For those of you who blog with Wordpress or need a script for your landing pages and stand alone sites for blocking the dangers of SideWiki (read about it here and here), I have updated and loaded my Ultimate Sidewiki Blocker in the Wordpress Free Plugins area, and you can get it by going to your plugins page in your Wordpress Admin (install plugins and search for “sidewiki” or for “ultimate sidewiki” and install. Active and set up your key-phrase and you are good to go!).

Or you can download the plugin here: Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker Best part is it is FREE!

Should I buy the micro-brewed Brouwerij Van Steenberge? Or the Primátor Maibock. I can’t take it! I guess I’ll just buy the Budweiser…

Options. Most people and most marketers mistakenly think more is better, but recent studies and some published books have shown that it can be a demotivator at a certain point, actually causing real sales to plummet.

Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice.  For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”:

They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams.  40% of the customers stopped to taste.  30% of those bought some.  A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams.  60% of the customers stopped to taste.  But only 3% bought some!

What does this mean for Success in our marketing efforts, in deciding between tasks we want to accomplish? In deciding in goals we want to achieve?

It means we can be paralyzed by choice. The human mind is capable, on average, to hold up to seven things at once. We can only truly focus on one thing, but we can keep track of about seven max (for the best of us). Probably between 4 and 6 is more realistic for most of us. What this means is that when we are face with choices that are very much greater than this, we face a dilemma where we are not sure what the best choice is because we cannot analyze all of the choice data, so we get internally frustrated and ultimately make no choice.

This is statistically significant – in fact if we know exactly what we want, or have a pretty good idea, we can eliminate most of the multitude of choices and focus down to the few we really need to look at. This accounts for the three percent who actually bought jelly in the example. So what occurs when we have even a partial focus is we are able to “recreate” the situation with fewer choices. But when we are completely unfocused on what choice we want, and when we are faced with too many options, we don’t make a choice. This is a general principle that needs to be applied to our marketing efforts.

How many times have you seen a website where there were a dizzying array of possible options, links, videos, audios, banners, pictures,etc. and you simply did not know what to do. Perhaps you felt like you wanted to click something, but you had that frustration that whatever you clicked on would take you away from a possible better choice that led somewhere else…

How many times do you think sales have been lost at websites like that because of the issue of over-complexity and too many options? Probably more than most think, because most people assume that more options is better.

The solution to this dilemma is to find ways of presenting large quantities of choices in a simplified fashion. Splitting the choices using hierarchical trees, breaking data into related chunks, pulling together links into blocks that hide the details so that focus is regained. This is an essential tool in designing a website with many choices.

An excellent example of this is Google – a plain white field with a single logo in the center, a box to enter search terms, and two buttons. That is all. How is that for simplicity? And this engine can bring you the complexity of the entire web. This is the kind of forethought that needs to go into any sales page or product display, etc. It’s nice to have many options, but if you don’t present those options in a way that is digestible to human brains, you could lose most of your sales.

This principle holds in most things, not just selling jelly (or beer) – but in the presentation of data in a slide show for your office, or in presenting a scientific paper – anything that presents objects to be considered in some way.

One option too many can make life just as colorless as one too few. In business, this is an important principle to understand.

-DTM

The Post below is a what is known as a “Public Domain” rewrite.  I have taken the Public Domain Essay by Herbert Kaufman which was originally copyrighted in 1908 and 1912.  The copyright has since expired and so now the work may be used in any way, including making derivative works and calling them your own.  This is perfectly legal, however I am not one to take the work of another man and call it my own, these words were in their original form, penned by Mr. Kaufman.  All I did was take his ideas and transform them into twenty first century concepts.  The Basic Truths are still the same.  Enjoy.

The Clock that Had no Hands, By Herbert Kaufman

Rewritten by David T. McKee

Internet advertising is to business, what hands are to a clock. It is a direct and certain means of letting the public know what you are doing. In these days of intense and vigilant commercial contest, a dealer who does not advertise is like a clock that has no hands. He has no way of recording his movements. He can no more expect a twentieth century success with nineteenth century methods, than he can wear the same sized shoes as a man, which fitted him in his boyhood.

His father and mother were content with the shopping malls or local shops; nothing better could be had in their day. The were accustomed to print or direct marketing over the radio or television, or perhaps they shopped around the corner in local stores which depended upon the immediate friends of the dealer for support.

So long as everything was within driving distance or could be mailed without too much expense using catalogs or mail-order it was possible for the proprietors of these establishments to exist and make a profit. Local Radio or TV ads informed the public of a multitude of products.

But as technology moved forward things changed, as they always do.

As in the past when transit facilities spread, sections of the city became specialized. Block after block was entirely devoted to stores, and mile after mile became solely occupied by homes. The purchaser and the storekeeper grew farther and farther apart. It was necessary for the merchant to find a substitute for his direct personality, which no longer served to draw customers to his door. He had to have a bond between the commercial center and the home center.

In the same way the Internet has connected customers and merchants around the world and provided this bond in a global way. And the connection is made through Direct Marketing.

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While interconnected computers eliminated distance, advertising was still necessary to inform people where he was located and what he had to sell. It was a natural outgrowth of changed conditions–the beginning of a new era in trade which no longer relied upon personal acquaintance, or newspapers, or radio and TV for success.

Something more wonderful than the fabled philosopher’s stone came into being, and the beginnings of fortunes which would pass the billion dollar mark and place tradesmen’s daughters upon Oriental thrones grew from this new force.

Within twenty years it has become as vital to industry as communications is to commerce.

