Today is republic day. We celebrate the republic coming into existence. Today is a celebration of sovereignty. Of our union’s continued ability to exist through all that ailed it in the last 52 years.

I am conflicted on whether it is the strength of the people, the resilience of the constitution that its creators thought of or whether it is the indifferent and absolute adamant tendency of the Indian to keep the status quo that has kept things going. From what I have seen it has been the latter. The notion that we continue to do what was done before we came into the position that we are in.

Over the years I have grown pessimistic about this republic. I wonder  what it actually stands for and whether it is worth fighting for. If at this day and age after seeing all that has been happening around us if it is worth sacrificing something for the sake of the nation. It doesn’t seem like anyone would take a moment to notice or acknowledge all that you have done. It doesn’t seem like anyone would care in this country about all that you gave up for the nation.

A shocking indifference has grown thick in the minds of people here. The past decade has seen terrorism and corruption unlike anywhere else. The public of any other nation would have been up in arms in the streets protesting but not a lot of that happens here.

I don’t want to celebrate this republic. I just want to distance myself from it.

The british who wrote the IPC have moved on to pass the Suicide Act. Sense seems to be increasingly prevailing throughout the world. Somehow the wind has skipped India.

Laws don’t prevent suicides, if that was the intention behind making the law. It only causes more needless pain and suffering.

What we need aren’t laws

What we need isn’t a way to punish or a deterrent. What we need is a way to heal. We need to address the common problems that incite people to try. Do something about farmer suicides in South India. I don’t know what. I am not a lawmaker. I don’t know what can be done. But someone out there has the means. All it takes is the intent and the will.

I have been getting a lot of e-mails from users of WP Responder reporting that they are seeing bugs in the plug-in. Most of the time it is something they are doing wrong. But other times there is some problem with the plug-in that I did not foresee when developing the plug-in.

Some bugs that I have been hearing about:

1. Autoresponder Sends Multiple E-Mails: The autoresponder feature seems to send multiple follow-up e-mails to the same person.
2. New Broadcast Doesn’t Work – I am told that the new broadcast feature in WP Responder doesn’t seem to work.
3. No Menu Options – After installing WP Responder you are not able to see any menu options to start using the application. I suspect this is because you are using PHP4 instead of PHP5. WP Responder has been developed to work only on servers running PHP5.

You can rest assured knowing that I am testing and removing bugs from WP Responder as much as possible. Just like any other software, there will be bugs. Rest assured that I will be removing all of these errors in the coming version(s).

To be honest with you, if you are reading this article right now, you are a better person to test this software than I am. It doesn’t matter who you are. I don’t mean to say I am very poor tester. At my vocation, I am a software tester. The reason – Because I am the person who developed this application, it is not as easy for me to discover the bugs in it. As a developer my goal is to make a program work. Not to try and make it break which is what testing is all about.  – to start with the assumption that there are errors in the application and then to try and remove them.

You would be doing me a big favor to me and yourselves if you can find and report as many bugs as you can. You can e-mail the bugs you find to this address:

flarecore@gmail.com

In other news

Your favorite plug-in developer received his order of a very expensive book on WordPress plug-in development and another on marketing:

That’s the DELL laptop that created WP Responder for you. Seriously! No other computer was used other than that laptop to create WP Responder. A lot less time will be spent hunting the WordPress Codex and spamming the WP-Hackers mailing list for solutions to problems. :-)

I spent the better part (actually all of it) of my weekend on finding and removing bugs from WP Responder. There have been more problems in the plugin that I previously thought. I just couldn’t get myself to release the plugin knowing that these bugs exist in the plugin.

Some other bugs I have recently found and removed:

• In the new e-mail broadcast page, clicking on disable WYSIWYG editor and then click on enable again creates an additional text box below the WYSIWYG editor.
• All kinds of email delivery such as broadcasts,  blog posts, post series, autoresponder series are delayed by [offset of the timezone at which you - the user is  located].
• When the subscriber subscribes to your newsletter the Subscription Confirmed e-mail does not have the link to the manage subscription page (reported by a user).
• When you schedule a broadcast and then try to reschedule it, it always says you are trying to schedule the broadcast in the past.
• When you schedule a broadcast with HTML disabled and then edit the broadcast again, the HTML is shown to be enabled.
• When you select the attach images option in the new broadcast page, the settings is not saved and is set to enabled always.

What’s New In WP Responder 4.9.1?

