Graph courtesy of Elliott Wave. One of the few economic commentators to predict the current economic crisis with deadly accuracy.

300 years of the biggest economic growth spurt in the history of mankind looks incredibly impressive. But what does the future hold?

When it comes to the economy the majority take the current recent trend and extrapolate it off into the distant future.

Just like in 1999 everyone expected the economy to boom beyond belief, in March 2009, the vast majority expected stocks to keep crashing hard. In both cases the exact opposite was true.

At the same time its incredibly to difficult to know when a bubble is going to burst, if it will keep growing, or when an economic collapse will suddenly bottom and turn into rapid growth.

What history teaches is that the more people believe in one direction, the less likely it is true. Don’t believe me? Go look at some newspaper headlines from 1999 or 1929, before the crashes – consensus remained upbeat. People don’t buy a newspaper if they disagree with it – newspapers tend to reflect the general feeling of their target audience.

The lesson is don’t expect the current trend to keep continuing. Sudden changes will quickly unfold and you need to forget the old times, and quickly adapt to the current situation that is unfolding. Don’t get caught in the trap.

Recession, depression or boom – there are major opportunities. Understand what is going on around you, and be prepared to adapt fast.

Don’t take the current trend and exprapolate it off into the far future.

Don’t get caught up in consensus and the general feeling. It is usually wrong at the worst times.

Innovation in any industry is key to success. It is hard, if not impossible, to be successful doing the exact same thing as your competitors.

So you must innovate. The question is…

How much do you innovate?

The more you innovate the more risk you take. You are much more likely to be successful changing one or two small key ingredients to give your unique hook (USP) than to try and mix things up entirely.

Essentially you take the fundamentals which work, and innovate in a few key areas.

The problem is that MOST people start out innovating with EVERYTHING, and apply NO fundamentals because they are obsessed with being different, and think that different is better.

The Safest Route

When an entrepreneur starts out, the safest route to making money is to massively limit innovation, and simply copy the fundamentals and change the minimum possible to give yourself a USP (which is a fundamental in itself).

After doing that you learn a huge amount, and as you grow can make much braver decisions to innovate and experiment – and your bottom line can cope.

For example, I in my own business I start out applying strategies that are common among the best in the business.  The only thing different being a few small unique hooks.

Examples?

Facebook for example was not as innovative as you think. Social profiles and photo sharing, the crux of early Facebook, were already common. The main unique spin was to connect those already successful ideas and apply it to people in colleges.

The coding, the marketing, the funding strategy, the design etc. were all based on proven ideas that already existed in the marketplace, apart from a few tiny twists.

The ultimate lesson is this…

Recognize your position in the market. If you are not already a market leader, aggressive innovation is a BAD IDEA in 99% of cases if making money is your primary goal. Limit your innovation and focus on copying what works, and innovate just enough to give you a strong USP.

Your EGO is Your Enemy…

People are attached to over innovation because of EGO! The need to be an individual and the desire to be unique makes you want to innovate as much as possible.

Learn from musicians…

Aspiring musicians want to create a new genre of music. Many musicians face a feeling of depression when they realize their chord structure was the same as used by Bach (or some other great musician) hundreds of years ago. Their music is based far more on fundamentals than any innovation.

The most successful musicians actually stick way more to the fundamentals than the unsuccessful ones, with only a few subtle changes in style, and build on the successful styles, licks and musical structures of their predecessors.

The alpha trap…

The need to feel that you are right and better than others (alpha) drives you to overly attach yourself to any unique idea, and pursue that idea over copying someone else. It is part of the human desire to give yourself an identity.

Nobody wants to be ‘just another x’, whether x be a musician, salesman, teacher or professor. Yet anybody who is anybody in any profession built themselves up on the proven fundamentals provided by others. Not from innovating from the start.

Admit you are wrong…

The fear of admitting your are wrong, and that other people’s ideas are better than yours, and always were, stops people from abandoning their unique (but wrong) ideas and innovations.

As humans we are sucked into being innovative to stand out and get attention. Yet this leads us to failure.

We are too proud to believe that everyone else is right, and that we are wrong.

Don’t let your ego feed undue innovation, and recognize the long time proven fundamentals of others.

Fundamentals don’t make headlines…

The focus on innovation always makes headlines, but you will never see how much any successful company copied from others, which will actually make up the bulk of the whole of their business. Innovation is usually way more isolated than you think.

