Image from The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

In The Matrix Reloaded, the computer program known as the Architect takes on the form of a cold, stern old man. He is the creator of the matrix, the virtual reality program being pumped into the brain of most humans.

Because the Architect sees the world as a series of equations to be balanced, he doesn’t truly understand free will and choice. He therefore had great difficulty in creating a version of the matrix that humans would accept, and he recounted his frustration with the limitations of his logic:

“The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.

The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.

I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps, a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother.”

He was referring to the Oracle, who discovered that nearly 99% of all humans would accept the matrix if they were given the subconscious choice of accepting it. Finally, they had a viable version of the matrix. The solution wasn’t to be more logical, but to be more human.

I think I’m having a similar issue with understanding features and benefits. Ironically, my Myers-Briggs type, INTP, is known as the Architect. That doesn’t mean I’m emotionally dead, just that I’m logical, which I hear is a curse for marketing. Can someone help me understand humans?

Specifically, how humans see features and benefits when deciding to buy something. I talked about this with James Chartrand from Men with Pens, who was tremendously helpful. Before I get to that though, let me start off with how I saw features and benefits before talking to James.

The difference between features and benefits

Let’s say you’re browsing the selections at an online bookstore, and you come across one that strikes your fancy. While deciding whether you want to buy it, you notice that the bookstore offers free shipping.

Free shipping is a feature. It’s an attribute of the bookstore’s service. Common marketing wisdom says that people don’t buy because of features, they buy because of benefits. They think “OK, it has free shipping. So what?” Benefits are what the features actually do for them, and that’s what they’re really buying.

To turn a feature into a benefit, you have to figure out what it actually means for the customer. I’ve heard you should pretend you’re talking to a child (or a little guy on your shoulder) who keeps asking “So what?” You keep answering “So what?” until you get to the real benefit.

Lets see the little guy in action:

“You get free shipping.”

“So what?”

“You don’t pay shipping costs.”

“So what?”

“You save money.”

“So what?”

“You’ll have more money than you would otherwise.”

“So what?”

“Money can be exchanged for goods and services.”

“So what?”

The little guy’s not too bright, is he? Now we’re at a point where we can branch off into many different directions. What goods and services does he care about most? Would he rather buy a BMW, or feed starving children in Africa? We don’t know.

Let’s make a guess. Many people seem to want to spend more time with their family, so let’s take that angle.

“With more money, you’ll be able to afford the same goods and services without working as much.”

“So what?”

“Since you don’t have to work as much, you can spend more time with your family.”

“So what?”

Egads! He pulled the old “So what?” trick on us! There’s nothing to stop him from using that ad infinitum. If he can pretend he doesn’t know why free shipping is good, or what money can be used for, he can pretend he doesn’t know why he would want to spend more time with his family.

Where does it end? When will he say “Yes, that’s the real benefit!” Why does he really want to spend time with his family? Does he want a Darwinian answer?

“If people like their family, they take good care of them, so their offspring live to reproduce and pass on the genes that make them like their family. So through the process of natural selection, you have evolved to like your family. By spending time with them, you’ll be fulfilling your inborn desire to enjoy their presence.”

“So what?”

Hmmm…maybe happiness is the answer.

“When you enjoy spending time with your family, you’ll be happy.”

“So what?”

What now? Do we need to get into the chemical basis of emotion to explain why we want to be happy? Do we need to go back to the Big Bang, or God?

Isn’t it a lot easier to just say “free shipping?” Why is it our place to tell people what that means for them? Allow me to quote myself from a comment I wrote a while back:

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but benefits are highly subjective, right? If we look at a steak, one person might benefit from the taste. Another person might benefit from the energy. Another person might benefit from the sensation of being full. Another person might experience a large negative benefit by being a vegetarian. Another person might think a steak is the perfect doorstop. We have no idea what the benefit is until we consider the specific person.”

I’m really more of a features guy

Why do I need to be sold on benefits? Yes, benefits are technically what we’re after. We don’t buy a steak just to bask in the glow of steak ownership, but because we want the benefits we get by eating it. However, features determine benefits, and the link is pretty clear.

Tell me the features and I can figure out the benefits (if I even care to). Tell me the benefits, and I have no way of figuring out the features. I’m not really interested in a salesman’s opinion of what a product’s benefits are to me. If he says “This product will make you happy,” how does he know? Why not just tell me exactly what it is, and let me decide what it does for me?

Everyone knows that Snickers is “packed with peanuts.” That’s the feature part of the tagline. Not as many people remember the benefit part of the tagline. But that’s OK–we know what peanuts are!

Once someone highly recommended a particular ebook to me, but I wasn’t sure about it. The sales page was pretty useless, just listing benefits. I’m sure the author thinks his ebook has many benefits, but would I agree with him? Against my better judgment, I bought it, and I was so disappointed I promptly returned it. Had the sales page listed the features (crap), I would have been able to figure out the benefits (none). But because it only listed the author’s opinion of the benefits, I couldn’t figure out the features, and therefore I couldn’t figure out the benefits from my perspective.

