This is the move Google HAD to make, even if it makes them look like total douches…

In a world of infinite choice your friends experiences and recommendations become vital.

I was only discussing with a mentor yesterday, when I grew up in the 70s in a small country town we only had two TV channels, two radio stations and one newspaper. If it wasn’t for the magazines of the local newsagency I would’ve been screwed.

Now I look at the choices my nine-year-old Hannah has, hundreds of television channels, the entire Internet, Wikipedia, club Penguin, FaceTime and on and on.

As soon as she becomes a teenager the world of social networks will open up to her as well.

She can download books in an instant, buy a song whenever she wants, download a new game to iPad in seconds and choose exactly when she want’s to watch when.

In a delicious irony, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former’ish CEO and now chairman boasted Google collected more data in two days than information existed on the entire planet before 2003!

Google has an immense, unenviable and ultimately (as we are now seeing) impossible task. Google wants to help you find stuff on the Internet, it’s done its job pretty well over the last decade or so.

It’s losing the battle.

Who knew when Facebook opened up to non-college students in 2007 that 50% of all Americans would use it last month. The uptake and growth of Facebook has been like nothing we have ever seen. I’m not sure anybody, except perhaps the inner sanctum at Facebook, realised the simple like button would alter the search and discovery landscape forever.

This simple fact is why Google HAS to make this move with it’s +1 button

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The Like Button Competition
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As a marketer, the first issue I saw with all of this is we have to add another button on all of our articles.

Great…

In marketing we know a simple truth, it’s hard enough to get someone to do one thing! When you give the user multiple choices the likelihood of them pressing anything dramatically decreases. If I’m forced to add a Google +1 button, it adds yet another choice. And we know, with choice we will make it even less likely someone who reads an article will click anything.

The Facebook like button has been a tremendous success. Why? It’s because it’s a win–win–win situation for everyone involved.

For the consumer, pressing a Facebook like tells your friends you’re interested in the article. Your social graph (your network of friends) will get to see and act on an article. It’s a brilliantly simple implementation to the user means it’s very easy to press. The article goes into your newsfeed and your friends - based on your recommendation - are far more likely to go and have a look at the article themselves.

As a publisher I love the “Like” button. The moment we started adding a Facebook like button to our blogs we saw an increase in traffic.
Fast forward to today, nothing comes close to the amount of traffic Facebook drives to our properties.

That’s a win for us! So the consumers win, the publishers win, and of course Facebook wins.

By clicking the like button you’re also providing Facebook an extraordinarily accurate profile of your likes (and in this case I mean the stuff you’re interested in!). This is extremely valuable information, and allows Facebook to provide services like demographic pay per click advertising. Your “likes” add to the base of this demographic information. This is a massive business for Facebook.

BING can also use your information to display more relevant search results, more importantly, it allows BING to show sites your social network have liked in your search results.

Please don’t underestimate how powerful this is.

Remember how I opened this article, in a world of infinite choice we almost have to regress to how things worked when we all lived in villages. Recommendations of people you actually know, trust, respect and admire carry far more weight than anything any computer algorithm can ever hope to generate.

Facebook knows this.

Microsoft knows this.

And Google realises it to.

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What about Twitter?
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We still have a Retweeting button on most of our properties.
I encourage you to have a look at any website you come across that has both a Facebook Like and a Retweeting widget. Nine times out of 10 the Facebook Like button has an order of magnitude more likes than the retweets.

Twitter has a problem.

It has become a broadcast medium, not a community.

I know this bit is going to be controversial. I’ll deal with the Twitter problem another day. Just go with me for the moment.

My view is Twitter will become a broadcast medium for artists, corporations and people with tribes. I believe Twitter will still survive and thrive because in return for being broadcasted too as a consumer you have a guaranteed method for communicating back…

The @reply.

I’m pretty sure Joe and Jane Smith are not using Twitter to alert their social network, (or group of friends as we used to call in the old days!) about things they found interesting.

That’s what the like buttons for.

Facebook won the game while the digerati wasn’t looking.

