Do you speak at industry events? Do you present to clients and prospects? Have you considered using teleseminars or events for lead-gen?

When I met Lisa Sasevich, author of The Invisible Close at Eben Pagan’s Internet Marketer Big Wigs’ Green Room event in Miami I wondered how I could have missed hearing about her brilliant techniques until now.

Authentic Selling Secrets Teleseminar Host Lisa Sasevich http://bit.ly/bIuXxU

As a lifelong public speaker, I’ve always wrestled with the tension between “not being pitchy” and the frustration that comes from knowing I am taking my valuable time and energy to do a speak op and feeling like I squandered an occasion to tell people about my products who, in reality, would probably LIKE to buy them or know about them as a resource.

Lisa has the solution. Join me on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th 2pm PST 5pm EST to listen to her value packed, free tele-seminar to open your eyes to the possibility of generating solid leads AND closing deals every time you speak.

“Authentic Selling Secrets: How To Be Yourself, Have Fun and Sell a Ton on Stages and in Tele-seminars,” is THIS Wednesday.

You benefit from discovering:

* EXACTLY what you need to put together a life-altering talk that feels GREAT to share without giving away the store (AND creating the situation where your ideal clients WANT to invest with you.)

* That everything you’ve been taught about Speaking-to-Sell is WRONG?

* How to instantly create desire for your products and services without being “salesy”.

* How to effortlessly transition from content to close and have your audience glad you did.

* How to SEED your audience early on, so that when you finally tell them about your product, they are glad you did.

* What NOT to do at a live presentation.

* How to craft your Irresistible Offer.

* Using tension and limits to generate significant demand.

* Using THE RIGHT handouts to drive day-of and week-of sales and customer acquisition with elegance and professionalism.

“Are You Ready to Enjoy Massive Sales and Profits From Speaking Live or on Teleseminars?”

Then listen to Lisa, the master in action, on this teleseminar: “Authentic Selling Secrets: How To Be Yourself, Have Fun and Sell a Ton on Stages and in Tele-seminars,” this Wednesday.

(In a hurry? Grab your seat here.)

I have met Lisa and I have The Invisible Close. Her free calls are content-rich and loaded with the EXACT strategies she uses and tons of “how to’s” you can implement immediately.

I’m going to be on that call to hear Lisa model her own strategies for selling. She’ll be promoting the upcoming launch of her “Big Mission, Big Sales, Big Life Virtual Bootcamp.”

Here’s that link again to reserve your spot in this complimentary teleclass.

http://bit.ly/bIuXxU

P.S. Tell me if this changes your entire approach to public speaking and gives you myriad new ideas for lead-gen using teleseminars.

P.P.S. Feel free to invite friends and colleagues to this call, but please remember to reserve YOUR spot first!

http://bit.ly/bIuXxU

P.P.P.S — The call is free, and there is no obligation to buy ever, but if you ever do, know that I’m an affiliate of Lisa’s (which means I truly believe in the value of what she does and if you buy something I do get a commission).

Lisa has offered my followers a $50 discount off The Invisible Close. You must go to http://www.theinvisibleclose.com/dishy to see the discount or use Promo Code DISHY at check out.

Do You Have What It Takes To Be An Information Product Marketer?

So what we’re talking about here is the business model for information products. Information products are any collection of content that is, it goes beyond a book and it typically teaches you a system, a strategy and provides a solution to a problem or a business opportunity. And when a person has a unique skill and you’ve been trained and you’re credentialed, there is a greater revenue opportunity for you to do more than just offer a book or an e-book on the Internet. If your knowledge can benefit from being communicated via a “system,” using a collection of audio, video, workbooks and e-books, it lends itself to becoming an information product. Consider the possibility of it being a virtual downloadable series of assets as well as ultimately becoming a tangible product, something that you could ship to someone, like a book with a DVD series.  I recommend that people start with a virtual product and tweak it a lot before they actually turn it into any physical goods. Best is to sell five thousand copies of something before you make a tangible item.

