MindValleyLabs Internet Marketing Blog

If you have ever wondered why you couldn’t convince your wife to buy that Ferrari, or why your customers don’t seem to ‘get’ what you are desperately trying to sell them, it’s really not your fault. Our Chief Mathematician revealed these mysteries through the power of maths/physics/scientific proof.
Below is his brilliant presentation during our last idea-sharing meeting.

Knowledge Transfer and the Problem of Perception: The Achilles Heel of Logic

This is somewhat related to a lot of what Kenneth has said about generating big ideas. Before I start explaining my concept, I will briefly explain 3 mathematical concepts –self-organizing systems, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and the Chaos theory– and I’ll use those in my explanations. They all sound very highflying but the concepts are very simple.

1. Self-organizing Systems

Self-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system –normally an open system which continuously interacts with its environment while maintaining its state– increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.

The brain perceives things through a self-organizing system; it is not linear.

Imagine you are standing in front of a box of sand. If you start pouring water into that sand, it will form a particular pattern and start flowing along those particular lines. Even if you pour in more water, it will essentially continue to flow along only in that pattern.

In the same way, the brain is a self-organizing system. When information goes in, it flows only in a particular pattern.

2. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

What is it? It states that any logical system has statements which are simultaneously true and false.

Let’s use language as an example, because language is a logical system.

In language, there are some statements that are both true and false. A very famous conundrum is, “If God can do everything, can He create a stone which He cannot Himself roll?”

If it is true, then this statement is false. BUT, if this statement is false, if you think about it, it is also true.

It is a basic problem of language because any logical system will always contain those kinds of statements which are both true AND false.

That is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which brings us to the limit of logic. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shook the mathematical world by showing that logic itself is incomplete.

3. Chaos theory.

The chaos theory, in essence, states that even a small change in a system can cause a very big change in the outcome.

Now, I’ll begin to connect all these concepts to the main idea I want to share with you, which is the problem of perception, and the Achilles heel of logic and knowledge transfer.

How do you transfer knowledge?

When you transfer knowledge, how do you do it? Normally, you talk and try to come to a logical conclusion.

Many times it works, but sometimes, it doesn’t.

For example, if someone tells me that this is a chair, I could argue that it is not a chair but a table. But if someone says that it is an elephant, I wouldn’t know how to explain that it is not an elephant because it is so different.

When you face the kind of problem that you cannot even begin to explain how to explain it, it means that it is not a problem of logic. It is a problem of perception.

What is perception?

Perceptions are the patterns which are formed by self-organizing systems. If you apply logic to this, and yet your perceptions are different, you won’t reach any conclusions.

You have to go back and look into your perceptions, not logic, because, as Gödel’s theorem has shown us, logic has flaws.

Even if your perceptions are even slightly different, they may lead to very different results. However small the difference in perception may seem, because of the Chaos theory, you will reach very difference conclusions and obtain very different results.

In order to transfer knowledge in the right way, you have to understand first that there are limits to logic. Proceed logically and if you cannot do it logically, don’t argue more! Go back and check whether or not your perceptions match.

You don’t have to change your perception in order to understand where the other person is coming from.

You don’t need to change your perception –you just need to understand the other person’s perception.

For example, in many Eastern countries, when you give someone money, they count it in front of you. But, if you go to a Western country, if you were to count your money in front of the person who’d handed it to you, they’d feel offended. Although you may understand it, your perception is different.

Hence, having a perception is different from understanding a perception.

O.K. Why is this important, again?

I’m glad you asked.

When you plan your marketing strategy, you need to understand the perceptions of the customers’ in your particular niche –this is why the customer avatar is so important.

One area in which knowledge transfer and perception affect business very deeply is information marketing, which we do a lot of. It involves packaging your information in a way that is not only logical, but falls in line with the perceptions of your target audience.

Isn’t it fascinating that science always has an answer for everything?

We all know what karma is. What goes around comes around… it’s the law of the universe. Simply put, the more you give, the more you get… or as Robert Cialdini puts it in the science of “Influence”, it’s the rule of reciprocity.

Now, we’ve all heard of reciprocity with our customers. Give them bonuses, surprise them, and as we’ve riffed on, basically delight the customer to get them to love you.

Lets backtrack a little bit. Two years ago we wanted to go into a new niche market. To test the market waters, we setup a landing page and saw a really great sign up rate. So we started to look for partners to help create a product.

And we hit a wall.

Experts were just not responding to our emails or calls. It was difficult to get their attention, much less try to start a partnership with them. So we put the project on the back burner for a long time.

And then one fine day, I came across this product “The Secret Six and The Power of Intimate Interviews - Advanced Edition” by Shaune Clark. If you haven’t already heard of it, the course teaches you how not just to do an interview as a boring Q&A session — it teaches you how to do an intimate interview.

But it wasn’t just the techniques of doing an intimate interview that really caught my attention. It was this one line on page 17 that rang the proverbial bell:

“As An Interviewer, You Are In A Rare Position To Access Experts”

That insight blew me away. I realized then what we had been missing… we needed to delight our potential business partners too. So I put aside the time to study the course. Okay, I’ll admit… it did seem a bit dreary at first, listening to 12 hours of audio… but let me tell you it was well worth it in the end.

The guide walks you through everything from the power of listening (it’s surprising how often we forget to listen!) to the six different types of questions (and when to use each type) to drawing out best responses from interviewees. Everything is broken down into golden nugget techniques for easy consumption.

What is especially helpful is that every lesson plan links to real life interviews done by Shaune himself (the 12 long hours of audio I was talking about), making it easy to see the practical application of the strategies.

We began implementing the new knowledge immediately.

We sent out emails to experts offering to interview them. We offered to introduce them and their products to our market - for free. All we want is an interview and they can tell everyone on our list in their own words about themselves and their product.

The result?

In one week, the top five leading experts of that niche market replied back with their interest. (not too shabby)

We’ve now used interviews to approach experts across all our projects, and it’s never been easier. By offering just one interview, we get in return:

* access to experts
* credibility
* back end products
* bonus giveaways
* free article content for our blogs and newsletter (where we also get to test the market’s response)
* potential JV partners

…and really, the list goes on.

The more you give, the more you get indeed. That’s the power of karma.

You can check out Shaune’s offer here (recommended).

I learnt many things from advertising, including how to instantly and rapidly generate big ideas to explode your income. I’ll begin by tackling the definition.

What is a Big Idea?

A big idea especially as relevant to our industry involves combining the "knew" and the "new".

‘New’ is something totally unrelated to the industry and ‘knew’ is something existing within the industry. When you combine them, you come up with something innovative which explodes your profits.

They may be ‘big ideas’ in terms of advertising campaigns, products, marketing or sales strategy.

Most people say that you can replicate success by using tried and true methods; many say that copywriting is swiping a few files to replicate success. It works in some cases but if you want to take your success to a whole new level, you need a big idea.

Clayton Marketplace says his biggest winners in terms of his copywriting and his letters were based on big ideas which, in their time, were almost revolutionary in nature. It’s from such big ideas that accelerated growth can happen.

If you follow a predictable route, the growth will be predictable. Predictably high, perhaps, but if you want to go to the next level you need a big idea.

If I had to describe the foundation for big ideas, I’d talk about a monkey sitting at a typewriter. A thousand typing monkeys locked up in a room over a century will be able to produce work the quality of Shakespeare. What I mean is, when it comes to big ideas, it’s all about the numbers. The eureka moment; the ‘aha’ moment is a myth. It’s about quantity not quality.

How do you generate Big Ideas?

You don’t sit there and meditate and suddenly one big idea comes out…No, really. It doesn’t happen like that.

You sit down, and generate 50 ideas. Or 100 ideas. Or even better, 300 ideas. And from there, I bet you that at least one of them will be good enough to explode your business to the next level. That’s the foundation –it’s always a numbers game.

But, how do you generate as many ideas as you can, you’re wondering? There are some who regard themselves gurus who can generate brilliant, problem-solving profit-booming ideas, instantly. However, the rest of us mere mortals need to keep trying and pushing.

This was how, in my previous life, I got hired as a copywriter although I had no prior experience. My boss told me to generate as many ideas as possible for three products. They didn’t have to be good ideas, but I had to come up with as many fresh angles as possible.

Within the space of 3hours, I came up with 300 ideas…and I was hired on the spot.

This is the key:

Be Avant-garde Outside Your Own domain.

This key isn’t just for generating big ideas, but for success in anything –even my success in advertising. In my time in advertising during which I won numerous awards, I attribute my success to this key. What’s interesting is this: this key isn’t from any business book.

It was actually from an author by the name of Edmund White on a commentary on Salon.com. He observed that artists are mostly only avant-garde in their own domains. Although they expose themselves to the finest of their own field, everything else they take in is just like what everyone else is taking in.

For example, as a marketer, if you want to be the best in your field, don’t just study your field, marketing. When you do this, you create an incestuous loop, and you won’t create new ideas because they’re based on something someone else in marketing has done before. Even if you read many direct marketing and entrepreneurial books, you’re still going round the same circle.

But, if you step out of that domain, if you start, in the words of Brian Vaszily, "immersing yourself in genius", where you immerse yourself in the greatest form of human expression and creativity in every single field, good ideas will come out from there.

Imagine that fruit are ideas and the soil is your imagination. The fertilizer then is to make sure that the soil is fertile and produces as much fruit as possible…that fertilizer consists of ideas outside your own domain, outside the realm of marketing.