I guess benefits are helpful for things you don’t understand. If I’m sick and a doctor writes me a prescription for blahblahgra, that doesn’t mean anything to me. What will it do for me? What will it make me feel like, and how soon will it work? Still, I’d like to know the name of the drug, in case I ever come across something about it.

Sir James to the rescue

As you can see, I was pretty confused about this, and maybe you are too. But James Chartrand shed a lot of light on the subject for me. I’m quoting him here with permission. (You’ll have to pardon his French – figuratively, in this particular case for the French Canadian.)

“I think the problem is that you confuse benefits with goals. Let me see if I can help a bit with this, because I know it’s a tricky concept.

I want to walk in the rain. That’s my goal.

I need boots to do so. Any kind of boots? No. Rubber boots. Rubber is a feature.

Why do I need rubber? Because I want dry feet. Dry feet is a benefit. Not my goal, which is to walk in the rain.

So I go shopping for some boots. I see a pair. The tag says:

100% PVC
Red, blue or yellow
Inner Teflon liner
Wool padding

Well, that’s a bunch of features. Fucking boring, honestly. And I really don’t care. Why? Because my goal is to walk in the rain.

Then my eye catches another sign for another pair of rubber boots.

100% PVC for highest waterproof factor – your feet stay dry all the time!
Red, blue or yellow – walk in style and make sure you get noticed by the fashion crew!
Inner Teflon liner – extra waterproof prevention in case of leaks!
Wool padding – enjoy comfy, cozy feet while you walk!

That pair lists the features, but it also gives the benefits of that product. The manufacturer doesn’t know if my goal is walking in the rain, shoveling shit in a barn, emptying my basement of a flood or puddle jumping. Nor does the manufacturer care. He’s simply telling me WHY I should buy these boots by answering the question, ‘So what?’”

Well that clears up a lot! I had no idea that there was a third party here (goals). I thought anything related to “why” fell under benefits. But it works like this:

A customer has a goal. A product enables the goal. The product has features that describe it. Features have benefits that explain why the features matter.

When I see the feature “100% PVC,” I don’t know why that matters. But the benefit “highest waterproof factor – your feet stay dry all the time” tells me why it matters. Most of these features are jargon that doesn’t matter to most people, but the benefits tell you what you need to know. Even if the feature is self-explanatory, benefits give some emotional oomph.

But benefits alone aren’t enough. If it just said “your feet stay dry all the time” with nothing to back it up, you wouldn’t believe it. But it says “100% PVC,” and you might not know what that means, but it looks important enough to justify the benefit. And sophisticated boot aficionados may look for the “100% PVC” label.

Features and benefits, a match made in heaven.

I still think “free shipping” is pretty simple, but let’s benefit it up, shall we? Now I see that we don’t need to tie free shipping to a goal, as I thought before. We just need to remind the customer why free shipping is a good thing.

“Free shipping – you’ll have more money to buy all the great stuff you love!”

The feature isn’t linked to a goal, because I don’t need to know what they want to use the money for. The benefit just makes the feature more enticing by fleshing out what it means for the customer (even though they already know). Is that the right idea?

The plot thickens

But wait, there’s more to it than that. What about when someone asks “How would your product benefit me?” That’s a different kind of benefit, because it’s about what the product does for you, not why a feature matters.

When Philip Brewer wrote about how to launder money, he said that it took him a long time to understand money laundering because at first he didn’t realize that it refers to two completely different things:

1. Classic money laundering: converting dirty money into clean money. That is, hiding the illegal source of your income, without hiding the money itself. This is often done by creating a business that will claim the dirty money as legitimate revenue. For example, you can open a car wash, pour your illegal income into it, and simply pretend you washed more cars than you actually did.

2. Modern money laundering: hiding money from someone you don’t want to know about it, such as the IRS or an ex-spouse. First you make the money disappear, then you make it reappear in a way that it won’t be seen by who you’re hiding it from. You can make the money disappear in a safety deposit box or overseas bank. You can make it reappear by slowly withdrawing it over time, or by staging an invoice scam or fake casino win.

In a similar way, it appears that I’ve had a hard time understanding benefits, because the term refers to two completely different things:

1. Why a feature matters.

2. How the product will change the customer’s life.

We’ve covered the first one, but what about the second? Good sales copy is supposed to answer the “how will this change my life” question, but isn’t the answer obvious once you know enough about the product?

Going back to the boots, the customer may want more information than what’s on the sign. “Do these boots come in half sizes?” is a good question. “Do these boots have good traction on snow?” is a good question too. And “How long will these boots last?” is also a good question. But who asks “How will these boots benefit me?” Shouldn’t they know?

Forgive me, because I know every marketer in the world is going to have a heart attack when I say this, but once the customer has enough information, aren’t they the one who needs to decide how the product will benefit them? How would I know if the customer needs boots?

If they want to walk in the rain and they don’t have any waterproof footwear already, there’s probably a need there. If they want to lie in the sand at the beach, not so much. Then again, maybe they want the boots because they want to dress up like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. But only they know their situation. Aren’t they capable of figuring out if they need boots?

