Decla Dunn
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Name: Declan Dunn
Industry: Online Marketing
Website: www.declandunn.com
Product: www.dunndirectmedia.com
Declan Dunn’s Bio: Declan Dunn, it seems, has been online since the beginning of time. He’s been on the cutting edge since 1995 when he was one of the pioneers of multimedia CD roms. He’s heavy on blogging, podcasting and social media. He’s handled major media campaigns with the likes of American Express, Preiceline, PBS, ABC and Intel. And this is all just for starters.
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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.
David Jenyns: Hi guys, welcome to theseomethod.com. This is another call for all my guys out there who I’m introducing to some experts who have had a really big impact on my marketing career and the things I’ve done. I’m very excited about this call as I’m interviewing Declan Dunn. He’s been around the internet forever just about. He got started back in the 1995 era. He was doing multi media CD roms when they were in their early days and doing a lot of coding. He’s really been on the forefront as technologies evolved and got heavily into the blogging and pod casting. With things that are happening now, he is very much on the forefront of social networks and new media.
Not only that, he’s very good at monetizing that as well. He is able to bring in affiliate marketing, and then to find out how to make money from it. It’s well and good to get heaps of traffic, but unless you convert that traffic to putting money in the bank, what’s the point? He’s worked with some really big clients as well. He’s not just inside the internet marketing world and he doesn’t just deal in that realm. He also works with big corporates and takes the strategies he knows to those. He has worked with American Express, Priceline, PBS, Intel, mypoint.com just to name a few.
He’s done some major media campaigns and I think that will shine through. I’m very excited to have Declan Dunn on the line. I’d like to invite you on.
Declan Dunn: Yes, and I’m very excited to join you and explore the new things that are coming up the way the market is shifting. There’s lots of opportunity again.
David Jenyns: We’ll jump straight into it. You really are on the cutting edge as far as the social media and the social networks that are happening right now are concerned. You do a lot of consulting with clients as well. Perhaps we can talk about when you’re first starting a campaign and working with a particular client. What are some of the processes you go through for driving traffic, even just masterminding a strategy for them?
Declan Dunn: The first thing I really ask them, and it sounds really obvious, but what are the results you really want to create? Don’t just begin with the end in mind, but where are you dreaming about? For example, I had a woman call me up and say, I want to sell 100,000 books and I want you to guarantee it. I said, yes, me too. Five percent of authors sell more than 20,000 books. That’s if you’re in the real world in the US, I mean real world like a store. So that’s a silly number.
I don’t mind dreams, but what people keep talking about are old perceptions of hundreds of millions of visitors. I’ve done 60,000,000 visitors a month. I wouldn’t do that today. It isn’t going to happen. What’s happening now, is, it’s not how much traffic, I want to know the quality of your traffic. So I ask them, what are you going out to do to get in front of the people who actually want to buy? You can go out now and I can get you tons of people looking at your stuff that they would never ever buy. They simply don’t care. Because it’s social media it’s simply a bunch of people who are sitting around chatting in a room.
The first thing I ask them is, what are the results you want to create? Don’t tell me the tactics. What I mean by tactics is Twitter is a tactic, Facebook is a tactic, MySpace is a tactic, search is a tactic. There is nothing wrong with any of these. Where do you wrap these things around as a strategy so that you know which ones you can leverage as a strategy?
Quite frankly you’ll find some things are much better in search, other things have nothing to do with search, believe it or not. So don’t say search just because it’s a tactic. Is it a tactic that a) people are searching for and b) they’re actually buying from? Is there a buying behaviour in there, because, if not, what are we going to do? c) How can we put this altogether so that you can leverage what other people are doing so you don’t have to recreate the wheel?
I actually get most people to stop fifty percent of what they’re doing, which is fake productivity, working like slaves on what some guru or anybody else taught them. I’ve got nothing against the guru. You’ve just got to pick the things that work for you, not just because someone said it. That’s a tactic. A tactic without a strategy is like running around in circles with your head cut off.
David Jenyns: I think you mentioned something important, which is identifying what it is you want to do. You’re not an SEO guy, even though you do know a bit about SEO. We talked about the fact you don’t build a website for the sake of building a website. You need to first identify what it is you need to do. You help the client distill that. Are we talking down to the point of, we want to drive x number of targeted traffic? Is that the clarity you try to get with defining that objective?
Declan Dunn: Yes, and realistically how big is that universe of people? If I have a search thing, I can figure out how many people are searching, figure out how many people are going to click and figure out how many people are going to convert. We have a number. I leverage. I work with a lot of search engine people. I consider them sharp shooters, experts. I really don’t want to replicate what they do. They can’t do what I do, which is build partnerships and affiliate things and strategies. It’s a big world.
I want to figure out what that traffic is and how much of it is realistic. For example, you’ll be blown away. I’ve got one guy who is running a blog. By the way, here’s the difference between an SEO blog and a blog written by somebody who wants relationships and a big fan club. The SEO blog, don’t get me wrong, you can write it well, but you can get away with not writing it very well. You can hire people. It’s keywords, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re there to solve a problem, they’re not there to say how great you are or really become a fan of you.
If you’re going to do that, you’ve pretty much got to write your own blog or hire somebody really talented, not the cheap stuff, to write it. The quality of your writing matters. I’m not trying to say with SEO the quality doesn’t matter. But it really isn’t the same thing if I’m writing my blog and I want you to listen to what I’m saying. I need to write that.
One guy set up his blog, built his email list to eight hundred people, and I can hear everyone saying, oh, snore, that’s not enough people. These people by the way all knew him. They really trusted him and read his stuff all the time. We’re talking about a guy who would get forty or fifty comments on a blog post. Nobody’s ever heard of him, except in his circle. He went out and did a membership program. It was something like $US90 – $US100 a month, a really great program. He converted something like well over two hundred people of that eight hundred to buy immediately.
That’s because he’s writing well, they really love him, they know him. If I was doing SEO, I wouldn’t spend that kind of time on writing the blog. That’s why you need to try to identify. If you’re really going to solve your different strategies, your different things you have to implement in your business, think about it. Writing’s an important thing.
If you want people to really listen to you, you better either be a good writer or hire a good one. If you’re doing search, then you really want to think about getting many, many different keyworded posts, not written like garbage, but not really the level where you’ve got to string people’s emotions and get them going.
David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head as far as, what’s Google trying to do? Google is trying to give the best user experience. That’s why I talk in terms of SEO. A lot of times SEO will just happen naturally if you do the right stuff, if you’re putting good content out there. That’s what I like about you. You’re all about putting the good content out there in the right places. Even though you might not focus on SEO, it happens naturally by virtue of putting out good content. What do people do to good content? They link to it. It’s like that flow on effect. It’s just by putting the good content out there.
One of the first things you do, you identify what is it that we’re trying to achieve. Then from there, because you’ve got a really big tool box of different things that you can draw on to achieve that, how do you go from there?
Declan Dunn: The next step to go from what really are the results is first, reality check. People are running down these paths telling themselves or having a friend or again someone who’s just told them this works just to do it and they’re not really backing off and saying wait a minute, is there enough traffic, is it out there? The other thing is, if you’re doing anything in today’s media and you want to get on search, I mean believe me, everything I do is to get links and tag it well and use the right keyword. So I never ignore search.
But even that’s going to take a little time. But there’s no quick drive through Burger King window, like we used to do many years ago. There are a lot of people competing, so do you have the patience to grow it? If they don’t have any of these things in line, I start looking at it and say, what are the key assets that you have?
