How's everyone doing today? Good. I am not going to stand at the lectern. I talk. Has anyone ever seen one of my talks before? Couple people. So a couple things. This is interactive. Please, please, please, shout out to answers, raise your hand, tell stories. Oh, I will throw things at you. They laugh because they haven't seen me before. So this is not the talk you probably think it is, but it's talk that I've given literally to over 50,000 people over the years. I have changed it quite a bit and I added stuff from the presidential campaign. So what could go wrong? So, yeah. Who am I? What am I doing? I'm an evangelist for BoldGrid. That's the show. I want to talk about BoldGrid. We can talk out there. I'm also the Treasurer of Open Source Matters Inc. Anyone here know what Open Source Matters is? One person. Okay. Open Source Matters is the foundation of the Joomla project. Oh, How did he get in here? For everybody with pitchforks, Joe used to be on the board too. So You can do that. Here's my thing is I think Open Source is above all else. I love Open Source. I don't care what tool you use. I love WordPress. I built hundreds and hundreds of WordPress sites. I built hundreds and hundreds of Joomla sites. Open Source is first. I don't care what tools that you use because we all should pull the rope in the same direction and put the internet forward no matter what tool set you use. You know, I don't care if he has went to his Mac Linux. It doesn't really matter. So I started with Joomla and I thought I wanted to give back because it will gave me my start. So I should manage it for the Joomla World Conference when there was still a Joomla World Conference. Also the I'm a husband, video game lover, former Disney cast member and owner of a wonderful dog.  That kind of talks about what I do. Why I do it. I go to events. I go to schools and I talk about WordPress. I talk about internet and I talk about why I love this community so much and why I love open source. And then I ask her a lot of hard rocks and then, you know, that was Paris last year during Matt's talk at WordCamp Europe. Would anyone go into Serbia in two weeks? WordCamp Europe? No, Serbia is beautiful this time of year. So you should definitely check it out. Besides the flights, everything's very affordable. So to get out there. I go to a lot of different types of events. This is Salt Lake City at a mommy blog conference. Those are our professional male dancers dressed as unicorns at a mommy blog conference. I was one of two men at the conference. The other guy was a Lego master builder. So him and I hung out as a while. But I think he enjoyed the dancing a little bit more than I did. That's the official drink out there though. And here's the thing I love about WordPress. On an open source in general, that is very inclusive. This is such an inclusive community. I am so happy that there was a code of conduct when we walked in here because WordPress is just people. And that's what is most powerful for anything I do. This is an open source talk. I have another one of those. But I just love how we all pull the rope in the same direction. We come from different races, religions, creeds, political beliefs, all this stuff. We all can come together for WordPress because it's our passion. We're all not going to agree on every topic and that's okay. But as long as we're all respectful of each other, you know, I think that's what you teach that in elementary school in Canada, right? We don't get that in the U.S. But please, just I just love, really love open source as a whole. And that's kind of why I do this. And that's why I do these things. So that's enough with me getting on the soap box about open source. So now let's talk about A-B testing. So this talk is not a technical talk. I'm not going to give you a lot of plug-ins. I'm not going to give you a lot of things to do. I am going to talk about how I did A-B testing for Fortune 500 companies for years. Some of them are brands you've probably heard of. Actually, all of them are brands you've probably heard of. And talk about the pitfalls and how it's so powerful, what you can do with A-B testing without even having to think about it. But before we get there, can somebody tell me, give me a definition of A-B testing? Anyone tell me what A-B testing and split testing is? Anybody? Yeah, yeah. So you try to do different things. Let's say a picture. You try one picture and try another picture. You see which picture performs the better and then you kind of go from there. Has anyone ever tried any sort of split testing or A-B testing on their projects? Okay. Did you say it went well? Good. Mix of both. Try a lot of things. You don't know why stuff happens. Can somebody give me an example of a time that it went well? No? Anybody? Okay. Yeah. Okay, cool. Awesome. How are you tracking that? We using a tool or did you just change the color and track before and after? Okay. Okay, cool. So the average card value, so yeah. So A-B testing is basically trying two variants of something, sometimes more than two variants, and seeing what performs the best, what performs the best. So that takes us to the thing is A-B testing needs to be controlled. There's not going to be a lot on these slides, so don't get over excited. Most of it is in my head and that's how I can keep the same slide deck for years and just change the content when I, well, as I read about cool stuff. So it has to be controlled, right? You have to make sure it's controlled. I want, you know, and by with that, does anyone here have a PhD in applied data science? No? And your web developers? You might want to go to the next room. I mean, actually I did that once and this guy was like, yep, MIT. And I was like, oh, okay, you let me know if I'm right. So he was very proud of that fact. This actually happened twice, so I've given that. So here's the thing is that there's margins of error with A-B testing. Just like any sort of survey or statistical thing you do, there's margins of error. And unless your test is controlled, you're not going to know what that margin of error is. We'll talk about how you control it in a little bit, but first of all, we have to talk about why your website exists. Has this ever happened to anybody? Oh, actually I should ask, who makes websites for other people? Most of them. Who makes websites just for yourself? Okay, good amount of people. And some crossover there too. Now, has this ever happened with a client? Or heck, if you're with your own site. The client, you launch a site, honeymoon phase. Site goes live. You're the best person in the world.  Site's amazing. You call them six months later to do an update to WordPress or something else. And they're like, hey, WordPress 4.9's coming out. We should probably update whatever it is. Well, no, I don't know. The site's not doing enough. Not what we expected. The honeymoon phase is over. And it ends quick, right? And has that ever happened to anybody? That the client just turns over in a couple of months and you have no idea. Like why? You love the site a while ago, but now you hate it. Now it's not doing it. You just look at it as a waste of money. That happens all the time. And it happens for one very simple reason. One reason. We don't ask the clients why. We assume why their sites exist. We assume their KPI, their key performance indicators. By the way, if I say an acronym and you don't know what it is, throw something at me. I will say the full thing. We assume what it is. Great example. I once met someone and it was like, okay, hey, I have a utility. And they told me they care most about bounce rate and time on site. So I did all this stuff to lower the bounce rate and increase the time on site. They didn't ask the second question. Why do you care about that? You know what they cared about? Because their time on site went up and their bounce rate went down. The client wasn't happy. The client wanted the opposite. They wanted bounce rate as high as possible and the time on site to be as low as possible. They wanted their site to be so optimized it would find the FAQ support page for the question the person was looking for and not have to navigate to get the answer. Because their utility, that's what they cared about. I've talked to people that have done user, have done things for different provinces here in Canada and how to get information to relocate to that province. And the province actually wanted to add hurdles to get the information. Like I just said, an email and do all that because they're like, we want the people to prove they're worthy to come to our province. I won't say the province. And you have to ask the client, what is the goal? Does anyone here at every project ask what the goal of the project is? Okay. And for the five or seven people that raise their hands, how many times you write that down in a non-subjective phrase? Can you a year from now look back at a project and say, with data, the project was a success or not? Can anyone here do that? No one's, okay, a couple of people are raising their hands. That's great. Most people don't ask the question. The client says, well, if it's an e-commerce site, I want to sell more. I want to sell more. What does more mean? You have to put an uppers on it. I tell a client when I was doing freelance stuff, well, actually I was in freelancing when I was working in an agency in downtown Minneapolis, because I'm from Minnesota by the way. If we can do this by this date, will this be a success? And then you add stretch goals in there. If you don't lay out exactly why this project exists, you are going to lose clients. Period. You're going to lose clients. If you don't write down day one why the site exists, with quantifiable yes or no answers, you will be fired left and right. Because the clients have a different opinion of what they think they want to what they really want. Clients think they know the answer. Has anyone had a client that has self-prescribed something? This probably happens all the while. I want WordPress. They call you to say I want WordPress. That is not the best answer. Because maybe WordPress is a good option for them. Maybe it's not. It probably is. But it really depends on their use case. And you have to do that. So you have to be controlled. And what I mean by controlled is use a tool. And use a tool like Optimizely or VWO, or there's plugins out there that will tell you if the testing you're doing is within the margin of error or not. And then it will say yes, this test was a success. So this test was a success. Because just because sales go up doesn't mean that that AB test was a success. You've got to compare it to multiple factors. You've got to compare it to how many users were. Because you're only getting 100 visitors, two sales can skew your data, quite frankly. If you're getting millions of visitors, that's less of an issue. But you also have to look at year over year. I had a client. They're like, oh, I did this change and my sales went up 40% month over month. Okay, you're an e-commerce store to compare in October to November. What happens in November? Black Friday, exactly. Black Friday. And we compare it year over year and their sales went down. You have to make sure your data makes sense. And there's tools that will do it for you. And this talk is nothing more than very basic ideas on how to make money. Because AB testing is the number one way you can have residual income for forever. And not really have to fight it. Where did my, there it is. And not really have to fight it. The cool part about it, excuse me, is it's so easy and it's fun. You can have so much fun playing with someone else's brand. I'm going to go over some real examples in a little bit. This I just talk is to give you ideas and actionable things and how you can make more money. And with that, here's the secret. Here's the secret of web designers. Most people that make websites, they make a website, they leave it alone for two and a half years, three years, and they start over. As a client of a colleague said, oh, we did our site four years ago and now we need a new one. And then they don't touch it again because it takes seven months and it's such a tedious process. And clients hate dealing with web designers. I mean, they have to give content and write stuff. And they have their job to deal with. They don't want to deal with that. That's why they're hiring us. And then they say they're going to blog. They say they're going to do it, but they don't. And then the site sits for two to four years and then they get another call. Usually they call somebody else. Let's be honest. Sometimes they don't. And they want to do it all over again. It's a definition of insanity. Here's the secret that web designers don't tell their clients. Here's the secret. We're all guessing. Every site that goes on the internet is a guess.  