I know I said there will be no new features in the plugin but a little foresight demanded that I implement these two features.

Update Notifications

Some of the users of WP Responder have been downloading the plugin from the WP Responder website. Some of you have been downloading it from the WordPress plugin extend website. Currently it is not possible for me to issue updates on the plugin to all of you. So I have implemented a new feature to automatically check for a new update periodically with my server and then notify you by e-mail when an update is available.

Tutorial Series

Apart from the update notifications I have also implemented a tutorial series feature. The plugin will automatically send you a series of articles by e-mail showing you how to use it and get the most out of it after you activate it. Optional of course.

When Will I Release This Plugin?

Some time this week. There is still a lot of testing  to be done. I anticipate the testing and debugging to be finished this week completely.

I want this plugin myself!

Here’s the strange thing. I am dying to get started using this plugin. This plugin is beginning to get awesome even for me. There is so much I can do with it. I am sure you are looking forward to it too.

Look forward to it! Stay tuned!

I released WP Responder v4.9 last week.  And it has been one swell week ever since. Since I released the version 4.9 of WP Responder last weekend I have found many more bugs. Please read on.

Plugin Directory Name Mayhem

I was very optimistic and very happy with the WP Responder release I made last week. Little did I realize the number of bugs that were in the release as a result of the unforeseen directory name. You see, I wanted to make sure that those who wanted the plugin will be able to find it without any difficulty so I choose a really long name that is very descriptive of the plugin’s features.

Last year when I started making this plugin I implemented many features counting on the plugin being stored in:

 /wp-content/plugins/wpresponder/

When submitting the plugin to the WordPress directory I used the really long name. They replaced the spaces with hyphens and made that the directory name when creating the SVN check in account. That is not the only problem in this plugin. The WordPress MU installations may not use the above mentioned path for the plugin directory.

Drag And Drop Of Widgets Interface Fail

The drag and drop widgets interface are found to not work when WP Responder 4.9 is enabled. This is because jQuery UI seems to get loaded into the page when it is not required causing a clash. I have removed this bug in the upcoming version.

The solution for the time being:

1. Deactivate WP Responder.
2. Use the plugins interface to modify the widget layout
3. Reactivate WP Responder

Other Known Bugs Are:

1. Preview email button doesn’t work – The preview email button in the New Broadcast page will not work as a result of the plugin name mismatch
2. Customization of recipients doesn’t  not work – Again because of the plugin directory name mismatch.
3. Images in the WP Responder dashboard will not load – ditto.
4. Deletion of a mailout will not work – Once you create a email mailout you will not be able to delete it. Same reason as above.
5. Import/Export Subscribers – Import and Export of subscribers will not work.
6. Some Short Codes On The New Post Page Don’t Work – The [!delivery_date!], [!post_url!] , [!post_date!] short codes do not work.
7. Activation Errors: You will see a message mentioning that the plugin generated 2096 characters of unexpected output.
8. Unsubscription doesn’t work – The unubscription and subscription management URL in email broadcasts and the other outgoing email will not work as it points to a URL that doesn’t exist. Readers will not be able to unsubscribe.
9. Subscription Confirmed e-mail doesn’t have a unsubscription link – When newsletter subscribers verify their email address, the email that is sent immediately on confirming th email will not have the required subscription management option.

All of these bugs will be fixed in the upcoming version.

WP Responder Works Only On PHP 5+

I received a few emails from users who have seen some basic syntax errors when activating WP Responder. These are because the plugin uses some features of PHP 5. Particularly the SwiftMailer library which is used by WP Responder to send all e-mail works only in PHP5.

WP Responder doesn’t support PHP 4.

Please get your web hosting company to upgrade your server. PHP4 is no longer actively developed. There are even many security bugs that are well known but will not be patched. The core PHP project members have stopped working on PHP 4.

What Have I Learnt From All This?

1. To use subversion. A plugin developer gets this for free in the WordPress repository.
2. Do not hard code the path to the plugin.

What is coming up?

1. WP Responder 4.9.1 will be released in this weekend
2. A new website will be available at WPResponder.com

I am working on it

You can rest assured that I am identifying the problems in the plugin and am removing them. Instead of making a hasty release with a whole new set of bugs to remove, I am working on making the next one a stable release. For now I am working on removing the bugs in the existing features before moving on to implement new ones. So the next version will not have any new feature. Nevertheless I am sure you are eager to start using the WP Responder plugin even with its current feature set.

