Business Growth Strategies » amazon

3 Fascinating Business Predictions that Made Me Think

Ryan M. Healy — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:06:37 +0000

Here are three business predictions that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read them. I think they are quite prescient and worth your consideration. Perhaps they’ll hit you the same way they hit me.

Made-Me-Think Prediction #1: Search moves to apps
by John Jantsch of DuctTapeMarketing.com

John writes on his blog: “My use of search-engine technology is slowly being replaced by the use of apps that provide me with answers relevant to my personal needs. My guess is that while you may not have taken note, you’re using search engines less and answer engines more.

“This trend highlights the marketers’ need to go beyond SEO and PPC and move deeper into social networks, mobile marketing and app-based local marketplaces.”

Made-Me-Think Prediction #2: Four horsemen: Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and Amazon
by Perry Marshall of PerryMarshall.com

Perry writes on his blog: “The price of books, movies and music is headed towards zero. You’re already seeing 1-day Kindle specials: $20 books are $2.99, 99 cents or even free.

“Amazon will start renting books to you on your Kindle the same way Netflix rents movies.

“At Amazon, books are just a loss leader for selling flat-screen TV’s and Christmas presents. For you, books are a loss leader for selling ______?

“You better decide right now. And if you don’t come up with a loss-leader strategy for your biz… someone else will.”

Made-Me-Think Prediction #3: The downfall of dashboards
by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist at Google

Avinash Kaushik shares on the Market Motive blog: “People in the Analytics world whose primary contribution is to puke data will find themselves with fewer and fewer contracts/jobs. People who provide a list of actions to take, rather than a puke of data in ‘dashboards,’ will find they are richer than they anticipated.”

What do you think? Agree or disagree? Leave a comment and let me know.

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

An Easy Way to Read More Ebooks

Ryan M. Healy — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:41:39 +0000

Do you have a bunch of paid and free PDFs languishing on your hard drive?

Here’s how to blast through them in a fortnight — without sitting in front of your computer screen for hours at a time.

Step 1: Get a Kindle. (I got mine as a Christmas gift last year.)

Step 2: Email each PDF to your private Kindle email address (issued to you when you register your Kindle). Put “Convert” in the subject line.

Step 3: Make sure you’ve got a WiFi connection, then synch your Kindle. All the PDFs should download to your Kindle within a few minutes.

Step 4: Read the PDFs on your Kindle!

This has got to be the single biggest unexpected benefit to having a Kindle — the ability to read PDFs away from my computer.

Note: Amazon does charge a small fee to convert a PDF to Kindle format, but it’s more than worth it… because… you’ll finally get some value from all those ebooks you’ve purchased!

Update: Antone Roundy shared the following tip for getting your PDFs converted for free…

You can get the PDFs converted for free if you add “free.” into the email address you send them to (i.e. “…@free.kindle.com”). You just have to have WiFi to get them automatically loaded on your Kindle (“free” doesn’t deliver them over 3G).

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

A Tipping Point in Books

Ryan M. Healy — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:30:43 +0000

Always be looking ahead to see where your market or industry is headed.

What are the trends? What are the ramifications of those trends?

This summer marked a tipping point in the book industry. From Bloomberg as reported by the July 30, 2010, issue of The Week:

The e-book revolution has reached a tipping point. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said this week that his company now sells more electronic books than hardcovers. It’s “astonishing,” Bezos says, “when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”

Ebooks are dead? Hardly.

The ebook market is growing while the print book market is shrinking.

This is why Barnes & Noble and Borders are struggling to stay afloat.
This is why B&N released their own e-reader called The Nook.
This is why my local B&N has reduced floor space for book shelves and now has a dedicated selling area for The Nook right when you walk in their front doors.

Try to spot the trends in your industry. Figure out how you can profit from them so you don’t get left behind.

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

Brandwashed

Ryan M. Healy — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:09:10 +0000

You might wonder why I asked you to tell me your favorite brands a couple weeks ago. The reason I did this was to prove a point: brands are powerful.

In a world of information overload, brands are even more important. They give us a decision shortcut — a way to side-step all the choices we’re faced with every day.

We don’t evaluate dozens of different brands every time we go to buy a certain type of product. We do our evaluation once, maybe twice, then we default to our “brand of choice” for months, years, and possibly decades.