Twitter’s future is its ability to get messages out to a lot of people and for those people to understand they have a right to feedback.

The sad thing is Twitters greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The @ symbol unleashed a spam storm and i’m not sure Twitter will ever be able to effectively deal with it. One persons SPAM is another person’s convenient snack food.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter has a great future, I’m just not sure it’s the future its founders had in mind.

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Why Google Why?
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Why would Joe and Jane Smith press on the Google +1 button? There are a lot of reasons to push the Facebook like button, a couple of good reasons to push the Twitter button, but what’s in it if they mash a +1 button?

Is it to tell friends?

Nope.

Have you ever been to a Google personal profile page?
Neither have I.

Google could in theory shove these in your face. If they do, they tread a very dangerous line.

Not many people remember when Google was first launched. In those days, Altavista and the like ruled the roost. Yahoo! was a major search engine.

They all tried to shove other stuff in their users faces.

Google made its name because of its comprehensive indexing but most importantly, because Google got out of the way and delivered the search results.

Over the years Google has put more and more things in and around the search results but on the whole they’ve been very good about keeping things relevant.
If they did anything else it would be suicide.

I wonder if the +1 button may be the thing that pushes them over the edge?

So if Joe and Jane Smith are not going to push the +1 button to tell their friends, what’s the reason they are going to press?

AHA! I know, more relevant search results for you!

Ummm, Google, how’s the star rating and favourite thing working out for you?

You already have the ability to customise your search results and favourite things you like to see. Nerds do this, Blackhat SEO types do this this, Lot’s of workers on Mechanical Turk do this, the digerati do it to their own sites...

Joe and Jane Smith do not.

There’s simply no incentive for the Smith family to press the +1 button. There’s simply no payoff! This is crazy unless you consider the next point.

I know why Joe and Jane will do this! They want to help Google search and stay relevant so Google can continue to spree better targeted ads their way!.

Yuh.

Does Google seriously consider your average net citizen is going to like stuff on a page just so it can save Google from irrelevancy? They’re fighting a couple of million years ofchuman behaviour if they think this is going to fly!

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You need to understand, Google must do this.
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They have no choice. The day Facebook blocked Google out of its like information Google knew the writing was on the wall.

If there’s nothing in this for Joe and Jane Smith, maybe there’s something in it for me, the humble publisher.

Ummm, no.

Adding the Google +1 button on my content is going to add confusion. More choices equals less people clicking. We conducted a study over a dozen blogs in the last quarter of 2010. We got rid of the multitude of social network clicky buttons and just left Facebook and Twitter. Across the board, usage and resultant traffic increased.

If we have had to add another button (and you’ll see why I say “had to” in a moment) this will result in less clicks and less traffic.

Google right now doesn’t bring me much in the way of search engine traffic. My site is not dependent on it. Most sites making money are.

What if Google makes this a part of the ranking formula?
Then all of a sudden it’s on like donkey kong.

I’ve read a number of articles over the last few hours which indicated they would not do this…yet.
The only official comment I’ve seen from Google seems to indicate they won’t do this at the moment by are “very interested to do so in the future”.

If this is the case and it remains independent +1 is dead on arrival - there’s no point.

Let me be clear, they HAVE to do this.

They have no choice. They have to do evil to stay relevant. (Don’t get me started on the Android Bait and Switch happening as we speak - again, they had no choice)

Let’s not cry for Google just yet. This is a media company still well and truly growing.
Google is very much king of the hill.

They are many things, stupid, is not one of them.
There is a limit to how much algorithms, machines and massive data centres can map, index and deliver you the Internet.

Two things happened that Google (or anyone for that matter) did not see coming.
I don’t think anybody could have predicted the “lack” of usage of the Internet.

Wired was lambasted for declaring the Internet dead.
I agreed with Wired!
Of course, the Internet is thriving, it’s just the “traditional”, old-style, surfing around from webpage to webpage Internet is rapidly disappearing.

How long is it going to be before people spend more time on the Internet through a mobile device they do through traditional PC?

For my wife, my hairdresserand lets not forget, Joe and Jane Smith this is already a reality.

