Yesterday I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday. My friend Matt asked me a pretty deep question in the restaurant that had me thinking:
“What is the biggest thing you have learned in your life so far?”
This question was a good one – somewhat made less impressive by the fact he had a massive smear of spare rib on his face. But I thought I’d share my answer with you. Over the past twenty-five years the biggest thing I have learnt is that time waits for no one and you’ve got to go out there and make things happen in your life. Whatever it is – no matter how big or small – waiting for that dream to happen is not good enough. You need to get emotionally involved in that dream and go after it.
(The second biggest thing I learned in my life was to never say something so deep in front of a large group of drunk adult males.)
Anyway, after that nugget, here’s another that will be the answer to all your video search engine woes.
A cool video search engine resource – http://www.blinkx.com/
Here’s a really, really cool little resource that you can use to find tons of videos on pretty much anything. The video search engine is found at http://www.blinkx.com/. You can type in any search and it will go out and find tons and tons of videos on any subject from You Tube, Google video, Myspace and all the big boys and return you a list in one place. This is great if you’re looking for content for your blog or web site and is a huge time saver.
There’s a big opportunity for creating niche video web sites. For example The Secret has turned the law of attraction principle into big knowledge. You could visit Blinkx and type in “law of attraction” and you’ll see twenty-seven thousand results. You could create a huge video web site just on that subject of the law of attraction and drive traffic to it to earn from advertising and affiliate revenue.
Another cool resource is http://www.youconvertit.com. This won’t cost you a penny and here you can convert word documents into PDF ebook format, turn video into audio and much, much more. These are all services that you’d have to pay for elsewhere so make sure you keep a note of the web address.
Product review – Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar
In the past few months I have praised Yanik Silver and his internet marketing products. I really enjoyed his Information Players Workshop and thought that on the most part his products are some of the best out there.
So when I got an email from Yanik offering his latest “Underground Seminar” on DVD I jumped right in and bought the seminar set straight away.
Boy was that a big mistake.
The Underground Seminar has been running for about four years I believe and the gist is Yanik gets speakers up on stage who are not the usual “guru types” or marketing experts that regularly speak at these types of things. You are promised “Underground techniques” and business opportunities. I had seen one of these seminars before, and I wasn’t too impressed at all. Basically a speaker will get up and speak for an hour and a half. The first half an hour is their “story”, then there’s good content for about forty five minutes and then they start to pitch their product or service that will help you earn like they do.
The one I had seen before in 2005 was a complete pitch fest but had a few good ideas there that made it worth my while coughing up for the seminar.
On the first DVD of the latest underground seminar is a guy called Cameron Johnson. He started his first business aged nine and was making a fortune by twelve. He’s now a multi millionaire and has done some fascinating things with Donald Trump and Sega. I was really excited about hearing what this guy had to say. Surely he had loads of stuff to teach. He did. If you wanted to learn his entire life story and nothing else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an egotistical presentation in my life. For the entire time he was speaking he spoke about his life. And I learned nothing. I’m serious when I say in an hour and a half the only thing I learned is that Cameron Johnson loves Cameron Johnson.
Each time the camera panned to the audience you could see people yawning and not too impressed. Yes the guy is hugely successful and that’s great but if you pay to hear someone teach you about how to make more online you don’t need to hear about the fact he once stayed in the same hotel suite as Macaulay Culkin did in the film Home Alone 2. That little “nugget” of a story is ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back. If I ever hear Cameron Johnson is about to speak again I’ll be sure I’m not in the same county, let alone the same room.
Next on DVD one was Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com. This guy had made hundreds of millions selling shoes online. Again I was hoping to learn a lot. And again I was disappointed. Whilst this was certainly a step up from Cameron “Man I’m great!” Johnson it wasn’t really anything new. Customer service is important was the general gist.
With a heavy heart I started to plough through the rest of the DVDs. The only person who gave away some really, really good stuff was Eban Pagan. I’d seen it before on his Get Altitude program but he was more interesting and charismatic than all of the rest of the speakers put together. And this, I think, is where the problem lies with this seminar set up. You see because these speakers are not the usual seminar speakers and teachers they seem to do one of two things. In the main they hardly give away any information at all, so that their business remains underground. Or they burn through so much information so quickly you haven’t got the foggiest idea what they’re on about.
The more experienced speakers like Eban give away quality information at a good speed so you can take everything in. And as usual, Eban gave away his best stuff: something that he teaches others to do. I think that’s where this idea is fatally flawed. Yes there are people out there making a fortune away from the internet marketing niche, but that doesn’t make them good teachers.
I am really, really disappointed with this product. It’s seriously annoyed me that it was such a blatant picthfest of people just not really teaching anything at all apart from their life story. Once I’d finished the DVD set I sat back and asked myself was there anything in the seminar that I learned that was either new information or that warranted my investment. The answer was not really. Eban’s stuff was the best in the seminar and I had already seen that. Apart from that I didn’t really have any “aha” moments at all.
I cannot stress enough how much of a let down this was. It seems Yanik spent more money making the seminar theme like the TV show 24 than on actually putting together a decent seminar. This is going to be the first product I actually send back to the States. Usually I’m far too lazy to box everything up and ship it off, but this just isn’t worth the money at all. One out of five.