What I'm about to tell you is very powerful. It's totally exclusive and no one knows about it yet. It's research on how we make decisions and what makes us comply. It's scientific evidence of what leads to yes.

Researcher Dr. Robert Cialdini proclaims that, "There's nothing wrong with lining your pockets, so long as you're providing good service to your customers." I have to agree, that's what it means to run a profitable business.

So long as you're conducting business in a fair and ethical manner, staying within the rules of the FTC, governing bodies and the tax man… why not use a little persuasion to convert shoppers into buyers?

What bothers me - as I've already seen evidence - is that many direct marketers will be releasing whitepapers and courses in the coming weeks, some costing thousands of dollars, all claiming to have invented this research. The only way you can stop their persuasion, and know if they are using proven psychological manipulation on you, is if you are armed with the same information that they have.

You must stop any side projects this week and learn these tactics now, or else you'll lose more of your hard earned cash with their smooth talk. You'll learn how to recognize a Trojan Horse when you see one. And you'll also learn how to apply this research to improve your persuasive abilities in your own environment.

The first is a book by Dr. Dan Ariely, a Professor of Behavioral Economics at the MIT Media Lab. His book "Predictably Irrational" (audio available from iTunes) uncovers the hidden forces that shape our decisions. He also operates a blog by the same name at: http://www.predictablyirrational.com

One of the things that impressed me most was the Decoy strategy. It's a clever method of positioning offers for products or services. And you'll be seeing it everywhere from now on.

According to Dan's research, "It's hard to evaluate anything in an absolute way. All decisions are made relative to each other. We don't compare one decision to everything. We compare only what's available at the moment of making a decision."

Let's take the example of the decoy. Here are three payment options for a popular trade magazine:

* Online Version - 47 Dollars
* Print Version - 97 Dollars
* Both Online and Print Versions - 99 Dollars

The middle option appears to have no purpose. No market share. No one will choose it. But it's there for a very important psychological reason. It's there as a decoy.

Without the middle option, people are far more likely to choose the lower cost online version. With the decoy, it serves to show, or point to the amount of "value" in the higher offer.

Dan Ariely found that, "The decision people make, is based on the amount of information available at the time of purchase. The combo deal is seen as a great value in comparison, or relative to the print only version. Now the purchasing habits are reversed, far more people are likely to take the higher priced offer."

Having three offers with one as a decoy, gives people a reason to make the choice. It forces them to make a decision. It gives them more confidence in the moment.

Start using this simple strategy on your direct sales page and you can either, double your profits, or leave half of it sitting on the table. It's up to you.

The second resource is Dr. Robert Cialdini, who has two books that are essential reading. First is "50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive" which was released in June 2008.

His second book explains the psychology behind direct marketing. It's called, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." The latest edition called "Influence: Science and Practice" will be available August 2008.

(You can also jumpstart your knowledge on this work by getting the 50 minute Executive Briefing by Robert Cialdini at iTunes.)

Dr Cialdini asks several key questions that are critical to marketing success:

If you have two items to present, which one do you present first, the one with the higher price, or the one with the lower price?

If you have new info, when should you mention that it's new, at the beginning, or the end of the presentation?

When it comes to presenting your product, service, or idea, which should you present first, its strengths or weaknesses?

What's the first thing you must do, immediately after someone has praised you, or your organization. There is a real moment of power here and most people let it slip away.

Getting these points in the right order can double or triple your responses and orders in most cases. Get them out of order and you'll lose 50 to 60% of all your profits.

Here's a little takeaway from the audio book. Dr. Cialdini explains that, "When you describe the benefits it's not sufficient to describe what they'll gain. The psychological research is very clear, that people are up to five times more motivated by the idea of losing something, than they are of gaining that very same thing."

A good example is the home insulation case study. This test went door to door and talked to the owners about insulating their home. One group told the owners they could save 50 cents per day by insulating. The other group was told they would lose 50 cents per day by not insulating.

It's the same idea and the same argument. But the people who choose to insulate based on loss was significantly higher. (The audio didn't mention a percentage.)

