persuasion and psychology
It was one of the worst moments of my life… Several decades ago, soon after I got my licence, I was driving back from an event in the Blue Mountains. It was foggy, and I was trying to clear the windows… When suddenly, I looked up… And BANG! I smashed into the car at the […]
Read This or Die What would you do if someone said that to you? Truth is… It was one of the most dramatic headlines ever written. It was followed up with… Today you have a 95 percent chance of eventually dying from a disease or condition for which there is already a known cure somewhere […]
It was a huge “aha” moment. And it changed my game instantly… I’d been playing cricket for years, when my dad brought home this video about footwork when batting. I learnt about when to get on the front foot, when to get on the back foot, and my game instantly improved – thanks to these […]
According to Alex Berman‘s book, The Cold Email Manifesto, one of the biggest reasons cold emails fail… Is the lack of specificity. What you want people to say when they get any piece of communication, whether it’s an email or a Facebook ad is… “This is for me” Think about it: what would mean more […]
I looked down at the scales and it scared me… Then the penny dropped – the reason I was packing on the pounds all boiled down to the 80/20 effect. While I wasn’t eating much during the day, after dinner… I would go to the fridge, and RAID it. Maybe it wasn’t 80% of my […]
I put everything I had into it, yet despite this my first business failed. Living in a halfway house in my early twenties, I remember lying there on a couch with a feeling of regret lurching around in my stomach. I wish I hadn’t hired that one person. I wish I had tried harder with […]
What should you do if you’ve got an offer that’s too good to be true? How do you highlight the benefits while addressing the skeptical prospect? John Dwyer suffers from this problem. His company literally allows business owners to give away holidays to their clients, based on an incentive-based marketing strategy – and some of […]
It made my heart burst… One of the best things about being a parent to a newborn, was watching my son’s face light up at the wonder of discovering something new. And that “something new” could be anything from a sunrise to watching a parachute fall from the sky. Adults are harder to please, yet […]
I remember venturing into my first business, wet behind the ears in my early twenties. It was a… Hair salon. And it was extremely risky. Why? Because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. In hindsight, there were plenty of ways I could have slashed my risks (and saved myself some serious emotional pain)… And […]
I stumbled across it by accident… After being contracted to write email subject lines for a company with an email list of over 2 million subscribers… And seeing the split-test results over a period of time… I noticed there was one four letter word which kept popping up over and over again. I’ll explain why […]
Nobody likes it when others are sneaky, yet it happens… For instance, I just watched Brett Warren‘s video about the new secret tax the Qld government is implementing (see comments). If I was writing a headline about that, I might say something along the lines of: Sneaky New Land Tax 98% of Qld Investors are […]
I was meditating peacefully one morning, when it felt like a bomb dropped. I heard that sound – The Morning Garbage Truck And I’d forgotten to take the bins out. I’d never moved so fast in my life, and thankfully… I got it there within literally a matter of seconds. Make no mistake – deadlines […]