I'm a professional, Mike.  It is, by the way. But I'm a professional. I know best practices and I know responsiveness. And I know all these other buzzwords that apparently are check boxes that I have to check off. Every set of clients are different. If you think you know the users of your client, most likely you don't have a full enough picture as you think you do.  I've had so many times clients like, I had one client. It was a food client. They sell food product. It's like, you know who comes to us college students? And sororities and fraternities. That is number one who buys from our stuff. And we're like, okay. So we started to do advertising. Gear did that demographic, BMX, stuff like that, whatever. You know, whatever the kids are into. I feel old. And nothing was selling. It was a food product. You know who was visiting. We looked at the data. We started doing some user surveys. You know who was visiting in the site? Single family mothers, single family homes. Because it was an all natural product. So we started shifting to the marketing that way. We did AB test that way. And guess what? Seal Skyrocketed. You know why they thought it was college students? Because the marketing manager just graduated from college. You laugh, but this happens all the time. This happens all the time. People think they know who are visiting their site. They don't. You have to test it and use AB testing to get you there. The cool part about this is you can sell residual income from day one. I've had tons of clients. I've sat down and said, hey, you will never have to do another website again.  Because if you sell a monthly residual income AB testing or whatever you want to call it, the site's going to evolve. It's going to change. You're going to use data to make it better. We will make best guesses based on our knowledge and expertise and what we know, but stuff's going to be wrong. It's going to be wrong. It's not going to be perfect day one. And only data and AB testing is going to get you to where you need to go and to make that site go from minimum performance all the way up to something really amazing. So with that, it needs to be statistically relevant. So I talked about the margin of everything. Use a tool like VWO, Optimize Lead as Google has one too. I'm not here to say one tool is better than the other. That's not this role. I'm here to talk high concept stuff. And it will actually tell you if the test is a winner and implemented or if you need to keep testing or if the test is not a winner and just to kill it. So you can do all that stuff. Micro testing. I recommend only do micro testing. What I mean by that is only testing one varied at a time. The reason I say that is a lot of times people are like, I'm going to do AB testing and I'm going to have variation one, have a new photo, a new headline, a new picture of the button. And then I'm going to have variation two, have two photos and two buttons. And variation three, I'm going to have no buttons and no photos and no content. And we'll see which one performs better. But really, you have to have a lot of traffic. To do multi variant testing, really, in my opinion, you have to have at least 100,000 visitors a month. And that's a lot for a lot of sites. So if you test one at a time, it might take you longer to get the results you want. You test individual elements and then you can test the winners of the individual elements grouped together. Against your original.  Because just an image that wins and a headline that wins and a button that wins individually might not win together. So do some micro testing. Oh, what to test? Can anyone give me any ideas of what you could test on a website? Because I get a lot of people saying, I don't know what to test on my website. Anyone have any ideas of what you could test on a website? AB test? Navigation. Navigation. Oh, first paint, like speed and things like that. Yep. Headlines. Copy. Call to actions. Value proposition. Yeah. Font. Text. Excellent. Color. Yep. So there's so many things you can test. We'll go over some of them. Buttons. There are so many things you can do with buttons. The color of the button, the size of the button. I once had a national insurance company. National insurance company got an 80% lift. We did usability testing. We did focus groups. We did all the research we could think of. But I always recommend trying a crazy test.  Tests that you think will never work. Because sometimes those are the winners. We tried everything. And I couldn't get any lift, like 4%, 2%, whatever. Tried everything. I tried a two-pixel drop shadow. A two-pixel drop shadow on a button. Nothing else changed. 80% more sales. A two-pixel drop shadow we added. I didn't believe it. I ran 4 million people through that test. Every time. Different pages. Every time. Consistently. Now, before we all run out and add two-pixel drop shadows to everything, every setting of users is very different. So you've got to test your users and your sites. I mean so many people say, well, according to this case study, that original photography is better than stock photography. So I'm going to use only original photography. Because you use photographers in the room. And then it's like, no, this case study over here, it's a stock photography works better. There's no right answer. It all depends on the users that are visiting a site, because you're not building for you. You're not building for your client. You're building for the users. And we forget that all the time, because you're trying to service your client, right? So buttons. Text. What the text says is called action, the font, size, style, case. So many different things you can do with text. I mean, heck, I've run AB test with lorem ipsum on it, that I performed better than the original copy. It's true. If you ever want a fun test and your clients are letting you do it, I recommend a ipsum called corporate ipsum, because it looks so correct. And especially in block content, no one's ever going to read it. And it just feels at the page very nicely, and it has the right words like synergy and balance and things like that. So yeah, these are all real ideas that I've done. Images. So many different things with images. Here's what I ask. Who only uses original photography? Okay, one person. Are you a photographer? No. No, okay. Usually it's the photographer in the room who's like, yep, and I sell it. Okay, who uses stock images? Good amount. There were some people that stock images performed really well on. There were other ones where stock images performed really poorly on. There were some user groups that images at all don't perform well. I've seen websites that have grossed five million dollars in a week with stick figures drawn with crayon. It all depends on the users.  I know the owner of that site, they tested hundreds of things to get to that point. So whatever you do at the first time isn't going to work. You need to make it better. Everything. You can test everything. I hear people all the time say there's nothing to test on this site. I don't know. You can test navigation. You can test, you know, if the sidebar's on the left or the right and all that stuff. And a lot of times people are like, well, how do we do this? I'm not a coder. But what you can do is you can use a tool like VWO, which is what I use. It's not, it's just what I use. There are other options out there. There are WordPress plugins. I like to do it on a third-party service for this simple reason. The reason I use VWO is it allows me to make the changes and have my marketing team make the changes without needing to know any development. And it doesn't do it on the source because the worst thing you can have happen is Google index a test. And unless you're very good with robot files and things like that, which I'm not saying you're not, but in my opinion, it's just too easy to break and have a test get indexed. Because you don't want production, a test to get indexed on production until it's ready to go to production, right? So VWO, what it does is it puts a JavaScript into your theme file and it will change it on the user browser side, the agent side, so that all the changes are being served on only the browser level.  Simply because on slower connections, you see that CSS pop on slower. So then that element might change a color or something, then that person might notice it. It's less of an issue now with higher speed connections, but something to keep in mind. And if you're getting a lot of people that are on lower speed connections, you might want to try a different tool. It doesn't use that tactic. But you can test everything. And for those of you who think, well, that's fine for your Fortune 500s, but my clients are special. My clients, they care about their brand. They care about design. You know, there aren't majors at heart and all that stuff. Well, here's what I say to that.  Don't put any of these on without asking. At least don't do it and tell me. You know, you have to make that. But you can get stuff. I've done things that you would think never would pass a Fortune 500. Done with Fortune 500s and they've approved it. Because I say it's only 5% of your audience and I test about 5% of the traffic. You might need to have that be higher for you guys based on your traffic. These tools we usually recommend one. I'm like, it's only 5%. And if we learn something, we learn something. Because at the end of the day, they care more about their goals, their bottom line. Again, we're going back to day one. What's the purpose of the site? So here's where I talk about the presidential campaign. So let's talk about Donald Trump first. It gets dangerous and I'm in Canada, so. So. Where do you draw the line? Like the two pixel drop? How do you know where to stop? It depends how much traffic you have. If you have a little high traffic site, you can get a lot more lenient on it. I always recommend doing four tests based on your experience, based on what you see in the analytics and what you think will be best for that user group. Do tests that you think will work best. But try one crazy one. I give a list of crazy ideas at the end.  But the two pixel was my crazy idea at that time. But the other ones are legitimate ones. Like you know what? I think us getting original photography would work really well. So we'll try that on this landing page. So I recommend if you're doing five tests a month, that's what I recommend for agencies to sell their clients. Because most clients can afford five tests a month. You know, that's probably about 40 billable hours, depending on your agency. And most clients will be willing to swallow 20 to 40 billable hours a month. If you sell it to them as, this will be, you'll be paying a residual income, but you'll never have to do a new site again in your life. Visual website optimizer. So let's talk about Donald Trump. One of his most successful, now it's no surprise that political campaigns, especially in the U.S., they do A.B. testing to maximize their donations, right? Everyone does it. Every party. I'm not saying it's bad or good, I'm just saying it's what it is, right? I know, because there's companies that specialize in that. I used to work for one. Donald Trump's campaign, a week before the election, one of his most successful fundraising efforts ever. He did a thing that said, okay, donate money, you'll get your name on our Facebook page live or our website live. If you were going to do that, assuming you took the job, just suspension of disbelief now, and how would you accomplish that from a technical perspective? People donate money, their name goes on a page. That's like a thank you to Josie from New York, whatever. How would you accomplish that? Anyone have any ideas how you would accomplish that? Yep. Like a third party service, there's ones out there that will like zoom in on the map and fly video and all this cool technical stuff. What they did is for seven hours, the week before the election, they had a live webcam of a laser printer. This isn't a political action committee. This isn't third party. This is the official Donald J. Trump campaign. Now, regardless of what you think about our current president, I think we can all agree he cares about his brand. Right? I think that's fair. No matter where you are in the spectrum, I think it's fair that Trump cares about his brand, right? And they did it. And it was one of the most successful fundraising campaigns.  