Stay tuned!

I released version 4.8 of WP Responder . Since then I have received may emails from users of the plug-in regarding problems in the plug-in. It has been one hell of a week for me. I have seen more than a 1000 downloads for the plug-in in less than 5 days.

What’s New In This Version

Below is a brief layout of the new features in this version:

1. HTML Email Templates
2. External SMTP Server Facility For All Outgoing Email
3. Customize Email Sent Out For Blog Posts

Missing Confirmation Link Download Problems

Many users have emailed me saying that when they filled out their name and email address in the subscription form on the plug-in website they received an email that did not have a email address verification URL. This happened almost entirely in Gmail email addresses. Gmail seems to strip out URLs that are very long. If the server where you installed WP Responder has a long domain name then many of your subscribers will not be able confirm their subscriptions.

This is a huge problem obviously. Rest assured I have fixed in and will be releasing a new version of WP Responder. Very soon. How soon? Read on..

Why So Many Bugs?

I don’t have a good answer to this question :) I started creating this plug-in in mid 2009 to learn how to create wordpress plug-ins. I wasn’t aware of a lot of of the wordpress API features and wasn’t as experienced in programming as I am today. I created this because I needed it for my own website. I was not old enough to get credit cards to pay for an Aweber subscription. It looked as if none of the other plug-in developers understood email marketing as well as I did. (pats sell on the back)

However, sometimes it ALARMS ME to read the code I wrote an year ago! Yes there are many bugs in this plug-in and I AM testing this plug-in in the time that I have available (which is obviously not a lot!) . I need to eat food and keep a roof over my head, go out on dates with my girl (as soon as I get one), and generally..have a life. Which is why I need your help to make this plug-in problem free. You can help by reporting as many bugs as you can as you find them through the bug reporting form within the plug-in ( WordPress Admin –> [Newsletters] –> Dashboard ).

Next Version

The next version of WP Responder will be released……tomorrow!

Version 4.9 will be released tomorrow. This is because I’m seeing a huge number of downloads for this plug-in. There are some really big flaws in the plug-in at the moment that will keep you from reaching all of your subscribers. I really really want to make this plug-in work for my users. I want you all to experience the most success you can with this plug-in. May all of your build insanely huge audiences and then make millions for yourselves and your family. With WP Responder you can finally do it without spending a single penny on an email marketing service.

Download Now!

You can download the latest version of WP Responder email newsletter and follow up autoresponder plug-in at its new website.

An email marketing platform is a software or a service used to create a newsletter. The platform allows you to schedule email broadcasts to your newsletter subscribers, schedule follow up email messages to be sent to a subscriber after a pre determined period of time.

The home for your newsletter. Many consider it to be the foundation of an online business. The choice of service or software to use for email marketing is VERY important because once you start gathering subscribers, moving your newsletter to a new service or software may

1. cost money – you may have to hire a web developer to export the subscribers from the database. This is if your autoresponder software or service doesn’t have a export to CSV file feature.
2. cost time - you have to wait on your web developer to export the subscribers from your web application to a csv file.
3. cost subscribers – third party email marketing service require subscribers to confirm joining your newsletter again if you are importing them with a csv file. They do this to ensure that spammers cannot misuse their service by importing vast databases of email addresses that they don’t have permission to contact. This prevents their servers and ip addresses (which cost money) from getting blacklisted by spam directories. But requiring subscribers to opt-in again will surely cause you to lose some of them.

The choice of email marketing software is like buying a laptop. You do it once and hopefully don’t change for a long long time.

The Email Marketing Platform CheckList

Below are some features that are necessary beyond the very basic functionality of a email newsletter software of taking subscribers and sending broadcasts.

Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a .csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.

Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.

Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.

Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.

Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.

Third Party Autoresponders

Below are some autoresponder services that are highly reputed 2 of which I have used in the past.

1. Aweber – This is the most popular email marketing service. The de facto standard for online autoresponder service. Has the more features than any other autoresponder service. I terminated the account because I didn’t need it anymore.
2. GetResponse – Very similar in features and pricing to Aweber.
3. MailChimp - This is a very good email autoresponder service if you are just starting out. It allows you to have upto 500 subscribers for free. In the free account they insert an ad for their service in your outgoing email.

Which one is for you?

If you are short on cash go with MailChimp. Use their autoresponder feature judiciously to make some money, reinvest your earnings to upgrade your account.If you can afford to spend money, go with Aweber. They are very easy to use and have more features, especially the email analytics feature, than any other autoresponder.

Advantage of 3rd Party Email Newsletter Software:

Higher Deliverability: Paid autoresponder services have an agreement with the major ISPs so that emails that are sent by their clients don’t get blacklisted as spam. Emails that are sent using these services don’t land in the Junk mail folder or rejected on receipt.

Actually, the deliverability between a self hosted and a paid autoresponder service is the same. All email that is sent by a self hosted email autoresponder will get delivered, initially. However with self hosted email autoresponders, there is a higher risk of your server getting blacklisted as spam in some spam server directory like spamhaus. When that happens your email deliverability will go down as a lot of subscribers will either not receive your email or will get them in the junk email folder

Cost Can Be Predicted: With third party autoresponders, you will not have unforeseen expenses. The cost of Aweber for a year starting with 2000 subscribers and growing at 100 subscribers a day can be predicted.

Disadvantages of Hosted Email Marketing Tools:

Charge By Subscriber Count – Most autoresponder services charge depending on the number of subscribers in your newsletter. More the subscribers you get, the costlier it becomes. It used to be the case that it costed $19 a month whether you had 1000 or 100,000 subscribers at Aweber. But you can’t get that pricing anymore.

Importing Lists Require Confirmation From Subscribers – Sometimes you may want to import subscribers from another email autoresponder service through a CSV file. When you do this with paid autoresponder services like Aweber, they will send an email to each subscribers in your import file confirming if they want to be in your new newsletter. This is a problem because you will lose some subscribers as a result of this import.

Self Hosted Email Newsletter Software

Self hosted email autoresponders are web applications that you install in your web server.

PHPList – This is a free open source software. It is the oldest and the most widely used one. Unfortunately it is extremely user-unfriendly. It can be difficult to use. The subscription form code cannot be generated and copied to your own web page if you don’t have knowledge of HTML as PHPList provides its own subscription page even which is a bit difficult to customize. You can use it if you are comfortable with editing HTML code.

WP Responder WordPress Plugin – This is the plugin I created for my blog. I needed an alternative to buying an autoresponder service and the available RSS feed to Email services like FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. With this plugin you can create newsletters, create follow up messages for subscribers to receive, provide email subscription to your blog, use blog posts as follow up email, provide subscription to particular categories in your blog.

Which one is for you?

I recommend using WP Responder to build a newsletter because it is much easier to install this plugin – you don’t have to create an additional database. The installation is the same as any other wordpress plugin. You can easily learn to use it even if you don’t know coding. I made WP Responder with Internet Marketers in mind. I took the best features from Aweber and added them to the WordPress dashboard in a way you would expect them to be there. Click here to download WP Responder.

Subscribers are the life and blood of a newsletter. You can never have too much of them. In this article I will show you how to get more subscribers to your newsletter.

1. Place a subscription box in all of your websites in all pages

You want to website visitors give all possible opportunities to opt-in to your newsletter. Remove all possible effort for a subscriber to add themselves to your newsletter. Put your subscription box in all of the pages in all of your relevant websites. If you have websites about affiliate marketing, Internet marketing and email marketing place opt-in boxes in all of these websites to your Internet marketing newsletter.

More importantly try to place them above the fold – the section of the website the user sees when they land on your website without having to scroll down. Placement is very important. Another great place to place the opt-in code is right below each article in your website where readers are bound to be looking after they read an article.

For wordpress blog: If you have a wordpress blog in which you want to insert the autoresponder opt-in code, go to the admin panel and go to Appearance > Widgets. Add a text widget and insert the code for the autoresponder. Some wordpress themes have a separate region for each page type.

The wordpress CMS has two content types – posts and pages. So there may be some regions that contains the widgets that show in the pages only and another that has widgets that will shown in your pages. If your theme has that, make sure you create a text widget and insert it into each of the regions.

For a drupal website: If you have a drupal website, you must add a block to your website by going to Administer > Site Building > Blocks. Click on add block and insert the code for the opt-in form .

For your website that has plain HTML pages – use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or Kompozer and open up every page and insert the code of the autoresponder subscription form in all of the pages in your website.

2. Offer a bonus for subscribing

Most of us we can’t get subscribers merely by having a subscription form on all pages. That only works if you are a celebrity and your website content is regularly updated and forms a deep connection with your readers like say.. steve pavlina. Your website visitors will need a compelling reason to subscribe to your newsletter. To get theme to subscribe you ahve to give something away in return for subscribing to your newsletter.