Advertising is not a luxury nor a debatable policy. It has proven its case. Its record is traced in the skylines of cities where a hundred towering buildings stand as a lesson of reproach to the men who had the opportunity but not the foresight, and furnish a constant inspiration to the young merchant at the threshold of his career.

This is a new category for The Master Achiever Blog: Healthy Living.   Success is meaningless if you are not healthy!  With all the buzz about the Swine Flu Virus I thought it would be fitting to look a little deeper at the whole question of Vaccines.

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Back in 1796 Edward Jenner was developing and testing the worlds first Vaccine.  It was for smallpox, a disease that killed one in every three people that got it, and infected about 60% of the total world population.  It was highly feared, and yet today, due to the work of Edward Jenner and others, it has been eradicated.

So Vaccines are good right?

Well, let’s take a closer look.  Jenner’s vaccine for Smallpox was to induce a related but non-deadly disease called “Cow Pox” at that time.  It had been noted that milk maids seemed immune to smallpox, and Jenner noticed that they would get the tell-tale blisters of Cow Pox. He put the idea to the test, purposely infecting a test subject with Cow Pox and then, after that persons blisters healed, attempted to infect them with smallpox. The rest is history  (read more about it here).

Later it was found that dead or weakened viruses would also work to immunize against various viral diseases.  Vaccines became widely used and many other diseases were also eradicated.

Unfortunately, as with most things, there were complications.  Some viruses would start to respond to vaccine treatment, and then they would surge back, much more virulently.  Research showed that the virus had mutated, had essentially modified itself in such a way as to no longer be affected by the anti-bodies that were produced via the vaccine.

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Enter technology – boosters were invented, and new ways of “weakening” the viruses.  The new vaccines contained a soup of various chemicals along with the weakened virus – chemicals like Thimerosal, a mercury containing drug, or Formaldehyde, or aluminum.  Some of these chemicals were known as “adjuncts” – designed to boost the bodies immune response to the weakened virus, others such as Formaldehyde are used to stabilize the vaccine.

The only problem with this is that you are injecting these highly toxic chemicals directly into your blood-stream!  In many cases such as the flu, it would be better for you to get the disease than take the vaccine, especially if your are of good health!

Here are some facts about just these three chemicals:

Mercury: – Considered one of the most dangerous and deadly chemicals to living things. Causes birth defects, tumors, cancer and death.

Formaldehyde:  Not a whole lot better than Mercury, it is used a disinfectant because of its ability to kill bacteria, it has been labeled as a carcinogen.  It has also been banned from being used in cosmetics and the manufacture of various resins that are used in carpets and insulation foams.

Aluminum: Although in most uses aluminum is perfectly fine, when in the blood it accumulates in the brain and nervous system and can cause a variety of nervous system disorders.

The problem is long term studies of what these things can do to us have either not been done, or they have and are not published because of the expense and bad press that would occur to companies that make billions off of these drugs.

Now – I am no liberal, and I have no problem with a company making billions,  I want to make billions! But, not at the expense of a single human being.  I have a real problem with that!

We know these chemicals are dangerous, so it only stands to reason that very careful studies should be done before injecting even the smallest amount of them into our systems.

With regard to the Seasonal and Swine Flu, I think it is prudent to learn all you can about these vaccines before you take them.

David T. McKee

Google’s new tool Side-Wiki looks like a great new addition to the plethora of new tools coming out that are essentially plug-ins to the browser. For most sites that are simply presentations of information of various kinds, this new tools just creates a comment bar on the side. Even though it is called “Side-Wiki” it is not a wikipedia page at all, but just a set of visitors commentary on the information in the site. Normally this would be considered a cool thing, there is only one problem with it: Anyone can post anything, and if the page is your sales page, and the poster is your direct competitor they can post slander and libel against you and direct your prospects to go to their sites all while hosting it on your site!

That is an outrage! Because now all that work you did to create traffic and improve your site, to create your product and drive traffic can be destroyed by just a few clicks from an enemy.

What do you do? Well, if you are smart you get a blocker for Side-Wiki. A good blocker needs to be able to sandbox your site without screwing up any of the links, existing anchors, or data – it needs to be able to create random redirection, and should be keyed so you can see that the redirection is yours and not put in by some hacker or other spam tool.

So how does Google’s Sidewiki work, look at the picture below and you can get  good idea:

What is happening is that with the Sidewiki tool bar you are really running two browsers at once. The first, your regular browser, is looking at your sales page, or as you see in the picture, at the Google search screen. The other browser which is hosted on the left side is communicating directly with the Giant Google Corporation, and accessing the Massive Google Database, and posting the various comments from the database to the sidewiki application.

Then what happens is that your competitor or person who simply does not like you (represented by Dr. Evil in the picture) decides to write all kinds of bad things about you, your business practices, your products and services, and then offers the same product for less money elsewhere. This drives all of your business away!

And there is nothing you can do about that as long as your site is not blocking sidewiki, anyone who has downloaded the new Google toolbar has this capability to see the bad things others have written about your site, and you are hosting it, at least that is how it appears to them.

You need some way to block this! You need an Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

There are a few on the net, but most of these are remotely hosted scripts. If you put one of these on your site you are bound to have problems if that remote host goes down, or gets hacked. It is a much safer bet to get a script you can install on your own site. These scripts will work in your blogs as well as your straight sites, landing pages, mini-sites etc.

Look into a Side-Wiki blocker, like the one I offer – even if you decide not to use it, it should be in your toolbox!

-DTM