Dr. Cialdini's has scientific proof that, "Anything couched in terms of loss, resonates more powerfully with the average person. They are more interested and likely to act on information based on what they stand to lose instead of gain."

So it may be time to revamp your salesletter to list the benefits that someone stands to lose if they don't move in your direction. Sure it's ok to list what they hope to gain, but its also important to list what they stand to lose.

Get Robert Cialdini's "50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive" and "Influence the Psychology of Persuasion" and Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" at Amazon, iTunes or your favorite book store.

Remember, this is not theory. These are the facts. It's scientific evidence as to what makes people say yes. It's about getting people to comply. To get them to take action and do what you want, rather than just think about something in a positive way.

If you understand and employ these principles, you will become an agent of influence in your professional environment. If you don't learn about this research, you'll never know if someone is influencing you, your thoughts, ideas, or decision making process, and just sucking the cash out of your wallet using proven psychological persuasion principles.

Wouldn't you like to know?

The following is just a quick excerpt of cool tools, super tips and information that I've found useful. I didn't have time to write about all of them in the newsletter, but they were just too valuable to leave out.

Open Source Screen Recorder
Some people swear by Camtasia, some people swear at it. If you're one of the latter, or if cost is a factor, consider getting this open source screen recorder for Windows. (Mac users, if you're still using Snapz Pro, be sure to have a look at Screenflow. It's an amazing screen capture system.)

Adobe ConnectNow Screen Sharing
Acrobat.com has recently added Adobe ConnectNow for web conferencing. You can meet live over the web and share your screen with anyone. I tried it and it worked well. The really cool part is taking remote control of your client's mouse and doing show and tell, even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

Sculpting PageRank
I'll often aim my PageRank away from the "contact us" and similar pages on smaller sites using the nofollow tag. But is it a wise idea, especially for larger sites? Adam Audette has written a blog post examining the whole PageRank sculpting thing, arguing against it actually.

Creating Documentation FAST
ScreenSteps is for creating documentation, or more specifically, for people who don't want to create documentation, but they have to, because it's part of their job. Here's something that takes the drudgery out of creating visual learning aids, making them fun and easy to do. It works on Mac or Windows and only takes a few minutes to master the software.

How Skype Works
Is your computer slowing down? Is Internet Explorer grinding to a halt? Is your computer turning into a zombie? If so, it might be Skype that's causing the problem. Here's some background info on how Skype works, from the wonderful Technology Evangelist blog.

Create Slideshows without Software
280 Slides allows you to create and share presentations online. You don't need any special software. And when you're done making your presentation, you can share it any way you like.

Twitter Autoresponder Service
This service allows you to automatically follow someone when they follow you on Twitter. You can also send future dated tweets or simple little thank you notes to your new followers.

Git Repository Hosting
Git Hub is for software programmers. It's a hosting service for collaborative development that allows you to participate in the project and monitor it with ease. It includes news feeds, a source code browser and public developer profiles.

Increase Leads by 86%
Want to increase leads coming into the sales funnel by 86%? It's an innovative way to improve the number of leads in the pipeline. Hint: It's the landing page and most marketers are doing it all wrong.

Google SEO Documentation
According to Matt Cutts' blog, "Google added a bunch of nice documentation in various places." We're talking their official position on robots.txt, IP delivery and cloaking, nofollow, doorway pages and new quality guidelines. If you'd like to stay on the nice side of mighty Google, this post is an essential read. And if you'd like to know how they use their search engine data to fight spam, you'll find this an interesting read as well.

Keyword Results Analyzer is Dr. Andy Williams' best selling product. It allows you to dig deep within keyword data to discover long tail keywords, phrases and markets related to your primary keywords.

The Pro version digs deeper to find niches inside of niches. It uses LSI (latent semantic indexing) tools to determine the exact meaning of competing pages much the same way as some search engines do.

Now LSI may seem a bit scary, but it really boils down to the theme of the page. What it's really about.

Are all the ancillary and supporting words found. What kind of keyword pairs occur and what are the proximity of the keywords to each other. All these details and a lot more come into play with LSI or themes.

