At present we’re in Sydney (home tomorrow) for PrintEx07, and staying at the Somerset Serviced Apartments in Darling Harbour. Nice place, very well appointed (try not to get a low-floor though facing Druitt Street, a little noisy on weekend nights!).

So all is nice… except for the cost of access to broadband and modem-speed internet.

Thankfully, we’re on broadband, which “only” costs $24.95 per day (albeit the same high as we just paid at Legends Hotel on the Gold Coast for the last 2 days). That’s only $748 per month — for a 200Mb per day download limit.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic: at $748 per month, the cost is sky-high.

But if you think that’s bad — try modem pricing: access calls costs $0.95 per minute. They cap that fee at $20 per day (or a whopping $600 per month) for dial-up phone line access. Then you pay your ISP on top of that (probably only $5 a month!).

But that $20 cap is only for local calls. Dialling anywhere else, you pay $1.10 per minute and it’s not capped. A 1-hour phone call — for slow-speed modem access — would cost you a staggering $66 — over twice the cost of broadband, but only a fraction of the speed. We’ve been online about 5 hours today — if we were dialing a non-Sydney modem number, that’d cost an outrageous $330 per day… or $9,900 per month.

For modem line access.

Lucky it’s not an international number: that’s 400% of the same cost!

Thankfully those costs aren’t universal. Some accommodation is literally switched-on for technology users. We stayed in Surfers Paradise at apartments with hard-wired ADSL 2+ service (no extra cost, it was part of the regular rate), and they’re soon upgrading that to full wireless access. But I didn’t mind plugging in a network cable for that. Sure, we were limited to 500Mb traffic (counted both up and down the line) — but, as I was doing a large mailout of 16-page personalised pdf files, I needed to buy and extra 1Gb of traffic — for an extra cost only $10. Comparatively, that’s nothing.

That’s actually a great service in comparison to what is here at the Somerset apartments and the Legend hotel, who are still in dinosaur land for broadband pricing. But at least we have broadband here: some hotels don’t even offer that. Even at the Legend, with plug-in ethernet in the room, wireless was available on ground level and in the foyer — but, amazingly, didn’t work in the conference rooms on level 1.

I’m sure eventually there WILL be a day when hotels “get real” about the internet. And those services will arrive in a city-wide fashion — high speed free wireless — but not yet! If you need broadband on the road, it still requires research (and a hefty budget).

Whatever association you want to wrap around ‘The Secret’ as a presentation of the Law of Attraction — or how much you understand or believe it — all I can take is my own experience of specific times in my life when my thoughts have manifested an outcome that can hardly be explained by logic or reasoning.

• The big example for me is the time when camping with family, we became “rained in” and I decided to walk into town to look for help. Town was about 58km away. To break it down, we had 6km of waterlogged paddocks to cross, a 21km stock route to finally meet the main road to town (Moulamein NSW). For about a dozen years we’d been camping in the area, and, although I didn’t go into town all that much, I know that the stock route was very little travelled — no wonder it was full of potholes and just a single lane country route.

  To jump to what happened, my cousin Peter came with me and the paddocks took quite some time to get through, as footing was pretty slippery. We finally got to the stock route, it had been raining all the time and we were glad for a firm surface. But here’s the key. We’d been on the stock route for no longer than about 5 minutes when I heard a car coming along. It was a ute with two young guys in it, been out the night before and were using the stock route as a shortcut home. Not only could they give us a lift (and I got to sit in the back tray of the ute, under the tarp with a farm dog and her pups) — but they actually gave us a lift all the way into town — more than 50km.

  Had we come along 10 minutes later, the car would have been gone before we got to the stock route. Whatever you want to call it, the law of attraction came true on that day. We got to town, and less than 24 hours later we were all on the way home.

• There are 4 specific times I can easily recall where I have driven my car to a town, suburb or place I’d never been to before, and found exactly the place I needed, without extra time driving around, without looking at a map or without planning in advance.

  The first time I ever drove to Sunbury, I needed to go to the printers to pick up some business cards. Not only did I drive into the right street, but I parked, and then looked around to find where the printer might be. The shop was right in front of my car, without consciously planning it!

  The same thing happened driving from Sunbury (where I ended up living for six years) to Dandenong. If you know Melbourne, you know they’re a long way from each other. I drove to a computer store, found the right street and parked right out the front without deliberately thinking about it. It also happened in Geelong when looking for a particular store (first time driving through, finding the street and getting a park literally out the front — right in the middle of Geelong’s CBD). And it also happened once when I needed to drive to Station Pier — it was like I was nearly driving on auto pilot — without ever having driven to that place before (or having been a passenger for any of these examples).

The example that David Schirmer uses in The Secret presentation is right — not just about car parking — and these are specific times I know when the law of attraction worked for me.

Whether it’s psychology, creative visualisation, deliberate NLP techniques, creative processes like what is explained in the Secret — however you describe it, the law of attraction abounds.

Many months ago we registered for this week’s PrintEx expo in Sydney.

From a customer point of view, the reason to pre-register is to avoid hassles at the expo — you get your badge in advance, and can avoid the queues and paperwork of having to register at the door. The conference organiser promises to mail you out your badge early, and in return they also save on the manpower needed at the door, and also know in advance there are people planning to come along!

We even got a phone call (one each), two weeks before the event to remind us that we’re registered, and to check we’re still coming.

So, by the time we leave Melbourne for Sydney (only 3 business days before the expo starts) — the badges have NOT arrived!

That means we’ll still have to queue up to get our badge at the event (although we do have a barcoded registration page to save re-filling out paperwork) — but the conference organiser has to pay extra in 4 ways:

• Extra staff costs are required to process visitors who didn’t get their name badges in advance
• That also means extra costs for registration equipment (badge machines, computer terminals, booth setups)
• The badges they send out in advance are also wasted — staff, badge, processing time and equipment, postage — as they hadn’t arrived in time before travelling
• And finally, the customer experience is not as good because of the frustration in not receiving a promised badge early, and having to take extra time once arriving at the venue

Perhaps there is a trade-off between sending badges out too early — and visitors losing/misplacing them — and sending them out too late — and visitors, especially from interstate and overseas (this expo receives plenty in that category), not receiving them in time before their travel commences.

Would it then be worth having two mailout periods, one for local pre-registered visitors and one for interstate/overseas pre-registered visitors?

Lesson: keep the customer’s point-of-view in mind! Think about the steps they take to get to your event, and how to fit in to suit the majority of them.

According to Dennison Hatch, here are the eight copy drivers — the “emotional hot buttons” that make people act:

1. fear
2. greed
3. guilt
4. anger
5. exclusivity
6. salvation
7. flattery, and
8. patriotism

Keep these hot buttons in mind as you create your copy — and how you can use them as an influence tool, ethically, in directing the reader to buy.

I have two of Denny Hatch’s excellent books in my direct marketing library, 2,239 Tested Secrets For Direct Marketing Success and Million Dollar Mailings (here are links if you want to check them out):

And in a future post I’ll review both!