An Active, Not Passive, Revenue Stream

If you’re thinking about becoming an information product marketer, then you would want to consider this set of outcomes. You would be thinking about this not as a passive revenue stream, but as an active revenue stream in that, yes it will be sold while you’re sleeping or on vacation or out in your garden, and it will also take a focused amount of your effort to create a channel of opportunity and revenue for yourself, even with business partners like Personal Life Media. We don’t do it all for you. You have to be pretty committed to doing a lot of work yourself to build a business with an active revenue stream. So what I also want to do in addition to explaining the model to you is to give you some food for thought about whether the work that this would take is really the work you want to do in the world.

Consistent & Extensible Product Ideas

The other thing that’s important is that whatever you create has to be extensible and sustainable. When people create information products about things like social media technologies they have to constantly update them. So creating something that’s a more long-term product that doesn’t need to be constantly updated is the right thing for information products. If you’re in a world where it’s a constantly changing thing, it’s probably better to be a blogger or a consultant. (And I don’t think it’s very easy to make money blogging, in general.)

Bring Others To Completion

The other thing is that creating your own information product is that it should expand your reputation. This should be something, like writing a book, that gives you even more credibility. The other thing that’s really important for Tim and I at PLM is that when we create products we like those products to bring others to completion. We’re very interested in personal and professional growth oriented content that teaches people to be even better than they are today. That’s unique to our professional ethos, but in many ways I think it’s potentially unique to the information product world too. IM’ers trying to solve problems and/or teach people things.  I challenge you to think about how what you know and can offer is unique, solves and problem and is a natural fit for being taught in a multi-modal way —with ebooks, workbooks (exercises/practices), audio and video. That justifies the higher prices of ebooks/information products versus printed books.

The Network Effect

We have been creating groups of people who work together to launch products in a mastermind group so that everyone gets ideas and cross-support from each other. They cross-promote each others products, they get ideas from each other, they cry on each others shoulders, and I typically have in the past linked like-minded IM creators together. When I have 8 people I take through the process simultaneously, we’ll do weekly group calls and I’ll put two-two-two-two teams together and go with strengths and weaknesses or similar product, so that everyone has a partner and you’re not completely alone. So those are some of the things that I think about when I’m talking to someone – would they be a good partner, would they be available to their partner, are they going to be able to be part of an ongoing process, four or five months worth of work to create their content, are they going to have the appetite to be a marketer of their own content after the fact. If they’re thinking they’re going to set it, forget it and it’s just going to sell itself, they won’t be a good partner for us or for themselves.

The Business Model for Information Products

Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing has a great concept of a business model for an info marketer. In his Nitro Blueprint product, he says there are four quadrants:  1) a front-end, 2) a continuity program or membership site, 3) the upsell product and 4) the post sell product or service. These different components could be called anything, but I like Kevin’s model and Kevin as a great human being.

Let me give you more detail about these four parts of the Nitro Blueprint model. [Note: The prices ranges I’ve mentioned are just examples – you can charge what ever your competitive market analysis will allow you to demand.]

• The Front End is typically a single eBook. Simple, cheap, high-value. Typically $17-$97.
• The Continuity Program or Membership Site is expanded, educational content that costs more and can be sold as an annual membership fee or a montly recurring charge for access to content that is dripped out over time. Typically $20-$300 a month or an annual fee ranging from $47-$2000.
• Upsell is a home study course or a single product you download to your desktop or a DVD series or similar that is shipped to you. This can range in cost from $47-$5000 or more.
• The Post Sell is often an even larger purchase – a suite of products, events, offline interaction, coaching or similar. Post Sell often includes access directly to the expert.