I don’t think people understand this. I ask you how much time and money you have. Time is money. If I was to ask them, the very first thing I do next, is what in the next three months would be an achievable goal for you? What would make you happy in terms of what I call grocery money? It’s money that pays your bills but you’re still not doing much except eating your groceries. Where are the big number? How many people do we need to get there?
Normally after that, honestly I start looking for the people who are already in front of the audience, and I find a way to nurture, to engage them, not just to pitch them. If you really want somebody who’s got trust and who’s good and successful, they’re not waiting for you to call, ok? They’re very busy, so you want to understand that and say, ok here’s the big player, as I jokingly call it, the eight hundred pound gorilla.
Then there are the people who are the interim players who are good, but they’re not too big that you can’t contact them pretty quickly and they can take action for you, either posting an ad, doing a blog interview with you or what have you. Do you have people who can take action and how can we start getting some numbers going? If you’re just starting out with a new domain and no links, good luck on Google. At least buy an old domain, do something. You’ve got a big uphill battle.
The other end is, you can still not use that as a negative. In the interim that’s what I love to use affiliate partnerships with, doing joint ventures. Let me give you an example. Way back in the day, we were all struggling for traffic by the way. It wasn’t as easy as a lot of the gurus say. We ran into four guys who were doing about a million visitors a month. It was more common back then. They weren’t making any money and we do make money, ok? This is nice. The people who do know how to make money are pretty rare in this business, I’m sorry.
So we stepped in and really said, you guys are awesome. We created a group of five people who worked together. We did the monetization and the other four guys brought the traffic. We managed to send traffic to each other. Each one of us managed to increase our traffic by about 20%. We brought the monetization. As the partner that’s what we brought to the table and received about a million visitors a month in exchange. We monetized everybody. They locked in with us because once you’re making money, life gets very simple. We all were able to do it.
I was able to go out and start a website and get an ungodly amount of traffic to it. We were in a relationship, so these guys weren’t doing it with anyone, we were making money together. I was able to turn out $20,000 or $30,000 a month because they could send traffic to me by just snapping their fingers. But what they couldn’t do was monetize the traffic. Once we not just taught them but put in the systems, that gave us the lock in to make money on their traffic which made them much more than they were making. We did not have the traffic. But we had the smarts, copy, conversion and squeeze pages, 101 marketing. You think a lot of people know how to do it. They don’t.
A lot of the guys with the traffic today, I see as a great opportunity. I know guys in the blog world, let’s face it, the social media blog guys, there are not a lot of seven figure people in that business. They’re awesome people, but they’re like the early web masters. Some of them are like what we used to call cyber communists. ‘I want make money.’ Then they’re going to wake up and realize, I’m blogging like a slave and I’m not making money. Is there a way I can balance honouring my audience and making money? So that’s what I ask. Who’s out there?
I really start out, number one as a customer of yours. That’s really the single thing I’ve done throughout my career. Forget about you, your product, forget about you. I’m the customer and who do I care about? Me. Life gets really easy. Who do they know, like and trust? Where’s the traffic? Go do a little bit of research. Go to Compete and spend $500 for a month and you’ll get more research than you’ll need for a year. If you know how to use it, who’s sending traffic to who? It’s not like you have to analyze. It’s like little groups of people working really profitably together.
If you’re beginning, ideally you want to become part of a little group of five or ten people that work and share traffic and, by the way, not just share, but make money together.
David Jenyns: I suppose one of the first things being, identifying what assets you’re got to leverage off and where are those players in the market and start contacting them. Initially is it just connecting with them to see what value you can add to them? You’re really a master of building those networks. That’s another one of your skills. Are you initially trying to see what value you can offer them? Or are you just going straight to them and saying, I want to buy space on your blog, or it might be a question of how long is a piece of string? It really just depends.
Declan Dunn: It’s a great point. What are your assets and what are your weaknesses? If you don’t have money, that’s not a deal breaker. But face it, you’re not going to be able to go out and pay people. I’ve actually gone out and made bigger businesses by people with no money than people with money. People with money tend to get really silly. It sounds
weird, but they tend to think they can buy it. You can’t buy love.
What you first need to know is what are you bringing to the table honestly that you could talk about to somebody in about two minutes that they would get and they would totally understand and by the way that you would feel comfortable with. I’m not against hard pitch guys. In the end, people have really got their guard up against people fly by night saying all these things that might happen and burning them. You want to make sure whatever you promise, you can deliver on.
If you have money, money is an awesome tool. If you have an ability to understand basic marketing, you can create ad copy and landing pages and emails; that’s a huge asset you can plug in anywhere in this business. The guys with traffic are often spending so much time, I’m talking in the blog world strictly here, not the guys doing smart SEO who’ve got a financial objective.
A lot of times these are just guys or women who are just writing because they love it and they’ve never thought about making money. We used to call it, have fun, make money, do good. Are you having fun? They’d say yes. Are you making money? No. I would say, then you’ve got a hobby. Would you like me to be able to turn your hobby round, by the way without screwing over all those people, without ruining what you’ve built because I don’t have to? They’re really nervous about that because they don’t understand the money end. Then doing good for yourself and other people.
Businesses on the net tend to gravitate to a very few key cooperative partnerships. It doesn’t mean you don’t work with other people. Ultimately you’re looking to find those people you can work really closely with. What is it that they have that you don’t? What is it that they lack that you have? Nobody’s perfect. I’ll look at a market, and say, how does this market make money? Is it from email? Some markets work still to this day sending out email. Others work tremendously via search, primarily.
Where’s the place the money is and how can I fit myself into that? That’s one of the best ways that we leverage. One man’s garbage is another man’s gold is so true on the net.
David Jenyns: With some of the different methods that you do, we talked top down strategy point of view. At this point, you’re leveraging what you can see is out there. Obviously you’re trying to connect with those people and brainstorm different ideas. From a tactical point of view, and I don’t want to get too bogged down in tactics, because it’s very easy just to list tactic after tactic, do you have a few core ones where you like to get started? Are there some where you say, this is a no brainer and this can be very easily systematized, therefore there is great leverage there?
Declan Dunn: I’m a big fan of email and affiliate partnerships because they can move quickly. Personally what I like to do, I can put email copy together and conversion pages and test it in weeks. Not completely getting everything out but I can feel comfortable with it versus other things that take more time.
Let me give you an example of somebody we work with, MyDentalChannel. This guy is a dentist in the US. He has nothing. He has no traffic. He has a domain name. He has got very little time to be able to do it. He has some money where he can pay some people on a monthly basis to keep the site updated and things like that. He’s really stuck in a place where he can’t just work it every day. He’s got a very successful job.
We came to him, and here’s how we assessed it. He’s in the dental industry, which, if you look at it, is totally not driven by search. It’s driven by email. These are small business guys, and just look at the search terms. We’re talking maybe a thousand searches. It’s really just not happening. These guys have jobs and barely sit in front of a computer. That’s really not a great way to reach them, even though that’s what most of them are doing. I love markets. It doesn’t make any sense. Just look up how many search terms for specific dental terms.
If you’re selling dental services to customers, search is great. People looking for dentists, totally. Dentists San Francisco, California, buy it, get it, that’s what you want to do. But if you’re a dentist trying to sell training services to other dentists, there’s no way. So we started looking at, here’s a bunch of people that are overwhelmed, have great rate relationships with their customers, but are so lost on the internet. I love markets like this, by the way. I love people like this because they’re coming to the net, they’re great people. They just have no idea how this stuff works.
So I went and looked at the industry. This is what I do before I even start pitching. Find a couple of people who are experts and say hello, in an email or a phone call, not even a pitch. Listen to them. Find out what do you guys like, what don’t you like, what’s worked for you, what hasn’t. Ask basic questions. What turns out, dentists, all of them, would send newsletters in the old school, out through the physical mail and some guy would create a newsletter service and put his header on it. Basically, he would write the content and send it out with their name and address to their clients.
We said, well that’s pretty easy to do through email, isn’t it? So we set up a newsletter service where we offer to our partners who have lists of dentists, by the way this is a business to business, b to b niche market. I love niches by the way. Niches are so ripe right now. Everyone keeps competing for the heavy duty stuff, where ‘Those guys are really good. You better be really good if you’re going to compete up there.’ You’re skills aren’t likely there, but if you’ve got it, go for it, because that’s where the money is. But in the niches people ignore them.
Here are these guys with dentists. So we created a private label dentist newsletter. In return, we have an affiliate commission if they buy our subscription based service, we give them a commission. We ended up getting 20% of the total dentists in the US. Of the total dentists who have email addresses, we now have 20% of them, within four months, at no cost. I checked this out.
You’ll love this with the blog. This is the other thing that drives me nuts. People think bloggers have to wake up everyday and type and do this stuff. I love it. If you can do that, go for it.
My guy’s got one day a week. So we did this really secret thing. We actually write ahead of time. We script. Now we’re three months scheduled ahead of time. I can already tell you what’s coming out in January 2010 and what marketing campaign it’s hooked into. It took us one focused period of one week of writing and recording to get three months of content. We spend the rest of the time on the phone calling people. When our blog updates, it sends out automatically hello to our newsletter.
So my guy pulls one blog, schedules it for three months, it goes out to the newsletter and there is this thing called FriendFeed and TweetDeck and every other tweet that syndicates it to Facebook and Twitter. So we’re covered.
It’s not perfect but now we’re out in all the media. It’s driving traffic. We post to one place and we script. We write short interviews, send them out. That becomes our newsletter, our partners give us emails, and by the way it’s a joint venture. So it’s sent by them with their brand and ours, but we control everything. Why? These guys don’t know how to make money. So basically what I’ve done is create an email newsletter which goes out with their graphic on top. I’ve got 20% of the US audience simply because these guys kept trying to do it themselves, but they didn’t have the time.
David Jenyns: You make it sound really easy there and I want to drill down slightly into what’s going on, the mechanics behind that. We talked about the newsletter, and you said, we’re posting it on the blog and we’ve got that to drip feed out and you’ve got the newsletter and people are getting told when that’s being posted. Now as far as driving the traffic is concerned, you’re leveraging off some of those existing networks. You’re also pushing the content out there. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re pushing that content out there?
You mentioned a few different things, that are going to push it through to Facebook and MySpace or whatever markets you’re publishing on. How do you structure something like that?
Declan Dunn: First thing we do, I use FriendFeed. I like FriendFeed. FriendFeed allows me to put these different urls in, so my blog posts then can send them out to various places like Facebook, Twitter accounts. Let’s say I have about five accounts total, we don’t need to name them all. You know them all. They’re all the usual suspects. I get logins and passwords for those. I enter those into FriendFeed so that handles all the communication. FriendFeed says, oh, blog’s updated, tell Twitter, tell Facebook. I don’t know how it works other than logins and passwords and everything goes like crazy.
What’s important, and a good point you’re making is, when we generate traffic, we do interviews. Then we let our people know when the interview’s coming up so they can blog about it, they can send it out to their email list. In fact we encourage them to make this a bit of a celebration, because these people don’t do anything else to promote themselves. It’s like a focused interview. When you’re interviewed on MyDentalChannel, it’s a big deal, it looks really good.
Each guest expert will be encouraged to send out the email and then a week after it’s posted on MyDental Channel, we actually share a little excerpt, about two to three minutes of let’s say a thirty minute interview for free. We let them post it on their blog. Then usually about four to six weeks later, we’ll post a second part of their interview on our blog and let them know. We say, before , during or after, or all three if you’re great, can you let people know and then a week later we put it on their blog and they can let their people know, and put it on their site by the way, which honours them. It says, I want to drive traffic to my site.
Meanwhile our emails go out to our partners. Instead of you just sending it to your email list or mine, I’ve got five different partners, who by the way love this and we have rules about not pitchfesting and not beating our audience up, but giving them real content. I drive them to squeeze pages. If they give me a url I link to them and we’re all interlinking, so we’re playing the search engine game. We’ve got really high page rank relatively. It’s not exactly a real high page rank industry, but we’ve got decent page rank that our link matters.
We’ve got people, for example, one part of a general electric company. There are some big players who could care less. They’re just getting interviewed, they’re not actually an email partner. But if I put that content out, it adds to what people are doing. Then what we’re doing, to add to your point, you’ve got to tell people what to do as partners. Everybody says, you’re cool, I’m cool. I like to say, I’ll scratch my back, you scratch yours, and we both end up with itchy backs. Nobody scratches. You’ve got to tell people in a good way, I’m expecting you to do this.
My admins check in a day or so ahead. Here’s my other secret. Let your admins create the illusion that you’re organized. Tell them, a day or so before, contact the people, follow them up if they don’t do it, be nice, pick up the phone and give them the guilty call. They will do it for you, but they need to be nudged. Don’t expect anyone to do anything. So with one virtual admin and a schedule, my virtual admin already knows what’s coming out next month.
She knows who to call, has the phone number and email, the interview’s done and then it comes out about two to three months later and it gets segmented out. We try to get as many opportunities to post this and share traffic as possible.
David Jenyns: When it comes to actual implementation of this, I suppose you brought it up when you talked about the admins. A lot of this I imagine the core infrastructure of this is your time. You’re going to mastermind out what needs to be done. When it gets to a point of implementation, because you have lots of different projects that you’re working on at any one time, how do you pull that together and not go crazy trying to spin sixty plates at any one time?
Declan Dunn: I ran an agency for a long time so I learnt this in the trenches. I like to run two to three person teams being, one is the expert or the leader of whatever that company is and the other is the admin person who actually gets things done. If the leader can actually get things done, I’ve got an awesome team. I would encourage all those people here to not play this attitude game where, oh, I’m so lazy and I just sit around driving my Ferrari, I love you too. Here’s what you could do. Try working five hours more every week. You could increase your revenue exponentially.
When you care about your business, your people care. I don’t just talk to my admin and then throw them a brain dump and go out and stare at my belly button. I give them specific steps to do. I’m such a big fan of systems because, if you just spend the time in the beginning to say what are the various steps it takes.
Let’s say to my virtual admin, this is MyDentalChannel. We record content, it’s transcribed and edited down. What that person is given is about a two paragraph word document, maybe even html and a little two to three minute audio snippet. We hire a transcriptionist to do that. We record the audio and we do hire somebody for two to three days every three months to work eight to sixteen hours; that bills out at about $US30-$US40 an hour. It’s a little bit of a cost, but if you look at that quarterly, we’re probably spending $2000 a year on audio.
Audio’s our most expensive thing because it takes time to edit. The transcription stuff is nothing. I can give you tons of amazing transcription services that are incredibly cheap. So we bring it out. So my admin knows that I go to the blog, and instead of them going to the blog every day which by the way would cause errors. She knows that she sits down with that stuff and just schedules it out over, probably takes her two to three days. She makes sure everything is scheduled out in our blog.
WordPress does this, everyone does this, schedules ahead. Most people don’t think this way in the US. Everybody’s trying to do everything at the last minute, which is why stuff screws up because you’ll make more errors running through it than thinking ahead. By giving my admin that, after they do that one week of intensive work, by the way I can go back and check their work now. It’s not coming out tomorrow, so we’re not all having heart attacks. I can go check their work and say, ok, everything’s good.
Now what my admin’s doing is reflecting on comments, going to Facebook. Probably I would say I expect them to do about an hour a day. It’s just like checking email. Check Facebook, check Twitter. You don’t need to go to fifty sites unless you’re an SEO guy, then you do. There’s a real point to going to fifty sites because it will hugely increase your value. But if you’re like us, and you’re really trying to, what I call, fish in the right lakes, there are only a few lakes where the fish are biting. Facebook is one of them for us.
So we want her there to comment, we want her there to reflect back, to answer the questions but she spends literally about five hours a week, so that’s about twenty hours a month. We probably get that up to thirty when everything is said and done. We have her once a quarter, spend a focused week of twenty to forty hours extra chugging out all that extra work.
To answer your question, we compartmentalize our time into focused one week production times followed by just making sure the rest is running. That way we’re not doing production every week and it saves us a great deal of time and money. It’s just scripting ahead.
David Jenyns: That initial production time, would that be working with the client as well as getting the content ready for distribution? At that point, you’re working on a project for a week and you’re getting all the systems in place, skilling up your assistant who is then going to be able to take and manage that project through to whenever the person’s contracted to have that project go through. Does that sound right?
Declan Dunn: Yes. When you’re hearing it, it sounds like a lot at first, but once you’ve done it, it’s not. This is what I do. Now I can go out to any author or speaker and I’ve got a system that I can then train them in how to interview. We’ve got a whole book and training series. By the way, I don’t just throw them a book. I talk to them. It takes about two hours to train anybody. I listen to them, if they have the personality to do an interview. That’s how I qualify them. It’s not rocket science – some can do it, some can’t.
The interview and then the recording, then the posting and then the checking, that’s a system. It sounds like a lot at first. But here’s what people don’t realize. You’re probably going to work more and, to your point, a lot more at first doing it because you’ve never done it before. But the second, third, fourth time you start going through, this stuff gets so easy. It only gets easy by repetition. You’ve got to put in the time. But what that does is what anybody good in business knows, is that creating systems makes, three to six months from now, you’ll be blowing away your competition.
Most internet folks like to make things up on the fly. Those businesses just tend to crash and burn, because that is not a system. That is based on one person’s genius. Genius is not replicable. I want things that are replicable and that I can train good, average people to do. If it is something that takes a really high skill level, I’m going to look at that and say, I’m not sure about that because when you’re talking really high skill levels, there is a limited number of people who can do those kind of things.
David Jenyns: It almost feels like we’ve drawn up two business models. If we talk in terms of dentists, because it does depend very much on the client you’re working with and what it is you can already leverage off them. You find out where they’re strong, also identify where their weaknesses are and identify what partners you can work with. Similarly we were talking about, I don’t know if it is a separate system or whether it merges together depending on the individual.
After you’ve identified that, you also look at what content can we create with this particular client, be it through interviews which can convert into transcripts, to articles for basically distribution and getting that content out there. Just so I understand how you’re doing this process. The idea of getting the content out there is then hopefully to market to either the affiliate partners that you’ve lined up or through any sort of email communication that you’ve built up. You’re continuing to market to the people who are already in your funnel.
Then slightly out of that, you’re creating this content, putting it out there and you’re putting good content, hopefully putting it in front of the right people. You’re throwing the good stuff out there, and like I was saying, good SEO happens from putting good content out there. Does that sound right?
Declan Dunn: Yes, right. And one of the things we do is, we do a half hour interview. We give away three to six minutes. I’m not being religious about it, but it’s like a free chapter in a book. That way, if you’re on my email list, you’ll get a taste. But if you want to pay, you’ll get the whole interview plus savings by buying that person’s product or service. So anybody we interview has an incentive. For example, we don’t let them pitch, which would drive all internet marketers crazy. That’s ok. That market would kill us. We wouldn’t be able to send to those lists.
To your point, you want to make sure that what you’re sending out, that the list is willing to hear it. Internet marketers are willing to hear pitches. That’s fine. I’m not against that, but if I try to take that attitude over here, we’d lose all our people.
So we go out, and we know that they don’t want to hear pitches, but the end is, the person that I’m interviewing will sell services to a dentist that range anywhere from $US1,000-$US10,000. So they’re more than willing. Their goal is to be in front of real dentists who would hire them. They’ve got to put on their best. To this point, it’s one of my measures. Do I have people who give me good content, and won’t make my life difficult by doing it?
All these are rules. I look at it and say, because if that is not going to happen, and each market has its own way it works, then I would adapt to that market. This market told me no pitches. But the other end of it is, if this guy or girl is smart, then that dentist listening is going to hire them. That’s awesome, because they have money to spend.
If this makes sense, David, I positioned this as, are you a lead product or are you a back end product? We’re lead product for an entire industry. That is so competitive that enables us to make a deal. As part of what I do when I look at a business is, where do you best fit in to this world so you can start making some sales? Are you a lead product?
It doesn’t have to be that black and white but there are so many more openings for being lead products right now because of the way the economy is. People aren’t spending as much, and it doesn’t mean they won’t. It just means they’re spending smaller chunks of money. So we became a lead product and that tended to work in that market.
For example, we’ve got an association of dentists who we email to and they love us. They’re going to endorse us to other state associations which could get us further and further emails because in that market, earning trust and being long term is very important. So we have to be a bit more careful than I might be in an internet marketing circle. By the way, I love internet marketing. I’m not dissing it here. It’s just you can be a lot more aggressive in speaking to them, because people are there hard core to make money.
That’s not the truth in any audience. You want to make sure whatever the audience is, that your voice, your tone, your copy reflects what they want to hear. You don’t want to just take some guru’s pitch which might work selling a get rich quick book on ClickBank and try and apply it to another market where you sound nuts. It’s just copy, it’s copy and words, that’s all it is.
David Jenyns: You’ve developed this system that you implement, and you’ve got a bit of a tool box so it can vary according to the clients that you’re working with. That’s where the core of your business is, identifying those clients.
I like the idea that you identified dentists and then you said the client is worth $10,000 to them, so there’s a lot of money in that industry. If they’re excited by the fact of email newsletters because they’ve never seen it before and you come into that space and a client is worth so much for them, once you start to generate that cash, obviously you’re going to get a piece of that pie. Is that the space that you operate in?
Declan Dunn: Yes, that’s a very good way to put it. I consider myself a new media publisher, which means I set up the strategy, pick up the systems, the right systems that people can run depending on their skill bases. I work with a wide variety of markets. I work with guys in the internet marketing space, I work with get rich quick, I work with really corporate guys. To me it doesn’t matter, the system is the system. What matters is what tactic works in that market and what tools work.
What’s funny, one of the things I learnt, the thing is as a publisher I usually get a set up fee, plus I get a license. Basically I’m licensing the system at a really deep level if I work. I do coaching and consulting as well. When I license a system I get a piece of the action like I’m doing with the dentists. It gives me the incentive to be a bigger partner, and it gives them the incentive. Let me give you a quick hint.
This is something we learnt in the new media game. When we started out we had these awesome interviews. This guy is really good. He’s entertaining, intelligent, it is fun stuff. No one’s listening to him, so we’re struggling at the beginning, saying what are we doing wrong here? We’re sitting here in the old school mentality, old school being two years ago. I’m only talking US here. You guys over in Australia are so far ahead of us with mobile phones. If one thing Americans are dumb at, it’s mobile phones. We are clueless, leading the blind, I like to say. I’m confessing being blind and being clueless earlier this year. I’m not throwing stones.
I’m sitting there saying, I’m designing the email, it’s perfect. Everything’s right, I know email. I’ve had lists of eight million. I really know email. I know how to design it. I’ve got a whole give away. I’ve given away a sixteen page document because it really drives me nuts that people don’t do the basics. But they still weren’t looking. So I said, never complain. That’s another thing. Don’t get into whining. Every obstacle is there just to teach you how to do it right.
So I talked to my dentist. I said, John, let’s just break this down, simple. I’m sending you an email. Where do you see it? He said, well, you know I don’t really check our email because I use a palm phone. John’s hanging out with dentists. I have to get education all the time. Another reason I do this is, they buy education all the time as part of their business, they have to. I said, when you go to these conferences, how many of these guys are on mobile phones? He said, everyone. I even asked my internet marketing friends, and they said, yes, everyone. I said, do you reflect that in your email?
Here’s the deal. You know why they weren’t listening? We had it like they were sitting in front of their computer, click to go to the website. That is beautiful on a big screen. Try that on an iPhone. It’s difficult, there is no screen. So here’s the magic word: download. We tested it, download the mp3. We sent them pdfs. Download the pdf. If we’re writing anything of length, they’ll import that to their computer. They can listen to the mp3 on any phone. I’m talking about the US only. But mp3s are pretty universal.
Our listening rate went through the roof, up like 500% and people started doing the viral thing and passing it on. It was such an easy thing once we figured it out. But we were totally lost in the old world, thinking that everyone’s sitting in front of the computer. I have to tell you, none of these guys are and every internet marketing conference I’ve been to since, they tell me none of their people are, yet they’re still driving them to web pages.
The last thing I’ll say is, we actually drive them to a phone. We actually don’t have a call centre or anything like that, we don’t have enough money. So we have an 1800 number where they can call and get an automated sales message and go to do an order. But we have to drive them to a phone and not a click on the link to do an order because they’re simply not in front of a computer.
David Jenyns: I think that’s one of the big insights you gave there. It’s really getting in the mind of who it is you’re trying to get in front of and almost put yourself in their shoes and look through their eyes. Where do other people, not even necessarily newbies, people who’ve been in internet marketing, where are some other areas where you see people going wrong when they start to market online?
Declan Dunn: I upset an audience about a week ago, it’s what I do in a fun way. I like to shake things up, but only from speaking from experience. I don’t believe I know the truth or anything like that. Forget your ego. If somebody couldn’t do what you’re doing, you’re probably in the wrong business on the internet. We’re not rocket scientists but what we do have are followings. To your point, what I was telling people was, that what was good if I was starting out now as a newbie, there is no way I would do what most of the gurus, including myself previously have taught. It’s not a good way.
What they’re doing by the way, is working for them, and it’s crazy. They look at me and say, what are you saying, stop this? I say, no you don’t but if I was starting out with nothing, I would flop doing what you are doing. That was a different time period. Everyone’s blogging, everyone’s in social media, and they’re running around, which I call the ADD of new media, they’re running round. You’ve got to have some video or audio to stop them, to get them to read.
They will read, but I’ve got people going up with text only and doing squeeze pages. There’s nothing wrong, test everything. The old methodology, driving lots of traffic and millions of visitors, it’s insane. Most people I know making seven figure businesses have 10,000-15,000 visitors a month. They’re not spending their time driving traffic, but again I’m not in the search business, that is a different matter. Even search has only so many searches. There’s not a lot of mass market.
If you want to go to the US and do diets for your search, you better have a big bag of cash, or you better be really smart and work eighteen hours a day. It’s a very competitive market. If you know how a bell curve goes, it starts low, heads up a slope and then evens out on the top. That’s where we are. We’re at the top of the bell curve. We’re mature. We’re a real business now guys. It’s really hard now. So coming out like you can drive lots of traffic, you’re going to go out today. What I would suggest the gurus are doing, I’m not putting all of them down, there are some awesome guys out there, I love them all, but the thing that they’re doing works for them wouldn’t work for somebody who’s starting.
If you’re going out, you’ve got to get some trust and reputation. Still the best way to do it is to leverage and engage people and meet them, even meet them physically if you can. If you want to make a really big deal, you’ve got to get out of the internet friend, to face to face.
I’ll give you a quick example. One guy is very successful, has money but not a lot of time. His teams are ok but not great. He’s managing this stuff and he’s got a product going on. He came to me and he said, I want to sell this product. Here’s what I tell newbies. Don’t just say I want to sell this product, see if that product would sell.
I see a lot of people are saying, I want to sell this and this thing won’t sell. Maybe you’ll make some cute money but you’re saying, no, I want to change reality. I would rather look at existing human buying behaviour and fit into something and make it work. So he came out and he had this book which was brilliant. The book was so brilliant it was a hard thing to sell. So we turned the book into a 90 day challenge. We sold it for half the price of the book, took the content, put it out in auto responders and contacted major affiliates and paid them the lion’s share of the $97, all digitally delivered by the way.
It was a challenge, it wasn’t just an ebook. People had to trickle the content out over ninety days. They participated, and the content was awesome. We turned his book into an event. Then all the affiliates marketed. He sold something like 19,000 units of a $97 product. He blew me away. It took him six to nine months to get those affiliates. He nurtured them, he looked at them, he found them and he had to shake their hand, but once he earned their trust and had enough of a commission, he was able to move forward.
So I’m not trying to say there are not get rich quick things because this is the internet. You could invent something wildly successful, and I encourage any crazy people to continue to be that. A great author Hunter S Thompson said when the going gets tough, the weird go pro. Most of the best businesses I’ve ever seen on the net, none of them started with lots of money. Look at Google, it started with a dream. Isn’t it funny, do no evil. How ironic is that? I can say that about Google because I’m not SEO based.
When you get big, evil’s relative. If I was a newbie, I would be blogging like crazy if I had writing skills. If I didn’t have writing skills and I was really smart and organized I’d be doing something search related in a niche that wasn’t too heavily populated. I’m a big fan of this. I’m not against competition.
I just think being all macho and jumping in to kick the biggest guy in the world, I would rather learn in a niche and move to the other niche when I was ready and had all my ducks in a row and I had links and I had built up that tracking. You’re going to have to build this stuff up. You’re going to want to make some money. You’re either going to go out there and blog yourself, or you’re going to blog and you’re not really a writer. I would always urge anyone to write well, but frankly if you’re scaling up a lot of search blogs, it gets tough.
People use something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, other sites where they hire cheap writers just to do posts. You can do that. But if you’re just starting out as a newbie, the best way to build your list is to build a blog. So if you’re building an email list, get a blog.
Start connecting and contacting people and don’t sit there and pitch your product. Look at what everyone does at the product launch now. Do you start with the pitch, or do you start with the candy, give it away free, get them interested in a month, then let them know what you’re doing for a month, then hit it a month late?
That’s a really brilliant thing that Jeff Walker’s created and other people have systematized, that little process. But think about what it is. Introduce yourself, but don’t jump and think, if I get one more newbie saying, hi, I’ve got a book, do you want to sell it for me and get rich? I say, no, I don’t even know who you are. I appreciate you love your book, but back off a little bit and realize you’re just getting into the room. You need to introduce yourself, you need to get known.
By the way, people will help you if you don’t come on like a freight train at the beginning. You can earn their trust and you get this other side to them. There are a lot of top gurus who will promote because they are looking. It’s ironic. We need the newbies to bring new ideas in. We’re all so settled in our ways that newbies are usually the ones that look at Mark Zuckerberger’s Facebook. You think anyone who came from the web 1.0 world would think like him? No! Think about sharing and communication. No! We all thought about killing the customer. I’m serious, it was just marketing. People thought he was nuts.
I’m not trying to espouse this, that’s a big level example. Newbies don’t realize the thing they’re going to bring in is a different point of view that people that get good in this business have lost. Because they’re good and they’re good at what they’re doing, that’s why they’re growing their businesses focusing and stop paying attention to some things.
That’s what’s happening now. There are some shifts in terms of copy, language, style, the way people are marketing. I’m seeing people who three years ago people would have laughed off, doing better than people who three years ago would have been really successful.
David Jenyns: I think you hit something key there. Building that trust and reputation is the biggest thing online, especially when you’re going to buy something. The biggest hurdle people have to get over is that trust factor. So it’s important to build up that trust both with your key partners who could help you out from an affiliate point of view further down the track, and also your clients. Building that trust, I think you hit the nail on the head as far as Jeff Walker’s material is concerned. That really does connect with the individual and applies a lot of the Robert Cialdini principles through influence. It’s building a relationship rather than just coming out of the gate and going straight for the jugular.
I think that right there is really key as far as where some people are going wrong. Looking back on everything you’ve done up to this point, because I know you’ve had a huge amount of experience starting way back. If you could identify, if you could have known what you know now and redo it all, how would you do things differently? More specifically if you can identify some key points or leverage things that happened in your career, when you look back and say, when I did these one or two things, it really exploded my business.
Obviously connecting with the right people and building that relationship was one of those. Are there any other things that had a huge impact?
Declan Dunn: Mentors. Jonathan Mizel and Martin Sanders is the way back machine for some people but still two of my best friends. I was so clueless about marketing. People don’t have any idea about how bad I really was. I had an attitude against it. They taught me. People say, oh, you’re so good! My headlines, you would cry they were so bad. I had no clue on how to write it. So having a mentor relationship with some folks was great. I don’t know how anybody can go without that. Most of my mentors I’m seeking now are under thirty. I’m going back to the old hippy saying, don’t trust anyone over thirty. I’m way over thirty!
They know how to use the internet like I don’t and I know how to do marketing. I really learn from them. What is funny, they don’t just have to be twenty something, don’t get me wrong. But if you’ve grown up with it, there’s a different mentality from my generation who didn’t grow up with it. They know the tools. To this day, I continue to look for mentors who are not like me, who don’t have my viewpoint but are doing things that I think are amazing.
That’s how I ran into Eben Pagan years ago. It was so funny, we finally met in 2004. He is an amazing guy. I was so busy in 2001. In 2004, Eben is so like this, he’s always looking for knowledge, he’s always looking to learn. That’s why he’s so successful. Never stop wanting to learn. If I could go back and correct what I did…I have this ability with this marketing. If it wasn’t for the internet, I would be as poor as could be. This real world stuff does not make sense to me. When the internet came along, I’m really good at knowing what’s going to happen two to three years down the road. I made a lot of money through that.
When I went into doing info products, my biggest problem has been, my products have been two to three years early. The product I’ve been releasing I’ve put in the closet because it was too early. I’ve sat there and said, I’m going to stop trying to create it. I don’t mean let the market catch up. There are patterns, there are trends. That’s what I mean. There is no visionary stuff. You can see the way people are using stuff. When you see people start spending money, pay attention.
In 2001 people started spending money at Google. It wasn’t a lot of money but everyone else was making nothing. You’re seeing that with Facebook right now. They’re doing $500,000,000 while Twitter’s trying to figure out its business model. That’s a pattern. Somebody’s learnt to make money even though, don’t get me wrong, it’s a macro thing, but $500,000,000 with a crazy thing like Facebook is relatively not that much but it’s money. Whether they’re rather clueless about some of their marketing, which they are, they can figure that out.
Twitter is trying to say, we don’t need any business model, but unfortunately they don’t have the genius. Compare Twitter to Google. Google is run by engineers, Twitter is a cool little tool that anyone can replicate. There’s no money.
I would say, and this is my own weakness is being at the head of the market and knowing when to leverage that at the right time. Sometimes in an info business, timing is everything. I’m not saying most of you have an idea that’s not in there, I’m just saying, my particular thing is, it’s a gift that I’ve been able to get this and I make lots of money with bigger people doing this. I’m already doing this, paving the roads, but it doesn’t happen for a year or two.
So I had to balance that with stuff that’s not just here and now but that I didn’t put out a product and then come back and see two or three years later somebody with a product that is similar to mine, and mine’s now two or three years old. I pulled mine off the shelf. So I actually learned this time. We’ll see. I don’t know whether it will be a hit or not. I’ve been off the road for quite a bit. But we shall see.
David Jenyns: If we can get a little bit of insight, and I know you don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet. We have got your new book that’s coming out, New Media Game. Can you give some insight, about what you can see what’s coming two or three years down the road? What are some places that people can position themselves to be in front of this wave?
Declan Dunn: Let me give you a context. This is the third in my series. The first one I wrote was called Winning the Affiliate Game in 1998. I became a bible of the industry and I turned that in to my own agency which just went crazy. It was the high seven figures for the whole seven years I was there. It was an awesome experience. I created Winning the Internet Game in 2001. That was when Google was coming up, so it was search, email, a lot of the old school internet stuff. I haven’t really written one since 2004, so this one is called Winning the New Media Game. It’s different than a book. It’s really about audio and visual material to answer your question.
What’s really happening now is, you’ve got to have some audio visual presence. You want to hear something really crazy about video that people don’t get? People don’t understand. Video has been around for ever. The biggest thing that people look for in your video is not all the whiz bang tricks. There is a study out from UCLA, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the percentages right but general rules apply. About 45% of the reason somebody likes your video is the audio quality. People don’t understand.
I used to do video back in the day, my audio was bad, people used to crucify me. You can have bad video with good audio, you cannot have good video with bad audio. Bad audio is not allowed. That’s the number one thing. It is so counter intuitive. Number two, it is the sense of your presentation, whether they like you or not. It’s not anything to do with what you’re presenting, but the way you present it. It’s just simply one’s audio, the second half is your presentation style, whether they like it.
That’s why you get all these crazy people on YouTube who have this crazy thing, but they’re just genius just who they are. People love it. You know what 10% is? The content. Literally, content is meaningless to them. People don’t get this. They spend their entire time on content. People could care less about content. It’s the audio, the presentation style and the content is a 10% consideration.
So with my book and what I’ve turned it into is audio-visual training and practical training. It’s called The New Media Game because I’m about coaching people to get into the game and actually get off the sidelines, put it into action and create an area where I can coach and mentor some people at a lower level, other people way up the totem pole. I’m able to reach more people. Something I really love is I learn from these guys. This community is going to develop by everybody’s efforts. We’re going to have a lot of rules about not screwing each other over, which I will have to knock on wood.
If you screw people around and steal ideas, you’re going to be gone. I’m going to be like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld. ‘No soup for you! Bye!’ Seriously, I don’t have time. You can go plenty of places and do that by the way. You can go replicate it. But I want people to come up with their ideas and be able to put them into practice. I going to take audio and video and take social media mobile. This social media mobile is not a trend. It’s the customers in control of everything. Wake up!
