He makes the interesting point that if your success is from a random event or ‘luck,’ then you are vulnerable to losing it by a random event. He then goes on to show how most things are indeed random and ‘lucky’ with considerable justification. Which includes most business people, and most of Wall Street.

But then of course, everyone, including myself, have a puerile instinct to believe that we are special, and our decisions of course are brilliant and the real reason for our success.

Things that aren’t the result of luck are something like a dentist – they have learned a trade, have educated themselves in a skill, which can’t be learned by reading a book.

One of the examples he gives is 10,000 investment managers. Each has a 50% chance of making $10,000 and 50% chance a $10,000 loss. At the end of each year, all the managers who lost money are fired. After the first year, 5000 are fired, and so on each year, 2500 the next, 1250 the next, 625 and then 312 after 5 years.

Surprisingly, just with a 50/50 chance over 300 investment managers have a ‘track record’ of making money for 5 years. The kicker is that year number 6 is no different to any other year – the remaining 312 still only have a 50% chance of making money – their ‘track record’ is of no consequence.

Which is really another way of saying, life is a long-term thing – over time, life will deliver all possible outcomes. So if someone is ‘successful’ it generally refers to today or this year, rather than a long-term view, which changes everything completely, and far fewer people qualify as ‘successful.’

Further, given a hugely elevated random element and longer time frame, one of the fundamental assumptions of success requires a second look, namely that asset values will continue to increase in the future at the same rate as they have in the past, (oh, ask Lehman Brothers or Merril Lynch) which seems increasingly dubious.

All in all a fascinating read! And I will have to revise my earlier post regarding the 10,000 hour rule be be really successful.

Profile of Nassim Nicholas Tale from Bloomberg

Fooled by Randomness Webpage

Clickbank is another choice, with the added option of managing an affiliate program, which is handy, but I don’t find it worth the whopping 14% fees. I personally find the affiliate program of marginal value as it caters to more sensational, get rich quick type of products and sellers. Just my opinion though, others may differ.

Another disadvantage of clickbank is the waiting period for payout and payment by check, whereas paypal has no waiting period and direct deposit in 2 – 3 days (although they claim 5 – 7 working days, in fact it is 2 – 3).

2. Sales Processing and Downloads
Selling download-able products is the only way to go, especially if you are selling internationally. Regular mail to distant corners of the world, such as Ethiopia or even Thailand or India is not feasible as postal system is too corrupt.

In addition, paypal requires a tracking number, and rightly so, which protects you the seller in the event of a dispute. Selling internationally, this presents a problem when purchasing power and exchange rates are taken into account, the service becomes too expensive.

Depending on what you are selling and to who, you may want to use a fulfillment service, especially if it is a high-end product. I recently bought a package from here and they used a fulfillment service, which seemed quite efficient. They are selling courses for $300+ to the developed world, and charging for shipping, which I didn’t mind paying as it is a small percentage of the total cost. However, if you are selling something for under $50, then the shipping (as well as printing and handling) then the math doesn’t make sense.

So – better to go with downloads. Here is a few things I have learned.

1. Customers have to get an email.
After purchase customers are generally automatically re-directed to the download page, with Paypal or Clickbank. This is great and works fine for about 80% of customers. The other 20% will take up a huge amount of time dealing with however. Many people think after they have paid for something and entered their credit card information, that is it, and they close the browser. Or any number of other things can happen – the redirect fails because of funky javascript browser settings, their computer crashes, their husband/wife/children need something right then. etc., etc.

Some people really don’t realize they are being re-directed. I don’t know what they are thinking, but somehow they don’t seem to get it. This kind of problem can be reduced substantially using a bit of code. After processing the credit card for the sale, Paypal displays a white page saying the purchase is complete and a link in a tiny font, that says, “Return to Merchant.” This is quite ambiguous and I am not really sure why Paypal chooses this language and tiny font. Anyway, there is an option for customized code – (full list of paypal developer codes here)

The maximum number of characters is 64, and I have found it works the best to fill the field to the maximum with spaces, as in

that way, a huge button is generated that customers absolutely can’t miss.

As a temporary or partial measure, this works very well and cuts down on “I didn’t get my download” email substantially.

The best solution however is to redirect after purchase AND have an email automatically generated that sends the download link to the customer after purchase.

There are several front end software products that will help. One is Digital Product Guard, which will encode the download URL and generates an email to the customer but doesn’t include the download URL in that email, instead relies on the redirect after purchase.

Another is Paypal Download Manager, which is a great product and does everything except the code is encrypted so you can’t do multi-variant testing or customize it. That is a significant disadvantage – not being able to test the sales pages means you are stuck in the stone age (!) and you are losing more sales than you are getting.

The best system I have found which covers all of the essentials and a has a few nice extras is GETDPD (www.getdpd.com). Customers are redirected, and get an email with the download link, which expires after a pre-set number of downloads. They accomodate different websites under the same account and also administer an affiliate program. And everything goes through paypal.

There are still a few bad boy countries that paypal screens very carefully, so inevitably some people get caught up and can’t use their credit card on the site. Paypal also offers a Virtual Terminal where you can take credit card purchases over the phone – very handy! Great for International orders and perfect for clients that want to send a check.

1. Test the Price and Listen to what your Customers say.
Always test a selection of prices. Sometimes a higher price is perceived as better quality and result in higher revenue and sometimes it won’t. No way of knowing unless you test – the customer is always right.

When releasing a new product, it is quite likely to need some tweaking and adjustment. Most likely people will use it for a different purpose than you are selling it for. That’s OK too! Listening to feedback from customers, and watch your stats like a hawk. For example, you may want to target students, however, teachers end up buying it to use as a lesson plan to teach the subject. No problem – back to the drawing board and re-write the material, adding classroom activities, games and notes for the teacher. Presto! Instead of an ebook for students, it is a lesson plan for teachers.

What testing does is force you to do things differently that you think they should be done. Often we become attached to having a webpage or a product a certain way. Or the way the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or the person in the company with the most aggressive personality wants it. None of that matters. What really matters is the customer. Listen, watch and stay open and flexible.

2. Most products will fail on release.
I read somewhere a survey where business people were asked to rate the success of their new product or service. The result was a staggering 12% rated their product a success. So – probably your project will fail on the first release. That doesn’t mean you give up though. What you need to, as above, is listen and watch, and think of another way product can be used. Maybe you can give it away free if people join your Face book page. Or a free iphone app. Stick with it and think outside the box.

OK, those are some higher level strategic concerns. Now for some tactical coding level concerns in Part II in a week or so.

If it is properly indexed, they you have 300 or 400 pages of material which is a huge boost for your rankings and traffic. Beyond that, it is just sitting there.

What you do with this accumulation is compile it into an ebook which you can sell! Here is what I did with a 5-year old blog, plus several years of article submissions and masses of site content.

First I hired a guy who was referred to me by a client as Editor and Project Manager. He had a Masters degree and was unemployed and agreed to work of $20/hour. First I got him to come up with an outline or table of contents. I asked him to research every single possible topic for the book (in this case on how to study) so that the book would be the complete guide on how to study and cover every conceivable aspect and topic.

Once we had the table of contents, I zipped all of the material together (which was quite a lot) and sent it to him together with a quick index of the material.

The first step was for him to go through and inventory everything and compile a list of topics that are missing. Once he gave me the list I hired my usual freelance writer to write up the missing parts,which was about 40 pages total.

While that was being written up, the Editor was putting the existing content together as well as writing transitions. A book is more than just a collection of blog posts and articles put together, and putting them all together into a cohesive whole was harder and more work that I expected.

Simply copy and pasting a huge collection of blog posts together feels very disjointed. As well blog posts tend to be quite short, and often just give a cursory coverage of the topic. Often blog posts had to be taken out or used as a basis for a more in-depth article which was then integrated into the larger document.

Still, a successful project, although it took longer, cost more and was more difficulty than I originally planned.

The result? 3 ebooks, on related topics, 200 pages, 110 pages and 50 pages respectively. Hooked them up to paypal, linked everywhere internally on the site and re-couped my investment for the freelance editor and writer in just over 1 month. From here on in it is all pure profit.

One of the ebooks, here, was so successful, I had my main writer, add another 50 pages.

All of the ebooks are undergoing extensive multi-variant testing to determine price breaks, and sales copy. So far, it looks as though my original guess at price was too low, and tweaks to the sales copy have increased conversion by 57%.

Very Nice!

The full article is here , recently populized by Malcom Gladwell, in Outliers, the Story of Success.

I like Malcom Gladwell - he is iconoclastic, eccentric and intellectual. So it caught my eye. So how many is 10,000 hours in days and years?

Quite a bit – 4 hours per day, which is a fair bit to focus attention on exclusively, for 5 days a week, works out to 960 hours per year, which would be 10.41 years.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, only 26% of online marketers are taking advantage of testing technologies.

Seems hard to believe when you can quicly and easily replace a picture and increase your conversion by 150%! That is an awful lot of money left on the table.

And if you think Google isn’t paying attention to high conversion websites? Think again! Google loves high conversion sites.

Perhaps the missing element in the latest Caffine update?

More Discussion here

Here is a great post – there are thousands of ideas like this

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/12/25/scientific-money-poster-a-free-business-idea/

Aaron Wall offered an interesting view on his blog http://www.seobook.com/blog which I can’t locate, and I am paraphrasing here, saying to keep most content just above the medium quality level, and then smaller amounts of very high quality content.

With 52 sites and 100′s of pages of content, it is easy to lose track of everything! The really important take-away from this book is to make a Content Audit. Make a list of all the content you have, organized by category, PageRank and then see what is converting and what isn’t.

Guaranteed to change the way you look at, create and post content.