What's great about KRA Pro, is that it analyses the top scoring pages to find out how they are themed. And this is important because it's not generalities that you're after. You need to know what your competition is doing in any given keyword category.

Why? Because search is topic sensitive. It's come a long way in the past few years. That's why KRA Pro is more important than ever. The search engines keep getting smarter and so do the tools that we need to analyze our competition. So if keyword analysis is important to your or your company, you need this tool.

Professional Keyword Analysis: http://www.cdzn.com/krp

(When you go to order it, Paypal defaults to Spanish, because Dr. Williams lives on a small island that's technically the property of Spain. So just follow Andy's instructions for selecting your country and the order form will switch to English.)

Two years ago, Google Trends would let you enter keywords separated by commas and it would fill in the blanks. Fun but not very useful.

A year ago they added Hot Trends so you could see what people were searching for in near real time. Which made it a little more useful for market research.

Now they've added a new layer that displays website data which you can read about on their Webmaster Central Blog and on the Google website in the Trends section:

What's really cool, is that you can enter a domain name (ie; cars.com) into the Google Trends Tool and click on the search button: Then in the results that get displayed, click on the little "Websites" link under the Google Trends logo.

Using this tool you can gather a lot of competitive intelligence about the site. You can breakout the traffic by region, discover the other sites their visitors looked at, and what other keywords their audience searched for. Very handy for market research, keyword gathering and spying on the competition.

Everyone needs a site builder. I use a combination of Rapidweaver for my static pages and Wordpress for my blog. Unfortunately Rapidweaver is Mac only and my PC cousins could only weep at my amazing ninja like production skills… until now.

XSite Pro was a fantastic product. But version two is like anything that's been cooking for a couple of years. It has matured in flavor and features, and it's still way easier to use than Dreamweaver or hand coding HTML or CSS.

You get hundreds of templates and graphics for an original design. You can add audio and video with just a few clicks. You get a mobile phone friendly version of your site. Live news feeds. Easy to insert PPC and Amazon ads. And hundreds more new features to keep your visitors happy.

So if you want to build great looking sites that are search engine friendly, include ads and the ability to grow on auto-pilot over time, XSite Pro may be just the site builder you've been waiting for.

Click now to reserve your seat at the webinar. Let them show you how easy it is to build high quality, search engine friendly websites, with the kinds of features that readers want and marketers love.

Date: Friday 4th July 2008
Start Time: 12:00 Noon EDT (5:00pm UK time)
Duration: Approx. 60mins
Register: http://www.cdzn.com/xsv

Date: Sunday 6th July 2008
Start Time: 3:00pm EDT (8:00pm UK time)
Duration: Approx. 60mins
Register: http://www.cdzn.com/xsv

Missed the webinar? No worries, just click over to the site and watch the video. You'll discover how XSite Pro takes away the pain and drudgery of site building and makes it a pleasure to do.

How to Build Great Sites Fast: http://www.cdzn.com/xsp

How would you like to get top search engine rankings and thousands of visitors with a brand new domain name that's never been indexed before? It's not some cheesy reciprocal linking scheme and doesn't involve any gray hat tactics.

I heard about this one from my good friend Jim Morris over at Nichebot. He was quite excited about it because it's simple and it really works.

It involves making your own software and uploading it to the software directories. Now before you plug your ears and run to the next topic, you don't need any technical expertise to make this work. And you don't need to hire a programmer.

I had to see it to believe it. So I asked the author Michelle MacPhearson, to set me up a comp account so I could go poke at it and see for myself. I tried it out and am convinced…

If you can point and click that's all it takes. You simply fill out a form using your web browser, selecting from mulitple choice options, and create your own software in as little as 30 minutes using online tools and freely available components.

I'm adding this strategy into my marketing mix. Not only is it drop dead simple to do, it would be silly NOT to do it, considering how many instant one-way backlinks it can bring in.

30 Minute Backlinks by Michelle MacPhearson is simply brilliant. It's search engine friendly. Totally white hat. And it's one of the best linking strategies that I've seen in a long time.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Best Practices Podcast with your host Michael Campbell and SEO Specialist Mike Marshall.

