Archive | Blog

The Streisand effect is the name given for a phenomena that can be used for good or evil – for your own advantage or against you.

In 2003 Barbra Streisand’s lawyer sent a cease and desist letter to the California Coastal Records Project regarding an aerial photo of her Malibu beach mansion on the website. The website operators rejected that letter and all follow up letters and the Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed the frivolous suit.

Here’s what happened: The previously little-known CCRP website includes more than 12 THOUSAND overlapping aerial photos of the entire California coastline. Plus they house an additional 55,000 photos that date back as far as 1972.

Streisand was upset that her mansion was visible in one of these 67,000 aerial shots.

Had she done nothing, likely no one would have ever noticed or cared. But because of the lawsuit, now everyone has heard about the site and the photo. Today, you can find that exact photo distributed all over the Internet.

Anytime anything is censored on the Internet, it’s immediately picked up by other websites. Get it removed from one site, it shows up on 10 new sites. Get it removed from those, and it’s on a hundred sites and in the news.

Banned books become highly popular. Movies that get protested see box office surges. Comedians, musicians and magazine publishers prosecuted for “obscenity” become folk heroes. (Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison and Larry Flint, for example.)

Watergate wouldn’t have made much more than a ripple if it hadn’t been covered up. But six months of lies brought down an entire presidency.

The examples are prolific and you can find more of them here: rationalwiki.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Now then – why is this important to you and your business?

Two reasons. First, it can bite you if you’re not careful. Is there something you don’t want known? Did someone say something really rotten about you or your business that people could believe? Then it might be in your best interest not to make a big deal of it.

In the same vein – did you make a major mistake? Rather than trying to cover it up, it might be best to admit it immediately so it never becomes an Internet sensation.

Second reason and food for thought: How can you use the Streisand Effect to build your business?

Every year PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) submits an over-the-top TV advertisement for inclusion in the Super Bowl. It’s often highly sexually-suggestive, and usually the network flat out refuses to run it.

PETA lets it be known their commercial was banned, and overnight it becomes an internet sensation. And they didn’t have to pay the outrageous Super Bowl ad fee, either. Now that’s smart.

Greenpeace wrote a pamphlet critical of McDonald’s. McDonald’s sued and the case was in the news for over 10 years; the longest libel trial in English history. Thanks to the lawsuit, that little pamphlet and its contents became famous.

And the icing on the cake was when the court ruled the activists had not engaged in libel – now the claims McDonald’s fought to suppress had the tacit backing of the English courts.

Books, albums and movies that are banned by churches, religious groups and so forth nearly always see their sales skyrocket with the ensuing publicity.

Are you getting any ideas? I can’t give you a step-by-step here on what you might do – that depends entirely on your business. But you might keep the Streisand Effect in mind.

Sooner or later you’ll find an honest and ethical opportunity to use it to your advantage, and it’s up to you to grab that opportunity when it happens.

Rosa Parks was a woman, a relatively ordinary black passenger on a bus going into town one day in 1955. At this time, black people had to give up their seats on public transport for the white passenger; a rule that most followed to keep the peace. But not Rosa.

One day, she had had enough. Her mission was to encourage the civil rights of black people in her community and she felt that this rule was both unfair and demeaning to her cause. So when the bus driver got angry and told her to give up her seat for a white person, as was normal – she did something unheard of. She said no.

This small message to the people around her was the sparking of the Civil Rights Movement and was a key action in the future equality that stemmed from this fight.

Sometimes, in life, you have to be congruent with what you want others to see and experience. Sometimes your business name is not nearly as important as what you stand for. In fact, a well – written or explained mission statement can be the most vital part of your marketing strategy and it can change customer loyalty.

For example, the first store branded as “Trader Joe’s” opened in 1967. This Californian store, despite having a very unexciting name quintupled the number of its stores between 1990 and 2001, and multiplied its profits by ten. Trader Joe’s sales for 2009 was estimated at $8 billion.

In 2010, Fortune magazine estimated Trader Joe’s sales per square foot of floor space to be $1,750 — more than double that generated byWhole Foods Market even though technically they were much bigger with more advertising coverage. Why? Because they had a very clever mission statement that customers believed in and backed. Their statement was this:

“The mission of Trader Joe’s is to give our customers the best food and beverage values that they can find anywhere and to provide them with the information required to make informed buying decisions. We provide these with a dedication to the highest quality of customer satisfaction delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, fun, individual pride, and company spirit.”

This statement puts the customer and the customer experience central to the reason that they do business and their customer service policies back that up.