A lot of people think that if you’re an information product marketer you have an e-book. That’s a myth! What I didn’t realize when I got into the IM business is that the ebook is the loss leader. You create your ebook as the on ramp to your higher priced products —your continuity/membership, upsell and post sell products… You give 50-75% of the revenue generated from your ebook to your affiliates and JV partners to get the leads to upsell into your higher priced products. And if you’re smart, you also give your affiliates or JV partners a revenue share on those upsells too.  A long-term cookie is key to taking care of your partners.

So How Do I Make Money? The Front End

Here is how the business model of information product marketing actually generates income for you. The front-end, lets just take your e-book. You sell it for, yours is $12.95 – you can sell them for any price, even $100 dollars, anywhere in that range, whatever’s appropriate for the market. Business books sell for more than personal books. Professional growth sells for more than personal growth. Making money sells for more, a lot more, than hobbies. So if you were to think about putting your expertise in an e-book as your front-end you’d also want to think about how you could teach others to do it so that they could make money and how you make money and how you run your business. So the first thing you have is a front-end.

Continuity Income

The second thing you have is called continuity income. This is where you actually create a website and you teach people on a monthly or a weekly basis more and more information. You provide more and more value. It can be what’s called a drip system where each week or each month they get a new, you know, bit of content that’s worth $20, $30, $40, $50 dollars, $100, $150, $200 dollars a month, depending on the vertical market. So what you’re actually doing – and this is kind of like a blog. It’s essentially a blog that’s private where you can post audio, video and text and PDF’s and downloads to your customers so that they have access, behind the scenes access, to content that they’re paying you for. You can send out email newsletters to drive them back to this content, you can conduct interviews with other people in your business or people who’ve had success doing what you do, or people who know things about your business that you don’t know so that you can provide that content to them. And you can also have a membership site in this area, in this continuity area, where people join and they talk to each other, not just to you —a forum or maybe like an old school bulletin board kind of thing. So this is a place where they come and they get billed monthly to be part of the experience of being associated with your knowledge.

The Upsell

Then there’s also something called an upsell. Your customers might be paying $20 or $30 dollars a month to have information, but lets just say you have an entire system, like a home study course that teaches them everything. You’d want to move some of the people from your continuity or your membership site into the full tilt boogie stuff that you have, that might cost $300 to $1000, $2000, $3000 dollars depending on what market place you’re in. So that upsell. The idea is that people come in through your front-end, very low priced, and then you convert them as customers primarily through email marketing into your membership site where you teach them things every month, ‘cause sometimes things are so complex that you can’t learn it all at once. Then you can upsell them into an even bigger more comprehensive program.

The Post Sell

And then the final piece of it is this idea that the Kevin Wilke at Nitro Marketing calls a post sell, which is access to you – coaching, workshops, events, webinars. These can be virtual or IRL – In Real Life – or a combination of those things. That is in the $500 to $2500, $5000 dollar range, to have access to you. So what you’re doing is building this big funnel where the front-end, the cheap thing, has lots of people, and as you get down the funnel to the most expensive things, you have a smaller group of people paying more money.

When you think about marketing your product you also have to think about how you’re going to create that funnel and parse your content. How you’re going lay your knowledge into this model is the key to success in information product marketing. (Along with targeting and buying traffic that converts profitably.)

I highly recommend you get the free two part series from Nitro Blueprint here.

Marketing Strategy in Information Products

The best marketing scenario is a combination of SEO (your site for your product optimized so Google can put it in the organic search results), PPC, affordable display advertising, email marketing, social marketing, PR 2.0 outreach, affiliate marketing and working with joint venture partners. The multiplier effect works particularly well in the affiliate and JV world.