With me on this podcast is Mike Marshall, who is widely known as the creator of the original theme-based LSI tool for SEO professionals. He has recently released a new tool called SEO Recon that will analyze what your competitors are doing, and generate detailed reports on how to get higher rankings than they do, in the search engine results.

In addition to SEO best practices, we'll discuss a list of things that you should and should not do. We'll also take a look at what types of things can get you banned and how to do SEO properly so you'll stay within the webmaster guidelines.

Download the SEO Best Practices Podcast or download a PDF transcript of the call. Get back issues of all the Internet Marketing Secrets Podcasts here.

Have you considered a media room for your website? The easier you make it to find information about your products, the more likely the media is to write about them. (That includes newsletter authors like me.)

Very often I'm looking to write about a product, but the website makes it difficult for me to find the necessary information. I want to get past the boring 10 page salesletter, the mission statement puffery, the unique selling proposition, the chronological press releases, and into the real meat of the story.

A really pro example of an online media room is the one supplied by Apple Computer. You don't have to go this extent, because even a simple media room will help.

Tell me in three paragraphs or less, what it is that you have. How do your customers use your product or service, and how does it help them solve their problems.

Then give me a short synopsis. Tell me benefits of what it does. Why it's different or better than the competition. And why I'd be crazy not to deal with you, or to go someplace else.

If you were to supply this basic info, along with product shots, box or ebook covers, logos and your photo, you'd make my job easier. And by making my job easier, I'm far more likely to write about you and your products.

If I'm doing in-depth reporting I can dig for more information. You could provide entire press kits in printer-friendly formats like PDF. You could also include other media like sound clips, interviews and video.

Another thing to consider adding to your media room are customer testimonials. Or better yet, stories and case studies about your customers.

Let me know how your customers have benefited by using your products or services, but let them tell the story in their own words. It's useful for journalists and good for prospective customers as well.

So how do I decide which products or services get coverage in my newsletter? Very often it's the ones that have made my job easier by having a media room, which lets me understand their product or service at a glance.

If they've provided a couple of hype-free cut and paste ready paragraphs, along with clean and bright product shots, they'll get written about more often and by more journalists.

So what's your story? The media would love to help you tell it.

If you provide a media room for your website, you'll make their job a lot easier. And the easier you make their job, the more often your story will get told.

Recently, I was asked if it's possible to upload a video to a streaming video service like uStream.tv. It's one of those secrets that's so good, I almost wanted to keep it to myself. But then again, I've always believed in disclosure and transparency, so decided it best to help everyone out.

The trick is really simple. To upload video to the streaming video site, select Camtwist as your video source. Play a prerecorded video and click the record button on ustream. It's slow but it works.

The streaming video service doesn't care, or even know if the streaming source is a live camera, or a virtual camera driver as is the case with Camtwist. (For my Windows friends, I'm told that the Mac OS X equivalent of Camtwist for PC is WebCamMax and the same trick will work for you.)

I was thinking of the implications and uses for this idea. It gives you the opportunity to edit before uploading. To time shift a guest interview into your regular time slot.

You could do something that was "recorded live" in front of a studio audience, then upload it, as if it were "happening" live. But instead of performing live in front of the camera, you're simply playing a recording. That way you can put your full attention on engaging the people that are participating in the chat session, while the "upload" is in progress.

One more thing. Most cameras can record to disk, tape or memory stick while they stream live. This means that you can reposition your video in whatever format you choose. So instead of having a Flash streaming video, which is the case for most streaming services, you could also create MP4s, host them yourself, and let people download and play them on the go, instead of having to sit there and watch a stream.

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What do your videos look like? Shaky camera, poor lighting, scrolling messages like a used car dealer? Sorry kids but this isn't 2004. That kind of video online just doesn't cut it any more.

You must keep the audience engaged, motivate and persuade them to take action. An effective video - that matches your content - will do that.

Spend only a couple of minutes on this website and you'll see what I mean. You CAN produce this level of quality, and it won't take a two years at a broadcasting academy, or bust the bank. (Enrollment for June courses on now.)

Create Video that Rocks: http://www.cdzn.com/wvu

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