If you think this wasn't deliberate, you're far mistaken. They'll use a group that they were targeting this connected with them. They tried the Polish approach before, doing it before the convention, super high produced video type of thing. Didn't work as well based on what we know based on FTC filings. We can assume things and stuff like that. Hillary did A.B. testing too, right? She tried different giveaways. You know, when more people donate if I offer you a copy of my book or a sticker and things like that. And she was trying different scenarios with that. And my whole point to this is no brand is too holy to do these concepts on. Maybe not to this extreme, but you can make baby steps. That's why I recommend one crazy test to four real tests. So what are the crazy tests that I do? This is literally the checklist I use. I'm going to go through it real quick. Professional versus unprofessional. There are times unprofessional converts better. Anyone here get one of those five page long letters asking you to donate to save the unicorns or something as like writing in the margins and things like that. Those long form like solicitation mails. As a reason why those exist. They're less effective than they used to be, but they're still effective. The companies that send them out still send them out because they work. Sometimes unpolished stuff just converts better for certain types of people because you got different education and you have different backgrounds and you have different interests and you have different devices, right? You have, you know, so many people are so focused on the desktop experience, but the fastest growing market on the internet is mobile only. This is a developing world, but depending on what your client is, that might be very important. Imagine you're making a website for the human rights campaign. You might need to develop a website that is text only so that people in the developing nations can access that content. Maybe not important to you, but it's worth thinking about. Photo versus illustration. If you don't have illustrations, they have stock illustrations out there. They work. One color versus another color. Colors are so powerful, as we heard in our button example over here. And one of the things is test accessible colors. You can look up the color contrast that are accessible or not. If you're not sure what those are, you can look up the WCAG, WCAG, 2.0, AA and AAA. It'll give you the mathematical numbers right in there for the percentages of the ratios. And if you test an accessible versus a non-accessible color, most of the time, accessible colors will win out simply because one in five adults in North America suffer from a disability related to color. One in five. Low brightness contrast versus high brightness contrast, border versus no border. Clear image versus a blurry image. Static versus animated. Imagine the car was going. It's supposed to be animated.  Some people really respond well to super produced model photos. Other people perform really badly with highly produced photos, and they're looking for people that look like them. It is not all the same. I guarantee you the only way you're going to know this is to test. And that's why I care most about data-driven decisions. I don't care what something looks like at the end of the day. I don't.  Now, that's an extreme. You can test these elements in a vacuum. I am not saying to all of a sudden get rid of your beautiful theme and to have only text and no pictures on your website, but test these elements individually and see if they perform. Even if the test doesn't succeed, you'll learn something. So I always recommend do four tests, five tests, four that you think will perform based on your experience and your wish list. When you meet with that client, you write down every feature you think they want or that you want, and then you do test with them to prioritize based on most impact, based on your experience as a professional. Static versus interactive, get 50% off, or you can choose if you want to get 50% off the pizza or the doughnut. There's not all of the above options, unfortunately, but... Professional stock photo versus amateur informal photo. Some of these perform way better than the others. And here's where we talk about the title of the talk. A.B. Testing, which way does the duck face? Anyone came here because of the duck title? No, nobody's not honest. Oh, I got one. There we go. I have a sequel to this talk called What the Duck, by the way. So there was a test, I think, by HubSpot. They had a picture of a right facing duck and a left facing duck. And the right facing duck converted five times more than a left facing duck. Can anyone tell me why that would be? Any ideas? Duck facing towards the text, possibly. Right hand versus left handed, like how you read. Okay, right brain, left brain, sometimes like the direction of the text, people also say. Any other ideas? Yep. Arrow to the point of action. Every fifth five times I do this talk, somebody raises their hand and say, because the duck is looking into the future. Here's the answer. Here's the true answer. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Seriously, why?  Sorry, I'm a little hang up on the two pixel drop shadow experience I had in my life. But you can spend all day focusing on that two pixel drop shadow or that duck, or you can test it and move on. If the test proves out and you can prove it with data and it's past the margin of error and you run it again, maybe on a different page and does it again. If it's making the needle move, that's all that matters. This is how I explain AB Test to a client.  These are the exact words I use. I'm not at all making this up.  If I could give you $2 for every dollar you gave me for that magic money machine, how many dollars would you give me? They laugh and I say, no, seriously. How many dollars would you give me? If I can prove to you, this machine makes money. And you can always cancel any month. We'll go month to month. And they say, well, unlimited dollars. I say, well, let's start with 2000. And every month, every year they increase because they see the data and it's based on the goals. And if you can prove to them that their goals are happening, looks fade, the honeymoon period on a nice looking site end like that. Thank you. Now, there are times when they care where there are different KPIs. Maybe they care about time on site or engagement or whatever their goals are. Your testing can help you get there. One layout versus another layout. One call to action versus another call of action. Images versus text only. Believe it or not, that does work for some people. Upright versus angled button versus blue underlined text. Red Laborta versus a false board and drop shadow. Custom ad design versus familial UI elements. I recommend when I say that, I don't say make your website look like Facebook or Twitter because that's, I don't know what the word is, fraud. But you can use some of the ideas, right? People started noticing that the Facebook app is now doing the bottom menu on some phones or testing that. And now some websites are starting to mimic the bottom menu because the top left hand figure is out of the reach of the thumb. So the elements like that is kind of what I mean by that. A visual image or some air image, there's our friend, the duck again. One font size style case versus another font size style case. A standard ad shape like a rectangle or a custom ad shape like a circle or in this day's day and age, a standard ad shape like a circle or a custom ad shape like a rectangle. Positive versus negative.  I once made a website for a product that stopped stow fires before elderly people. You know what worked? Your mom's going to leave the stove unattended and it's going to burn down. She's going to die. It's going to be your fault. We tested other things too, but if it works, it works. Come on, click. Click. Generic versus relevant to time period. Want a girlfriend? Or are you home alone on a Friday night? Or do you want a girlfriend for Christmas? It is Friday night and it's almost Christmas and yeah, I would like a girlfriend. Sorry, honey. Mentioned prices or discounts. Regular $20 or leave it a mystery. Add your card. Anyone here see you have to add to the card to see the price or something like that? You know, the prices, you have to add it to the card to see the price. That's the old version of, oh, Bob's Appliance Mart. Our deals are so crazy. That you have to come on down to the showroom. Same thing with online. Sometimes there's legal things that you can't show a price unless a customer has an intent to buy. Most of the time it's just marketing. No trust logos versus trust logo. It's like Better Business Bureau. I don't know if there's a Canadian version of the BBB up here, if it's also the BBB. You know, as seen on ABC, CNN, whatever. Anyone here watch America's Got Talent? Okay, I don't know. Yeah, so the most common people that use as seen on America's Got Talent are the losers in the first round, because when you're at your local comedy club and you see like, oh, Joe Smoh, as seen on America's Got Talent, and the season lasts like 12 years, so you're not going to remember what happens in the beginning. You're like, well, they must be good. But if actually you type in Joe Smoh, America's Got Talent, they were laughed off by the judges in the first round. But trust logos work for certain people because it adds validity. Weapons of influence go through these really quickly. Consistency, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, you know, free trial or risk-free trial. I used to sell timeshare. This is risk-free. It's not free, it's risk-free. You know, things like that. Appeal to the eight universal desires. You know, companionship, enjoyment of food and beverages, comfortable living conditions, care and protection of loved ones, social approval, survival and enjoyment of life. Features, benefits, not features. Nobody buys on logic. Nobody buys on logic.  I used to do A.B. testing with people that sold rotary parts for NASA all the way up to, you know, fine art. People buy on emotion. They justify it with logic. Even if it's a mechanical part, the emotion is, okay, this company has it taken care of. I'm going to look good to my boss, things like that. So focus on emotions when you do any A.B. testing, especially if it calls to actions and for the pictures. And playing it have fun. You can have so much fun with A.B. testing with somebody else's brand. You have no idea how satisfying it is to throw an ugly version of your client's website up on the internet. It's kind of fun. Of course, when these all buy your clients and all that, I only test like a small subset, like 5%. I got that from a book called Russell Brunson. He owns a product called ClickFunnels. He started from the supplement industry and he has some good training out there. I'll show you how to get a copy of that book, but I warn you, his stuff is focused on the direct response world. Supplements, coaching and things like that. So start with the free book before you buy any of the other stuff because a lot of people are like, well, I sell digital marketing. This is talking about how to sell weight loss pills. Concepts are concepts. You can test it. So here's a cool test called 108 Split Test Winners. So you go to .comsecretslabs.com slash free dash book. My slides are on slide change so you can get this later. You don't have to write it down right now, but I'll walk you quickly how to buy it without spending money.  You need to pay for shipping. You get an offer. You say no thanks to the offer. You hit another page with another offer at the bottom, you say no thanks. You hit another page with another offer at the bottom, you say no thanks. You hit another page with some more offers. You close the tab and then you get an email and you can unsubscribe from that email if you'd like. I want to be clear. I have bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars of his products. I think they're really good, but too many people can't mentally get past the examples of direct response like supplements and online coaching. So try the free thing. Pay the $8 shipping and see if his coaching style works for you because I've got in so many ideas for Fortune 500s from his training materials that I'm not an affiliate or anything. It's just I really like his stuff, but I recommend start with the free and I'd walk you through that because his sales cycle is so good you're not realizing you're buying something for $800 even though that's what those pages were offering you. Upwards of $2,500 sometimes. And his stuff is I think worth it, but start with the free one just like anything. And you can unsubscribe and if you don't want his emails, but I keep his emails because I find him interesting and see what he's doing and then I try to mimic it with that. So with that, we have five minutes. So I have time for questions, comments or death threats, depending on how many designers are in the room. So yeah. I use a tool called VWO and I use the JavaScript that they offer to change the test to the end user in the browser side. So the production site never changes until we have a winner. And then in that tool, I can say I want 5% of the traffic to see this because I don't do side by sides because unless you're very careful with URLs and robots and stuff, Google can index the test. So that's why I let a third-party service. It's not a free tool, but I think it's worth $99 or whatever they're charging now for 20,000 tests or something. So there's other ones out there. The Google has a free one. It's like Google testing, Google it and probably find it. Optimize Lee's another one. And there's some native WordPress plugins, but again, it's superstition on my part. I prefer not to touch production until I'm ready to apply the winner. So any other comments or anything? You can test with any traffic. It's just going to take you a lot longer to get past the margin of error. Ideally, five to 10,000 users a month is what you're looking for, but there's shortcuts you can do, right? If you're looking to test a headline, a way to get around it is to test the headline in a Facebook ad. It might not apply to your website, but if you test two headlines or two photos in a Facebook ad and you run 1,000 people through each one, cost you 25 bucks, you can get the ideas and at least it gets started. So that might not apply to your website, but a lot of times it does. It's kind of a hacky way around it. So the tools will tell you based on its algorithm because there's a whole algorithm. I found ones online that you can punch into your own numbers, but that's algebra and no. It's not what I'm into. So I literally will just tell you there's three settings. I want fast learnings, accurate learnings are balanced.  No, or we're not sure, keep testing. So that's why I like VWO because it's just simple, red, yellow, green. Anyone else? No? Cool. Well, thank you so much. My name is Mike Demer.


It's number 11 with the now Christian Ripley playing it out of his own zone. Ripley puts a good move on the defender. He's looking to score a short-handed goal. It does so! What a play by Christian Ripley!


Welcome to Newton's Third Law of Motion, Law of Interacting Force. Sir Isaac Newton, the English mathematician, astronomer, physicist, philosopher, and all around scientific genius changed our understanding of the universe. His laws of gravity, motion, and mathematics shaped how today's scientists view the world. His first law predicts how objects behave when forces are balanced. His second law tells us how objects behave when the forces aren't balanced. His third law explains how forces act and react with each other. Specifically, it states, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And to our apple orchard we go once again. This time, Newton tells us that every interaction has a pair of balanced but opposite forces. It helps us explain how the apple sits on the ground. The apple exerts a force on the ground that's matched by the force exerted on the apple by the ground. The apple's force presses down and the ground presses up with an equal force. Forces are always balanced and they're always opposite of each other. This means that if the first object pushes on a second object, then the second object pushes back on the first object with the same upon a force but in the opposite direction. Say your brother gets bored of simply throwing apples or launching them from a catapult. He decides to move on to the big stuff and decides to tie an apple to a rocket. As the rocket sits on the ground, the upward force of the earth balances the downward force of the rocket. But once your brother lights the engine, it pushes the gas down and out of the rocket and the gas counters by pushing up and away from the rocket. This sends the rocket flying into outer space. Once the engine loses its energy, the thrust from the exhaust isn't as great which allows gravity to take over. The rocket loses height and comes crashing back to earth. The apple slams the earth and stops. Now the rocket and the ground are again balanced. Unfortunately, the apple has disintegrated. But that's another story. In summary, Newton's third law states for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it's officially time for your brother to leave the orchard. Newton's third law of motion, law of interacting force.


Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch. 2022 is coming to an end. It's been an eventful year, of course. There's been the Russia-Ukraine war, a number of crises on the economic front, on the front of technology, a lot of people struggling for food. But one of the news items that has remained continuously in the headlines throughout the year we've read about, we've seen TV channels, in newspaper reports, even in fiction, is that of climate change. Now, climate change is nothing new, something we've been talking about for years now, but this year was one of those that brought the urgency to the fore, because of a series of natural disasters, as well as the COP 27 summit that took place in Egypt. But even now, there's sometimes a lot of lack of clarity as to what it means. Sometimes people get the impression that it's something that's really far away. So to explain and decipher all this, we have with us D. Raghunathan of the Delhi Science Forum and the All India People Science Network. Thank you so much for speaking to us. Raghunathan, first of all, I think the question I wanted to pose was really about this year, what has been, what have been some of the major, say, insights that scientific research has provided us through reports, through analysis, through studies. At the end of 2022, where are we, broadly, with our understanding of how climate change is impacting the world? Broadly speaking, we have had a series of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, not exactly during 2022, but in the lead up to the previous COP in Glasgow. There was the sixth assessment report of the IPCC and three special reports of the IPCC, one on the target of 1.5 degrees C, one on sea level rise, and one on the oceans, et cetera, the ice caps and glaciers on the cryosphere. All these have essentially told us that climate change is getting worse at a much faster rate than had earlier been thought of. Second, it has told us that the last shreds of uncertainty about climate change, and you would perhaps know that in each successive report of the IPCC, the level of uncertainty about predictions has been coming down, and we are getting more and more certain. Now, the conclusion is it is beyond any doubt. Third, linked to the earlier one is that extreme weather events, as you said in your intro, this we have witnessed in the last few years dramatically. Cold spells in North America, heat waves in Europe, floods in Europe, forest fires across North America and in Europe, and of course extreme rainfall and cyclones around the Indian subcontinent. These are witnessed more frequently and with greater ferocity. So clearly, climate change is getting worse, but equally, the measures required to counter climate change, that is to reduce emissions to a point where we can come closer to the target of restricting temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5 Celsius. These measures are not keeping pace. We are very far behind where the target should be. There is a very thin silver lining to this cloud, which is that after the revisions upward of all the countries targets at Glasgow COP26, we have slightly reduced the gap, but it is unfortunately very little. We are expected to have the global emissions by 2030. We are very far away from that. There is a large shortfall close to 15 gigatons and unless the big developed countries, European Union as a block, the United States as a block and for this purpose, we have to consider China. Also as being a major contributor without home, no global target can be achieved. If these three big emitting nations don't substantially reduce their emissions quickly and by quickly, I mean virtually immediately, there is no way of reaching the target of having global emissions by 2030 and if that doesn't happen, then your targets of 1.5 or 2 degrees are not going to be achievable. So we have two phenomena simultaneously. One is climate change is getting worse, much faster than we thought and secondly, global measures to control emissions are not taking place as fast as we require. In this context also quickly wanted to talk about the present, the aspect you mentioned about disasters, natural phenomena of various kind which are not part of the norm so to speak. You mentioned the various types of forest fires and cyclones etc. Are we also increasingly or not increasingly, are we also really under equipped to deal with the impact of this because this is one of the issues that has come up. We'll talk about loss and damage of course later but currently based on what's happening right now, how are countries placed when it comes to having to deal with the disasters that are taking place here and now? So in this, I would like to divide my answer in two parts. One is the developing world as a whole. In the developing world as a whole, particularly in the most vulnerable island states, in the least developed countries, particularly in Africa and in our neighborhood countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, we've seen the huge damage done by the floods in Pakistan. Bangladesh continues to suffer from sea level rise in the Delta region which is getting worse by the year. These countries have virtually no ability in terms of technical capabilities and more so in terms of financial abilities to be able to withstand these impacts, to reduce their force of the impacts and to build resilience to this and that is why we'll come to that. I'm sure the question of loss and damage etc. arises but I am even more concerned about India. See, we have long approached the international negotiations as a kind of a foreign policy bargaining venue where you go there, there's a treaty and you work on the language in such a way that pressure is not put on India and you come away happy if that happens. But India should be talking in the global negotiations more like the island states and the least developed countries because we are among the top 7 worst affected regions of the world. For us also, this is an existential crisis by pretending that the international negotiations have nothing to do with the impacts on India on the one hand and secondly, all the domestic discussion is also taking place only around reducing emissions, meeting our targets at Paris and Glasgow and so on. We are neglecting the huge impacts that are taking place in India. I've already mentioned some of the extreme weather which has led to landslides, floods and urban flooding has become a major problem. Urban infrastructure needs to be very urgently upgraded. Hostile erosion is taking