As always the mainstream thinking is the opposite to reality.

The bulk of effective advertising used today was already known and used back in 1930s, (read “scientific advertising” published in 1923 as an example of split testing being used nearly 100 years ago). Sales tactics that were established in the early 1900s make up the fundamentals of what we use today (see ‘how to win friends and influence people‘).

Very little has fundamentally changed, and it rarely does.

Fundamentally proven formulas run the business world. Innovations in the grand scheme of the business are small, and often not innovations but fancy spins on something that has been fundamental for a long time. Often they are just technical advances, which is where most innovation takes place.

Next time you think you need to innovate, question whether your business has mastered the basics first.

Something I was thinking about last night…

The attention span of your audience is largely out of your control, no matter how awesome you treat them.

This is just something we have to accept. Of course you get the rare hardcore true fan if you are good, but the average person will drift off no matter how awesome you are.

My personal experience is that whenever I buy someone’s product that person/company has got my full attention, be it Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Jeff Walker, Apple or some other guru or product.

But my attention fades whether they reach out to me (i.e email me) daily or once a month. I learn from them but eventually

• feel the need to move on and learn from others,
• just get bored, or
• the stage I am at in my business or life moves on and what they discuss now doesn’t apply to me so much

Eventually I may unsubscribe, or just only check their emails very very occasionally as I become programmed to ignore them. Only a major announcement gets my brief attention.

Recapturing Attention…

However, when those people launch a new product I am keen to see what it is because I liked their first product. I’ll probably buy it based on my previous good experience. By buying I make a commitment to read/watch/use it, at which point they recapture my attention all over again.

I go through the cycle again of paying attention and gradually drifting off (just probably quicker).

Therefore the best way to recapture the attention of your audience is to launch a new product. It refocuses the attention of your existing subscribers, as well as bringing in new ones.

In essence you have to keep re-creating news. Just like people will pay attention to a celebrity when something news worthy is happening, but they’ll lose interest when nothing new is happening.

You have to keep creating news and drama. For product vendors the new product launch is the best way to do that.

If it works for Apple, it will work for everyone else!

The perpetual launching of new products is built into our psychological make-up and is ingrained in our society.

Just like the government has to keep launching new politicians into the scene to takeover from the predecessor, and a new cell phone model seems to launch almost daily, we are addicted to the new!

Perpetually launching products is a robust and proven business model. Keep launching or your audience will get bored!

TRUE STORY: In a fresh internet chat room 20 strangers made a pact together to make $50,000 revenue in 3 months by getting their ideas out there as fast as possible. It was a big but serious dream, especially considering some members were close to broke!

In just 9 weeks two of the people in the group exceeded $50,000 and a few more are close behind and making great progress. However, at the same time over half the group is barely making a dent.

So what’s the difference? Why are some racing ahead and others being left behind?

All 20 people work in the same niche and market to the same audience, they are all intelligent people, but the difference between the winners and losers is in how they act and how they think…

The Winners…

The personality traits of winning entrepreneurs. Do you pass the test?

1. The winners set launch dates, deadlines and aggressive goals like releasing a new product/update/offer every two weeks. They may miss, but they try hard to hit them.
2. The winners focus on this one project with pinpoint precision. They make more money because they can say no to pursuing other projects. That makes sticking to #1 much easier.
3. The winners don’t focus on perfection and are more focused on getting something good out there quickly, that getting something perfect out there sometime in the distant future.
4. The winners accept “flops” as inevitable, and embrace the “flop”. They know their early attempts probably won’t do great, so it is important to get those early attempts done and dusted as quickly as possible.
5. The winners hunt out their mistakes. This is against our natural emotion to accept we did things wrong but it is vitally important to improve. The winners know that mistakes are normal and are not wrong at all. They hunt out what they did wrong so they can improve next time.
6. The winners say “If they can do it so can I”, and they find out how they did it. They network, analyze, scrutinize, and reverse engineer to find out why someone else did better than they did.
7. They focus on a few USPs (unique selling propositions) and copy the rest from other winners.
8. The winners focus on extending their strengths (after identifying them) and rely on using or copying others in areas they are weak.
9. The winners hunt out successful people they can learn from and put a big effort into networking.
10. The winners are generous to their partners and stakeholders. They pay generous commissions, good wages, share profits and help others. Their generosity stands out against the competition. This motivates their partners and creates opportunities.
11. The winners focus on marketing more than the product/idea/service. In fact the marketing drives the product creation.
12. The winners block out distractions and set time aside to get things done. They are disciplined to turn off email, chat, television and any other distractions that stop them from working.

