a nutshell, for the thirty day challenger, this site does one thing and it does it beautifully. Once you sign up with fresh accounts, over the next few days, you will be able to past in your URL, your tags, your phrase, and statement, press a button and all your social bookmarking will be done. It will save you an extraordinary amount of time or money. You might even find that Anil Feltcher in India might be out of business.

38:06 OnlyWire used to purport to do this, but it never actually did; this actually works. This has been 7 months of hardcore programming by Dan. Dan is an absolute genius.

36:11 There’s only one way to celebrate Dan’s genius (– the Pink Thong Video)

42:05 Now I wanted to talk about live tv. I’ve been doing a lot of research and a lot of testing. One of the cool things about being able to Twitter is when we wanted to test we would get anywhere from 15 to 25 people to help. This time last week was a disaster, Justin.tv just blew up on me. I don’t want to bag Justin.tv because it’s where we got the start. It has some really nice features, but I think the difference between Justin.tv and Ustream.tv is analogous to MySpace and FaceBook. Ustream has some very nice exporting options, I save as a movie, and it also has a submission engine to put it on YouTube. Most importantly, it allows really nice audio visual streaming of other (pre-recorded) videos.

45:04 It also allows you to have a co-host. It you have a webcam (or mic) and headphones you can come on the show. It’s vital to have headphones to avoid feedback.

47:36 The tools at Mogulus.com are just extraordinary, it’s like your producing CNN, you can have people jumping in backwards and forwards. You can have multiple producers, so you can have people doing the switching for me between videos. However there are a couple of things that it doesn’t do that I think are vital. It doesn’t allow you to export a video of your show and that is very important. The quality is superb, but can really tax your computer and can crash Firefox on old computers.

49:18 Mogulus are one to keep an eye on. You can half a dozen people that you switch between for segments, and you can have people queuing up everything for you. You can also have clickable links appear at the bottom of the video screen which for internet marketing is just superb. It’s going to be great for launches, because you can make your own infomercial show and have it running 24 hours a day.

50:35 What you should do is just like we’ve done is go and register yourself a .tv domain for your niches.

52:04 Twitter has got a bad wrap, but it has become huge and is becoming vital. It’s where things happen first and it’s a more reliable method than email if it’s used properly. The thing that makes people’s experience of Twitter not good is because they use it for the wrong things. There are three types of Twitter user, the first is groups of mates. I would love to do this, but I can’t really use it like this because of the position I’m in. When you hook it up to your mobile phone, or use it with Halo (if you know the link please leave it in comments below – thanks, Tim) it’s just brilliant. If you’re using it for marketing, you can’t use it for private conversations because it comes across as being rude – people feel as if they’re being left out of a conversation.

54:29 The whole micro blogging aspect can’t be underestimated – the leverage possibilities are extraordinary. To be able to type once for it appear on FaceBook, and loads of other social networks are going to make it indispensible in the marketer’s armoury.  We are going to make it a big part of the 30dc this year.

55:05 Can someone please Google for me “Frank Kern’s VW”? Look at this, Frank Kern’s VW page didn’t exist before Friday. That’s nuts.

56:21 We are going to be using Twitter enormously in the 30dc both as a communication tool amongst all the Thirty Day Challengers and as part of the methodology. I’ll be publishing some lessons going forward which will make Twitter much more useful.

56:50 Rob Summerville (head of the 30dc labs) was the biggest sceptic and critic of Twitter – he thought it was a load of toss. @Rob: Any sort of acknowledgment of genius in the chat window will be fine.

57:34 What I want to close out with is a presentation about Twitter and why it is so important.

58:30 **The Tao of Twitter** Here is an explanation of why I believe that twitter is such a cool thing for internet marketers. I’m using the Pecha Kucha style of a 20 second per slide, 20 slide presentation.

58:54 A lot of people wonder what’s the point of Twitter – why would anybody be interested in little snapshots of people’s lives? It doesn’t seem at first glance to make sense, but it does. It can be used for link building, selling without selling, and something that I think everybody has missed.

59:13 To make my first point about what makes Twitter so successful I need to show you an amazing book written by Paul Zane Pilzer called, “Unlimited Wealth”. When Paul was writing this he had one rule: a new technology will become accepted once it has become better and easier to use than the preceding technology.

59:36 If you have a look at Twitter it fulfils all those rules beautifully. Here’s a screen shot showing 4 different ways in which I can access Twitter.

1:00:00 Now the most important reason (except for the secret one coming up) is the bottom line formula: More Contact = More Sales. The person who makes the most contact will make the most sales – every internet marketer I know is in that position.

1:00:27 This is my Twitter screen and I use it to keep in touch – like micro-blogging. A lot of these conversations you can see were made via SMS when I was stuck on a plane.

1:00:45 One of the main benefits is that if I type in a post in Twitterific, the feed can go to up to 16 or 17 places.

1:01:07 Twitter and Google have a very good relationship. Twitter is indexed by Google, which makes it very useful, particularly with low competition phrases.

1:01:30 The most powerful lesson of all is one that people completely miss. Anytime we are communicating with a sales letter or an email, the reader has all their sales defences up.

1:02:13 The cool thing about Twitter is that it’s “fly on the wall” communication. You are side by side with your followers – here are some specific examples.

1:02:43 Here’s Twittervision on FaceBook – it shows that I’m located in London.

1:02:58 Hands down, the biggest mistake that people make with Twitter is using it for instant messaging. If you use it for IM, from an internet marketing perspective you’re dead in the water. There’s nothing more annoying for your followers than seeing conversations they are not part of.

1:03:21 Don’t sell! I saw a list of sales phrases you can use with Twitter – that’s just so stupid. If you sell to people then they are no longer a fly on the wall, you are going head to head with them.

1:03:44 If you’re ever wondering what to put up on Twitter, just answer the question, “What are you doing?”

1:04:05 I’ve run out of time this morning, but I’m going to do a video showing how to set up Twitter. If someone in the 30dc can beat me to it then send me a link and I will send it out to everybody. They have made it a lot easier to set up in the last few days.

1:04:27 When I’ve found someone who’s having a lot of success I just copy and follow along with what they are doing. So you might want to go to twitter.com/Ed_Dale and twitter.com/DanRaine to see how Dan and I are using Twitter.

1:05:35 The next lesson is about Check Moves, or How to Sell Without Selling created by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson.

1:06:49 Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget, the next show is at 8pm EST on Monday - I’d love to have you there. Make sure you blog about us, you are more than welcome to put the video on your pages, you have all the permissions required - Anil Feltcher will be having a heart attack. Now we are moving to questions and answers, so bye to all the folks watching the recording. Make sure to join us live because it’s so cool. Thanks very much for being with us and we’ll see you next week.