But, here’s a disclaimer:

The statement says no artist is avant-garde outside his own domain, and this basically means you MUST be an artist to begin with.

This means that in order for this to work, you must master marketing first. Before an outside idea can work, you must know the rules of Internet marketing before you can tap into being avant-garde outside your own domain.

If you are not a master of your own domain, if you are avant-garde outside your domain, everything will crumble because you don’t have the proper foundation to know what’s good or what works in your field.

Most copywriters say that to succeed in your industry, you have to be an expert in your field and in your products because when you know your product inside out, you can express it in new ways. It’s probably part of the secret behind Agora’s success.

There are many ways to tap into generating big ideas, but below are two fairly instant, practical ways to go about doing this. You have to immerse yourself in genius, in music and the arts, in different specialty magazines –you may find some good ideas. This is what I sometimes do. I call it funnel vision in practice.

How to generate a Big Idea

Funnel vision is a concept by Jay Abraham, the basic idea of which is this: if you look outside your own field into another domain, whatever is there –their cliches and norms –take them and apply them to your field and your products will soar. It’s instant innovation, and there are two practical ways to do it.

i. From the Inside, Looking Out

Dan Kennedy says to list down all the norms of your industry –its standard picture poses, usual phraseology, etc. And then, you break and/or twist them, one by one.

ii. From the Outside, Looking In

Take another industry, list their traits and cliches, and apply them in your industry and in every aspect of how you run your business. E.g. if you take the example of an airline where they have free tickets and a check-in counter, think of how you would apply these to your business.

You can generate a lot of ideas using these two techniques. Listing the norms may take you a while, and just by twisting them you already have 20-30 ideas off the bat.

Overnight Test

To illustrate this, I would use the example of somebody sleeping. That’s how simple it is. In advertising, it’s called the overnight test.

A good idea at that time may be the most contemptible of ideas in the morning. You might think it a genius idea when you first come up with it, you might find it amazing, but sleep over it first and see if it’s still a ‘genius idea’ in the morning.

If, in the morning, you are still equally excited about it, it most likely means yes, it is a good idea because it has passed the overnight test.

There are other idea-generating methods, and I’ll continue to share these with you later. In the meantime, I am as usual curious to hear from you how the principles I am teaching you are affecting the way you do business. (Don’t forget that other like-minded people are linked to your website when you comment on our blog!)

Here is the proposal:

If you use Google AdWords to advertise, I want you to immediately leave a comment below and ask me all of your AdWords questions and challenges. 

Just do it!

What nags you at night about Google AdWords?  What challenges are you running into?

Please tell me!

In return for telling me what challenges you face, I am going to answer every single question on future blog posts.

Why would I take the time to write all these freebie answers?

As you know, we offer an excellent AdWords Guide on  www.AdWordsSystemExposed.com.  Well, a lot has changed since I first wrote it.  While it is still an excellent course and does a wonderful job dealing with the fundamentals, I am in the process of updating it and you will get the answers for free since you are helping me.

So, please leave a comment now so that I can help you with AdWords.

Mike

PS: I also wrote a report recently on AdWords that you can read at www.TheComingAdWordsWar.com

In my last few posts, I’ve shared various things I’ve learned, and the several insights that Brad Antin of Centerpointe shared with me.

You might be wondering how Brad Antin and I ended up talking business.

Did I walk up to him and say, "Hi, I’m Mike, I actually plan to be your biggest competitor, could you please tell me your secret?" Not quite.

Because all of us have a very different mindset, and that’s the one crucial difference that differentiates us from the rest.

I believe in a world of abundance. I think there’s enough for everybody, so I’m not competing with them.

I approached them because we are in the same market and together we can help each other become vastly more successful. That’s the attitude I have, and that’s the attitude they share.

This market is enormous, the demand is almost insatiable and we’re only 2 tiny fish. If we can work together to help each other rise, that’s great.

So, I told them, we operate in the same market as you –spiritual and personal growth, we have similar businesses and similar sized lists, let’s figure out how we can work together.

Brad Antin immediately said he’d love to promote one of our products to their list, which is great because they have one of the single most responsive lists on the Internet.

I approached him like that, and I flattered him. I told him, you know what? I’m your biggest fan. I’ve bought your product just to figure out how you guys do business because I’m floored, what you have done is phenomenal, and we’re not anywhere close. I’d love to talk to you for 5-10mins and learn more about what you guys do.

That’s how I approached him –it was flattery and a mindset of abundance. But I didn’t lie –he knows that we’re in the same market, and he also has the mindset of doing cross promotions and helping each other grow our businesses.

Partnerships are some of the best ways to grow and improve your business.

My question to you is –is there someone in your market whom you can work together with? Is there someone doing better than you are? How are you going to approach them and work together towards a more successful future for both your businesses?