Create a small ebook that promises some benefit that your subscribers. For example, you could create a book that shows how to get a 70% discount on buying a particular model camera for your photography newsletter.

Anything that saves time, money, effort will be a good fit for potential subscribe to join your newsletter. It may not be a book, it may also be a software tool. Oh, and try to  make the benefit an instant one. “How to speed up your computer by 400% instantly!” will get more subscribers than the one I suggested above. People love instant benefits.

Once you create the ebook or software that you want to give away in return for their email address, configure your autoresponder software to send the subscriber a link to the software or ebook.

3. More traffic from relevant sources

Very very few, actualy no one, who visits your website by clicking on a link in a site about japanese cartoons is going to subscribe to your newsletter about dog training. They will find the website very irrelevant and will click away immediately.

If your website receives traffic from relevant sources like – other websites about pets and dog training. You could try to submit content to those websites in return for a link to your website. Many website owners will not like the idea but many will. You could also offer to give them a link exchange for a link.

4. Guest post on relevant blogs

Almost any topic on which you can start a newsletter has a blog on the topic today. Blogs are again, the same as relevant traffic sources but they must be covered separetely because blogs are like newsletters. In many cases, blogs ARE newsletters when the blog owner provides email subscription. Submit a article to a relevant blog and link to your landing page from the blog artice.

For example if you have a newsletter on dog training and you find a blog on pet grooming, you could write an article on dog grooming for the blog. Apart from mentioning your website in your blog article as part of the author information, include relevant links to your website in the article itself.

Placing a link to your website will be barely enough for most readers to click through to your website. But if the content on your website to which you are linking is relevant to the topic of the article and somehow adds value to the reader, then they are more likely to clickthrough to it.

In other words, get creative and think up article ideas to write for relevant blogs in which you can shamelessly plug in links to your websites pages and landing pages.

Performancing has a great article on finding guest post opportunities on blogs

5. Test And Tweak Your Traffic Sources

The best traffic sources vary from niche to niche. Sometimes the way this will work will be counterintuitive. Your newsletter about freelance programming may receive more subscribers who came to your website from a forum like sitepoint than from writing guest posts on blogs like freelance switch (hypothetically). Only way you can know this is by testing your traffic sources.

Many autoresponder software and services like WP Responder provide a means to place a code in the subscription form. There is no tool that does this directly without needing some programming to be done. But here’s what I would do to find out where most of my subscribers are coming from:

All autoresponder tools allow you to add a custom field. The field can be a text field (like address, phone number) or a multiple choice question (like sex, age, country) or it can be hidden. the hidden custom field is not shown on the web page but it is still there in the page, the value of which is set in the HTML code of the page.

To track the source of traffic that gets me the most traffic, I will add a hidden field to the subscription form, put the code in the web page then add a javascript program that sets the value of this hidden custom field (lets call this custom field TS) when the page loads to the URL of the site from which visitor landed on your website. This way all of my subscribers will get a URL attached to their subscription that mentions which website they came from when the subscribe to the newsletter.

There will be many traffic sources but a selected few traffic sources will be sending majority of your traffic. You can see which ones these are if you see the list of subscribers in your autoresponder software.  Once 1000-1200 people opt-in to my newsletter I will check how many people came  from each of my traffic sources by counting the number of people with a TS value equal to each of the dominating traffic sources.

Once you find which one of them is giving you the most subscribres, you can focus more of your efforts on that traffic source and eliminate the poor performing ones. Now that I think about it, you can also use Google analytics to accomplish the same by using the goals feature. Here’s how:

Normally you must have three pages – one page where website visitors land on your website, the page where visitors are taken after they enter their subscription information (this one is optional)

and the page they see once they click on the opt-in confirmation email. Suppose these are the three pages:

• Landing – http://mysite.com/landing.html
• Request Confirmation Page – http://mysite.com/pleaseconfirm.html (optional if you are relying on the page generated by your autoresponder service/software)
• Confirmed Subscription Page – http://mysite.com/confirmed.html

Here’s how to configure google analytics to record each traffic source and the number of subscribers that come from there:

1. add the google analytics code in your landing page, and in your confirmation page so that you know where all of your confirmed subscribers are coming from.
2. go to Google analytics and create a conversion goal.
3. add each of the URLs above.