I’m only talking from a US perspective, but advertising’s dead. It’s so dead, it’s dead like I never thought it would die. It’s been gutted to death. You’re either doing something on performance, because people don’t make money selling ads, they make money when ads perform. Google is the biggest, greatest example of that at a text ad level, but everybody’s doing it on their space. So social media is really a two step direct marketing.
You don’t sell them in social media. You take them from social media, and you actually drive them. Instead of a squeeze page, here’s a little trick, drive them into your own social network where they’ll opt in for everything because it doesn’t look like a squeeze page. Create a community around that with the right market.
For example, I saw a guy do that, called Shelfari; they were bought by Amazon. He drove people into a community to talk about books. They bought books from Amazon. He basically built that site and became an affiliate for Amazon by driving people who loved to talk about books. Gary Vaynerchuck, is the wine guy who everyone knows. Gary drives them into his wine network where they talk about wine and they like to buy wine. You have to have a buying behaviour.
But he wouldn’t do that on Facebook. There he puts out his videos, free entertainment. He gets them off there to a network where it’s ok to talk about commerce and it’s ok to buy stuff. You’re not going to do that in certain audiences. So you’ve got the old internet, which is the search, email and affiliates. The new internet is social media mobile. Where can we get them off there and into the old internet to make sales? Mobile’s just been invented and I can’t go into a lot of this, it would freak people out.
When I saw the iPhone, and being such a dumb American, when I was over in Australia in 2004, I was talking to guys from Orange. We’re barely talking about 3G now. We’re so bad. Being able to deliver content to people when they want it, subscription based and also the sense of micro payments, under $20 products is what’s great. People don’t get that. You don’t sell $100 books on a mobile phone.
I meet a guy in China who was actually buying up mobile phones, dumping on some poor nation for free, but he was getting $2 a subscriber for content. So scalability wise, he’s going to make a lot for certain markets. If you read an interview by the CEO of Nokia in Fast Company recently, he’s doing that in India. What we don’t get as Americans is, we always sell high end expensive entertainment and stuff. He’s going out to a farmer in India with a cheap phone, who needs to get weather information and charging $2, and targeting about 10,000,000 farmers.
David Jenyns: Over there, the scope of that market is unbelievable.
Declan Dunn: We know it’s cool. He said there are three things in mobile that blew my mind. It’s news, obviously, entertainment, we all like to watch each other, life is reality TV and then survival. That’s where I think most people miss it. The farmer getting the information is survival.
There are a lot of things people need on their mobile phones that they’re not going to get in front of a computer. The computer and the TV are going to become this giant plasma amazing experience but the mobile phone is where they’re doing email, it’s where they’re connecting and communicating and it’s where you’ve got a lot of viral marketing going to come in very big.
In the US, I don’t know about outside, but everything is, especially in the under thirties, under thirty-fives, it’s all about friend to friend marketing. The old days of advertising and marketing are gone. My nephew’s sixteen in New Jersey. There’s no way he’s going to trust your ad, but if a friend tells him something, and we can get the friends to tell friends, and by the way we’ve got to be cool and hip and earn that, which is pathetic for old people to say, but we do, they’ll pass it around.
That friend to friend marketing is what’s going to dominate, which is why it’s really important that you don’t just screw people over, because friends won’t talk about it. You won’t get scale unless you’ve got some form where friends will pass it on. I’ve seen this in all generations.
David Jenyns: You’ve touched on so many key insights there. I think the friend to friend is absolutely key. You need to make sure you’re doing the right thing because stuff spreads on the internet like wildfire. You’ve seen companies that are just getting destroyed by bits of information circling the internet. There were those krypotonite locks that were shown to be picked by a pen. That got out onto the internet and spread like wildfire.
If you’re doing something in a space that is not kosher,
it will spread. That friend to friend is key. The idea as well of talking about survival, a lot of people are missing that.
There was a really interesting podcast just last week on The Economist podcast through iTunes talking about what are the effects of mobile phones going into third world countries. One of the first things is that it increases the country’s productivity based on the fact that you have some dude now who can call up and find out what the price of fish in one area is, find out what it is in another area, and it makes the prices even across the whole country. They can call ahead. If they need to go pick up a delivery of fish or something like that, they can call ahead two days.
Instead of going out to pick this fish up and then find it’s not ready for them, they can call ahead and make sure it’s ready for them at the time they get there. It makes them a lot more efficient. I feel like you’re right. We’re only scratching the surface of where we’re going to see mobile phones are going and the technology. It is, it’s a child still, it’s in its infancy.
Declan Dunn: When I saw PC back in the eighties, I actually dropped out of school and published my own magazine, which back then was amazing. I didn’t even have a hard drive. That will date me. It was really funny, you could see this thing, and it was the same thing I felt when Mark Andriessen introduced Netscape in 1994. The net had been cute but he made it consumer. It made sense.
When I saw the mobile phones, the BlackBerries, the Palms, the iPhones are standard in the US, but still there are a lot of different versions that are doing it in their own way. This is radical, because all my friends, everyone I know, you can reach them on their cell phone. I even read an article where people doing debt collection in the US, which has been a big deal, they know that the only way to reach people guaranteed is on their mobile phone.
They’ll give up their home, they’ll give up their house, they’ll give up their car, they’ll give up about everything, except their mobile phone. When you start seeing trends like that, you start seeing that human behaviour is not too hard to figure out. What we used to have in a computer five years ago, you’ve got carrying around in the palm of your hand. What you’re basically doing, you’re communicating. Even though I really like the videos and so on, the fact is most people are not using it to watch video on the little screen. It’s there, but if you want to really see a great video, you’re going to go home to your computer or your plasma.
The screen’s cute. So it’s really a communication device. It’s going to be where continuity programs go. I’ve got people sending out information, doing stuff to mobile phones where people can get updates and be updated. They’re basically checking their email on a mobile phone and it’s all short text messaging. So why don’t we use it? Use it if you’re in real estate, if you’re in stock investment, if you’ve got some ticket service.
I had a buddy years ago who created a crazy service called Tickets Now. He was selling second hand tickets. The next thing I saw he was doing $200,000,000 a year. Go figure out! These are the kind of guys you won’t see coming, it won’t sound like the same old thing. They’re going to go and do something on the mobile phones now that’s just going to blow people away.
I was just doing a study on mobile. It needs to tie into something about their lifestyle, which could be spiritual. I do a lot of work with ‘spirituality’ companies, from new age to religious kinds of things. If it’s something of a real lifestyle thing being an important part of it, astrology is a big one in that sector, but investment, stock tips, travel.
People love to hear about travel, they love to see videos of travel. These are really key core things that people will get. You need to understand the mobile phone will be a way to keep connected, and we will be selling products in the US that are less than $20 and quite honestly less than $5-$10.You don’t sell expensive stuff. Once they do that, the whole goal is to move them from mobile into the richer environment of the internet and to get them to spend the time with you to sell your richer products.
So I think you’ll you see a lot of $1-$5 opt in pitches where people will get the audio visual but then they want to go read. The real goal is when they buy, they read.
David Jenyns: I think there are a few little key things you point out there. You mentioned you watch different people and you take on these mentors to try and get your finger on the pulse and you mentioned Eben Pagan. Are there any other people you keep an eye on who you think are at the forefront of their particular niche and who help you further develop your thought processes?
Declan Dunn: Actually one of my pieces of advice is only pick a few of them. I’m talking about being on steady communication. I don’t handle that much information well and I don’t think most people are productive, but whatever your choice is. My biggest advice to my folks is, cut out most of the gurus and pick three to five. By the way, you’ll hear what everyone else is doing through those three to five, it’s a very small world. But that’s just one man’s advice.
The thing I like about Eben, and you’ll hear it about me, is he’s really got a lot of heart and a lot of integrity. I’ve got a lot of respect for him. Plus I’ve had the joy of being able to hang out with him many times and just learn so much. It’s so funny, really great marketers don’t end up just talking about marketing. They’re interested in a lot of different things which adds to their marketing.
A guy I want to mention who most people don’t even know and who never writes under his name. His name is Jay Weintraub. He runs LeadsCon. If you haven’t subscribed to it, subscribe to DM Confidential, Direct Marketing Confidential, that’s the only pitch he’ll ever give. He always writes under editor, he’s funny. His stuff is genius. He talks about the CPA world, he runs a lead generation thing at a level you can’t even hold a candle to. When he talked about the fake blogs, he talks about them without being holy and righteous. He looks at the business models.
If you go in the guru circles, most of these guys don’t know what this other higher part of the market is doing which is very much driven by one or two person teams. Jay Weintraub has brilliant stuff. There are a lot of people I follow. Quite honestly one of the things I always suggest people do is go beyond just the marketing advice, look at ted.com.
David Jenyns: Yes. I love ted.
Declan Dunn: You get so much. You want to expand your brain. Spend twenty minutes with any of those people and they are all over the place. Don’t just limit yourself to marketers.
I love Jeff Walker. I read his stuff religiously. You know what I really liked? I’m not really buddies with Jeff. I’ve known him but it’s not like we hang out. I really respect what he does. Being on his list, he actually wrote me once about the discipline of gratitude. It was wild to see. He’s a really great marketer and normally in the old days, marketers wouldn’t show any sign of weakness. But he’s talking about looking and being grateful for the people you’re working with. This is powerful stuff. What he told me was Tony Robbins’ influence.
David Jenyns: Yes! You can see that shine through. You see that in a few guys at the moment. Obviously there are the few things going on at the moment with Frank Kern and the whole interview series. It’s filtering through and it’s fantastic to see.
Declan Dunn: You know what Kern does and it’s so cool. I’ve never really hung out with him, but I’ve been around the same circles for many years. The thing I really liked about his videos, he has this ability to just be himself on video. It’s not unteachable. It’s about being comfortable with yourself. His stuff is brilliant. Some people say, oh, it’s so simple. Yes, simple is genius. Making things simple is one of the hardest things. I don’t think he oversimplifies at all.
I think it’s his beauty is that message in his video. If you want to study how to do video, I would much more look at him than most of the people I see who are very stiff. You can see it, their hands are clenched. They’re not really comfortable being there and they’re not comfortable being able to say something and screwing up or being funny just being themselves. It’s funny. In most of my stage stuff now, I say, here’s the real key. Here’s the secret to twenty-first century marketing, are you ready? Be genuine. Be yourself. People try to be somebody else.
There are so many of these guys now that I follow. I’ve been marketing a lot to women. So I’ve been studying a lot of different ways and the whole marketing style to women, moving into markets that are not less competitive but have some opportunity.
So I study a lot of people there, Lorrie Morgan Ferrero’s one of my favourites in that space, because she talks a lot about marketing to women. It’s interesting, she comes from a direct marketing and Dan Kennedy background, so it’s not all. ‘Oh, women are different.’ You know that is so phony. Women are women, and you can talk to them but there are certain things that drive them. What’s really cool is you learn that, I can apply the same things and understand how men market and how they react to things. It just gives me a different perspective. So they’re some of the people I listen to.
David Jenyns: You’re definitely someone people should listen to as well. If they want to keep on the pulse of what you’re doing and I know you’ve just pushed back the launch of the New Media Game a little bit. If people want to keep on top of that and make sure that when it comes out they grab a copy, what’s the best way to do that?
Declan Dunn: Go to my blog which is at thenewmediagame.com and add ‘/blog’ if you actually want to see the blog. I’ve started putting a few things out and actually next week, October 15, I’m going to be doing a regular video inspired by Vaynerchuck, inspired by Kern et al. One of my series will be Just South of Paradise, which is where I live in the canyon.
Paradise is up the mountain. It’s great because I’m not quite in paradise but I’m just south of it. That’s my inspirational end. I’m also going to be talking about releasing a whole lot of information about how to do marketing and hopefully in a cool way come out of being a little bit underground in a good way. I’ve been in this business a long time. I stepped off the stage for three or four years and I’m coming back strong in 2010, but if you catch up at the end of this year, it’s going to be me, no virtual admins, no people pretending to be me, no me pretending to be me.
I hope that will be a blessing. Really I’m from the early school of the internet and I wish I could tell you guys. The one thing you guys are missing now, that we had, and I don’t mean ‘Back in the day it was great.’ But there was a camaraderie, a friendship, an appreciation of the other guy. What happens when markets grow, people start plunging and pillaging and taking everything. There’s nothing wrong with that; just grow up, that’s the way it is.
But I’m building little communities and I’m seeing this all around. We’re actually coming in with the intention to do something different and that’s just for a limited number of people. It’s not about 10,000 it’s maybe 100, 500 maybe 1000 people. You see these in all the circles. I really want to tell people that what that’s about, it’s not just about being able to trust people, but being able to grow where people are really sharing ideas. They’re not so phony, they’re not scared of you taking it, because, you know, it’s a big market. People will take your idea and grow. Don’t yell about that. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
My friend Mizel taught me years ago that it’s not the ideas, it’s the execution on the idea.
Building communities where people can come in and have a place where they can really learn and not learn under this veil ‘That’s right, and there’s more’ pitch fest is really coming out. That’s part of what I’m into and I really encourage them.
I can tell you, the very first internet marketing summits, for my opinion, were run by Jonathan Mizel. I can’t tell you enough, Jonathan Mizel is one of my close friends, I’m totally biased. I think he changed my whole life seriously by far, not just as a friend but what he taught me about marketing and really talking.
When we came to the Boulder summits, everybody was brilliant, everybody was strong egos but everybody was listening to everybody else. Collectively we would all come out of the thing and people grew businesses. I’ve actually got a picture on Facebook of Yanik Silver, Ken McCarthy, Yanik was sneaking into the meeting. It was so funny. ‘Yes’ I say, ‘you were sneaking in.’ He was great. He was a newbie. What was funny was he was a really great guy. Jeff Walker used to go to those. All of us. Jim Edwards, I could go on and on. Corey Rudl. All these people would come in but it was, you met there, your brains just grew. It wasn’t just, oh, I’m following this guy.
Everyone was following their own piper but everyone was listening and respecting everyone else. I’m not saying it’s going to go back. I think things come around and what we’re seeing are smaller communities of people. You can still do the big thing, they’re still valid. But small groups masterminding at a level to grow their businesses really big and to a point you’ve got to have trust, David, you’ve got to have trust.
David Jenyns: You’re definitely one to keep an eye on so I’ll be watching to see what happens later this year and then hopefully early in 2010 and I’ll be doing all I can to support you. You’re very generous with your time. Much appreciated for everything you’ve given everyone today and I’m sure they appreciate it. If they want to find out more they can head over to declandunn.com and also check out thenewmediagame as well just to keep on top of everything. I’d just like to thank you so much, Declan, for the call. It’s been great.
Declan Dunn: A pleasure. Thanks very much.
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