Already, more people use Facebook than the “traditional web”.

When was the last time you spent an idyllic half an hour surfing the web?

Exactly.

Google is about hiring the brightest Ph.D. engineers and systems people on the planet.
It makes sense right?

By hiring every postgraduate they could get their hands on, they caused them selves a very big blindspot…

You could not even get an interview if you dropped out of college.

Like, say, Mark Zuckerburg…

Steve Jobs…

Joe and Jane Smith...

It took the longest time to convince my academic friends (I’m looking at you Guru Bob) to convince them Facebook wasn’t a waste of time.

There was a tectonic shift going on in the way we roll online.

The academics didn’t realise - while all those people were playing Farmville, they were also finding a new home free of spam, free of viruses, and the only messages they saw were by people they “friended”.

Facebook was created by college dropouts and hackers. The majority of the world are not postgrads...

It’s ironic, now we have access to effectively infinite information our choices and decision-making comeback to something as old as human civilisation…

Asking your friends if they like something.

This is Google’s big problem and unless they push the big red “Do Evil” button and make +1 a key ranking factor they’re in massive trouble.

Ed

PS They’ll never, ever announce +1 will effect rankings, it’ll just happen and we’ll see an epic SEO arbitrage occur.

It’s hard to believe the original Dominiche was released, Christmas time 2006!

Half a decade is a long time anyway you cut it. On the Internet, it’s an eternity!

I always wanted to reissue Dominiche for a number of reasons.

But not until I had made the ultimate sale. 

Taking my company public.

When we released Dominiche in 2006, the whole concept of buying and selling websites was ridiculously new. Even though the practice of buying and selling websites was happening in the background, the concept of selling or buying a website was a completely foreign concept.

The course was such a trailblazer. 

 I know so many people who used Dominiche as the inspiration for creating a whole new businesses online.

It was such a different world then. Traffic was cheap and easy. You had to be so sensitive about revealing information about your website because it was so easy for someone to simply rip it off. This was much cheaper than buying the website, and sadly, much quicker.

The sales process was convoluted. This was necessary to protect all of your hard work. Until somebody actually put a deposit in an escrow account you couldn’t safely reveal any sort of site statistics. I remember shaking my head at the number of people who were listing sites for sale on eBay and watching them  stolen before the sun rose the next morning.

Even though it was hard, the pioneers did extremely well. They not only recognised buying and selling a website was a sensible investment, they realised the website had value, not only in the cash it made but also things like it’s authority and the amount of traffic the site had.

To me, there are two dramatic changes in the last five years.

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The Difficulty Of Ripping Off.

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At the end of 2006, traffic was still easy and cheap. It was the world of the five cent click, uploading 40,000 keywords into Google to see which piece of mud you threw at the wall stuck.

Because traffic was so easy, it was very simple to rip off a website. Usually copy the sales page, steal the e-book and throw a bunch of cheap, fast traffic at it.

I remember when Frank Kern and I were teaching the Underachiever System we had the concept of the “sacrificial lamb” site. The moment we mentioned a site in anything we taught. You could be guaranteed someone would be ripping it off before I’d had my morning latte.

Sad but true.

And when it came to selling your website it was crucial you had a very serious non-disclosure agreement. You couldn’t reveal the topic of your website, let alone the traffic and stats of the site before somebody had paid you a deposit to show they were serious. You can imagine, this made sales infinitely more difficult than they are today!

 It made sales very complex, yet, buying and selling websites did happen and people were very successful in the early pioneering days.

Let’s fast forward to today.

Traffic is hard.

There, I said it. The dirty little secret of online business. Getting traffic to a website is hard, there’s no two ways about it.

If you want fast traffic then you have to be prepared to pay through the nose for it.

“Cheap Traffic” takes significant effort and most importantly time.

This is great news! Your average scumbag has a significant character flaw.

They’re lazy.

Even if they rip off your sales letter, replicate your sales video (when Dominiche was released, YouTube was about two months old!) and product. There’s no way for a rip-off artist to quickly and cheaply get the traffic they need.

You can’t underestimate the effect this small change has made to the buying and selling marketplace. 

The impact is being dramatic.

Because the danger of somebody ripping off your idea has reduced so significantly in the last five years, in 2011 and beyond you can be transparent about the site you want to sell.

You want my stats? 

Sure, go right ahead.

Want to know my niche?

Sure, go right ahead.

This transparency has allowed new marketplaces like Flippa to flourish. It’s hard to believe that Flippa is only a couple of years old.

Having a convenient and safe marketplace to look for sites has been crucial.

The other benefit of transparency is  your ability to tell a compelling story to increase the value of the sale of your website.

It’s an old maxim of sales, “The more you tell, the more you sell.”

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It’s not just about the money.

--------------------------------------------

In the 2006 version of Dominiche, I spent a lot of time explaining the concept of R.O.I.(Return On Investment).

To me, buying and selling websites was all about getting an excellent return on investment.

Little did I know, much smarter people than I had figured out there was more to a website and how much money it makes.

Back in 2006 I was pretty dismissive of SEO.

 Okay, I was outright hostile!

This hostility blinded me to an incredible opportunity. Smart students from Dominiche realised they could buy sites with wonderful authority (authority is measured by PR and is used by Google in its SEO ranking algorithm) for very little money!

They could buy websites with a PR of four, five, six and seven for a couple of hundred bucks.

They then used these sites to link to pages they wanted to appear on the front page of your favourite search engine.

The strategy was devastating.

This strategy is STILL devastating.

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Traffic Is Expensive.

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You’ve probably got this point by now, traffic is hard and expensive.

This is a wonderful opportunity! 

If you have a site with decent traffic in a certain niche -  thanks to the miracle that is Google adwords  - you can quantify how valuable the traffic is to somebody who is already in the niche and is already making a commercial success of the market.

You may not be able to unlock the conversion key of what to do with the traffic to your website. There are others in the market who already figured out how to make the traffic pay. You can make an extremely compelling argument, as to why they should buy the site when you compare the cost of how much they pay per click from Google.

It’s a total win–win situation.

Of course, the other side of the coin is cheap traffic (and I use that term very loosely!). It takes a lot of time to see a return on the effort you put in.

Smart students of Dominiche quickly realised buying your way into a market where somebody has already solved the traffic problem is a faster way to test the commerciality in a marketplace.

A crucial concept in Dominiche 2006 was the “margin of safety”. The marvellous strategy first taught to Warren Buffett by Benjamin Graham.

When people testing markets bought these websites with an inbuilt margin of safety, it was a no-brainer. 

There was only two outcomes.

Outcome 1, the market was a winner and off they went to the races.

Outcome 2, the market didn’t turn out. Because they bought with a margin of safety as I’d taught them. They resold the website and often made a small amount of money on the initial investment.

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One More Thing.

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If you’ve read my stuff for any amount of time now. You’ll know  I hate get rich quick stuff. It’s all bull.

In last year’s challenge we tested a new methodology to create a site and sell it on Flippa and make $100 or so.

It works like gangbusters. 

It STILL works like gangbusters!

This technique allowed somebody to start from absolute scratch and build up a bank they could use to acquire a larger site.

If somebody asked me the question, “What’s the quickest way to raise some cash?”, I tell them about this.

Let me be clear, this strategy is not a business. This is not a long-term solution! It’s a wonderful way to start.

Dominiche 2011 will be the most comprehensive buying and selling system ever released.

We will cover buying and selling strategies from just getting started to taking a company public. Both of which we’ve done in the past five years.

As we finalise development. I’d love you to follow along with our progress at the new Dominiche and page on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/DominicheTheArtOfBuyingAndSellingWebsites

Make sure you hit the Like button so you can stay updated through Facebook.

Dominiche 2011 has been five years in the making. I can’t wait to bring it to you.

Ed

The more I go down the “creativity is a habit” path, the more I realise creativity is all about shipping.

I first made the connection after reading “Tribes”, by Seth Godin. It was like a light bulb switching on. A market leader in any niche is defined by the following formula:

Market Leadership = Content x Consistency

It’s so simple to understand, yet so difficult to execute.