This way Google analytics can be configured to record one successful conversion everytime someone subscribes to the newsletter. Google analytics also tracks where each those successful conversions, that is subscribers, came from by traffic source. So you can get a clear idea of which traffic sources are sending you the most number of subscribers.

One of the most important part of running an online business is making decisions. Our everyday work involves making many decisions – decisions on which market to target, which contractor to choose, which employee to hire, etc. These decisions, I am sure you agree, are to be made on sound logical thinking void of any bias or emotion to make the right decision, make more money and achieve our goals.

Our brains were not made to think. They were made to react. The first time we touched fire and burnt our skin we learnt what to do the next time we encounter fire. The ability to think is just a side effect just like the ability to play awesome 3D action games on a personal computer that was made to run word processors and spreadsheets. Back in the day this serves us well – we needed to react instantly. The world was a dangerous place and these reactions helped us survive.

Now We React Less, Think More

Today we don’t do as much reacting as we used to do. We do a lot more thinking. We are not in danger of being eaten by a tiger. Our brain is wired to find quick and dirty reactive solutions which are not always the best solutions. These are good when we are trying to survive in a rain forest but not so good when trying to negotiate a contract or forming a business deal.

Most people attempt to solve problems by playing around with the issues at hand and then making decisions based on faulty logic, biases, emotions, cognitive dissonance resolution and other shortcuts. We may rationalize our decisions afterward, but in reality our solutions are based almost entirely on gut feelings, emotional reactions, and hidden biases. As a result, our solutions tend to be no more valid than the architectural designs built by a child playing with blocks.

Almost everyone makes irrational decisions

Most people make decisions about a problem at hand based on faulty logic, biases, emotional and reactive thinking. A lot of time our decisions are just reactions. Once we make the decision and act on it, we rationalize our decisions after we made them gathering logical reasons to support the decision. But in reality our solutions came from gut feelings and emotional reactions and hidden biases which we are not aware that we have. As a result we make many irrational decisions in our professional and personal life.

One of the many reasons we don’t make well thought out decisions is because of biases. In this  post series I will go into the various factors that color our decisions and keep us from making correct decisions in our personal and professional lives.

There are many biases under which we act. One such bias is confirmation bias.

Confirmation Bias

It is a tendency of people to prefer information that confirms preconceptions, hypotheses whether or not they are true. It will cause us to reject and forget evidence that proves the contrary of our biases. It makes us ignore/devaule information/evidence that is in contrary to our beliefs. This bias causes people to prefer information that confirms their preconceived notions. It makes you see what you want to see. Confirmation biases lead to faulty decision making.

For example: you may believe that astrology actually works. As a result of confirmation bias you’ll remember only those instances when when the prediction in the astrology column came true and forget the majority of the cases when the prediction was very wrong. As a result you will continue to believe astrology has some base in reality.

What are the effects of confirmation bias?

1. Creates beliefs on false premises

If you act under confirmation bias you will believe claims that aren’t true – they have no basis in reality. We all get some vague hypothesis in our minds. When acting under confirmation bias you will seek only the evidence that proves the hypothesis to be true. Even if you come across evidence that clearly contradicts the hypothesis. You will come across evidence that will prove the contrary but you will ignore than and will not remember them. So you will believe a claim or hypothesis that is not true.

To make matters worse, our beliefs aren’t isolated. Our sub conscious mind forms beliefs by inference based on existing beliefs. Beliefs combine together to form more beliefs. More faulty irrational decisions.

2. Creates Outdated Beliefs

It can cause outdated beliefs. A belief you held would have been true at a time. But because of confirmational bias you will ignore evidence that built up over time that show that your belief is no longer true.

For example, let’s say you believe that creating and submitting youtube is the best way to market a blog. You tirelessly make videos everyday and submit them to youtube. Although it worked once or twice, you will ignore all the e

3. Keeps You Acting In Outdated Behavior

When you have outdated beliefs you keep acting in old ways. For example, long after buying television advertising isn’t working you may keep buying television advertising when doing so is not profitable anymore. Under confirmation bias. You will have forgotten all the instances when your company incurred a loss and will only remember the instances when there was some profit.

4. Shows you a pattern where there isn’t any pattern

Confirmation bias makes you see patterns where there are no patterns.

5. Gives you fictional experiences

Researchers at California Institute of technology conducted a experiement as a part of a research:

They scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices. They were administer tiny tastes of wine, measuring the senseation in the medical orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses register. The subjects were told the price of the wines without their knowledge they tasted the same wine twice.