You benefit from having all of your affiliates and your joint venture partners promoting it to their lists and on their sites and in their auto-responder series. You want to reach out to other online marketers who are compatible with your product, anybody who’s in the world of your category, whatever it might be, and you can think of 20 different categories where the people who follow them might be interested in following you, the people who learn that stuff might be interested in learning what you teach. And you want them to market your e-book to their followers. And then those followers buy the product and become your leads for upselling into your monthly program or your home study course or your coaching and workshops. And you’re giving away 75 percent of the cost of your e-book, so the $27 dollar e-book is creating value for your affiliates. She makes 75 percent of the fee. It makes it worth it for her. If she knows she’s going to make $25 dollars every time she does get a sale it’s worth it to her. If it’s a $12.95 e-book and she makes $6 bucks, she’s not going to do it. This is how you build your list because the real money comes from the monthly residuals that you get from your continuity system, your membership site and upselling them into the home study courses and having workshops with them.

Using PPC and Affiliate Marketing

The way that an info product marketer sells his products in addition to affiliates is most often through Google Pay Per Click— buying tens of thousands of keyword phrases that are in your area of scope, and having an automated customized ad campaign that goes with that. There are many affiliate and super affiliates who will also market your product for you with PPC, so if you don’t want to do it yourself, you might find others willing to do it for you.

You must also be registered with an affiliate network like ClickBank, Commision Junction, Share A Sale… When you are working with affiliates as part of an affiliate network, anybody can come in and grab your ad banners and your text links, and whenever they put those on their website or send an email out they sell product that’s linked back to them so they make the revenue, it’s all done through links, tagged links that track the clicks and the purchases back to the person that originally found that customer. So you need an affiliate infrastructure system.

At Personal Life Media, we have created our own, private affiliate network called RevShareNow. http://revsharenow.com.  That way, any of our partners can sign up at our network and get their links, banners, email swipe copy and myriad other content assets useful for promoting our products.

JV Partnerships are slightly different than affiliate relationships – often deeper, more integrated.

You might provide unique content for their blogs or you might have a joint venture partner mail out a series of emails to get people to buy your e-book and then give them the revenue. So all of that fills your database with prospects for your higher priced products.

You can also do PR and social influence marketing efforts such as appearing on talk radio and podcasts, you can write e-zine articles, you can blog with links, you can get interviewed by bloggers, you can put out press releases, you can Twitter, you can have a Facebook fan page, you can put images up on Flickr that have your URL on them that link back to your sales page. There are a million ways that you can create a marketing campaign that drives people back to your sales pages.

So when people think about information products, it’s not “Oh, I wrote an e-book and put it up on my website and I don’t even know how to drive traffic to it.” It means you must focus on building out an entire system of content. So what kind of content?

Problem Solution Set Up

Your product line should be oriented toward a problem and solution. What are people searching for on Google? What is their pain point? How can you solve it?

Or another way to look at it is “business opportunity.”

In your world it could be one or the other, and these are the kinds of products that people are creating – Every Other Day Diet,  Sugar Free Diet, How To Get Her Naked, Burn The Fat, Vertical Jump Training, Dirt Cheap Airfare Secrets, Lose Man Boobs – I love that one, so funny. So the idea is that you’re providing a solution in the title of your book. And you’re explaining what that is and it’s a benefit. You’re selling a solution, you’re selling a benefit. Or you’re targeting something very specifically, like Muscle Nerd Fitness. There’s a segment: nerds who want to bulk up.

That’s where you start. Or it could be a 7 Figure Success Formula For The Digital Photographer, or it could be Pay Per Click Mastery Blueprint. So there are the business-side of things too. Start Your Own Dowsing Business and Earn a Six Figure Income.

Platform, Technologies and Infrastructure

So the reason that it’s so hard for people to get into this business and do well is that it’s very technically complex. You have to be able to generate multiple landing pages for your products so that different market segments might come in and read something about your product, and it might be the same product in the back end, but solve different problems for different people. You have to have a really good email database for your auto responders, the emails that automatically are sent out to people. When someone buys your e-book, they should get a series of auto responders that upsell them into your membership program.

We provide a network, a social network, for other information product marketers where all of the people that we publish, all of our experts that we provide all this technical support for, can go into this network and talk to each other.