place very fast, likely to affect more than 300 million people living on the Indian coasts. These are major problems even apart from the impacts on agriculture. We know very well the crisis of the apple growing regions in Himachal Pradesh but there is evidence in the past 2-3 years that even the main agriculture crop producing areas in Punjab and Haryana have suffered losses due to changing in weather patterns due to delays in onset of winter etc and there is no sign that the government in India is taking any of these seriously. Absolutely. And there is actually I guess a global phenomenon also because we talk about the climate as though it is something we face and often not think about the impact for instance on food production which is probably one of the ways in which globally we are going to be hit the most. Absolutely. We have not looked at this seriously at all even though in the technology missions set up in the previous government one of the 8 missions was the National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture. But all these technology missions including the one on sustainable agriculture have been completely starved of funds no serious political backing they have remained as a few small lab scale pilot projects conducted by some institutions there is no taking of these programs to the field to build climate resilience drought resistant crops saline resistant crops etc or changing agronomic practices which are needed in order to meet the threat of climate change we have seen no field action whatsoever and it is not surprising because you cannot have field action unless you have studied the problem come to some conclusion and have a prescription with which to go forward we have not done those exercises either. Absolutely. In the context let us go to Sharmal Sheikh in Egypt or go back to Sharmal Sheikh in Egypt where COP 27 was held a very interesting summit there was of course on the one hand what has been called a historic agreement on the loss and damage fund although the details are still very sketchy and unclear on the other hand there was increasing focus on the fact that you know the 100 billion dollars that was promised by countries of the global north was never delivered in fact even some of the claims they made what they delivered were exposed is probably a bit fraudulent or as an exaggeration so a few couple of months after one month after COP 27 how do we see you know what the you know how do we see funding right now in the coming years for the issue of dealing with climate change at a global level purely at a personal level I have long believed that the issue of loss and damage has been overplayed by the developing countries on the one hand the most vulnerable countries the island nations the LDCs etc and corresponding to that by the US and the European Union the developed world what I mean by that is even before the loss and damage issue came up in such a big way there was the adaptation fund and there was the issue of funding by the developed countries to the developing countries to meet the challenges of climate change to meet their mitigation targets to help them in technology and finance to reduce then the issue of loss and damage came up in a big way and it was made to look as if there is the previously committed funds for mitigation and adaptation and there is a loss and damage fund over and above that this was the logic in which the discussions on loss and damage proceeded ideologically it's it's fine it sounds good just as if I were to say that developed countries owe developing countries a debt for colonization nobody is going to argue with that it's a correct demand but you really think that the developed countries are tomorrow going to step up and say yes we will pay 500 billion dollars every year as reparation for colonials so the loss and damage issue I think has been a misleading issue which has come up and I said whatever money the developed countries are going to pay to developing countries is coming out of the same kitty you can call it what you want adaptation fund mitigation fund loss and damage fund it's the same amount of money they had earlier promised 100 billion dollars and now if you expect that loss and damage is going to be 30 40 50 billion dollars more than the when they have not even come anywhere near 20 billion out of that 100 billion I still continue to see loss and damage as a non-starter if you like there's only the same pool of money that's going to come and we have seen also very distressingly you pointed out that the developed countries are nowhere near target that they had earlier said forget about new targets of loss and damage etc now with the war in Ukraine has come up the US and its European allies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments and in backing Ukraine in the war against Russia without backing an eyelid while at the same time they say it's very difficult for us to find the money for climate etc even though the world including their own countries are being ravaged by climate change so I believe if we are realistic and look at the world in terms of what it is that the haves will continue to deny the have nots what they deserve and will spend whatever money they have in pursuing their own interests whether it is on climate or whether it is on geopolitics like it's happening in Ukraine I'm afraid this is the stark reality that we are facing today. But Nandilas Ragu I believe you would agree that loss and damage and such similar initiatives offer that matter reform of financial institutions these continue to be crucial agenda points for the global south to push it negotiations like this sure I absolutely agree it's worth to push it's worth making the point of what it is but at the same time we in the global south should also understand the reality and ask for what we think we can get it's great if we get an agreement in principle for reparations but if that aspiration does not translate into money or if it is used by the developed world as a bargaining chip we will give you money for loss and damage don't ask us to reduce emissions which is what they are doing ease off on the pressure that you are putting on us to reduce emissions we will give you money for loss and damage knowing full well that they will save money it's going to cost them money to reduce emissions and they will get away with paying some amount of money which is less than what it's going to cost them to reduce emissions thereby giving themselves an alibi I think that's what we need to protect ourselves against thank you much Ragu for talking to us for giving us an idea of where we stand today with climate change hopefully 2023 brings us some better news at least although the prognosis is not very bright but thank you so much for talking to us and we will come back to you soon with other issues my pleasure that's all your time, thank you for watching People's Dispatch


It's so true, I just, I feel so emotional just sitting here and listening to that subhanallah. Looking at the examples of our imams alayhim as-salam, each of them had a slightly different approach when it came to opposing the oppressive governments of their time. So for example, take imams hassan and imam hussein alayhim as-salam. Imam al-hasan alayhim, he is criticised for signing the peace treaty with Muawiyah, even though he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi, who signed the peace treaty of Hudaybiyyah.  Now, why is that, why are, why are their approaches so different? If it's different, it's because of the circumstances. In fact, imam hassan alayhim as-salam, he, he, eventually he signed the truth, if you like, it wasn't a peace treaty. But if imam hassan resorted to that, was because he was about to go and if you like to go to war, because Muawiyah had made sure that he wanted to put imam al-hasayn in a position so that he can fight him, because he knew he had far more resources and so on. And imam hassan, what he did at the last hour, if you like the last minute, he started buying off the personalities or if you like the senior figures in the army of imam hassan alayhim, and they betrayed their imam and they sold out and they accepted the money from Muawiyah and, and betrayed imam hassan. That's why imam hassan was left with no option but to accept the truth, because, because if he hadn't done that, the shia would have been massacred, because the, if you like, the his generals, his army, senior army figures, they betrayed him and they sold out to Muawiyah, he had to accept the truth so that the blood of the shia would be saved.


What's going on guys? In today's video, I want to talk about a question that has come up pretty frequently on my YouTube comments and for my email list subscribers and also in like my Facebook group. And that is, Sean, as a new agency owner, what are some of the biggest mistakes and pitfalls to avoid? And this is a good question, especially right now, given the current situation, like the current global situation that we have. It's important that you understand these mistakes and pitfalls so that you can move quickly and you don't fall into the same mistakes and pitfalls that I made in the beginning when starting my agency. So let's just jump into it right now. There's going to be a short quick video and let's just jump into the first one right now. The first biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid is not doing enough outflow. Now, I actually heard this phrase or this concept from a guy named John Whiting, super smart guy, seven figure plus agency owner. He sold his agency and he always said outflow equals inflow. Now, what does that mean? Well, outflow is the activities that you're doing like direct outreach or posting value on social media and making posts on your social media page and putting enough out there in the market. And inflow are things like new leads and people interested in your service and new clients and new sales and new deals. And most people, they want the inflow. They want the results and the money coming in, but they don't put in the outflow, right? They're not doing the activities required to get there. So what you should really be doing is you should be focused on putting as much outflow in there or outflow out to the market as possible, right? So every day you should be reaching out to warm and cold prospects who can benefit from your service. Real quick, a warm prospect is someone who already knows, likes and trust you, maybe a friend, a family member, a colleague, someone already in your network who knows you. That's the easiest way to get a client is reaching out to your warm network first and seeing if they or someone they know can benefit from your service. And you can offer a discount or an incentive-based pricing, whatever you want to do to get them on board, to get some testimonials and social proof coming in, okay? So reach out to your warm network first. That's the easiest way to get your first few clients is to reach out to your warm network. I'm surprised at how many people don't do this, but once you've tapped that out, you're going to have to go to a cold audience, people who don't know you at all, right? And this is a lot harder to close, obviously, than a warm, a warm prospect, someone who already knows, likes and trusts you. Now, the beauty of the current landscape or the current internet world that we live in today is you can basically reach out to any decision maker you want at any company using platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and email. So what you should be doing is, at a minimum, what I suggest is 100 plus pieces of outreach daily on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and email. So this means that you're going out to 100 different people every single day, and you are sending them a message and asking them if they would like to learn more about what you have to offer and if their service can, if your service can help them, right? So this is like the biggest game changer for most new agency owners. I'll talk to a new agency owner and they say, I'm not happy with the amount of clients I have. I'm not happy with the amount of income I have. And I'll ask them, how many pieces of outreach have you done? And they'll say maybe five, 10 pieces of outreach every single day, sometimes less, sometimes I'm just waiting around for people to come to me. And I tell them 10x that, right? And that's the easiest way to get clients is increasing your outreach, knocking on enough doors. And in the beginning, the truth is, it's going to be quantity over quality first. You're going to have to get enough activity going and momentum going before you can expect to tweak things and make, you know, pretty messaging and all that stuff. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to have some screw ups, but I have a ton of free content on my YouTube channel around how to, how to do direct outreach and messaging. So watch those videos if you haven't yet and focus on hitting that 100 plus pieces of outreach daily. If you do this for 30 days straight, I have no doubt you can get, you know, a handful of clients. So if you're doing 100 pieces of outreach every day, combined on these channels, I have no doubt you can secure at least one client. Okay, if you have a good service, of course. So this is the main thing right here, 100 plus pieces of outreach every single day. The second thing is you can post social selling posts delivering value and showing people how you can help. So a social selling post is a post on your one of your social media pages, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, that delivers value to your market while also getting people interested in how you can help them and gets interest gets people interested in what you have to offer. So let's just say you are a Facebook advertising agency, or you have a Facebook advertising service, and you don't have to create this content yourself, you can find a third party article on Facebook advertising, you might post it to your LinkedIn wall and say, hey, I am a Facebook ad specialist, I help X1Z types of industries with generating more leads and appointments and new customers using Facebook ads. I found this, this article on the seven best ways to improve conversion rates and this is off the top of my head, by the way, for a certain industry, I thought this might be useful or helpful to you guys, that's why I posted it. So you post it on your wall, and that gets people checking out your LinkedIn profile that gets people searching more about what you do. And sometimes you'll over time, this is a compounding effect, right? You're posting content consistently, social selling posts, eventually you'll help people reaching out to you saying, hey, so and so I'd like to have a chat with you to learn more about what you do and how you can help my business. So these are the two things, right? Social selling posts, and also direct outreach. If you are knocking 100 plus virtual doors every day on these channels, and you're posting maybe once or twice a week on those channels, and you're doing that, let's challenge yourself to do that for 30 days, and then come back to me and tell me that you have, if you've honestly done that, come back to me and tell me if you haven't gotten a client, I'd be surprised if you did this and don't have a client at the end of 30 days. So really, I want to make this a point, generating appointments and getting on the phone with enough people in your market should be your only focus until you hit at least 10k per month. That's all you should be focused on.  All you should be focused on, especially if you run an agency or service-based business, is generating appointments and getting on the phone with people who are a fit for your service who are interested in your service. That's all you should be focused on until you hit 10k per month, probably more than 10k per month, right? We got to 18,000 per month without a website. So you don't need to have a website or anything crazy like that to make sales and get clients. So this is all you should be focused on, generating appointments and getting on the phone with people who want to talk with you about your service, okay? So that's the mistake, number one, not enough outflow. Make sure that you are doing enough outreach to your market if you want the inflow. If you want the new clients, the new sales and the money rolling in, okay? This is the biggest one. If you focus on this, it'll be a game changer for your agency. Number two, not specializing. So what you should really be doing here is specializing in one service. I made this mistake in the beginning. I first started a local marketing agency and I offered everything under the sun. I had SEO. I had Facebook ads. I had Google ads. I had copywriting. I had web design. I had all these different services. I was a full service agency. Now, the problem with that is if you do a Google search and you type in full service agency, you're going to see pages and pages and pages of agencies that offer like 20 different services. Now, let me ask you this. How can you stand out if from the other agency, if you guys offer the same exact services to the same to any market that will take it, right? So if you offer 20 different services to any small business market out there, it's going to be very hard to stand out. So what you want to do is specialize in one service. When we made the switch from a local marketing agency offering seven, eight different services to offering one service, which is LinkedIn lead generation, we went from our first month. We had $4,000 in sales from our first month from making that switch and in five months, we bumped that up to $38,000 per month. So we almost 10xed our business in five months just by specializing in one service, one core offering, okay? So you want to avoid having a menu of different things you do. Just have one core service that you specialize in. And also, as soon as you get your first one to three clients, you want to specialize in a specific vertical niche. And I'll talk about why in just a second. But I know on my YouTube channel, I talk a lot about specializing in a vertical niche and picking an industry. But with the current situation that we have going on in the world, I recommend just talk to pick a few different niches and just do reach out to as many of them as you can. And just try to get your first one to three clients. Once you get your first one to three clients, I just want you to get some money rolling in so that you have an income. Once you get your first one to three clients, then you can pick who to specialize in, which vertical niche or market or industry to specialize in, okay? So focus on at first, you can just reach out to whatever markets you want and pick like five niches that you want to reach out to you. And once you get your first one to three clients, then focus on specializing in one of those specific vertical industries going forward. Now, the reason you want to do that is you become an expert in your service and your market. And I'll talk about why this is so important in mistake number three. But when you are an expert in a specific service and a specific market, you become top of mind for everyone in that market, right? You become the LinkedIn lead generation guy for SaaS companies, which is what we are, right? So you want to become that expert or that trusted advisor in that one service and that one vertical industry or market. And that makes it a lot easier on you to get sales and get clients. So that's mistake number two, not specializing and always specialize in just one service, especially if you are brand new to starting an agency. Mistake or pitfall number three is not sharpening your sword, okay? And one of the biggest mistakes that I made was every day after I did my outreach, every day I did my prospecting and I finished my work for the day like two or three PM. I would just go home, I play some video games, I'd watch some TV and I'd put it out of my mind until the next day. And I wish I spent at least an hour or two, especially in the beginning, learning and sharpening new skills and learning more about my market instead of playing video games and like going out with my friends and you know, just doing nothing and watching TV. Not to say that you can't do that. I'm just saying I wish I spent an extra hour or two every day sharpening my skills. So what you should be doing is every day you should be sharpening new skills and learning more about your market, whatever vertical industry or market that you pick to specialize in. Now if you don't know where to start, you want to read books and educate yourself and watch my seven high income skills video on the skills that I'm focused on. Those are specific skill sets that are ever green and will move not only you but your business forward. And you want to learn and hone evergreen skill sets that will again move you forward and move your business forward. Evergreen skill sets are things that copywriting, like sales, like persuasion and speaking, these are things, these are skill sets that you can, will apply to any business and any part of your life, right? If you know how to write well and sell well and speak well, those are skill sets that are evergreen and will never go out of style.  That's what I mean by evergreen skill sets. So learn and hone those skill sets and learn to love your market and dive deep into their language, their pain points, problems, etc. So when you can dive, when you pick a market or a vertical industry to specialize in and you dive deep into that industry and you learn about their language, the way they speak about certain things, the way they talk about their pain points and their problems and you go out to the market and you use their same language when you speak to them. It's a game changer, right? They listen, they become more excited to talk to you because you are speaking to them in the way that they speak about their specific pain points and their problems and they trust you more because you understand them. So that's a big reason why you want to specialize in that one service in that one market eventually because you can dive deep into the language and the pain points and the problems that they have and also the way that they talk about those things, the specific language that they use and that's going to be, that's going to make getting clients and getting sales and growing your income a lot easier. So what I ask myself every single day and what you want to ask yourself is how have I gotten half a percent better than I was yesterday and if not how can I get a half a percent better than I was yesterday? And I know this sounds a little fluffy and woo-woo I promise you I'm not like that mindset guru that you might see on YouTube or wherever else but I always ask myself this question. It's a powerful question because if this compounds over like just let's just say a year right or maybe just a few months if you get half a percent better every single day for a whole year you're getting like over like a hundred percent, a hundred and fifty percent plus better right so that it compounds over time you get better and better and better and better and if you ask yourself this question at the end of each day how can I get half a percent better than I was yesterday or have I gotten a half a percent better than I was yesterday if not what can I do to get half a percent better than I was yesterday? You are going to push yourself to learn those new skill sets to learn about your market and eventually you're going to be making a lot more money if you make if you have this mindset and you improve every single day improve your skill sets improve your knowledge improve the way that you can help your market if you get half a percent better every day it is phenomenal what it can do for you and your income and also your personal well-being right so these are the three things the three mistakes of pitfalls that a new agency owner especially should avoid so number one again and not enough outflow make sure that you are knocking enough doors and doing enough direct outreach to your market on platforms like facebook linked in instagram and email make sure that you are posting value social selling posts to your market getting them interested in what you have to offer mistake number two is not specializing so specialize in one service and once you get your first one to three clients specialize in a vertical niche as well or industry so that you can become an expert in that service in that market number three mistake number three is not sharpening your sword so ask yourself how you can get half a percent better than you were yesterday you want to read books and educate yourself learn some new skills evergreen skill sets that are going to move you and your business forward regardless of where you go in life and in business and also learn to love your market and dive deeper into learning more about their language their pain points their problems so that you can speak exactly how they speak and increase your your sales and your amount of clients you have in your income and if you focus on it or not focus on if you avoid these three mistakes and pitfalls you're going to be ahead of ninety percent of other agency owners because these are three things that i see most agency owners make these three mistakes and if you can avoid these three things you're going to be ahead of most of them okay so that's it for this video guys answering the question as a new agency owner what are the biggest mistakes pitfalls to avoid those are the three things that i recommend to avoid and look out for if you fix these three things i can tell you that you will see a lot more success in your agency all right so that's it for this video guys and i will see you in the next one


Good morning and a lot. Welcome to Law Across the Sea. I am Mark Schloff, the host of Law Across the Sea. And the purpose of Law Across the Sea, this program is to bring lawyers who travel across the sea to and from Hawaii to talk about what they have found and what they have brought and take with them on their travels. Today our guest is Peter Esser. Peter is a lawyer in Hawaii who has an appellate practice and with whom I've done several cases. Peter has written over 250 appeals in Hawaii and has appeared before in Hawaii appellate courts numerous times. However, there's another facet of Peter's life experience that takes him across the sea and into exotic places where he uses photography to appeal to the senses. We're going to talk about both his legal practice and his application today. Welcome Peter. Good to see you. Good to be here. First of all, my first question is, what is an appellate lawyer? What does an appellate lawyer do? When someone is dissatisfied with a verdict, either in criminal court or family court or civil court, and they want the record reviewed by appellate courts, they come to an appellate lawyer, you file a notice and you write briefs.  Occasionally they'll set oral argument. I've appeared in front of the Hawaii Supreme Court about 150 times in oral argument. Also the Ninth Circuit. And it's a great job these days because of e-filing. You can pretty much do everything at home. And not only for you to file, but also access to the record. Not every lawyer is an appellate lawyer. I guess every lawyer could appeal their case, but they come to an appellate lawyer because appellate lawyer has some background experience in doing that, knows the system. That's correct. And most trial lawyers know that a big part of their practice is rules and procedure. You can't present your story. On appeal. On appeal. Well, and in trial court, you cannot litigate something unless you know the structure. That's what makes us professionals and experts. And of course one of the things I argue is that good trial lawyers should hire good appellate lawyers to take the appeal because it's a whole different kind of law. And I do almost every area, whereas most trial lawyers specialize like in family or criminal defense or whatever. And how long have you been doing appellate practice? Since 75, when I passed my first bar in California. And you like the appellate practice? Yeah, I mean I sort of ended up in it because I was uncomfortable with the stress of trial work and also I like the intellectual challenge of appellate work. You take issues that trial lawyers don't have time to spend so many hours on. And I usually put in 75 to 100 hours on a brief. Right. And that allows me to really get in depth and that's the part I like. And you have the ability, the luxury of time in a way. There are still deadlines, of course, in appellate practice, but you can put your mind into the topic a little bit more. That's correct. And as a lawyer, you know that deadlines are great because if you are not working on a brief and watching a movie or reading a book or going on a trip when you're supposed to be working, it's always much more fun. Yeah, well I want to talk about that really. And a different type of appeal. Yeah. I've known you for several years and I've seen many of your photographs and a lot of your galleries of photographs. How did you ever get into photography? The beautiful photos that you take are just outstanding. We're going to go through a few of them, only a few of them today. But how did you get into photography? There's basically two reasons to take photos. One is because I have a bad memory and I want to remember what I've seen. And also, when you take a photograph, it records things you may not have even seen when you were there. And lots of times I get home and study a photograph and see things that I didn't know about. That's like a classic movie I've seen. Yes, exactly. And the second big reason is the way it makes you look. Whenever I show up at a site like say the Parthenon in Athens or Salisbury Cathedral, I'm studying the light and looking at the angle and seeing artistically what it is so I can make it into a beautiful photograph. And it just makes me look. One of the things I frequently do is show up at a monument at the wrong time of day and get where the light's wrong where it's behind my subject. And so I literally leave and come back later in the day when the sun's right. Whenever I visit a monument of any kind, my eyes are where I need to be to get the light right. Because light is everything in photography. And have you been a photographer since you were a young child? Or is this something that you developed? Yes. I had a box camera, a brownie camera when I was like six or seven. How did you get into that? Well, you know, part of this comes from the kind of movies I liked. In the fifties there were epic movies. There was Ben Hur and there was King of Kings and that sort of thing. And I always loved the cinematic part of movies, the images, especially the widescreen images. And so the natural thing was to take photos. And of course most people take photos of people, especially relatives. They put the camera away unless it's Christmas or birthdays. And I pretty much only photograph people when I travel. And I do it with a long lens and I do it with an autofocus. And most of the time they don't know because adults get all weird when you take their photo. The only natural subjects of photography are little kids. And I photograph little kids all the time because they're wonderful subjects. But mostly what I do is photograph architecture and I have a fascination with ruins. So if a country doesn't have ruins I usually don't go there. And you had this interest in photography since you were a young child. And you tied it to movies and is it something that you must do? Is it part of your life now that you have to do these photography? Absolutely. And it has evolved over the decades because of the technology. And the biggest change happened to me ten years ago. And I finally abandoned medium format film work which was a big huge manual focus camera that took very slow studied photographs and went to digital cameras. And there's lots of great things about digital. And I know there are still film photographers reluctant to leave behind this sort of classic photography. But the wonderful thing is you get to develop your own pictures. And when you are, you can develop a film but it's very complex. And do you do that? No. All I did was take my photos in like everyone else to longs or wherever. And sometimes make enlargements and object and ask them to do specific things. It took forever and it was still being done by another artist, not me. And the first thing I discovered when I got into digital is how you could adjust contrast and color and light. And especially cropping and rotating. I have a tendency to take crooked photographs. I don't know it's because I'm just like out of focus. I don't know what it is but about 50% of my photos need to be rotated straightened up. And frequently you need to crop. One of the things you need to do is to get a camera that has a very high grain. Expensive but lots of megapixels. And what you get is you can reduce the image down to interesting things within and you won't lose the focus. And I've asked you to bring 20 of your favorite photos today. And I like to kind of go through them one at a time as best we can. I'd like you to take a look at them and explain what we're looking at. First we're going to talk about the one from Bali. This is actually from New Guinea and let me just briefly say how I decide where I'm going. Especially now because I've visited most of the major places in the world I wanted to go to. So I'm finding myself going back to a lot of them. The best vacation is to go back to some place familiar and then take a side trip to some place you haven't been. And this is a Danny hut in the Baylor Valley in New Guinea. In the western side of New Guinea that is part of Indonesia. Right in the middle of Indonesia is Bali. I've been to Bali a dozen times. It's one of my favorite places in the world. And I go there and stay at a hotel I've always stayed at before. And then I plan these side trips to new places. I don't photograph Bali much anymore. That's Bali because I've been there so many times and taken so many photos. That's the biggest, that's the besok temple up on the side of the volcano in Bali which I've been to many times. There's lots of towers. And that's probably around 1500 years old although of course they're rebuilding and taking care of it all the time. That is a very famous stupa in Kathmandu in Nepal which is Tibetan where huge numbers of Tibetans back in the 50s when they had to abandon Lhasa which I've also been to came and lived because of the Chinese. And that was severely damaged in the earthquake 18 months ago and it's been restored. And this photo here, who are those eyes? Who are the eyes of? That is an image of the Buddha and unique to the Kathmandu Valley. I don't even think they have those eyes in Tibet which is of course where all these people came from. It is a combination of Hindu and Buddhist art in Kathmandu. Kathmandu is an extraordinary place. Most of the city is 500 years old and hasn't changed. It's a medieval city in Asia. And what are those flags? Those are prayer flags which have Om Manipadmi whom which is the Sanskrit thing that says the jewel is in the lotus. I don't want to get too technical. There are actually streets up above Capulani Park where people have those flags. They're all around the world and what happens is when they wave in the wind they say Om Manipadmi whom which means the jewel is in the lotus. It's a Buddhist prayer. And just going back for a second to the Bali photo. The Bali photo, what temple is that? That's a Hindu temple. Bali is the only Hindu island left in Indonesia. Most of Indonesia is Muslim now. So that is a huge Hindu temple which I said goes back about 1500 years. This is an annual festival where people are making a pilgrimage to this temple. I just had a perfect time just serendipity. It's beautiful. Before our break let's take a look at the Easter Island. I've seen this before but these figures but this is a little different. This is the volcano, extinct volcano on the island. Easter Island is about the size of, say, Lanai, a very small island. This is where they were dug out of the ground and then they would bury these basalt chunks of stone in the ground and then work on them. This is an island that is one of the most remote islands in the world, like Hawaii. There's a long Chile flight from Tahiti to Santiago, Chile that stops here. I went there with a lawyer friend from here. My son was a Stanford student at San Diego doing foreign exchange and I stopped in Easter Island on the way. Absolutely incredible place and I have a whole gallery on the visit but those were all taken with an early camera and so the quality is not very good. I just love the image. It's great to me. We're going to come back and hopefully be able to get through the rest of the 20s in about a minute. Hello, this is Martin Despeng. I want to get you excited about my new show which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. We're going to broadcast on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Hello and Aloha. My name is Raya Salter and I'm the host of Power of Hawaii. Where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy. Be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians or artists to see how we can come together to make a renewable future. Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Aloha. I'm Carl Campania. I hope you please visit us this summer. It's a wonderful summer. It's actually a cooler summer than we're used to. But I hope that you come back and visit us and watch our show Education Movers, Shakers and Reformers here on Think Tech Hawaii. It's at noon every Wednesday. See you then. We are back with Peter Esser and we are going through his photographs of the world and they cover just about every place that's exotic and different from Hawaii that we can imagine. We're going to just start back where we left off and we're in Turkey right now. Again, this was one of those places where I showed up at four in the afternoon and the light was on the back of the library, the famous library at Ephesus, which is on the coast of Turkey. And I came back, paid another admission fee the next morning at nine and the light was perfect, as you can see. That was reconstructed by a German archaeologist in the early 60s. It's one of the great images of any Roman ruin. It dates from about the time of Hadrian, maybe like 130. And of course those sculptures, some of which have survived, are myths. Those are Roman gods, so this is pre-Christian. Another couple hundred years before the Rome adopted Christianity. And considering everything that's going on in Turkey today, just to put this in context is amazing. It is and Turkey is an extraordinary place to go as a tourist because it's been a center of civilization for thousands and thousands of years. So there are ruins at almost every epic in history and also every religion. Okay, let's go to the next photo. Oh, this is a beautiful, this is a Buddha. Even I know this. There's actually a dispute as to whether or not this is Buddha or Ananda, one of his disciples. But it's certainly Buddhist. One of the most wonderful Buddha images in the world from Sri Lanka. The face is great. It's extraordinary. By the way, this appears in a wonderful movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews back in the mid-50s. This image is carved in granite. It's about, I would say, a thousand years old. It's in Palinirua, which is a city that was abandoned in about 1200 AD. And where was this? In Sri Lanka. It's one of what they call the ancient cities in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is one of the most extraordinary places in the world to visit for ruins and for beautiful scenery and just everything. I was there 24 years ago. I haven't been back. I'm planning to go back. Of all of the islands in Asia I have been to, Sri Lanka is probably my favorite. All right. Let's move to Japan. All right. This is a beautiful, beautiful castle like in Japan. Where is it? This is Himaji Castle, which is north of Osaka. There's also a castle in Osaka, but it's a cement. And this is an original wood one that is about 900 years old. It's one of the oldest surviving all-wood buildings in the world. Another one, by the way, is a Buto Inn, which is in Kyoto. And we have a copy out here in Kaniohe. I was lucky enough to be there during Konami. I think I'm pronouncing it right, which is the week each year when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. Strangely enough, this shot doesn't show any cherry blossoms. It is an absolutely magnificent castle. And there's a bullet train from Osaka to Himaji. So you get there really quickly from Kansai Airport. Okay. Let's take a look at the next one. Oh, wow. This is probably my favorite photograph ever. This is the Dalai Lama's Palace in Lhasa, which is very difficult to get to and is 12,000 feet high. The mountains you see in the background are probably 18,000. Like Cusco and Peru, you have to be very careful about altitude sickness. I was sucking oxygen out of a bag at the hotel in order to avoid a lot of side effects. There's a very large enlargement of this photo at the Supreme Court that has been there for about 12 years. Supreme Court of Hawaii. Yes. It was put up by the clerks there. And it is in the clerk's office when you walk in. It is probably my favorite photo I've ever taken. It was taken with a medium format film camera. And they had just repainted the palace. Now, Dalai Lama doesn't live in it anymore. He lived in it up until 1959 when he was forced out by the Chinese. He now lives in Northwest India in a hill station. All right. Let's take a look at the next photo. Oh, my gosh. That grass really makes the shot. This is Machu Picchu, which has the Hawaii connection because of Bingham. Hiram Bingham was an extraordinary archeologist. But he also is the grandson of the famous missionary that our streets named after here in Honolulu. It's an extraordinary place, but Peru as a country is an extraordinary place. Cusco is at least if not more fascinating than Machu Picchu. And even Lima is an extraordinary place. A lot of Hawaiians, people from Hawaii have been to Peru and all of them loved it. Okay. Let's take a look at our next shot. This is probably one of the best preserved Greek temples in the world and it's not in Greece. It's along the coast of Italy. South of Salerno, it's called Pastum. It is unlike the temples that are famous in Athens, it's limestone. It's not made out of, that's why it looks so beat up because the marble temples in Athens have been, behold, their shape better. Absolutely incredible day. Right in springtime, perfect blue sky. I took all of a couple of dozen photographs of Pastum. There's four major temples in about an hour and it's some of the most treasured photographs I've ever taken of Greek temples. Okay. Let's look at the next. Oh, okay. I've seen this in the movies. Yeah. Well, this was the Indiana Jones. I think it was the third movie, the one with Sean Connery. This is a temple that, well, when Obama went to Amman to visit with a king, he insisted on going south down to Petra, the city of Redstone, and he visited the treasury, which is the most famous landmark there. This is another monument that you have to hike to that Obama missed. He was there a week before I was down below. It's one of the seven wonders of the world. It's an incredible place. I can't say enough about Petra. All right. Let's take a look at our next. Oh, okay. This is probably the oldest tourist site in the world. There were Roman tourists going here 500 years before Christ. These three pyramids represent father, son, and grandson, and were the tallest buildings in the world until the 19th century. Okay. And it's an amazing place. One of my favorite architectural things from the Roman times are the aqueducts. In other words, not the religious buildings, but the secular buildings. This is a restored aqueduct in Seville, north of Madrid that dates from the time of Trajan, probably around 100 AD, and it goes right through the middle of town and carries water from a river about 12 miles away to the city of Seville. And it's still working. And it's still working. And that's the sole reason I went to Spain on this trip was to see this aqueduct. Let's take the next one. Oh, okay. I've been here. Talk about icons. This is one. I've been here, I can't remember. It's two or three times. This is at sunset. Taj Mahal. It is the Taj Mahal. And then the water, the water reflecting it is beautiful. Yeah, in Agra, believe it or not, in the late 19th century, this was so overgrown, you barely see it because the Brits basically ignored it until they decided it was an important monument. And they cleaned out the gardens and stopped taking marble away to use on contemporary buildings. And, of course, it's probably the most iconic tourist site in the world other than the pyramids. This is a tiny little monastery in Bhutan, which is northeast of India, which is elevation from, say, 7,000 to 14,000 feet high. This is about 10,000. It's a five-hour hike up the side of the cliff to get here. And you took the hike. And I took the hike. One of the great hikes they've ever taken. It's only two hours back down. This burned down a year before I was there, and they have rebuilt most of it here. They still have another couple of buildings to add on the left. It's called the Tiger's Nest, and it's a very famous Buddhist monastery. It's Tibetan, but it's in Bhutan. And Bhutan's an extraordinary place. This I love. Another one of my very famous, this is photographs. This is a picture of the north face gate to Tapram at Angkor Wat. Tapram's the overgrown ruin. Most of the ruins, including Angkor Wat, they've cleaned off the vegetation to preserve it and also so you can see it. Tapram, they've left behind all of the trees and the overgrowth. And it makes it very romantic and great setting for a lot of great movies. Every time I go, I've been here three times to Angkor. I hike out to that. It's about, I don't know, a couple of hundred yards away from the main temple. And no one else goes there, so it's a very peaceful, wonderful spot. Again, those are Buddhist images. This is Tikal in Central America in northern Guatemala. Dates from about 900, 800 AD is probably the most famous Mayan temple. Completely overgrown when it was rediscovered in the 1860s by, I think, an American archeologist. No, actually British, Maudsley, I think. Anyway, it's literally the national symbol of Guatemala now. It's on their flag. It's on their currency. And it's just an extraordinary building. You can't climb up anymore. Okay, now, okay, I think we got a couple more. Okay, this is the Royal Palace in Bangkok, which I visited over and over and over again because Bangkok's a great hub for seeing all sorts of places in Southeast Asia. This is one of those very unique days when Bangkok doesn't have Southeast Asian skies, which are muddy and gray and make for horrible photography. I looked out the window of my hotel and saw that sky and dashed over there to photograph it. This is the Shweta Ganpagoda in Burma, which I just visited in October after 22 years, after my first visit. This dates about 2,000 years back. It's Buddhist, and supposedly there are hairs of the Buddha underneath. It's still an active religious site where pilgrims come from all over Asia, especially from Burma, and do a pilgrimage around the base of it. Absolutely extraordinary site. The top half has about 22 tons of gold on it. And there's a diamond at the top that is 72 carats. Absolutely extraordinary. One of my favorite sites in Asia. I think we got one more. This is Laos' claim to fame. Again, a pagoda like that last shot. Very little gold, funky. Some people think it looks like a ballistic missile site. Again, this is on all of the national seal, the money, everything. This is a national symbol of Laos. I absolutely love Laos. And that's why this is important to me. Peter, we've had to rush through 20 photos, which I'm glad we did. I like them all. Now, if somebody wants to take a little bit more time to go through your photos, where would they go? I post them on a website called Smug Mug. You access my calories by typing in SR-47, which year I was born. Space, Smug Mug, SMUG, MUG. There's about 100 galleries in the travel section. And each of these individual photos came from galleries with 50 to 100 other photos of the same thing. Well, thank you. I think you've won this appeal. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate you going through these photos. I love the various religious photos are beautiful, taking it apart from the religion, just the architecture and the work that went into them. It becomes much more fascinating when you study the iconography, when you figure out what it means, because all of them have connections, just like when you go into a church. The cross means something, and the statue of Mary means something. It's the same thing in Hindu temples and in Buddhist pagodas. And if you study the iconography, even without studying the religious faith, you can enjoy a lot more. That's part of it.