They invariably preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Why should you be concerned about confirmation bias?

1. For A Realistic View Of The World – Our beliefs act as filters of reality. To have a realistic view of the world we must question our beliefs deliberately and consciously and find out if they are based in reality or are they just a result of having sought confirmation for some vague notion that entered our mind.
2. To Make Rational Decisions - Confirmation biases cloud our decisions. When we form beliefs on this kind of bias, we delude ourselves. We always form decisions based on beliefs we already hold

What are the real world products of confirmation bias?

1. Psychics – A psychic who claims to know about your deceased relative will give very general descriptions about the relative and their relationship with the client. They say something like “why do I sense this distance” and the client goes “yeah, ronnie didn’t like it when I talk about our relationship”. The client mistakenly believes that the psychic actually has “psychic” powers.
2. Lawyers – The job of the lawyer is to gather evidence and make the case for a particular side of a court proceeding. Whether or not that’s true. Gather evidence that proves it – confirms it and present it at the court.
3. Politicians – Politicians make a living by telling you what the public want to hear. Politicians appease the public sentiment even if the public supports and wants slavery. Politicians sell hope -”change we can believe in”. They echo the opinion of the general public and get the most votes.
4. Placebos – Placebo are medicinal tablets used to “treat” patients. These tablets are basically nothing. It is usually a capsule filled with sugar. The patient is told that the capsule is a very powerful medicine and they should absolutely take the course of the treatment religiously. The patient doesn’t know that it’s an inert tablet and somehow they get better anyway.
5. Magic tricks
6. Wine tasters
7. Conspiracy theories (moon landing, world trade center, etc)
8. Books like Outliers, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics

What can you do about confirmation bias?

1. Ignore The polarized, Neutralize Your Customers/Audience

There are some people you simply cannot persuade, ignore them. As for the others, , put your audience and customers in a state of persuadability. That is why before you persuade your prospects to buy from you or trying to persuade your blog subscribers or newsletter subscribers, you must:

1. Establish Common Ground: Gain their attention and trust by establishing your common ground. Make it clear to them that you share their views and values.
2. Present Your Logic: present your arguments that logically lead your audience to the conclusion.
3. Call To Action: Ask your audience to perform the action that you want them to – buy your product or service, subscribe to your newsletter, donate to your cause or whatever else action you want them to take.

2. Clean out your belief system

You already have many beliefs made on confirmation bias. To  make sound decisions you must have a realistic view of the world. For a realistic view of the world you must form beliefs objectively without bias. You have to take the time to actively question your beliefs. It takes a great deal of courage and effort to question your most fundamental beliefs.

Examine your feelings closely and be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t worry about someone reading what you’ve written down. First get it out. The truth really does set you free. Sometimes we think we believe something that the majority of society believes but we really believe something else.

This means you must purposely set time aside for a few days, sit quietly, grab a pen and paper and start examining your beliefs consciously.

3. Analyze information objectively

We get information from all kinds of sources – television, friends, colleagues, newspapers, rss feeds, websites are some of them. We make decisions based on the information we receive. Start analyzing the information objectively – check the sources.

I’ve found that other people are a major source of illogical, distorted and biased opinions disguised as facts. Many people will not take it lightly when you question their every opinion and may get offended and shun from being open to you. Tread carefully.

Do you ever code for yourself? To solve your own problems?

A lot of satisfaction comes out of being able to solve your own problems when it comes to software.

The real world doesn’t allow you to create matter out of thin air, move things from one place to another with no effort. If you have a backache you must go to the pharmacist and get medicine.

If you know how to create software, you can scratch your own itches. If you can’t afford a particular software but have plenty of time, you can sit down and create it on your own. Theoretically. You may not be able to create your own Microsoft Word 2007 but this works for many real world problems.

WP Responder is one such itch that I had. I couldn’t buy Aweber’s services because it either costed too much or because they didn’t have a subscribe via PayPal option. Just then I graduated from college and had a lot of time on my hands. I got to work on creating a wordpress plugin that will both deliver blog posts and allow me to have a email newsletter.

I needed to create a membership site without spending $180s on a software like Amember. I went to work on Drupal and found the exact set of modules and their configurations that will let me create a paid membership website with unlimited levels.

There will come a time when trying to solve your own problem will start to cost more than buying a readymade solution. Until you get there leverage your programming skills to solve your own problems and get to the next level of financial independence.