• We buy some services once and distribute them across all of our products, like the Better Business Bureau logo, so you don’t have to spend $500 dollars a year having a Better Business Bureau logo on your site.
• We have an image library where you can get stock images and not have to pay for them.
• We have our own affiliate network where all of those awesome affiliates and JV partners can go and sign up to become your affiliate and grab links and ad banners right from there that track their sales, so we pay them for you and deliver you a check each month on all your sales.
• We have hosting services, and we also help you secure domain names ‘cause you’ll often want to have multiple domain names for the different parts of your products.
• We also do the Pay Per Click Google AdWords campaigns for you.
• We also make all the ad banners for your affiliates, for your product.
• We have the ability to do audio recording and video recording and editing.
• We have a download locker where your contents go so people can’t come online and steal it in any way.
• And in addition now to PayPal E-Commerce Integration we are building out our own shopping cart that will accept a lot of different merchant capabilities.
• And we also have ad serving capabilities so we can serve ads into other networks and things like that, and into our own network on Personal Life Media where we get about 50,000 visitors a month who are interested in the kind of content that we produce.

We have assembled together the entire technical backend infrastructure, we’ve selected the products and woven them together in a way that works for our experts to use those systems to market their products. Now we handle most of the technical side of generating revenue for your information products.

Mostly what our experts do is the writing – and there’s a lot of writing – and a lot of their own self-promotion. But we provide the structure, the direction, help you figure out what to create, show you how to create it, what the components are, help you produce it, and then put it into this network of places where it needs to live so people can buy it and pay for it and market it and find out about it.

So if you want to either teach people how to learn your expertise or you think that there’s a nice membership site that you have ability to do and webinars that enough people would be willing to pay for then you might have a product line.  You can either teach people to either learn what you know at a personal level or even better use what you can teach them at a professional level to generate revenue.

I hope that helped you understand better the complexities of being in the information product marketing world and how what you can teach might fit into the model that is currently working and always evolving online.

Dr. Robert Cialdini, Bob, is a superhero to the throngs of copy writers, landing page tweakers, affiliate marketers and info product mavens worldwide.

His insights about human behavior with respect to persuasion and influence are renowned. He’s the kingpin of motivational strategy. If you haven’t yet read his two books, Influence: Science and Practice and YES!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, they are must-reads. You’ll find yourself, highlighter and pen in hand, coming up with all kinds of nuances for your current web and email copy and ad strategies.

Bob is keynoting at Affiliate Summit, one of DishyMix’s sponsors, so I was perfectly aligned to book him as a guest. Here’s a brief excerpt from the audio interview. This is one of a series of pearls that are simple and powerful. I hope you’ll not only listen to the whole show, but you’ll pass it around to your team and marketing peers in other organizations.

As well, I’m almost as 1,000 DishyMix Fans on my Facebook page. If you are not yet a fan, will you please become one? I give away all kinds of great schwag to fans.

Here’s the excerpt about taking advantage of a critical moment of power in a business exchange:

Susan Bratton: How do you avoid bundling critical moments of power? There’s this moment of power and often we undermine ourselves, we’ve gotten people to a certain point and then we take a wrong action and blow up the ground we’ve taken.

Dr. Robert Cialdini: Right. I’ll give you an example that has to do with the rule for reciprocity for instance. There is a moment of power that we are afforded as soon as someone has said “Thank you.” What do you do with the moment after “Thank you”?

Susan Bratton: Well you don’t act like a sandbagger, I can tell you that from reading your work. You come in strong.

Dr. Robert Cialdini: That’s right. You don’t say, “Hey, and now you owe me one sister.” Right. What you say is “I was glad to do it because I know if the situation were ever reversed, you’d do the same for me.” You reach into the future…

Susan Bratton: Future pacing. Yeah, with that moment. You don’t try to develop the yes in that moment. You frame that moment so it empowers a future moment when you do need that persons help.