This is the power of a brand.

In a way, we are brainwashed… or brandwashed… to make certain buying decisions.

Does this mean that brand-name “image” advertising is good advertising? No. In fact, most image advertising is terrible. Yet brands thrive in spite of their advertising. The question is Why?

If you look at all the brands people listed as brands they love, you’ll find that most of them deliver more than just a product or service; they deliver a positive memorable experience.

For instance, Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks were all listed more than once. And all of them deliver an experience.

Apple offers a fun, low-stress environment where you can demo all their computers and ask as many questions as you want before you buy. (Of course, they have an amazing product, which doesn’t hurt either.)

Amazon offers a fast, convenient buying experience that is customized to you and your buying habits. Ordering is easy, prices are hard to beat, and Amazon’s personalized recommendations often lead you to new musicians and authors you would have otherwise never discovered.

Starbucks offers more than just coffee — they offer a pleasant environment where you can relax, read, study, visit with friends, or check your email. When you buy a cup of Starbucks coffee, you’re also buying ambiance.

Starbucks also showed up on my list. That’s because my wife and I used to go on dates at Starbucks. It was our favorite hang-out both before and after we got married. We’ve been going to the same Starbucks/Barnes & Noble combo for more than a decade now. That’s a lot of talks and a lot of memories.

So each time I support Starbucks, I’m buying not just the coffee (which I happen to like), I’m also buying my memories and all those good feelings I’ve associated with Starbucks.

In my view, people love brands that:

Create a (positive) memorable experience.
Stand for a certain value system or world view.

I believe a “memorable experience” is created primarily through one of two ways.

First, there is the experience that is designed to be extraordinary from the get-go. Take Disney, for instance. There’s nothing like it. And you’ll always remember the time you spend there because of that.

Second, there is the unexpected experience, usually in the form of outstanding customer service. This is why USAA showed up on my list. They’ve repeatedly given me excellent customer service. I haven’t experienced that anywhere else. So USAA stands out big time.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting because people hate brands for the same reasons they love them. We hate brands that…

Create a (negative) memorable experience.
Stand for a certain value system or world view.

Two examples…

Example #1: I hate Borders because I’ve repeatedly had bad experiences at their stores. And not just at one location — multiple locations. I was so upset by how I was treated at these stores that I literally “black-listed” them for years and refused to even step foot in one. Even today, years later, I will go out of my way to support their competitors.

Example #2: I strongly dislike Wal-Mart because of the values that run the company. Their approach to business is to save money at any cost — costs to the environment, costs to third-world countries, even costs to taxpayers. This is not what I believe in, so I intentionally avoid shopping at Wal-Mart.

So you see, we love and hate brands for essentially the same reasons. Interesting, eh?

Glenn Livingston dropped by and left an insightful comment. I’ve reproduced some of it here:

When I was a Fortune 500 consultant, we were involved with an advertising agency which wanted to promote the belief that people could define themselves by the three brands they absolutely couldn’t live without. They’d ask people what a typical day would be without those three brands. [...] Is your brand one of the 3 your customers couldn’t live without?

What a powerful question that is!

This is not to say we can all create “indespinsable brands” — but it’s certainly something worth striving for.

Remember: The more choices there are, the more important your brand is. Because a brand is how we shortcut the decision-making process. So, believe it or not, having a strong brand is important even for information marketers.

Case in point: How many blogs do you read on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?

I bet your daily blog list is short indeed. Maybe 3-7 blogs, max.

Taking a cue from Glenn, a good question to ask if you’re an information marketer might be, “Do I write one of the three blogs my customers couldn’t live without?”

Keep this in mind whenever you write blog posts… create information products… or do anything that defines (or refines) your brand.

-Ryan M. Healy

P.S. If you participated in my brand question from the previous post, thank you. It made this “thought experiment” much more interesting.
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The Ethics of Idea Theft

Ryan M. Healy — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:08:10 +0000

Fact #1: Words can be copyrighted; ideas can’t.

Fact #2: Original ideas are about as rare as 10-karat diamonds.

“Idea theft,” as I’ve called it in the title of this post, has been on my mind for a couple of reasons.

The first incident happened a few months ago when a good friend of mine expressed anger about a guy who had “stolen” his ideas and created an information product similar to what my friend had already created.