Of course, some cases are much more complicated. If someone’s car shopping, they might be confused about which of the billions of models out there best meets their needs, or what their needs even are. And car salesmen can afford to spend time helping them figure that out. But the customer still needs to provide some information, such as the fact that they want a reliable car with good safety features that can comfortably seat their family of five. It wouldn’t make much sense for someone to just stroll into a dealership, approach a salesman, point at a particular car, and ask “How will that car benefit me?”

Pop quiz: You’re thirsty. Do you want water? Yes or no? Or do you want to sit there pretending you don’t know how water will benefit you?

One main benefit

I hear a lot of people saying that a product needs to clearly present one main benefit. But why?

In some cases, this is no problem. “This pill will clear your sinuses and let you breathe easily.” Fine, but what about products that aren’t so simple?

Consider Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People. This book is not a solution to a specific problem. Instead, it’s about as high level as you can get, presenting the seven core principles of personal growth. The cover lists some things you can do with it, but they’re very broad, such as “achieve inspiring goals with disciplined daily habits” and “become the conscious creator of your life instead of feeling hopelessly adrift.” The focus is really on the seven principles themselves.

The book isn’t at all benefit-oriented, but it reached the Amazon top 100 before it even went to the printer. Of course, a lot of that is because of the huge audience he has at his blog. Still, I’d like to think that many people saw the value in a high level conceptual framework of personal growth, even if they couldn’t complete the sentence “I’m buying this book so I can ___________.”

Would the book have sold better if he had restricted it to one specific benefit? The cover says one of the things you’ll learn is how to “attract empowering relationships with loving, compatible partners.” What if he decided that the purpose of the book was to deliver that benefit? Well, going into the seven core principles of personal growth is a needlessly complicated way to get there. He might as well just write about relationships directly. But then, the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good, would it?

(Incidentally, have you noticed that ebooks tend to be much more benefit-oriented than printed books? What’s the benefit of Harry Potter?)

Why does everything need to be presented as a solution to an urgent problem? Sometimes abstract things have great value in themselves, regardless of their ability to achieve something tangible. Freedom, wisdom, knowledge, health, happiness, strength, relaxation, entertainment, humor, love – aren’t these things all inherently good, even if they don’t lead to something more concrete, like search engine traffic?

Besides, how often does a product actually deliver the ostensible benefit on a silver platter? As much as I liked Career Renegade, I’m sure that the author Jonathan Fields would agree that the book doesn’t instantly convert you into a career renegade just by reading it. It just provides a lot of guidance and resources to help you with the process. Not many products provide a magic solution.

Why we buy stuff

I told James that when SEO School came out, I didn’t bother trying to figure out the benefits. I just bought it right away because:

1. It’s an ebook. I like reading ebooks, unless something’s specifically wrong with them.
2. Naomi Dunford wrote it. The author is hugely important, because there’s a lot of junk out there.
3. It’s about SEO. That’s a decent topic, and while I didn’t really need it, I might learn something.
4. It has an affiliate program. I know a lot of people need to learn SEO, so it made sense to promote it.

It wasn’t any more complicated than that. I didn’t put up any irrational resistance to what was obviously a good product.

James pointed out that these are features, but I really bought the ebook for the benefits behind the features. Fine, these technically aren’t the reasons I bought it, they’re just convenient abstractions of the reasons. It’s a lot easier to say “because I like ebooks” or “because I like Naomi,” things I intuitively know are true, than to spell out the myriad of reasons behind them, some of which I might not even be aware of.

We often think in abstractions because breaking everything down to the molecular level is unnecessarily complicated. It’s much more natural to think “I want food” than to think “I want all the things food does for me, which I will now explain in great detail in case anyone needs proof of my desire for food…”

Do you need to have an inner monologue to debate the benefits of breasts, or do you just naturally like them? Feel free to substitute diamonds, shoes, ebooks, football, money, beaches, cats, your kids, or whatever you instinctively like without needing to convince yourself. Sure, you could probably come up with reasons to explain why you like these things, but you don’t need to. To you, these things obviously have intrinsic value, regardless of whether they enable you to solve a specific problem.

Bruce Springsteen did the Super Bowl halftime show. I never heard anyone ask “What’s the benefit of Bruce Springsteen?” People just knew they liked him, even without a long sales page to overcome their objections and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he would change their life.

Why are some things so different? Why will someone gladly spend $100,000 on a college education because it’s “the normal thing to do,” blow $30,000 on a wedding reception because “it will be so wonderful,” then hesitate to buy a $12 ebook about how to reduce stress because they’re not entirely convinced about the benefits of a longer, happier life? All the time they spend trying to figure out whether they absolutely need it could be better spent buying and reading it.

The Architect would observe this person struggling with the decision to buy the ebook and say:

“Sales resistance is the most predictable of all human responses. It is interesting reading his reactions. The problem is choice. But we already know what he’s going to do, don’t we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is already blinding him from the simple and obvious truth: buying this product is the right thing to do. Why does he struggle to make his choice?”

The Oracle would respond:

“Because he didn’t come here to make his choice, he’s already made it. He’s here to try to understand why he made it.”

I have no idea what the benefits of reading this post are. I’ve certainly made no attempt to spell them out. And yet, you’re investing a certain amount of time in reading it, which is equivalent to a certain amount of cash that you’ve handed over without knowing exactly why. Don’t we sometimes buy things without caring what the benefits are, because we just intuitively know that they’re there?

If you’ve tried to sell a product online before, you know that there’s a lot more to the process than just creating the product. People say “if you build it, they will come,” but it’s not true. Many people have trusted that advice, only to spend countless hours creating a wonderful product that nobody bought.

Why would people not buy your product, if it’s so good? Well, there are many possible reasons.

• Did you convince your audience of your credibility?
• Are you a good enough copywriter to create a compelling sales page?
• Did you get powerful testimonials from well known people?
• Did you build up enough buzz before launching?
• Did you sign up key people as affiliates?
• Worst of all, were you doomed from the start because you didn’t research whether there was a big enough market for your product?

The list of pitfalls goes on and on. There are so many intricacies to a product launch that it takes enormous effort to master the process. Jeff Walker learned so much about how to successfully launch a product, that he was able to sell his Product Launch Formula for $2,000 a copy. But $2,000 is probably a lot more than you want to pay, right?

There’s now a much cheaper alternative. Dave Navarro and Naomi Dunford have come out with a new ebook called How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook. From the title you can tell that this is specific to writing and selling ebooks, but actually most of the information applies to any kind of online product launch. (In case you’re wondering, no, they never reveal what **** stands for.)

I’ve bought both Dave’s and Naomi’s products before, so I didn’t need much convincing. Plus, people actually hire Dave as their launch coach. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a launch coach, but it makes perfect sense when you consider how much the launch affects your sales. Naomi saw this firsthand when she launched Online Business School with Dave as her launch coach, and made five figures in three days.

Their sales page very clearly says what’s in it, so I won’t repeat that. I’ll just tell you what I thought about it. First, the good.

The information in this ebook is essential for running a successful ebook launch, and nobody else is really talking about it. I didn’t even know that there was more to a launch than just saying “Here, I wrote this. Buy it!” It turns out, there’s a lot more than that.

This ebook contains a lot of information (113 pages), covering the entire launch process. It takes you all the way from testing your market, to actually writing your ebook, to running the launch, to making money even after the launch is over. It’s very thorough, and it includes lots of worksheets to help you stay on track from start to finish.

It’s hard to imagine this ebook not easily paying for itself when you put it into practice. And even if it doesn’t, for whatever reason, there’s no risk. Dave and Naomi will not only give you your money back, but you can actually get double your money back! (Getting your money back is completely hassle-free, but getting double your money back requires completing their worksheets and showing that you actually tried.)

Now, the bad. Yes, unfortunately there are some things I didn’t like about it. It’s still worth buying, but I have to mention these things.

First, if you’ve bought any of Dave’s or Naomi’s products before, you know that they usually make them really entertaining. Dave’s “What’s Holding You Back” was a pleasure to read, even for people who aren’t productivity junkies. Naomi’s “SEO School” was so much fun that some people probably bought it even though they don’t care about SEO.

But How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook doesn’t have a lot of personality in it. This is something you would buy just for the information, not to be entertained. Maybe I’m being a little picky in expecting information about product launches to be fun, but hey, that’s what I like.

I found some parts of it far too basic. Some of it is written for people who don’t have a blog yet. If someone doesn’t even have a blog, I don’t know what they’re doing writing an ebook. Then again, I’m just speaking from my perspective. If someone is new to blogging, or not even blogging yet, they’ll find this part very helpful. Writing an ebook without knowing how to leverage a blog would surely be a disaster.

I thought it was too long, and it contained lots of really bad typos. Not to be the spelling police or anything, but typos always jump off the page at me, and this ebook has way more than its share (though the copy I have is three months old, so it might have been cleaned up since then).

Finally, there’s a glaring omission when they talk about AWeber. I can’t believe they didn’t mention using pop-overs and lightboxes to increase your newsletter subscribers. I understand that some people don’t want to do this because they consider it too intrusive, but anyone who uses AWeber needs to at least be aware of these options. Darren Rowse wrote about his amazing results with pop-overs in How to Drastically Increase Subscriber Numbers to Your Email Newsletter.

Overall, I’d say that How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook provides lots of critical information for anyone who sells ebooks (or any other online products, really). If you want to maximize the success of your ebook launches, this is a much cheaper alternative than Product Launch Formula. And it’s half off the regular price until Thursday, February 5th (the sales page shows the regular price, so verify the reduced price at checkout).

I know most people aren’t on board with the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) yet, but how about taking some baby steps?

In a Washington Post job advice column, someone wrote in to ask what to do when your supervisor wants a doctor’s note every time:

“I have been certified for Family and Medical Leave Act time off for an ongoing problem that requires frequent tests and treatments (leaving an hour early twice a month, on average). My supervisor is not happy about this and is requiring me to submit proof that I attended the appointment and that I had the appointment…Should I just be grateful that I have FMLA and jump through these hoops, or should I start tracking this as a hostile work environment? It feels hostile.”

The supervisor isn’t happy about it? WTF? Does the supervisor think the employee is happy about having an ongoing medical problem that requires frequent tests and treatments? Should the employee have been more sensitive to the supervisor’s needs when choosing to have health problems?

And the supervisor wants two doctor’s notes per visit? Double WTF. Shouldn’t one note per visit be plenty? Does the employee really need to prove both that they had an appointment scheduled, and that they showed up? Does the supervisor really think the employee would schedule doctor’s appointments and not show up (and probably be charged anyway), just to get out of work? Or that they’d show up without a scheduled appointment, just to waste time?

The columnist’s advice was to just suck it up, and sadly I have to agree. Any action the employee took would do more harm than good. Technically the supervisor is free to make the employee jump through these hoops. They could probably require live streaming video of the appointments, if they wanted to.

At the same time, just because it’s not illegal doesn’t make it a good idea. Why does the supervisor think this is the best use of their time? Do they really keep a file of the employee’s doctor’s notes, and make sure that every appointment confirmation note is eventually paired with an appointment attendance note?

Who cares if someone leaves an hour early twice a month for medical reasons? I don’t know what the job is, but this time off can’t be that disruptive. And it’s more of a trust issue than anything else. The supervisor isn’t objecting to the doctor’s appointments so much as doubting that they’re taking place.

If an employee isn’t performing well, fire them. If they are, stay out of their way. Don’t make them write to the Washington Post to ask if they should start tracking their job as a hostile work environment. What does that do for morale, and therefore job performance?

Excessive enforcement of core hours is for darkworkers. Supervisors living in darkness, come back to the light!

In her post Blog Business Plan – Monetization, Marelisa Fabrega pointed us to the Affiliate Masters Course. This is a free 152-page ebook that presents a 10-day course on learning affiliate marketing.

• Day 1: Intro To Affiliate Business Basics
• Day 2: Brainstorm Your Site Concept
• Day 3: Develop High-Profitability Topics
• Day 4: Plan Your Monetization Models
• Day 5: Refine Final Concept And Register Domain Name
• Day 6: Build A Site That Gets The Click!
• Day 7: Build Free Traffic
• Day 8: Build Relationships
• Day 9: Know Your Visitors
• Day 10: Monetize!
• The Road To Success

<sarcasm>I wasn’t planning to do another review right now, but Evelyn and Carla complained that I wasn’t giving them enough books to read!</sarcasm>

Anyway, I didn’t find this too helpful for me personally, because I had seen most of the information before. It’s really geared towards new people (you don’t even register a domain name until halfway through). But if you’re new to affiliate marketing, or thinking about taking the plunge, this is a great way to get a lot of information in one place. I don’t agree with everything they say, but it’s a good starting point.

One topic they mention is the difference between selling (writing sales copy) and preselling (writing a review that encourages people to click through to the sales copy with intent to buy). They say that many people are selling when they should be preselling, and this hurts their results. This was new to me, and it seemed really important. I wish they had gone into much more detail here. But other people will appreciate all the detail on finding niches, keywords, affiliate programs, SEO, etc.

The main thing I didn’t like is that it gives off a very strong marketing vibe. There are many sales pitches sprinkled throughout, though I guess that’s to be expected in a freebie. It also seems a little hyped up and impersonal. My favorite line, for the sleaze factor:

“If you don’t monetize a visitor one way, convert her into dollars another way!”

People are not objects to be converted into dollars!

While most of its attempts at humor fall flat on their face, this one worked for me:

“The key to traffic analysis is to simplify. Forget the 150 different ways that traffic-analyzing software slices and dices hits, visits, pages, page views, and visitors. You simply don’t need to know how many left-handed Norwegians visit your site between 3-4 AM on Sundays.”

Again, great info for new people, but it’s just a starting point. It appears to have been written before blogging had come of age, and something more up-to-date would be helpful.

For people who have moved past this basic info and need something more advanced, Online Business School is a great choice. It gives an overview of six different ways of making money online, not just affiliate marketing. And WordPress SEO Secrets is the best SEO guide for people using the WordPress platform.

But the Affiliate Masters Course has one great advantage: it’s free. Check it out if you need an introduction to affiliate marketing. And if you’re a left-handed Norwegian, let us know in the comments.

It’s not that often that I buy books printed on that ancient material known as paper, but I made an exception for this new book on career planning by recovering lawyer/serial entrepreneur Jonathan Fields.

This is a guy who knows that the conventional way of career building just isn’t working anymore–he got his wake up call when job stress put him in the emergency room with a softball-sized abscess in his intestine. And the conventional way certainly isn’t working for people whose passion happens to be in something like art, music, cooking, or teaching.

What option is there, other than being a career renegade?

This book is called Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love. And what it’s all about can be summed up with a few lines from Jonathan’s own site:

“Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow” Is A Lie. More Often Than Not, You Need To Make The Money Follow. This Book Shows You How…

Doing what you love is pretty easy. I mean, just do it. You don’t need a book to tell you how to do that. But to actually make a living from it, that’s the hard part. And that’s exactly what Career Renegade is about.

The back cover caught my eye when it said that you can turn nearly any passion into a better payday, even video games. I was like, “Oh, come on Jonathan! Fine, I’ll read it, but you’d better be able to back up that claim!”

And yes, he did. But there’s a catch. Jonathan’s right, you can’t just “do what you love and the money will follow.” But, what most people don’t realize is that with creativity and hard work, you can figure out how to express your passion in a way that people will pay you for it. Like the guy who played video games.

Jonathan has run a lot of different businesses personally, as well as studied many other entrepreneurs. By doing this, he’s observed what successful businesses have in common, and learned the different ways of finding opportunities where most people wouldn’t see any. He has case studies of people who are making a living from things you wouldn’t think you can get paid for, and he explains how you can apply these lessons to your own passion.

A big part of what makes this possible is recent changes in the internet, such as blogging, social media, keyword research tools, self publication tools, PR sites, freelance sites, etc. This really does make things a lot easier, and he goes into a lot of detail about how this all works.

But while he includes a lot of detailed information, this is not a book purely focused on the internet. It takes a very broad perspective, starting with “I have a passion. Now what?” and helping you figure out ways to turn it into a career. It deals with issues like cultivating the right mindset, and getting your family on board. It presents a lot of practical information, plus tons of resources for learning a lot more.

Considering the glut of career books we see these days, I was pleasantly surprised by Career Renegade. I’d suggest following Seth Godin’s advice: “Go, read it, get started, hurry.” Be a Career Renegade.

Michael Martine has now launched his WordPress SEO Secrets. (If you heard me mention SEO-Nomicon before, this is the same product, just renamed.)

Yes, there are other SEO products out there. But one thing that makes this one unique right off the bat is that it’s specifically about WordPress SEO. Now if you happen to be blogging on a platform other than WordPress, you won’t care about that. But since WordPress is by far the most popular blogging platform, it’s great to finally have something specifically designed for it.

I had a chance to get an early look at the ebook portion of the product, and I immediately thought it was possibly the best looking ebook I’ve ever seen. I know that’s kind of superficial, but once I looked past the cover and the fonts, I found that there was inner beauty too.

What I mean by that is that it gives you all the details you need, in a way that’s easy to understand and implement. The information is very thorough. For example, it has possibly the world’s most complete list of WordPress SEO plugins and Firefox SEO extensions. At the same time, it’s written for people with beginner or intermediate-level SEO knowledge, so it’s not going to leave you scratching your head wondering how to actually put it into practice.

I’m actually not much of a fan of SEO because I find so many people talking about how to game the system, or focusing on keywords at the expense of content quality. But I agree with Michael’s idea that we should write for people, but tweak for search engines. Content comes first in my book, but content that people can find is even better!

You can get a sneak peak of the ebook right here. (If you’re reading this in your email or RSS reader, you’ll probably have to click through to the post.)

I haven’t heard the audios or watched the videos included in WordPress SEO Secrets. However, I’ve been on two of Michael’s teleseminars and two of his webcasts, and he doesn’t disappoint. I stayed on one of his webcasts for over two hours!

If you need more traffic to your site, you really want to check out WordPress SEO Secrets!

Photo by fdecomite

There’s one more aspect of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) that I haven’t touched on yet. And that’s the idea that our jobs don’t require our presence during certain core hours.

This is definitely a controversial notion, even among people who like the idea of ROWE. If people aren’t all together at the same time, how can the team get any work done?

In my post ROWE Vs. TOWE, I made fun of a vice president who sent out an email saying that even though they don’t have enough work to do, everyone still needs to show up at 8:30 sharp. (The complaint wasn’t that people weren’t putting in enough hours, just that they weren’t starting right at 8:30.)

Dot at Deeper Issues commented:

“I say it depends on the business. If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work. Also, when people start being late, morale falls.

ROWE is an attractive concept to people who don’t like the 9-to-5, but it’s not for everyone. So many Internet entrepreneurs make the assumption that all employees are potential entrepreneurs, or at least are high-level white collar workers. If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else. If you’re the boss, on the other hand, it may matter less when you get in.”

Yes, it does depend on the job. If you’re performing open heart surgery, you need to be there at the same time as the patient and the rest of your team. There’s no way you can be effective by yourself. But I think this situation isn’t as common as we might think.

First, a slight detour. I had one job where they didn’t use ROWE by a long shot, but they did have an interesting way of dealing with time. This was a government contractor, and the government said we had to work exactly 8 hours a day, on average, for the month. We recorded our start and stop times to the nearest 15 minutes, and put our time in their time tracking application. If there were 21 working days in a month, we had to work exactly 168 hours for the month (21 * 8), though it didn’t have to be exactly 8 hours per day. It could be 7 one day and 9 the next.

They were strict about this. When you arrived at work on the last day of the month, if you had logged 163 hours and you needed 168 for the month, that meant you had to work exactly 5 hours that day, no more, no less. Even if people still needed you, you had to go home after your time was up. The company also had a rule that you had to start each day between 6:00 and 9:00 AM. It was OK to occasionally come in after 9, but you had to call first to let them know.

Do you think this system was good or bad? Take a minute to think about it before reading on.

Overall, I think this system was way better than average. One great thing it did was eliminating sludge. The term “sludge” comes from Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. It means judging people by time. Like if you say “Nice of you to join us” if someone comes in after you, or “Leaving already?” if someone leaves before you, or if you brag “I was the first one in the office today!” Sludge reinforces the false connection between time and results, and it doesn’t help anyone.

At this company, there was no sludge, because everyone worked exactly the same number of hours (unless they used vacation time to cover a shortage). If you saw someone leaving at 1:00, no one would ever judge them for that, because they knew they were still putting in the same amount of time as everyone else. Either they had accumulated extra hours earlier in the month, or they’d make up the hours later in the month.

Not that time is a good way to measure performance, but at least the rules were clear. There was no wondering how long you’d have to stay in your chair with nothing to do in order to look good. The system also kept us from working too much (though there were times when I really wanted to work more).

But there were some bad things about this system. First of all, we had to start between 6 and 9. That’s a pretty huge range, and it worked great for me, but it’s clearly biased in favor of the early birds. A lot of people had a hard time getting in by 9. and were reprimanded for coming in even a few minutes late. I didn’t ask why they couldn’t get in by 9, because it was none of my business. If they had to take their kids to school or whatever, who cares if they came in at 9:05? (BTW, the window used to be 6:30 – 9:30 before they changed it. Some people never stopped grumbling about that.)

Another thing is that one of the managers required his team to work exactly 8 hours every day, because in his opinion no one can be effective for more than 8 hours a day. But his opinion of how people should work is irrelevant. For God’s sake, let your people decide what’s best for them! I can’t believe they let this manager destroy the benefit of the flexible time policy for the people unlucky enough to be on his team. It’s no different from deciding that your team won’t have health insurance or a 401(k), when the rest of the company does. The benefits should be the same for everyone, and not left to the mercy of your manager.

They were fairly close to a ROWE, at least on the time aspect. People would occasionally come in on the weekend, or stay late at night and then take off the next day. It was really great having that much flexibility (unless you had that particular manager, but let’s ignore him).

And yet, they still required people to come in between 6:00 and 9:00. That’s a wide enough range that you might as well get rid of it. Why chew people out for coming in at 9:05 or 5:55? Why would 5 minutes make a difference, when 3 hours in the opposite direction wouldn’t?

But wait, wouldn’t that destroy productivity? If they dropped the 6-9 rule, wouldn’t some people come in at 5:45, and some people come in at 10? Yup, they would. But the benefit people gained from having complete control over their schedule would more than offset any productivity loss. When people love being able to fit their job into their life, they’ll do whatever it takes to keep that job.

Say I came in at 6:30 (which was my usual time), and I started working on something, and I noticed that someone had done something that didn’t look right, so I wanted to ask them about it. If they didn’t come in until 10, wouldn’t that be a problem? Well yeah, it would. But it would also be a problem if they came in at 9 (or 8, or 7).

There will always be times when you’d like to have access to someone who isn’t there. But what’s the solution? Make everyone get to work at exactly the same time? Is it worth pissing off the employees just to have better overlap? (BTW, notice that “poor overlap” means the same thing as “broad coverage.”)

Besides, there’s no way you can eliminate this problem. What if someone’s taking a vacation day, or sick, or at lunch, or in a meeting? How can you ensure that everyone is always there? Should everyone live in the same house and sleep in the same big bed?

I haven’t worked in a ROWE, but according to Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, the employees figure out how to handle situations when someone isn’t there. Since they all love their jobs, they work together to ensure that the work gets done. They act like they have a vested interest in the company, instead of just punching a time card.

When you know you can’t assume that someone will be there whenever you need them, you plan ahead to make sure there won’t be any problems. You also make sure you make effective use of the time you do have with them. In a TOWE (Time-Only Work Environment), if you’re judged by time and everyone’s in their chair all day long, why not just chat with them all day? But in a ROWE, you wouldn’t do that because it negatively impacts results, and results are what you care about.

This is all according to that book, and I can’t say from experience that it really does all work out. But when I worked at that company and came in at 6:30, I did sometimes need someone who wouldn’t come in until 9:00 (if they were even there that day). So what did I do? I worked on something else until they came in. Maybe I sent them an email, or maybe I just spoke to them later. But no one should be unable to get any work done just because a particular person isn’t there. Only bad management could allow that to happen.

There have been times when I haven’t been allowed to take a day off when I was sick, on the grounds that they just needed me too much. But if I was really so critical that the company couldn’t function without me, they should have been paying me a lot more.

OK, now we’re done with the detour, and back to Dot’s comments.

“I say it depends on the business.”

Like I said before, I agree. There are some cases where ROWE won’t work. But there are many more where it will.

“If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work.”

I disagree. In most cases, the clients don’t have any reason to care what time the employees get there. For one thing, many employees will have absolutely no interaction with the clients. Another thing is that the nature of the work probably doesn’t require constant real-time interaction.

When I lived in New Jersey, I worked with some people in the U.K. But even though they were 5 hours ahead of us, no one considered moving our schedules 5 hours ahead to match theirs, because it just didn’t matter. There was some overlap in our days, and there was also email and voicemail. That was more than enough.

“Also, when people start being late, morale falls.”

Yes, it does. But why? Because of sludge; judging people by time. If someone comes in at a time that we consider late, we think that they’re not getting their work done. But how do we know that? Why do we think that someone’s arrival time is connected to their performance?

I’m writing this post at 1 AM. Is that “early” or “late,” or does it not matter?

Another thing is that if we see someone coming in at 9:05, we might think, “No fair! If he’s not going to get yelled at, then I should be allowed to come in at 9:05 too!” Yes, you should! You’re an adult, and you’re perfectly capable of determining your own schedule. If people were judged by results instead of by time, you’d trust other people to determine their schedule as well.

“If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else.”

This is where we go back to that idea of the team working together to make sure the work gets done, regardless of who is where at any given time. Answering the phone is a skill and not everyone can do it right, but it’s not like only one person in the whole company can do it.

At that company I mentioned before, there was one person who generally answered the phone. But the 6:00 – 9:00 window applied to her, and she was free to pick her own start time. If she wasn’t the first one in, or she wasn’t the last one to leave, there were some other people who would take on the responsibility of answering the phone.

One day we had two feet of snow, and the plows had to push it all into one lane, making that lane unusable. And this is an area with tons of traffic on a normal day, so it took me three hours to get to work. When I got there, I found that the person answering the phone wasn’t one of the regular people. Someone else had stepped up, even though it wasn’t her assigned job. That’s what happens when people work together with a focus on results.

In the worst case, a call could possibly have gone to voicemail. So what? You can call them back. It’s not such a terrifying apocalypse that it warrants forcing everyone to get to work at the same time.

Are there consequences to not having everyone available all the time? Of course. But you can’t have everyone available all the time, no matter what you do. And if you treat people like adults, letting them choose the schedule that works best for them, a funny thing happens. People actually like their jobs. So they do what it takes to make sure the work gets done. And when employees are motivated, the payoff for the company is tremendous.

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg

Today I’m a substitute teacher (guest poster) at BloggingWithoutABlog.com. This is a great blog to read if you’re new to blogging and want to learn the ropes in a supportive environment.

My post is called Twitter – Social Media’s Hidden Gem. There’s no shortage of social media platforms out there: Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Do we really need another one? And isn’t Twitter just a medium for sharing the dumbest things you can think of? I used to think so. Read my guest post and see why I changed my mind.

This post is mainly aimed at people who are considering signing up for Twitter, and people who have recently joined but aren’t sure what the point is. Since Barbara has more respect for her readers’ attention spans than I do, she requires guest posts to be under 500 words. I managed to get mine down to 499!

There’s quite a bit of drama going on over there. Stop by to see who has received detention, and who I’ve falsely accused of shooting a spitball.

Photo by Bhernandez

It’s been 20 months since Tim Ferriss released his world-renowned best seller The 4-Hour Workweek. He gave us his secrets for liberating ourselves from the “deferred life plan.” We’ve had time to put it into practice. So why haven’t we?

This is the question I explore in my new free ebook, “Why We’re Failing the 4-Hour Workweek (or, Reflections of a Pro Blogger).” For the last two and a half months, I’ve been happily jobless as a full time blogger, and free to work on creating a permanent alternative to the 9-5. But how has it worked out?

We’ll skip right past the flashy pictures of lavish parties and six-figure AdSense checks, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the world of pro blogging. You’ll get a glimpse of the harsh realities of entrepreneurship, and the tough choices a blogger is forced to make. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll see what’s wrong with the system, and how to deal with it. Oh yeah, and it’s really entertaining too.

To claim your free copy, just sign up for my newsletter here, and you’ll receive it instantly.

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When you’re done reading it, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Do you have trouble keeping up with all the demands on your time? Have you attempted a 4-hour workweek before?

You might know Jonathan Fields, the recovering attorney who now writes about work, life, entrepreneurship, and play on his blog Awake At The Wheel. He’s recently come out with a free ebook (no email required) called The Fire Fly Manifesto, in which he asks:

“Do you consciously choose to pursue a soul-sucking path defined by excess money, toys, burn-out and increased agitation, anxiety, depression, alienation and false security or will you take this window as an opportunity to rebuild your living around the quest for purpose, passion, health, friendship, love, time spent doing what you love with people you love, a body that doesn’t horrify you, a heart that’s not on the verge of failing and a career that fills your soul and provides enough to live very comfortably in the world?”

This ebook is a short, thought-provoking read. Near the end, he introduces his new blog Career Renegade, with its audio interviews with real career regenades.

This is all free. But for a little money, you can pre-order his book Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love (it’s out January 13th). If you pre-order his book, you get free admission to Flight School, his 16 hour online training program about accelerating your career evolution (it goes live January 1st, and you need to enter your book order confirmation number to sign up for Flight School). And if you’re one of the first 1,000 people to pre-order the book, and you sign up for Flight School by December 15th, you get access to his two upcoming live Q&A calls.

Yeah, all the offers are a little confusing, but you can start with his free ebook The Fire Fly Manifesto.