Susan Bratton: “Hey, it was my pleasure. Anytime, if it were me in the future and the tables were turned, I know you’d do the same for me.”
Dr. Robert Cialdini: Exactly. And there’s one other thing that you can say, and that is “Of course. It’s what partners do.”

Susan Bratton: Ah. So you’ve moved them into a new position with you of being a partner.

Dr. Robert Cialdini: And then add the addendum “for one another” – “It’s what partners do for one another” – so you’re not just characterizing yourself as a vessel of resources that you’re pouring into somebody else’s tank. No. “It’s what partners do for one another.”

Susan Bratton: Very nice! You’re setting up the inherent reciprocity.

Dr. Robert Cialdini: Exactly right.

Listen now via streaming or subscribe to iTunes or download the mp3 file to your portable device.

Robert Cialdini on Persuasive Marketing in Times of Uncertainty and Amplifying and Activating Influence Strategies

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I read a lot of books in preparation for my DishyMix show each week. I’ve amassed a whopper stack and I would like to send DishyMix listeners a copy of any book you want.

Just post your desire on the DishyMix Fan Page and make sure to email me your physical address.

I’ll mail it out to you.

The Age of Engage    Denise Shiffman
Boom    Mary Brown & Carol Osborn, Ph.D.
Click    Bill Tancer
Connection Generation    Iggy Pintado
Digital Outlook Report    Razorfish
The Dip    Seth Godin
The Element    Ken Robinson, Ph.D.
The Frugal Millionaires    Jeff Lehman
The Gort Cloud    Richard Seireeni
Groundswell    Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody    Clay Shirky
Honest Seduction    Scott Brinker, Anna Talerico & Justin Talerico
Ignited    Vince Thompson
The Leap    Bob Schmetterer
Open Brand    Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D.
Peak    Chip Conley
The Perfection of Marketing    James Connor
Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends    Pete Blackshaw
Search Engine Optimization    Rebecca Lieb
Stopping Identity Theft    Scott Mitic
Trust Agents    Chris Brogan
Who’s Got Your Back    Keith Ferrazzi
Word of Mouth Marketing    Andy Sernovitz

Thanks for listening to the show!

Simon Van Wyk: Host of Hothouse Interactive Podcasts carried these books back to Sydney during his recent trip to SF.

Simon Van Wyk

Brand Digital Allen P. Adamson
Branding Only Works on Cattle Jonathan Salem Baskin
Click Bill Tancer
Revolutionary Wealth Alvin & Heidi Toffler
Rubies in the Orchard Lynda Resnick
Saddle Up Your Own White Horse Saundra Pelletier

DishyMix episode 72: Simon Van Wyk, Australian Media Expert on “Lessons Learned” from DishyMix Guests: Blogs, Search, Social Media, ROI and Marketing as Conversation

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Celia Francis, WeeWorld.com

Celia Francis
CEO

WeeWorld

Favorite Web Aps of European Entrepreneurs from Traveling Geeks Trip

This is sixth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the sixth response, from Celia Francis, founder of WeeWorld in the UK.

Celia’s List:

Kodakgallery.com (used to be Ofoto in the olden days) – I post photos every month for my extended family in the UK and across the pond.
Facebook and LinkedIn – For the usual social/professional fun.
WeeWorld.com – Of course! WeeWorld is one of the most popular browser-based social games or virtual worlds for young teens.
Skype – So my kids can video chat with my parents.
Google Maps – To see exactly where I am going.
Etsy.com – Pure love of handmade items and beautiful design gets me back to this site all the time
Wolfram Alpha – Actually quite useful. It gave me the average temperature in Almeria, Spain in February. Graph and all! I like Bing too – much prettier than Google.

Image by sekhmet1776 via Flickr

Image by SusanBratton via Flickr

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Favorite Web Aps of European Entrepreneurs from Traveling Geeks Trip

This is fifth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the fifth response, from Jack Lang, EIR at University of Cambridge, Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Jack is also the author of  “The High Tech Entrepreneur’s Handbook.”