The Losers…

1. The losers drift and don’t held themselves to deadlines or targets. Ask the loser when his next deadline is and he won’t know.
2. The losers can’t say no to shiny objects and have a lot of projects on the go and find it too hard to abandon any one project to focus more on others. Quite simply they can’t focus.
3. The losers focus on perfection. They want everything ‘just right’ for when they make that all important launch. Perfection takes a long time and they miss opportunities and the learning process from launching NOW!
4. The losers fear the flop. So much so that they may never launch, and if they do they may hide away or seek to blame others and not accept responsibility when things don’t go to plan.
5. The losers are stubborn and blame others. They don’t want to be shown or face their mistakes. They want to prove to the world that what they did was right, and that it was others that were wrong. They’ll even go as far as calling their customers stupid for not buying their product, they’ll highlight the stupidity of the ad-network that does not approve their ad, they’ll blame a guru or teacher for their failures, and they’ll blame their friends and family for lack of support. They will be very reluctant to change or admit where they went wrong, despite the fact being wrong is NORMAL.
6. The losers look at the winners and make excuses about why they can’t do what the winners have done. Instead of looking for ways to emulate the winners, they hunt out differences which they can identify as excuses for not being a winner.
7. Losers forget about having any USPs at all and just try to copy someone else (and do a worse job). Just as common in losers is that they think they must do things differently to all the winners to stand out, and that doing this gives them a USP. So they choose not to do everything that the winners do to be “unique” and “clever”, and fail at the same time.
8. The losers focus on trying to handle and be good at everything, and are reluctant to put their weaknesses in the hands of others.
9. The losers avoid talking with successful people, or agitate successful people, because they don’t take advice and criticism well. Just being around successful people depresses them rather than motivates them because it shows that they have made mistakes and need to change, so they avoid it.
10. The losers are greedy. They don’t want to share their profits and success with others and will offer lower commissions, wages, profit share and less help to others. They ultimately alienate themselves from opportunities.
11. The losers focus on their product foremost and marketing second. They may produce an awesome product, but without solid marketing it flops.
12. The losers are easily distracted. In fact they unconsciously routine their day to have distractions like email alerts, chat, television, news, chores, phone calls etc. so they don’t have to face the music. They invite distraction rather than actively take steps to block it out. Even though these distractions lower their quality of life and stop them from achieving their dreams, they will defend them like a drug addict.

So are you a winner or a loser?

On the surface it seems like just another tweak by Google to improve relevancy, but under the surface something much deeper may be happening, a shift in Google’s fundamental principle on what makes a site rank.

Learning From Russia

Google has not been able to compete very well in Russia against the leading Search Engine Yandex. At first it was because Google didn’t grasp the uniqueness of the language and served bad results. They got that sorted, but still were not able to deliver better results than Yandex.

Yandex works very different to Google. It mainly uses machine learning to decide what sites are worthy of ranking. This simply means seeing how users rate a site, and then identifying what metrics good sites have in common.

If your site has those metrics, then it ranks high, if not, it doesn’t. Links are a lot less important in the machine learning model. What the user thinks is important.

What did Google do in the Panda update? It used machine learning to tweak its results. With the launch of the Google +1 button, paying attention to what users think is good, and devaluing the power of links, might be the direction Google is heading.

Watch the video to learn more…

We like to think we can think freely, but the more you delve into the human mind, the more you realize how we’re driven by illogical emotions and instincts.

Watch in the video below how about 2 thirds of everyday people are turned into killers, because the situation is right, the psychological weakness is exploited, and the right words slither into their ears.

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

This just goes to show how people can be manipulated into doing things they think they never would. Create the right environment, and use the right words and people react in predictable ways.

You are part of the experiment…

In the online marketing world this phenomenon is not unknown. Every time you browse the internet it is pretty much guaranteed you are part of some marketers scientific experiment.

Statistical tests to see how you react to different words, different colors, different designs, different images are carried out by websites every day. Google is doing it, eBay is doing it, Facebook is doing it, and I’m doing it too.