I’m working on a new project with one of my favourite Internet marketers, Michelle MacPherson. It’s all about creating content and shipping.

In fact, Michelle came up with the awesome title “Always Be Shipping”.

It’s a wonderful play on words from the great sales movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”.

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CONTENT IS SCARY LIKE CIRCUS CLOWN DOLLS
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Having failed english at High School. The thought of creating and writing content terrified me. In fact, I’m very happy doing video and speaking onstage, something that usually terrifies most people, because writing an article scares me like circus clown dolls!

The past couple of years have been an extraordinary journey for me. Finally getting creativity is not a gift but a habit.
God bless Merlin Mann and Twyla Tharp for teaching me this crucial point.

I hope I can infuse in you a love of creating content for your markets as well. Not just because it’s fun (trust me, it really, really is…) but because it truly adds to your bottom line and is perhaps the most important thing you can do for your business.

In the mentoring program, we have a concept called CFT. This is short for “Critical Focus Time”. I realised most of my dear colleagues in Internet Marketing (and most certainly, myself) have this one thing in common…

We are barely functional human beings.

Our redeeming feature is our ability to be able to spend at least half an hour a day to work on the stuff propelling your business forward. As Gary Halbert and John Carlton would say… “practising the mystic art of Operation Money Suck”!

You’ll be surprised at the amount of content you can create if you dedicate just one 25 min period a day to this most crucial of tasks.
Remember, It’s all about consistency and momentum!

Once you get into the habit (and I acknowledge it can be tricky) the momentum of producing content each day becomes an all-important habit.

So how does this content production make you a market leader?

Think for a second about any hobby you’ve done. I guarantee you, each market has a someone practicing Market Leadership!

In photography, for example, I think of people like Bill Wadman of 365 fame, Scott Kelby of the National Photoshop Association and David Du Chemin of craft and vision.

The common factor amongst these three is a commitment and consistency in publishing content in their marketplace.
Pick any market you can imagine, give me five minutes, and i’ll show you the market leaders.

You should be so excited about this! It’s not magic. There are no deity given gifts.
Just a commitment to ship on a daily basis.

As I look at my bookshelf right now I can see the collected works of Seth Godin, he publishes every day. His books are simple, to the point and brilliant.

He continuously publishes, he continuously ships.

As you’re reading this, I want you to think about your market. Then I want you to ask a very specific question…

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Do you care about it?
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There are two prerequisites, in my view, that need to be met before you consider practising a content creation market leadership strategy (let alone, a content-based SEO strategy).

The first criteria, is the market commercial?

Now of course, if you’re doing this with your local church, charity group or cause, or indeed, your lifelong passion. Awesome! These strategies and techniques are going to rock your world.

There’s no getting around the fact, however, they take time and dedication. So with my hardheaded commercial hat on, you need to be certain the market offers a significant chance of commerciality. The good news is, of course, we teach you how to do exactly that in the challenge. As always, there is no excuse to guess when creating a business online!

If you adopt the “always be shipping” mantra. And build your momentum, you’ll be amazed where this takes you. Over the next few months I look forward to interviewing people who have successfully completed Market Leadership 365 projects. I hope these stories inspire and give you great confidence.

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Houston, We have a problem.
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When we talk about content creation it’s crucial you have a point of view.
Trying to be everything to everybody in any marketplace will ensure you wind up being nothing to nobody.

You need to have an opinion.

As Gary Halbert often told me, “Ambivalence is the worst emotion any marketer can evoke”.

Of course, having an opinion also means, by definition, you will have people disagreeing with you!

This is the number one reason most people don’t ship.

They’re fearful of what people have to say.

This is totally understandable - but completely ridiculous.

I’ve said many times the first anonymous horrible troll criticism you receive is very hard to take. Trust me, I’ve been there. You can’t believe somebody would be so mean, so personal, and most importantly, so wrong.

Here’s the thing, just imagine if there were anyone in human history who was 100% universally loved. They would be the most terrifying person in history! Dissent is built into our genetics, it’s a good thing! It’s just sad this can be exhibited in the anonymous online world as hateful, dumb and stupid remarks.

The good news, it happens to everyone!

Mother Threasa had critics.

Ghandi Has critics.

The DaiLama has critics.

Even, and I know this must be shocking to you, I have critics.

Letting anonodouche stop you from shipping and telling your story is a tragedy.

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We Are All Publishers Now
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When you think about it, the best internet marketers are simply, publishers. It’s pure physics, if you’re not putting anything into a marketplace, you are by definition, not participating. How can you expect to have any form of influence, if you don’t participate in the market?

Let me leave you with this thought…

If you have a choice of buying a product from two companies everything being equal EXCEPT…
In the case of company A, you’ve read their blog, heard them speak at a seminar, and read forum posts they’ve written. In the case of company B, nothing.

All things being equal, who are you going to buy from?

Exactly.

And that’s why you have to take content creation seriously.

You simply can’t avoid it any longer.

I’d love it if you retweet and like this article if you think it deserves it!

Ed

Sent from my iPhone

Riding In The Car With Boys...

lesson number 47…

As soon as you try categorize any group of people via personality type, you head into a world of pain.

Making sweeping generalisations, is a bad idea. But as it’s Monday morning, and I'm already in the “I hate writing mood” I’ll tackle the subject and make a big sweeping bunch of them!!

In the first 12 months of mentoring I learned many, many, things. One of the most fascinating - the type of work people who join mentoring programs should do (and perhaps more importantly - what they shouldn’t!).

This became brutally evident, when we looked at the vital, yet at times, soul destroying, task of backlinking.

Backlinking is the most vital of a SEO tasks.

There's no question anyone joining my mentoring program is by definition, entrepreneurial. It goes without saying. What did become obvious, with these driven, clever, people is they struggled to backlink with any sort of consistency.

They were working very significant and intensive jobs during the day. They were smart enough to realise everyone should have a plan B. However...

To get on the front page of Google for your chosen phrase you can't get around the fact you need to perform a significant amount of backlinking.

As Guru Bob would say “It's about the backlinks–stupid".

Typically, if you're working a mentally intensive job during the day, coming home and doing even half an hour of this crucial work is a very, very hard task for anyone to take on.

Now - Before you think I’m giving you an excuse to give up - stay with me to the end….

You see, there is a way forward.

(Remember - The Challenge is all about starting, Mentoring is all about finishing - Well, as Zuck said in the “Social Network” - online business is like fashion - it never “finishes”)

Here's where the horrific stereotyping comes in.

In my simple world, there are two types of people. The first type, and I'm 99.9% certain you fit into this category if you're reading this right now. The entrepreneur.

The other, the worker.

There's nothing wrong with being in either category!

However, since time immemorial, we've needed both classes of money earners to make commerce roll.

To ask an entrepreneur to do repetitive tasks, is to crush their soul...

There's nothing more heartbreaking watching someone who has really worked their guts out and done everything asked finding out a market is just not going to work. Imagine, if you've spent the past six weeks diligently backlinking half an hour every day. It takes a special kind of character to bounce back and move on.

Incredibly, a lot of the mentorees from last year fitted into that category! My role as an educator, however, is to teach the 99% not the 1% of exceptions.

There was such a clear difference in attitude, approach, and downright enjoyment, of starting an online business when a mentor employed their first team member.

The difference was extraordinary!

Side note–just before you think hiring your first team member is the path to enlightenment and the land of milk and honey. Be warned, this too is a very tricky process and takes on average eight weeks to successfully complete. Not something all the outsourcing courses really cover.

If you look at this as an outsider, it makes absolute sense. If you have half an hour a night for five nights a week testing one phrase you have spent 2 1/2 hours doing backlinking. It takes extraordinary effort. Doing anything regularly for half an hour is beyond 99% of most of the population. When I saw the incredible difference hiring a team member for three lattes per day made… it all came together.