Jack recommends Worldcard mobile. He saw this post of mine:

If CardScan, CaptureTalk and MagicSolver Had a Baby…

Jack says, “I’ve been using Worldcard mobile, and while not perfect (the OCR often needs some manual editing, and it would be nice to add pix and logos ) it has the advantage of capturing the business card then and there. It integrates to Outlook address book, which can then propagate.”

http://worldcard.penpowerinc.com/worldcard-mobile-standard.html

This is fourth in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the third response, from, Andraz Tori, Founder of Zemanta, my favorite new ap.

Andraz Tori

Founder of Zemanta, a blogger's best friend

Andraz’s List:

Here are the coolest web apps by my standards:

s3:// a firefox extension. Simple yet powerful browser through your S3
data store/backup.

Google’s ‘essential’ Pack – Docs, Calc, Reader, Calendar, Blog Search
and Search
Sharing docs, data and news items has never been so easy and so useful!

Pearltrees This has been shown to me when I was in Paris. This is cool,
and sexy and I have absolutely no idea how to use it.

And naturally Zemanta, blogger’s best friend
Easy and simple.
My wider observation is that I don’t go and “use apps”. I go and “do tasks” which happen to include a mix of apps.
Now if I only could drop the requirement to “go to” certain web applications and those tools would instead seamlessly come to me wherever I am and whenever I need them…

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This is third in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. They are digging up some fun new things which may be new to you.

I’ve queried some of my favorite new friends from Amsterdam, London and Cambridge about the tools they love. Here’s the third response, from Alan Moore, Founder of Small Medium Large ExtraLarge Limited.

Alan Moore

Follow Alan on Twitter @alansmlxl

Read the SMLXL weblog on marketing communications innovation

Alan’s List

Noteflight is a great musical collaboration tool

Scrivner for organising chaotic ideas for writing

Novamind for mind mapping

The BBC iPlayer – what a media player should be

I just had the most amazing photos taken by Lesley Bohm, LA celebrity photographer. I’m working on some new information products to follow Talk Show Tips and wanted to update my “look” to my current styles.

I met Lesley at a Mastermind event and we hit it off. Once I saw her work, I realized I couldn’t live with anything less. Lesley is a celebrity portrait photographer. She LOVES to connect with people and make them look beautiful.

Lesley and Susan

Since so much of our contact is made online now, it’s more important than ever to have images that reflect who you are and bring out the best in you.

Here are some images from my shoot and photos of Lesley’s studio and of her working with another client.

New M&A Report from John H. Doyle II: Managing Director & Founder, Peachtree Media Advisors, Inc.

Web aps and mobile had most significant growth. Social media had largest decline in M&A deals.

John Doyle II, Peachtree Media Advisors

Here is a 2009 Mid Year Digital Media M&A Report summarizing digital media transactions in the first half of 2009.

Click here to download.

According to John:

“Although the first half of the year was lackluster for digital media M&A when compared to the first half of 2008, keep in mind that interactive media deal-making did not fall off the proverbial cliff last year until Google missed their numbers in July 2008 and the infamous Sequoia presentation.  At that point, everyone in the digital media sector felt susceptible to the effects of the economic downturn (previously thinking it was a newspaper/television problem).”

“On a relative basis, we expect the extreme opposite case for deal-making in the 3rd and 4th Quarters of 2009 versus 2008 because of the heavy drop-off in the latter part of 2008.  Expect a significant increase in the next two quarters versus the same two quarters in 2008, which is a good thing.  Only note that the steep gains are due to the drastic fall off in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2008 when the following headline appears “M&A Increases 400% in Q4 2009 versus Q4 2008!”

Listen to John on DishyMix.

John Doyle, Peachtree Media Advisors on Digital Media M&A, 2008 Capital Raises and Social Media Co’s Out of Biz