If you wish to succeed online in the same way, you must ensure that no matter how small you are or what product/service you may be selling – that you include a mission statement. One that shows the potential clients what you stand for, what you wish to achieve for them and how you plan to do so. This makes you believable, it gives you value and shows that you have ethics.

Not every online business has a mission statement. They think they don’t need one. They focus all their energy on branding, naming and selling their products and forget that being personal and driven in a very transparent way can absolutely double or triple your profits.

If you are one of these brands that have not yet developed a mission statement – I suggest you get working on one. It is also good to help you understand where you are at and where you want to go. Research some of the most effective mission statements and see what the biggest companies are portraying on their websites and through their ad campaigns to generate inspiration for your own mission.

People like to buy from genuine businesses who know and are congruent with what they are doing. It makes you unique to your message and shows people that you are not all about making money – you have some aims and objectives too that are very important and should be known.

If one black woman on a bus can spark an entire change in the world, who’s to say that your well designed mission statement won’t change the face of how you do business and how important you become to the customer?

Yes, you can work like a horse, make all kinds of big plans, stay up late and get up early. But if your head isn’t in the right place, you’ll never get ahead. It’s really that simple.

A second job? Forget about it. Unless that second job is digging gold bricks out of the ground, you’ll never get ahead. Lack of sleep, lack of a life, an abundance of stress, poor eating – the last thing you need is a second job.

And you know it. It’s why you’ve got your own online business or you’re starting one. So is mindset even important? Shouldn’t you be concentrating exclusively on the mechanics of your business?

The fact is this: Without the proper mindset, the mechanics really won’t amount to much. If you don’t believe you can do something then the odds of you actually accomplishing it are slim. And if you do momentarily succeed, your own self-sabotage will reverse that victory in a hurry.

Here then are 5 money mindset hacks you MUST have to permanently increase your income in a dramatic, gratifying fashion:

Believe in yourself and your abilities.

To say this is key is an understatement. If you don’t believe in yourself, you will actively find ways to fail, whether you realize you’re doing it or not.

We all deal with being vulnerable, feeling uncertain and fearing failure. But you’ve got to trust that by moving forward despite these feelings, you’ll figure it out. It’s a matter of stacking small victories one on top of the other. Each victory should give you some small boost in confidence that you can use to earn the next victory, and so forth.

This is why having a big hairy goal often doesn’t work – you don’t believe you can accomplish it because you’ve never done anything like it before. But if you break that big hairy goal down into tiny simple goals, and then accomplish them one by one, soon you will believe that yes, you truly can do anything you set your mind to.

Lose your money blocks.

If you’re perpetually short of money, you’ve likely been programmed to have a negative relationship with it. During your childhood you heard things like, “Rich people are crooks,” and “Money is the root of all evil.”

Two things you can do to lose your money blocks are…

Reprogram yourself. The subconscious believes whatever it hears over and over again. To reprogram your subconscious takes work, but it’s worth it. When you think, “I have to work hard to make money,” correct yourself with a statement such as, “It is so easy and fun to earn money.” Choose 2 or 3 positive affirmations and turn them into mantras that you say to yourself throughout your day and as you fall asleep.

Find friends who are good at making money. Connect with others who are on the same entrepreneurial path you’re on. Talking to, relating to and being around people who easily make money will help you to see it’s alright for you to make money as well.

Declutter your life.

This one is simple – if you have a lot of useless stuff lying around your office, your home and your car, you don’t have room for the abundance you’re seeking. You don’t have room to grow. Money loves speed, clarity and clear space. It hates clutter. Get rid of everything in your life that serves no purpose and organize the rest.

Be ever so grateful.

Let go of resentments. Forgive positively everybody of everything, with no exceptions. Holding resentments only hurts yourself – it doesn’t hurt the person you refuse to forgive. And be grateful for everything you have in your life, as well as those things about to come into your life.

Forgive yourself for your financial past.

The person you most need to forgive is yourself. And you might have to do it over and over again. Forgiveness is a funny thing – today you forgive yourself, tomorrow you’re berating yourself again for the less-than-wise decisions you made.

Any time you find yourself beating yourself up, forgive yourself. You did the best you could at the time. Remind yourself that the past can never be undone, and you can’t live there, either. But you do have today, so make it count.

Now, most readers will nod their heads at what they just read and forget about it. But a few – perhaps you – will take this advice to heart and begin making the changes necessary to realize your financial goals.

For you, this could be the start of a whole new financial life – one of abundance.