It's simple, if somebody is spending 40 hours a week testing phrases and baclinking, by definition, they are going to be test more phrases than somebody who is only spending 2 1/2 hours.

It’s not rocket science!

When you realise any person who is successful in any creative endeavour must create a lot of “coal” to find the “diamonds"- it becomes so obvious.

This to me was one of the biggest lessons from measuring 1.0 and has indeed really guided me creating Mentoring 2.0

Ed

Sent from my iPad

I like nothing more than irony.

Especially, when it comes to business.

This post is all about pen and paper. The irony kicks in when I tell you I mindmapped this particular article in with iThoughts HD on my iPad. I then used Dragon Dictate 2.0 to get the bulk of the post typed in.I edited in Scrivner prior to uploading it to the blog.

Side note –I just recorded a lesson in [1][Challenge Plus] about this particular workflow. I’ve never ever been able to produce as much content as I have in the last seven days since adopting this particular strategy. Look out for the lesson soon.

At the Going Pro conference here in Melbourne, it’s was funny how different themes emerged.

One of the things I noticed among many of the speakers was the use of pen and paper when they were planning out their businesses.

We had presenter after presenter showing you the original and sketched drawings of what would eventually become very successful businesses.

Not one of them had a business plan.

None you would call a mind map.

There certainly were no GANTT charts and project management software anywhere to be seen.

Every single one of them had a pen and paper diagram.

It got me thinking.

I remembered way back in 2004 when I was travelling in Japan with John Reese and Frank Kern. We were travelling on the bullet train up from Kyoto heading back to Tokyo. I remember at one point John pulling out his yellow legal pad and vision elite pen. He looked up at me and simply said “It’s time to make some money.”

To this day John continues to do this in each new venture, each new piece of software, on a yellow legal pad and a pen. Equipment you can get from any office supplies store, newsagent, stolen from your children or any other place.

On the very same trip, Frank and I were at a “Seattle’s coffee” in Tokyo. We planned out the entire, what would become quite famous, “Underachiever Project” on pen and paper.

Actually, I remember Frank and I being quite embarrassed because we were so wrapped up in our planning when we looked up, we realised incredible Japanese service was in full effect.

It turned out that the coffee shop should’ve closed an hour before at 6 PM. They had all stayed there without even giving us the slightest indication they should have actually closed and been home an hour before.

We felt so guilty!

But yet again we planned on paper.

Last years “Challenge” for example was a massive departure from what we had done previously.

We got all the key players in from all over the planet to help us brainstorm that new change. Again while the room was full of Mac computers. We did the actual planning with pen and paper.

You might have seen the webinar Trey Smith and I did last month. We were talking about our development and the processes that we use to create applications for mobile devices and computers.

If you recall, we use pen and paper first to jot down all the ideas. We then start to use other tools like Keynote to flush out the ideas and get ready to brief the programming and design people.

If you can’t get out your app on paper. Then you have no business engaging a designer or a programmer. You don’t need to know how to program at all. But you do have to have a very strong vision of what you want your app to be.

The way I test mentoring students vision is to get them to draw out the entire App. It’s a great method. This way, you can easily see which buttons are ment to go where, you don’t miss screens, indeed, you’re actually able to count exactly how many screens you have. When you go to brief designers and programmers to get somebody to build your app it makes it so much easier because you are so specific.

You’ll save a huge amount of money doing it this way.

It’s interesting, the more successful you become, the more simplicity becomes important.

Too often, tools get in the way.

It’s not about the tool, it’s about what’s between your ears.

Using pen and paper gets the idea out from between your ears and out into the real world.

There’s something magical about getting your ideas down on paper. it goes from vague to several step towards being very real.

I keep remembering those drawings from the Melbourne Conference. Too often, people get so wrapped up in business plans, charts, and massive to-do lists they forget to clearly define what it is they are actually going to do.

Both the Best Screenwriters and the best salespeople live by this maxim…

“Show Don’t Tell”

Coming up with a business or an App idea should be all about “Show Don’t Tell”.

It is only a start.

The first step of “Going Pro”.

Let me tell you,

It’s a very good first step.

Ed