The right words can make an incredible difference too how successful your website and marketing campaigns are. The right words can see you go viral all over Facebook, see sales of your product triple, and have people going click crazy for your emails.

In the Headline Handgun I share some of the hooks, headlines and words that have worked really well for me. Steve Lorenzo reveals his email marketing word wizardry and tested strategies in Sexy Email Marketing.

What has worked for you?

Chris Ingram Brooke: Born 1987
Projects: environmentalgraffiti.com, scribol.com, pixdaus.com
Traffic: Over 18 million unique visitors per month
Specialty: An eye for great content, and getting it seen.

Munchweb had a chance to interview this successful bootstrapping entrepreneur about the successful launch of Scribol, which in a matter of months it hit 30 million page views a month (15 million unique visitors) according to Chris.

Scribol is a mixture of recommendation engine and a traffic exchange system, it was launched in October 2010. Bloggers and online publishers can place a Scribol widget recommending popular content from around the web. Scribol has a strict editorial policy so only great articles are shown.

Publishers using the widget provide their readers with links to great content around the web, and being in the Scribol system, means they get their own content advertised on other high quality sites, helping them reach new eyeballs.

So over to Chris…

Please give me a quick bit of background on how you got started online.

In 2007, at the ripe old age of 19, I started a site called Environmental Graffiti and grew it to be one of the biggest environmental blogs. It was back-breaking work – however,  it lay the foundations in terms of connections and experience that allowed me to start Scribol. I still run it and it’s still one of my babies.

Scribol’s growth has been immense and you’ve signed up some high traffic partners from the outset. What was the key to your successful growth?

I don’t think there has been one magic bullet as such. One area we focus on in everything that we do is quality – from the design and technology of the site, to the caliber of the publishers, we’re trying to push the envelope. We’re not going after growth per se, we’re ensuring everything works at a small scale and then ramping up. We’re also working really long hours!

What sort of percent return are your traffic partners getting now?

On average, we’re sending publishers 350% back of whatever they send in. So for every click they send us, we send them 3-4 back. We believe we have the highest percentage return in the industry and that’s because of our extensive landing page tests, which we’re constantly trying to improve upon.




Where did you get the idea and how was the project funded?

Scribol started as a way to leverage all of our properties’ traffic. It was a simple idea to exchange audiences and to share great content.  We never intended it to become a business in it’s own right, but as soon as we had a few large sites signed up with us, it just took off. The business is funded entirely out of cashflow from our other businesses: Environmental Graffiti and Pixdaus.

Traffic exchanges have been around for a long time, but most fail. Why is Scribol different?

Traffic exchanges have indeed been around for a long time and you’re right to point out that most fail. However, although we’re sometimes guilty of describing Scribol as a traffic exchange, we think of Scribol as an engine that recommends content to the people that want to read it i.e. We’re connecting audiences together. Most traffic exchanges work on the premise of the webmaster having to view a number of websites.  We work on the premise of sharing awesome content and if people want to click it, they click it.

You main competitor is currently 2Leep, what sets you apart?

I wouldn’t really say 2leep or similar services such as MGID are our main competitors. Though at first glance the sites may appear similar, we’re really focused on working with high-end publishers. We have sacrificed a short-term burst of scale for quality, because we believe that once you start opening the floodgates and allowing any old publisher to sign up, there’s a limit to your growth. We’ve also strayed away from adding lots of new features because we’re mainly trying to improve our algorithms so our content recommendations are the best. In that respect therefore, I’d say our main competitor is something like StumbleUpon.

What’s next?

Now that would be telling

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur who has helped found 8 internet startups in Silicon Valley, and has a number of internet success stories behind him.

NOTE: THE VIDEO WILL AUTOPLAY

In this series of videos he discusses his Customer Development model for companies in their early stage. Munchweb shares the belief with Steve that building a successful internet company is not a hit and miss art form, but something that can be achieved and managed through best practices.

In other words, listen to what Steve has to say and put it into action as it will drastically improve your chance of success with your internet start-up. While the video focuses on the idea of having a product, it really applies to any business since every business has a product in some form. A blog for example, has it’s product within its content, and the content must live up to its audiences wants, needs & desires.

Sorry about the autoplay but it was the only way to embed all the videos together. Enjoy!

[Source: Stanford University]

Building an online business takes time and you have to push through that difficult start to gain momentum. Don’t give in, the summit could be just over the brow of the hill. Click here if you want to shortcut your route to a successful online business.

You may have heard the story of Alex Tew who created a website that sold advertising on a homepage that consisted purely of ads. It was made up of one million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. Alex sold ad space at $1 for a 10 × 10 block.

In reality such a website is normally pointless for both advertisers and users. However, due to the uniqueness of the idea and how Alex pitched the website as a way for him to pay for attending university, it caught the attention of the media. He got worldwide news coverage and in just over 4 months all the pixels were sold and he had made over $1,000,000 US.

Pure Genius or pure luck?

Well despite this instant success, Alex has failed multiple times since…

• Pixelotto: Alex developed Pixelotto, a spin on the original Million Dollar Homepage idea, which failed to gain traction. People were given the chance to win $1 million by clicking the ads, but it failed to sell enough of the ad space to raise the prize money. It was received with criticism and described as a ‘tax on the stupid’.
• PopJam: Alex then tried to create a real online business called PopJam, a social media humor site for text chatting with strangers, which despite angel funding also failed and was closed down.
• SockandAwe: Third time unlucky, Alex created a game called Sock & Awe where you get to throw a shoe at George Bush. It’s purpose was to promote PopJam, and while it got excellent press coverage receiving over 4 million visitors in a matter of days (certainly an admirable achievement), it didn’t help get PopJam off the ground, did not make any money from advertising, ran up bandwidth expenses, and ultimately became such a distraction that Alex decided to quickly sell it for a measly £5000. While £5000 for a weeks work (minus expenses) is not bad, its a step back from the success of his original project which averaged somewhere around £5000 per day profit.
• OneMillionPeople: 5 years after his original success, Alex then went on to create OneMillionPeople which was very similar to Million Dollar Homepage, just instead of pixel ads, it was photos of people. The aim was to sell spots for $3 and generate $3 million in revenue. That idea was quickly showing failure and was abandoned for free listings and the early buyers were refunded. Since the site offers nothing of real value and the Alex Tew novelty has long worn off, the site will again fail to gain traction.

Why So Many Failures?

Alex certainly has the entrepreneurial spirit and is continuing to try new ideas, which we can certainly commend him for. However, he needs to get a bit more inventive with his ideas and re-spark and channel his ability to drum up press like he did with the MillionDollarHomepage and ShockandAwe.

Alex has missed the essentials with each of his follow-up businesses. Since the Million Dollar Homepage each business has either:

• Lacked a unique idea – Popjam was just ChatRoulette without the video, and Facebook chat but with strangers, and there is already plenty of chat rooms for chatting with strangers. Pixelotto & One Million Pages were just poop reinventions of the Million Dollar Homepage (I meant to write poor, but poop is a much better way to describe them).
• Lacked a way to make money – Popjam didn’t really have any special ways of making money, nor could it be forseen too without a major change. While garnering mainstream use will eventually bring lots of money (think Twitter or Myspace), chatting with strangers was never destined to go mainstream. Facebook has become so successful at generating revenue because it gathers so much data from users which advertisers can use for precision targeted advertising campaigns. Popjam, even if it got off the ground, was never destined to make money. SockandAwe was also not monetized and missed out on some chunky advertising revenue, if it had managed just to secure a few banners totaling $5 eCPM then it would have generated at least $25,000 in that first week, and its sale price would have been considerably higher. It could have also been made to build an email list which would have been very valuable for promoting PopJam, or any future projects.
• Lacked longevity – The Million Dollar Homepage, Pixelotto and One Million Faces all lacked longevity. Once all spots are gone, the business is over and you have to start all over. Gaining traction is not an option, and it is no surprise Alex has just lost so much traction by trying to reinvent his original idea twice over.
• Lacked value for users - With the exception of PopJam all of Alex’s projects have lacked a true value for the end user, relieing on novelty, and as Alex has learned, novelty wears off fast.

Hopefully Alex has learned some valuable lessons through all of this, won’t die out a forgotten child star and has something worthwhile on the horizon. Or maybe he will burn through all his cash and end up back where he started.

He certainly has a talent for creating press and a good entrepreneurial spirit. He could just do with fine tuning it.