I understood his anger and frustration, but pointed out that ideas can’t be copyrighted.

For instance, I wrote about overcoming inertia last week. Does that mean I’ve cornered the market on that idea? No way! Anybody can go out and write similar articles or create information products about that idea.

What people can’t do is copy the words I wrote verbatim. That’s a violation of copyright law.

So you can express the same ideas, but you have to do so using your own words.

Go to the business section of any bookstore and you’ll see literally dozens of books all covering many of the same ideas, strategies, and concepts.

If I want to go out and write a book about business growth, I can do so without breaking any laws–even if there are already multiple books that already talk about that subject.

Get this… Pamela Dodd and Doug Sundheim wrote a best-selling time management book called The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques. If you go to Amazon.com and type in “time management,” their book will likely appear first, ahead of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

How Did They Accomplish This?

Simple. They bought the top 20 time management books based on Amazon’s ratings, read them all, and “stole” the best ideas they found to write their own book, which quickly became a success.

This, in my opinion, should not be viewed as stealing. This is synthesizing. It adds value. And it’s how every person on planet earth operates.

I could not write a single word if it weren’t for all the books I’ve read, all the teachers I’ve learned from, and all the people who’ve contributed to my life. Am I “stealing” from them? No. It’s simply how we learn, process, and share information.

Now, let’s talk about the second incident that prompted me to write about ethics today.

I recently signed up for a service based on the recommendation of a fellow blogger. The results the service can provide are really fantastic, but the set-up instructions and help files are pathetic. A quick scan of the private forum confirms this seems to be the consensus among most of the users.

As you can imagine, this opens up the door to competition. If somebody has a great idea, but is deficient in the execution, then aggressive competitors are likely to smell an easy kill.

Here’s a general recipe for business success: Identify a problem, find somebody who is already solving that problem, then copy the idea behind the solution, and improve upon the solution. Sometimes summed up with these timeless words… Make a better widget.

Again, nothing wrong with this. It’s been done thousands of times and is routine in business.

So where do we cross the line? Said another way…

At What Point Are We Acting Unethically?

Everybody’s moral compass will be a little bit different. I, for one, would feel uncomfortable buying somebody’s ebook and then “rewriting” it in my own words. This happens all the time, even though I would not personally do it.

I would feel more comfortable reading multiple books or ebooks and then writing a book of my own based on what I had learned.

Whatever I wrote would contain ideas I had learned, plus my own style, my own unique perspectives, etc. By doing it this way, I would ensure that my creative work would be sufficiently different from the source material to be definitively my own.

Crossing the Line…

Let’s get back to this “second incident,” which I mentioned above. As I already said, the service under scrutiny is lacking in some respects, and that has opened the door to competition.

But I am not here to criticize the service provider; I’m here to criticize an infiltrator. And in this particular case, I believe the ethics line was crossed.

I witnessed it this morning when I received an email that APPEARED to come from the owners of the service I am subscribed to. Here is a copy of the email with the name of the service blanked out.

Hi,

We see you are using __________.

A group of us have got together and wish to improve this great service, with our help. We are sure, like us, you love the system, but wished it was little less stringent.

If you are interested in a free account or just want to know more please fill in the form at http://___________.com

We just need your name and email, but you can include your likes, dislikes and any improvements you think can be made.

Work is already underway and any help or ideas will be greatly received.

Thanks,

Your ________ team

In each case where I’ve included a blank, the name of the service was used verbatim. Basically, whoever sent this email (and I believe I know who sent it) is pretending to be the service provider. He is inviting me to a “new and improved” service, which is not in any way affiliated with the original service I signed up for.

This kind of behavior is totally unethical and unacceptable.

Want to copy an idea and improve it? I have no problem with that.

But it has gone too far when a person hacks into a private community, steals customer email addresses, and then spams them with “new and improved” offers… all while pretending to be the original provider of the service!

This is not just idea theft…

It Is Customer Theft & Identity Theft, Too!

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is this: know what is lawful and unlawful. Know what is ethical and unethical. Determine for yourself where you will draw the line.

And let me encourage you to always err on the side of caution. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t, even if the law may allow it. Act in such a way that you can be proud of the work you have done… and still sleep well at night.

And if you decide ethics don’t matter, and you believe you can act however you want in the name of profit, then be sure to watch your back. What goes around comes around…

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts: