Ed Dale Interview

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Name: Ed Dale

Industry: Online Marketing

Website: Immediate Edge

Product: The Challenge

Ed Dale’s Bio: How does a self-described “odd Australian” build an empire from the ground up that consists of seminars, wildly successful online courses, a dedicated base of followers, and over $14 million in profits? He does it with a sense of humor and honest, hard work. In this Ed Dale interview you’ll discover the latest online marketing techniques that the ‘Tubby Nerd’ is using to make waves and millions of dollars. Listen to this Ed Dale podcast in the car or on your iPod.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, welcome to another call for theSEOmethod.com and davidjenyns.com. Today I think I’ve lined up one of the best interview I’ve got for you so far. We’ve got Ed Dale on the line. For those of you who listened to the audio where Ed Dale interviewed me, you’ll know how our history has been intertwined for a long time now. I’ve followed his original work with the UnderAchiever, I’ve attended the UnderAchiever seminar and went to the Beechworth seminar. Now I’ve even started taking the Thirty Day Challenge training and am using that to train my assistants to get them up to speed, shortcutting. I don’t think Ed Dale even knows that.

Obviously I’ve locked in for the Melbourne seminar coming up but I’m using Dominiche, which I got a long time ago to start selling my first site on Flipper. I’ve got a big network of sites and I know with some of the work I’ve been doing with offline business, you really do get a big cash flow injection when you do the sales. Suffice to say, I love Ed’s stuff, and I’m very excited about what we’re going to talk to Ed Dale about on the phone today. Ed, I’d just like to welcome you to the call.

Ed Dale: Well thanks, mate. I’m very excited. It’s nice to be on the other side of the mike so to speak. So I’m just going to sit here and take your grilling and see what we can talk about. So I’m very excited about it. Hey, that flipper.com really has changed the whole buying and selling websites thing, because it’s a really good, safe place to conduct the transaction.

But I think more than that, and this goes to the heart of everything you’re doing in terms of SEO, is that traffic is not as easy as it was three years ago. You really do need to educate yourself. You really do need to make sure you’re dealing with the right people and put in really serious effort.

This has had the by product of making it much safer to sell your websites now. In the old days I used to really harass people to say, don’t reveal your actual site. Talk about the actual thing, get a non-disclosure, get protection, get all this sort of stuff.

What was happening, people were opening the kimono as they say in the biz, and revealing everything about their site. Because traffic was so easy in 2006, people would throw up five cent Google campaigns or do some quick and dirty SEO and they would effectively mutilate the site. Rather than selling it, they would just rip it off. That’s just not possible these days, because you either have to spend so much more money to get the quick traffic, or you have to put in real effort on the SEO side.

For people who want to rip you off, effort is the last thing on their minds. So it’s very exciting. I think it’s a very exciting area now. It’s great. It really does sort the wheat from the chaff.

David Jenyns: I feel like this leads into, traffic being such an important part, and I know to stay on the cutting edge, you’re constantly testing and developing new techniques. You’re especially doing a lot of work with Dan Raine over in the labs for the Immediate Edge. Perhaps we should take a case study and dive into it. I know you talk about the Symphony of Four Parts and there is market research traffic conversion and also the product itself. Let’s really hone in on the traffic, and I know there is going to be some overlap obviously.

I know just recently you had a little product that you launched which went a little bit under the radar I think for the value of what it really could provide, which is your Valuing Websites course. This is obviously key for the buying and selling on Flipper like we talked about. What are the processes, I know people can follow along in the Thirty Day Challenge and see the processes that you set out. But I feel like that is about getting someone an excellent foothold, getting them to make their first dollar, taste a lot of different things. But when you’re launching a product, what are the processes you go through for driving that traffic?

Ed Dale: Well, the most interesting thing, Dave, is that the first week of the Thirty Day Challenge which is all about the market research side of things determining the keywords which will hopefully bring us traffic and using Market Samurai I suppose in particular, is absolutely no different if we’re doing a $10 product or a million dollar a year product. It really is exactly what we do. We don’t pull any punches.

The difference if you will, and a lot of people are interested in this, what is the difference? The difference is, once we find something that is going to work, then we apply a whole other bunch of traffic techniques. We teach effectively two or three traffic techniques, the most standard, the most important, the most basic ones inside the Thirty Day Challenge. As you well know, there are dozens and dozens of strategies that you can use depending on your skill level and the financial resources that are available to you.

If we take that Valuing Your Website product, you can’t talk about traffic without talking about market research and why you create the product in the first place. I think the biggest mistake people make is that they think about that product first which we often talk about as part 4 in the Magnificent Symphony. They come up with a product idea first without really seeing if there’s a) a market for it and b) if there’s any traffic in that market and c) will that market actually buy anything?

In this particular case, we knew that because of the rise of Flipper and the resurgence of buying and selling websites and the raw data in front of us, that people were selling their websites either way too cheaply, or people were buying the sites and getting incredible bargains. A lot of people were missing incredible bargains because they didn’t realize the true value of their website.

Let’s first talk about envisaging. This product was designed to be one that was consumed easily, is an evergreen product which will just sit there and stay and we put a lot of time and effort into the creation of it for it to be a permanent product. Because it is a permanent product ( I am coming back to traffic ) it’s so important to do your keyword research in that market research phase. If you’re going to create a product, if you’re going to put up a website, if you’re going to do a blog, if you’re going to create content about it, to me it’s a crime not to optimize all of that stuff for the keywords in that marketplace that are likely to attract traffic.

It works, no question,, but I’m all about leverage. Rob Somerville, who heads up the labs here in Melbourne, drums it into me all the time. If you’re going to go to all the effort of creating this content, it’s a crime not to do the research prior to it to figure out what the words are that people type when they are thinking about this. You’ve heard me say it Dave, nothing exists on the internet without a phrase. When you think about it, until somebody types something into Google or Wikipedia or whatever it is, it may as well not exist.

David Jenyns: And if you aim at nothing, you’re sure to hit, along those same lines.

Ed Dale: Exactly. You accidentally might rank well, but I don’t like accidents in business. I don’t want to be accidentally successful. I think you can accidentally screw your business up really easily, but accidentally successful I’m not a big believer in.

What we did in that specific case, ok, we’re not talking a mega market here David. As you quite rightly pointed out, this is a really niche product. A lot of our promotional strategies for product going forward are doing JVs with companies like Flipper and people who are involved in that very niche area, which is buying and selling websites.

Mark Copeman, who is our partner, a brilliant partner on that product, actually used Market Samurai and did exactly the same research that we teach in that first week of Thirty Day Challenge, to develop a series of keyword phrases related to valuing a website that we used for tagging purposes. We used them when we put the videos up, they’re keyword tagged with these phrases. The content is on the blogs and so on, and this is Grade 1 SEO, we don’t pick stuff deliberately, we don’t do any of that stuff. It’s cutting your nose to spite your face. Great content is the best SEO that exists.

Leslie Rhode, who is of course coming to Melbourne, who in my mind is one of the greatest SEO minds on the planet, a true legend in terms of SEO, points out that the number one best SEO trick, the number one SEO technique is developing great content. You can juice that content just by being smart about using the phrases that are going to attract traffic in that market in your headline, in that first paragraph.

These are the basics that we teach inside the Thirty Day Challenge absolutely for free. I think in some ways, it’s funny isn’t it, because you do this stuff for free, people have the idea that you’re not giving them the whole story because you want to sell them something. I learnt early on that is stupid. Again, it is cutting your nose to spite your face strategy.

If you only raise the hemline a little bit, if you only reveal a little bit of what you’re talking about, that is not going to make people want to buy from you more. They want to buy from somebody who is really enthusiastic, who really knows what they’re talking about.

My great mentor Gary Albert pointed out time and time again, I didn’t believe him at first but I have seen it time and time again, the more you give away, even if you lay out the entire strategy in a launch video, people will be more likely to sign up for the actual course and the implementation than they would if you only allude and you tease.

People don’t have time for teasing in this day and age. We’re so bombarded with content from every direction, that people don’t need teasing. They want good info that is either entertaining, it’s educational, somebody who’s enthusiastic or indeed people love a great fight. They love a great battle and they’re interested in seeing that. That’s what they want to see. They don’t want to see teases. Teases just come off as slimy.

What we did very specifically, to bring it back to specifics, we created a blog that used the categories, and those categories on that blog were the keyword phrases which were most likely to attract traffic in this particular market. Again, we’re not talking about attracting thousands of visitors a day, we’re talking maybe twenty visitors a day. But that is the size of this particular market.

It’s worth us putting in all the effort to create a really professional product and I encourage people to go, even if you’re not interested in the actual topic, have a look at the layout of the site because it is a good example. We created the categories so that Google looks at the site and says, oh, check that out. When I see value in websites, I expect to see these other phrases in a site about value in websites so we use those as the categories in that blog, we use a WordPress blog.

We’ve titled the videos and we’ve keyword tagged the videos that make sense. Google sees what it expects to see. It’s interesting, I can’t even tell you if it has any page rank at the moment, but it would not surprise me if it shoots up quickly to a PR2 or a PR 3 in the next update because of those on page factors, you’d call them, that help you in your SEO efforts.

You can get all these on page factors right from the get go and it doesn’t take you any more time or effort. This is what I see time and time again, Dave, that people are so enthusiastic to get their product up and running, that just that extra little time spent doing the keyword research with a view to targeting traffic would be good. Now of course what we’re doing with that site, is we’re sowing the seeds. We know now it doesn’t happen overnight as we started off saying. These things don’t happen overnight. But I bet you in three to six months, when somebody types in valuing websites, our site, if it’s not going to be number one, it’s going to be close to number one.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you mentioned a few things there. As far as the way I look at things, and I’m a lover of clichés, that whole idea of you measure twice and you cut once is valuable. You’ll do that market research, you’re setting up a WordPress blog, you’re making sure you’re feeding the data back using Market Samurai and that pulls from a variety of sources, Google being one of them. It’s effectively like Google says, here are the keywords related to this website, then feeding its own information back into it, which obviously it believes it should be seeing. Then you’re putting out champagne content.

One quick question I have if I may. When you’re installing the blog, are you talking about putting that all on the same domain name and having your product sales page at the front and the blog and a sub directory, or how do you work that?

Ed Dale: Yes, currently it’s all under a single line and then we use sub directories for the blog. So for example, it would be, bakingacake.com/blog. Now I know people who do it other ways. They may attack a different keyword phrase.

I don’t think that is as important as getting a core right of on page factors. Think about it. Google just wants to see what it expects to see when it is a normal thing. It doesn’t want to be gamed. Google doesn’t want to be gamed. It’s advantage. It has billions of websites which are being created by people who are not trying to game the system.

It looks at those websites and says, ok, if I see this word, I expect to see these other words or links from these sites. That’s what I expect to see. As soon as it sees stuff that it doesn’t expect to see, or it sees the phrase baking a cake seventy-three times on one A4 page of text, one legal pad worth of text, it says, hang on, what’s going on here? It flags it and it starts to realize, hang on, I’m being gamed here. That is just the on page factors.

It’s far more important to worry about your content and creating great content once you’ve got your fundamentals right. You do that initial research, you know what keywords you’re targeting, you know what your phrases have targeted. I think Rob Somerville puts them in a little text file. So every time he creates a video, or every time a new piece of content goes up, he’s got his tags ready to go. He copies and pastes them and in they go.

We don’t put thousands of tags in because, again, if Google comes to a site and they see thousands of tags, ask yourself, does the normal person put in thousands of tags? The answer is no. They maybe do half a dozen tags. You just want to do what normal people would do.

David Jenyns: I think Ken Giddens always talks about that, just replicate what happens in nature, because that is ultimately what Google wants. You talked about putting together this champagne content, putting videos out, posting them with the right tags. In this particular example, the Valuing Websites example, the content that you put on the blog, did you look at doing any articles, or was it more based on videos, or what sort of content were you putting on that site?

Ed Dale: Both articles and videos. We did the classic Ezine Articles with key phrases and we’ve seeded those out. Now in fact I’m pretty sure we haven’t done this, but the next obvious step would be to take our demo intro video, put that on YouTube and tag it up correctly. If we talk about things that are really working brilliantly now, and getting really big bang for your buck, it’s getting traffic from video. That’s really working well.
I know you do it. I know our number one source of traffic for Thirty Day Challenge is literally YouTube. For new visitors, YouTube is our number one source of traffic. People don’t realize, unless they’ve been hanging around the internet marketing industry, that YouTube is the second biggest search engine.

David Jenyns: And then you’re taking that content, repurposing it. We do a lot with TubeMogul. I’ve tested both TubeMogul versus Traffic Geyser. For the stick rate, because the way TubeMogul is set up, they’ve got relationships with those sites, so they’ve given API the back end access to the sites so it’ll load it straight in there and you’re getting stats back. It’s really quite easy to target those videos and then go after a keyword phrase. When you do your Google video search, you can have six, seven, eight positions within that Google search for that phrase.

Obviously some videos and some keyword phrases people aren’t going to be searching for videos based on those topics. Again this comes back to measure twice, cut once. Do your market research and make sure you’re using Market Samurai or some tool.

Ed Dale: It takes two seconds. You type in the main phrase that you’re targeting and add the word video. See what Market Samurai spits back at you. What are people typing? Are they looking for videos? Are there any words and phrases that have a relation? Is there any traffic to speak of? We use video submission services, either Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul and I must do some more testing on TubeMogul because we tend to use Traffic Geyser.

What makes me cry, if they had done that work in market research, is they’d know what to call the video. They’d know how to tag it properly for maximum effect. Videos are like any other piece of content, and yet people haven’t treated them like any other piece of content. Any links that go back to that video are back links.

Of course now we start to stretch into the off page factors of SEO which is what it gets to be all about. After you’ve launched your content, there’s nothing more you can do in terms of on page factors, that’s it, you’re done. Anything you change has to happen over a long period of time.

Then the focus switches to the off page factors and getting back links. Of course back links to those videos are so powerful.

David Jenyns: And no one is doing it.

Ed Dale: No. We’ve been experimenting with this for the last six months or so and it is literally shooting fish in a barrel at the moment. This is an arbitrage situation, there is no question about it. If you’re listening to this, it’s something you need to look at because the average YouTube video would have less than five back links.

If you want to test this out, it’s very simple. You just type any phrase into Google, you’ll see the videos come up in the universal search, usually they’ll be in position five or six, sometimes even higher.

Just grab the url of that, go to Yahoo and type link: and then the url and have a look at how many back links there are. Or alternatively, if you want to be a super ninja and use Market Samurai, Market Samurai makes it even easier for you. You can just go and analyze that site and you’ll see how many back links there are. You’ll see where they’re coming from, what PR they are and all those sorts of things. The videos are getting just great traffic. They really are.

David Jenyns: There are a couple of things with the videos that we’re finding. Firstly, it’s important, once you’ve done your keyword research, name the video your keyword. So it will be keyword.move; before you upload, you upload it to YouTube. We find that helps. Then using different services, as far as getting those back links, and yes, at the moment there is this arbitrage opportunity.

I think this opportunity will be here for a long time, even when you drill down into niches like knitting. It’s going to take so long before it filters through. It’s still an easy opportunity in internet marketing. So that obviously will happen. Porn usually catches up first, not that they’re putting porn on YouTube, but then internet marketing is a few steps behind. Once that hits, it will still take a long time before it filters down.

You can use things like AMA or Portal Feeder or any things like that where they allow you to post out using their blog network. A lot of them are now allowing you to embed the video. We’re finding that embedding the video is just as good as getting a link back to the video. That’s a sign that it is a popular video.

Ed Dale: Absolutely. Think about it from Google’s perspective. If someone’s deemed the video so good that they want it to be seen in their blog as opposed to just linking to it, again, physics, it’s much more likely to have more weight. If they think it is so cool that they’ve embedded it in their blog, that to me would carry slightly more weight than just a pure link.

Do I know that Google does that? No. Do I have any evidence of that? No. It’s amazing. Google pretty much, at the end, of the day has to work on common sense, because if they start not working on common sense, then somebody else will eat their lunch.

David Jenyns: Yes, and that will be when they’ll get gamed. So again, getting back to that Ken Giddens thing, replicate what happens in nature and just think through logically. You talked about some of the on page stuff, putting out excellent champagne content both in video and article format, and then you shifted into some of the off page factors. Because I know Valuing Websites is quite new, whether you’ve done it on this one, or perhaps drawing from another example, what then are the stages you go through for off page?

Ed Dale: Look, it’s back links. It’s all about back links. However, it’s all about the quality of those back links. Anybody can generate a thousand back links off social media sites or whatever. That used to work in the good old days. But Google realizes that’s not real and kills it and they make adjustments to their algorithm.

So at the end of the day, back links are what is vital and the quality of where you get those back links from. What’s interesting, and taking SEO advice from me, David, is pretty much like having Forrest Gump as you phone-a-friend in who Wants to be a Millionaire.

David Jenyns: Don’t undersell yourself, Ed.

Ed Dale: Again, I look at common sense. If CNN is linking to your little article, it’s got to be interesting. It’s got to be important. That’s what Google looks at and they say, ok. Whereas Ed Dale’s site that has one article on it and hasn’t been updated since 2004, does one link to a site, it’s not going to give much weight to that at all.

The analogy I try to give is in newspapers. If an article is published on the front page of The New York Times about you, a lot of people are going to see that and it’s probably more of national relevance. But if it’s published in the Ovens and Murray Advertiser, which is the 400 circulation paper at my old home town of Beechworth, it might have some relevance locally, and Google will show it locally I might add, but is it going to have any impact on a national level? No. Four hundred people are going to see it.

That’s the way Google works. It figures, wow, this big important site that we give authority to thinks that this content is worth linking to, we’re going to check this out. We’re going to rate this more highly than a site that has no authority, that has just been created or is an unused blog or whatever it happens to be. It’s as basic and advanced as that. It’s a bit like checkers. It’s two minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.

The thing that frustrates me enormously, and maybe people just don’t realize this. This is all back trackable, thanks to the magnificence of Market Samurai. You can now go into any keyword and pull up those front page sites. What people don’t realize then, is that you can go into each of those sites and analyze exactly what level of authority it has.

When we refer to authority, of course we mean page rank, PR people refer to it, it’s a logarithmic scale from 0 to 9. The thing that people really need to realize is that, and again, this is a fluffy number, not an exact number, but Google views a PR1 site to have ten times the authority of a PR0. A PR2 site has ten times the authority of a PR1 and so on. So if you have a link from a PR5 site, that’s worth hundreds of links of a PR0 site because of the way Google thinks about authority.

Given that this is the case, you can go into Market Samurai, and you can just research exactly where your competitors are getting their links from. You can find this exactly, not guess, but research it exactly. Then funnily enough if it happens to be a blog, or whatever it happens to be, why not send them an email and ask them to link to your blog? Or you could make a comment on their blog and link it back to you.

People tend to use a sledge hammer to do their back linking. There are some brilliant services out there in terms of back linking. AMA is one that immediately comes to mind that does a very good job. They will provide links over time that have some actual value, which is a brilliant service.

Otherwise people take the complete other end of the spectrum and they have a high tech sweat shop in the Philippines or India or Costa Rica or wherever it happens to be and they just pay people to just go and get links wherever they possible can. Most of that effort is wasted, of course, because they come up as spam comments and people who own the blogs knock them off or they just go on blogs that Google has already written off millions of years ago.

I think you can be a lot smarter than that. You can use Market Samurai to target sites that have authority already and that you can provide some specific content for and you can bring a bit of brains to it. If we’re talking about Viagra, you’re talking about the hardest, smartest, baddest, meanest, black hat and do anything to stay on top and I mean that, we’ll threaten anybody literally type of stuff.

The markets I love, as you well know, are where real stuff is being sold to real people, hobbyists and how tos and all sorts of things where there is nowhere near the competition. That’s where this stuff really works effectively and you don’t have to work as hard to do it.

David Jenyns: I think with reverse engineering what your competition is doing as well, you can begin to pick out, is this keyword worth going after? You can sit there and know what the value of my product is and then look at what the competition is doing to get that position and using some of the analysis tools find out how much traffic that particular keyword’s getting. Then you can say, is it worth me investing $1000 to hire this person to get enough links to take this position? You can then pick those battles.

I think that right there, the idea of reverse engineering your competition, is something that can just completely open the landscape up and it’s like you’re knowing where to punch and not wasting any energy.

Ed Dale: You’d know this. How many times do you ask someone you’re trying to help out on a site and you ask them what are the top ten phrases that are delivering traffic? They don’t know and they haven’t gone through and reverse engineered all this. It’s such a shame, because the only thing it’s costing you is time, particularly with something like Market Samurai, it’s so easy. In the old days, this used to take a huge amount of research, now, not even close. It’s just so much easier. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.

Of course there is another quantifier here, Dave, which is really interesting. You should also know how much that traffic, and Market Samurai tells you this too, how much it will cost you for the pay for click of that equivalent phrase. You will then know the average cost per click for that particular phrase in that particular market. You will start to see value for what that is worth to you.

Then, if you can do that and you know your conversions, and you know if you’re getting x visitors, you’re going to make y sales which is worth z dollars and you can factor that back and understand how much you can afford to pay for traffic and make a decent profit. It’s all the maths. It’s cool maths. It’s exciting maths. But people don’t do it and that’s a tragedy.

David Jenyns: I think once you do start to learn your numbers, and this comes down to understanding things like the lifetime value of a client, you can understand how much you can spend to acquire that client. Then the name of the game really becomes how many clients can I acquire that’s under the price that I’m going to get out of them in a lifetime. Then your marketing budget effectively becomes unlimited.

Where I see a lot of people go wrong, especially with the market research stuff, is once you start in on that, it’s very easy to just get caught up in the market research and then have trouble going through to implementation. By doing the market research, you’re sitting there and designing a trading system. You’re looking for that holy grail, that perfect system, or that perfect keyword. Sometimes you just need to do that research and then dive straight in.

I’m interested to get your thoughts on how to get over that.

Ed Dale: That’s a huge issue, massive, for two reasons. One, it can be like educational crack cocaine, people get so addicted to designing the trading system in your neck of the woods, or doing the research and learning about something, getting all high on learning how to do something that they actually don’t end up doing it, or they don’t put their trading system to the test. This is insane. The only reason we’re doing all of this, is because the information that you’re getting from Google itself is not gospel.

It’s just like in trading, past results are no indicator of future events. They can give you guides and you can get good at analyzing them based on your judgment and history, don’t get me wrong. At the end of the day, there is nothing like getting a blog up, targeting the phrase and seeing how it ranks, doing the work to get it ranked and then seeing the actual traffic coming through. That is the ultimate test.

Everything we do inside the Thirty Day Challenge is all about getting you to that point, which is, is this market worth going to all that time and effort into? It kills me that people have this emotional bank account of how much effort they can put into something before they decide, forget this. I’m going to go and watch Avatar for the third time.

David Jenyns: Good film.

Ed Dale: Great film. If you spend all this effort, you’ve got this bank account of effort and energy and if you spend all of that on knocking out the product, first of all just doing the research, you’re never going to get something launched.

Seth Godin in his latest book called Linchpin which is a ripper. Tribes was one and Linchpin is just superb. It talks about himself wanting to be an idea shipper, not an idea maker. I love that. What a great phrase. Be an idea shipper.

The distinction is this. Anybody can come up with an idea. We can brainstorm markets; you and I could go on for hours about different markets that we could get into and different things. This is what I admire about you. You ship your ideas. Most people don’t ship. What I mean by shipping is, you deliver a product.

Valuing Websites is an example of a shipped idea. It’s a shipped product. Will it be a super success, will it be a moderated success, or just coast along? Not sure. One thing I do know, it won’t be a dud because we’ve done the research. All this market research and all this traffic testing and so on will never tell us how successful something will be, but it can help us avoid a huge amount of time and spending all of our currency in our emotional bank account by going after something that is a dud and is never going to work despite your best intentions.

David Jenyns: I can see already there is a huge correlation between the trading niche and the idea of the way people design trading systems.

Ed Dale: The fundamentals are the same. If I’ve got any distinction, if I’ve been able to do anything with my time on the planet, it’s to realize that the fundamentals are absolutely incontrovertible, regardless of niche market or system. The fundamentals in finding a good trading system are identical to a good marketing system for a new website. They are identical for opening up a hairdressing salon.

The tactics are different. The tools that you might have to use are different, but at the end of the day, it’s research, you need to get traffic, you need to figure out conversion and eventually you have to have a product. With a trading system, the best systems are all about helping you say no.

David Jenyns: Exactly right. That’s what a trading system should be, it should be keeping you out of the market.

Ed Dale: Exactly. What is human nature? I want to get in, I want to participate. You could apply this to poker, you could apply this to buying businesses. You’re in the business of buying businesses, so let’s buy businesses. Let’s get in there and buy a site. The Bransons of the world, who are perceived as these great risk takers, read their biographies, they’re not risk takers at all. They’re actually very conservative. Ed Turner from CNN actually tries to mitigate all his risk in something.

Branson now has got it to such a level that all he does is lend his name for 50% of a product. That’s awesome. He has no risk whatsoever. I suppose if he attached his name to a whole bunch of things that didn’t work, his brand and his name worth would go down over time.

David Jenyns: Did you see his latest adventure? They brought out the prototype images of the submarine. How good is he?

Ed Dale: All these people have a fundamental in common, and that is they have systems for no. They have systems which they absolutely follow, and they don’t call them systems. They call them all sorts of things. Somebody might call them a process, some might call it a gut feel. I don’t care what they call them. They’re all the same thing. They’re about keeping you out of something so you don’t spend that precious energy on something that’s never going to give you any sort of result.

David Jenyns: I think you offered some really helpful advice there as far as some of the mistakes people make. You mentioned the idea of not researching, you mentioned also on the flip side, the yin and the yang, which is not taking action as well, the ability to say no.

Do you see any other ones, because I know you work with a lot of new people when they’re starting out, especially through the Thirty Day Challenge. What are one or two of the biggest mistakes that you just think, that is just what is holding you back?

Ed Dale: Ok, we mentioned a couple, analysis paralysis, as they say, where people get caught up in analyzing something and they get into this loop which is a negative loop. They never actually get something out and test it. In the Thirty Day Challenge we run up against this a lot.

We’ve just been talking about how all these systems are designed to keep you out of the market, so to speak. In the Thirty Day Challenge, what we do, we want you to get into the market but we want you to get into the market smart, with no risk. I think this is the other element. What you want to do is, you want to have systems, and I suppose the analogy in trading, Dave, is once you’ve created that system, to give it some real world tests. But you do it with limits in place.

Now I’m no trader, but you have all your systems in place so you know that if this all goes pear shaped, you know what your ultimate downside is. Anybody who goes into something knows things. The trouble is, tragically, most people when they go into something don’t know what their downside is, they haven’t put in these limits, they haven’t put in these stops.

To apply that in Thirty Day Challenge language, what do we do? We say, use a free account here at WordPress Direct and in fifteen minutes, and we’ll show you how to do it, it will take you a little bit of time the first time you do it because it’s all new and it’s tricky for you, but it won’t cost you a cent. Create a blog. Spend $8 and please only spend $8 on a domain name. Rather than guess a domain name, let’s use our Market Samurai research and it’s free trial, so you haven’t even had to pay for Market Samurai to do a test.

Let’s throw those up, let’s put them in, let’s use Traffic Bug and its free trial to get the thing indexed. Now let’s roll our sleeves up and do some effort and let’s create some content and some links and back links to get things cracking and let’s see what happens.

What have people risked? They’ve risked time and $8 for a domain name, but that’s it. We even mitigate against that because we say down the track, hey, if it didn’t work out, here’s how to sell the site on Flipper and Thirty Day Challenge created sites that are typically selling for $75 to $100. So they’re even making a little bit of money on the $8 for the domain name.

David Jenyns: Better than a poke in the eye.

Ed Dale: Better than a poke in the eye, that’s for sure. That’s what we talk about, we talk about that risk mitigation. I have a belief system, which is there is no excuse to go into any business with risk, with any risk except time. That is pretty controversial, because people consider businesses to be inherently risky. They’re only risky if you don’t do the research. Why am I doing online businesses and not like in the old days a suit business or a coffee shop or whatever it happens to be? The reason is, you can find out so much before you have to spend a single cent. That’s the key thing.

Trading systems are interesting too.

David Jenyns: You can back test a lot before you put money in.

Ed Dale: Here’s where the analogy comes into it again. Fundamentals are fundamentals. In trading systems, the true test at the end of the day though is when you test it with real money. To take another market, in sports betting, whenever there is a paper competition, like when it’s a paper trading system, and it’s paper betting like on the English football team or something like that, I dominate. Seriously. I am brilliant at it.

David Jenyns: The moment your money goes in though…

Ed Dale: Exactly. The moment I put actual money on something, I go to water.

David Jenyns: That’s why you make a plan.

Ed Dale: Exactly. I don’t have the constitution for it, ok but at least I recognize that. Here’s the thing. What I do realize for any system to be truly tested, you have to test it in the heat of the marketplace. That goes for any marketplace, any trading system, any website, gambling system, you have to test it in the fire of the marketplace.

A classic example is, a client of mine the other day, a really clever guy, did a really good deal with getting banner advertising on a site in his particular niche. By the way, just as an aside, we’re talking about hot traffic trends. It’s hilarious because it’s like going back to old school banner advertising, really targeted in niche markets on websites. It’s really doing well. But it’s a game you have to play with money. It’s not something where you can go in and get free traffic. You have to have a bank as both you and I say in our respective businesses.

So he said, here’s this deal, I’ll pay x thousands of dollars over the course of the year. They get this many impressions etc. It looked like a great deal. Plus it was a PR 7 site and he would get a link back to his site. It was a great deal all round. But I said to him, you know what? This, on paper, looks like a good deal why don’t we write to them and say, this looks like a great deal? We’re very keen to do it, but we always trial our advertising. So can we do a deal? We’ll sign up for twelve months, but we have a one month option, we do a one month’s trial. As long as we hit this x, y and z target, which you’re saying, by the way, we should get, then we’re in.

If not, you keep the money we’ve spent obviously this month, but we’ll part as friends, it just didn’t work out for our particular market.

David Jenyns: Smart business.

Ed Dale: Smart. It’s being smart about something and just having that little bit extra element of thinking about risk mitigation before, mitigation is a horrible $20 word, covering your bases, call it what you will, but just ask yourself the question, ok, what can go wrong here and how can I protect against that? Ultimately, isn’t that how you design a trading system?

David Jenyns: That’s exactly what you do.

Ed Dale: What can go wrong and how do I protect against that while retaining enough upside to make it worth my while?

David Jenyns: It’s funny, you were talking about these fundamentals applying across different areas. I would be interested to find out, those key insights, if you looked back, they would be the leverage points. They would be the points where once you got that, a lot of other things started to click together. I’m wondering whether you have any other leverage points which you can look back on. It might even be something like, when I started getting my customer support outsourced, I saw that as a leverage point because it freed my time up.

What are some of those key leverage points, looking back over your career,that you identify as crucial?

Ed Dale: The first two which I’ve talked about are massive. They are doing the due diligence, and if you want to break that down, what is due diligence? It’s asking the right questions and never making an assumption. The best interviewers, the people who are best at doing due diligence, doing the research, are the ones who ask all the questions.

I bet you’ve had this conversation in your head. I’ve had this conversation in my head all the time. There’s a little yellow flag, a little alarm bell going off about something. Maybe I’m buying a car. For whatever reason I’m thinking, oh, I’m not going to ask that. You don’t feel like you can ask it because you think you might come across as sounding stupid, or whatever, or you’re embarrassed. You don’t want to come across as not being knowledgeable.

David Jenyns: They’re the questions you have to ask.

Ed Dale: They’re the questions you must ask. I forget who it was, I wish I could credit the person, but if you ever watched Columbo the old TV series, he was like this doddering detective. People always underestimated him because he just seemed like this bumbling fool. But that’s brilliant. It’s brilliant to be the bumbling fool in your marketplace.

If you’re the one who’s asking all the key questions, that’s good. Due diligence is asking all of the questions, and getting an answer. Asking the questions and getting an answer, shutting up, not answering for the other person. Let them tell you the answer. If that means you being quiet for a while, be quiet for a while, ok. Human beings abhor silence, they really do. If you ask a question and they’re thinking about it for a minute, you’re so likely to jump in and try to help them.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, we tend to help them towards the answer that we want, as opposed to the reality of the answer. So ask great questions, and recognize the power of the question and the power of spending just a little bit of time to come up with some great questions before you go into that situation, huge. Market research, huge. Knowing that risk mitigation, again, think about it, how powerful are these questions, when you really cut it down, all of what I’ve just said is all about asking the right type of questions at the right time.

Then I suppose the net huge one for me, Dave, you will have seen me ranting about it all last year. I was looking online and at online niches, why some people are successful and why a lot aren’t. What are the core differences? I’ve got this privileged position, if you will, of literally seeing thousands of people with these businesses, thanks to the Thirty Day Challenge.

So I was asking, what is the core difference? One of these things is what I term market leadership. What I mean by market leadership is that the people who are really successful, either them or a pseudonym, it doesn’t have to be them, it can be a character, like Elton John, he’s Dwight something, but they have a leadership position. What I mean by that is that they take a position in their marketplace. They are in discussions. They are the ones who speak at conferences. They’re the ones who create blog posts.

Tragically, one of the downsides of social media, is that it has tricked a lot of people into thinking, if I retweet something in my marketplace that’s interesting, I’ve just done as much effort as if I’d created a piece of content and had others retweet. They think they’re doing something without actually doing something.

Retweeting is good, don’t get me wrong. It’s important to be the one who’s delivering information into your market. But when I started to look at this leadership, I said, ok, how are these people becoming market leaders and again, to mention Seth Godin again, at the time I was looking at this, he wrote the book Tribes. He calls them tribe leaders, a great analogy. How do people become this?

I realized, and this is where it hit me like a bolt from the blue. The only difference between someone who is active in their marketplace and one who is not, is their ability to put content into that marketplace. What I mean by content, it could be a blog post, it could be a pod cast, it could be a video, it could be a PDF, it could be an interview like we’re doing now, it could be anything. But they are a net contributor into their marketplace. They have positions, they have a viewpoint and they participate.

By doing this, and by doing that on a regular basis, now all of a sudden people in that marketplace, you’re the one being retweeted. By the way, what happens when you’re retweeted? You’re getting back links. This is the best SEO strategy in the world. Create original content that has a point of view in whatever media. I don’t care about the medium. You can use photography as your medium. You could use drawings as your medium, but you are a direct contributor into the marketplace.

For me, this insight has changed everything. It’s not, unfortunately, without its downsides. As soon as I use the term leader, a lot of people would have flashbacks, where we would say here in Australia, dakked or wedgied in the PE room by the cheer leaders or the captain of the football team. There is often a negative connotation with the term leadership for a lot of people.

That corresponds exactly demographically with people who are shy about wanting to be involved in a marketplace. This is a human tragedy. Whatever happened in their past, means that they’re shy. Because of their shyness, they’re hesitant to put out something in the marketplace that could be criticized. So creating that content was a huge realization.

That’s all you have to do. I’m actually doing some tests at the moment. You pick a marketplace and you do this, within ninety days, people are talking about you. You publish content five days a week, not great content, because when you start, it won’t be great.

Everybody thinks Charles Dickens started out with ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. He did fifteen different versions of that opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities. Stephen King busts out content, then he has to go back and edit and edit it. What we see in his magnificent writing, is the product of all these editors and himself reviewing and reviewing. A Gary Halbert sales letter is the product of fifteen to twenty drafts, where it is refining and refining and editing.

Unfortunately in school we’re taught to edit as we go, which is tragic. If you check out any decent writer, who is a good content creator, they divorce content creation from editing. They just get the stuff done. It’s going to be rubbish, and accept that it is rubbish. They get the stuff done.

Then, Dave, the other element to this, is, and this is a huge realization, if you want to do anything in a market, you have to be a market leader. Why? Do you have to be a market leader to be successful in a market? No, until someone who knows what you do and is also prepared to be a market leader comes into the marketplace. Then you’re messed up because they’ll take over from you.

Why? It’s a fundamental law. As a general rule, people buy from people they know.
If you’ve got a choice, same product, same service, same everything, and you know person A, you don’t know person B, who are you going to buy from? You buy from the person you know. It’s physics.

We have to get out there and we’ve finally got out there and we’ve got the guts and the determination to put out content on a regular basis. Here’s this next fundamental. This is a really hard one to accept. No person on this planet ever has been 100% liked. This has huge ramifications. As soon as you stick your neck up, amazingly, in my case, in your case I can understand Dave, but in my case, there are not only people who don’t like what I do, but they actually have the nerve to put those feelings in writing and criticize me.

The first time I read a criticism of what I had done, completely unfairly in my opinion, it hurt, badly. I don’t think I did any other work that day. I was just raging about how this idiot could have possibly written this about me. The first time this happens to you, and can you remember the first time this happened to you, Dave?

David Jenyns: That’s why I stopped doing my e support.

Ed Dale: There are some people who unbelievably do not like what you’re doing and your style will rub them the wrong way. This is important. Here’s why. Once I understood this, it enabled me to move on. Think about this for a second. It has to be a part of the human condition to ensure that someone is not ever 100% liked. Think of the horrific consequences if there was anybody in this world who was 100% revered. That person would have ultimate and horrific power.

If there was somebody who existed that had no criticism whatever, as a society we wouldn’t exist past a couple of years. Think about it, Mother Theresa had critics, Gandhi had lots of critics. Name any popular person on the planet and they have critics. It comes with the territory. No one can be 100% liked. It’s part of the human condition. I think once people fundamentally realize this, it certainly helped me, realizing every time I put something out, at best, someone will disagree with me.

You know what? This is the other thing that Halbert taught me. It’s great to be disagreed with. The worst thing you can do is put out stuff that everyone blandly accepts. You want people to either really agree with it or really hate it. That will generate action and energy. When everybody has antipathy for it, then you’re not going to motivate anybody to do anything. That’s why you have to take a view, take a position, you have to take a side.

If I could add a couple more fundamentals to this whole thing, that would be those.

David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head with that whole market leadership and I can see that as being the real key. We all know through any sort of sales training and that sort of thing, people are crying out to be told what to do. They’re looking for a strong leader to show them what it is they should be doing, because they’re not sure.

What are some of the qualities of a strong leader? A strong leader is someone who says what needs to be said when it needs to be said. He doesn’t care whether or not he’s loved or he’s hated, he says it because it needs to be said. That’s a real quality of a strong leader.

Similarly, that idea of adding value, not only just saying things to create a stir, to polarize people, but also adding value to that community so that you’re seen as that content creator. I think that right there is a fantastic insight.

You talked about something earlier as far as those little questions that pop up in your mind which you know you should ask and that’s when you should ask them. Coming to the tail end of the interview, I want to find out, because you have magnificent insight into what is coming down the pipe. The mobile revolution, and I’m not talking about mobile phones, because that is ubiquitous. What I’m talking about is us consuming information mobile, in new ways and having it come over the air. That is a huge trend. I know this one maybe is something you weren’t expecting but can you give us some insight, for 2010, what are some of the things on the horizon in the world of just online marketing?

I know it is a broad question, take it in any direction you like. What are some things coming down the pipe that are still on the horizon?

Ed Dale: Ok, well. I think first this concept of content as the best form of SEO, is still considered a relatively radical thing at the moment. I think as people put that into effect, they’ll see that. The other thing you talked about to inoculate against criticism, is if you’re putting out great content all the time, it does make it hard for people to unfairly attack you.

One of the side benefits, we certainly didn’t start the Thirty Day Challenge this way, but one of the side benefits has been, if I put something out in the marketplace that is very expensive for example, the more expensive your product is, the more anger it will generate. It’s mainly because people would like to do it, but they haven’t got the money, or whatever. This generates a blame thing and because of that, that generates criticism.

For me, because of the content of the Thirty Day challenge, it’s nice to say, here you go, here it is all for free, get cracking, you can do all of that. So content I think is going to be a huge trend coming up.

Two platforms which I think just have to be incorporated in any ongoing marketing mix going forward are Twitter and Facebook. I spend every January in the United States, and you look at all the businesses there and they’re all promoting their Facebook page and their Twitter. The stats on Facebook do not lie. People are fleeing from the ‘internet’ and finding a safe haven in Facebook, where the only people they have to deal with are their friends, and they can control their experience.

As marketers, we have to go where the crowds are. The crowds are unquestionably inside a Facebook. Now that means different things for different markets and you have to test it, but I don’t think anybody can ignore Twitter or Facebook as part of their marketing strategy in 2010. They’re platforms.

In terms of technology, I don’t know if you know this Dave, but I’m a little bit of a tiny fan of the iPhone.

David Jenyns: Really.

Ed Dale: I don’t know if you picked that up. It’s very subtle and obviously I don’t like to talk about it. Actually I’m being very sarcastic for those who haven’t heard me before.

David Jenyns: An Apple fan boy.

Ed Dale: It wouldn’t come even close to call me that. But I argue against that. If Apple produced something that was rubbish I would be happy to tell people about that.

David Jenyns: But they never have and they never will.

Ed Dale: They have. The Mighty Mouse, that was bad.

David Jenyns: The new one is supposed to be quite good.

Ed Dale: The new one is awesome. I had the privilege of being in San Francisco and seeing the iPad launch. We could spend another hour talking about the marketing lessons of a company that published exactly five words and generated seven times the press media of Barak Obama and his State of the Union address. There are so many lessons to be learnt there, but I won’t talk about them now or we’ll go on for another ten hours. What was said there was how people are accessing their information is changing. It’s changing far quicker than we could have ever imagined.

Three years ago, think about this Dave, three years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist. How did we live? We must have been like cave people. Actually, ironically, you might be listening to this on your iPhone on your iPod or in your car as a pod cast. People are changing the devices they’re using to consume their information. As marketers, we need to be attuned to that particularly as we’re going through 2010. In 2007 the iPhone didn’t exist. In 2010 seventy million of the things exist.

Let me put that into a slight piece of context for people. There has been nothing in the history of man, nothing that has sold seventy million units of anything. It’s unbelievable. No device has ever sold that amount in that period of time. It’s inconceivable. Whether you like Apple or don’t like Apple, the android phone, the smart phones, people are consuming more and more of their information in a mobile format. I think the iPad is just going to take that and better it.

This is where you start to say, is this just the fan boy coming out? Mark my words. The iPad is not, like it’s being portrayed in some of the geek press, it’s not just a big iPhone. Geeks are not the market for the iPad. It’s my father-in-law and my mother-in-law. It’s baby boomers. It’s people who don’t care what the device is made up of, what’s inside it, what’s the processer, they just want it to do stuff.

They just want to pick it up and easily look up a Foxtel or some sort of cable channel show and tap a button on the screen and it will magically record and sink in with their device. That’s all they want it to do. They’re not interested in the tech. They just want to see photos of their grandchildren and they just want to be able to do that by touch.

I think as marketers, we need to be aware of it. I’m certainly getting all our e books translated into ePub format which is the open format which the iPad will use to distribute books. It’s beautiful. Once these things are released, go into your local Apple store and try it. I dare you to walk out without buying one. I dare you. It is an experience like I cannot describe.

David Jenyns: I’ve got to say they have launched the right product at the right time. They’ve come out with an excellent price and with the way the apps are going to work, the smartest thing they ever did on the iPhone was having it open so developers can come in there and I can see such huge potential for the iPad. Once developers get stuck in there and make apps specific for it, I agree.

Ed Dale: I’ll ask you Dave, because you’re an iPhone man, how many of Apple’s actual applications do you use on the iPhone compared to third party ones?

David Jenyns: Probably just a handful. I use five or six times more third party applications.

Ed Dale: Exactly. And that’s it. I can’t wait. I’m sitting here talking to you, and I’ve got a yellow pad, the classic Gary Halbert yellow legal pad sitting on my knee here for notes. I can’t wait for that to be an iPad. Mind mapping just with you fingers, will be great. We’ve learnt more about our brain in the last two years than through history. There are some amazing books: Brain Rules, a huge number of great things.

They’ve proved there is something in our wiring, in our genetics, that when we’re actually physically writing the information, we are going to retain it more than if we type or do any other sort of memory saving recording skill. It’s an absolute scientific fact and they’ve tracked it and they’ve done it.

What’s exciting to me is that the iPad will give you the best of all worlds. You’ll get that digital saving ability to keep it and the ability to have those notes wherever you happen to be, but you get the unlimited yellow notepad, you don’t have to keep replacing it. If I leave this one at home, I can’t work because it’s got all my stuff on it for today and I’d be lost. I use a pen and paper, because as geeky as I am, I realize there are fundamental things that are very analogue and very fundamental.

David Jenyns: Drawing on your experience with Gary Halbert, Gary Halbert used to talk about the idea, and a lot of great copywriters talk about the idea, of taking excellent sales pieces and rewriting them out by hand. The idea is that it’s connecting your hand to your brain and it’s the closest you can get to the person who created that excellent sales copy piece. It’s effectively modeling.

Ed Dale: I wish Gary was alive today to see the amount of stuff that he used to talk about that was just gut feel to him that is now scientifically proven because of our ability to see what’s going on inside the brain without having to cut people open. I really wish he was, because he would be sitting back there and saying, I told you so. He would be.

I did that. I sat down and did that. It is an interesting thing, because so many people will read that. When you first start doing that, gosh, it is tedious. Any distraction from writing out a sales letter is welcome. Your hand starts to hurt a bit, and you say, is this really doing anything? If you actually do it, and you do it as an exercise, it helps. The next time you come to writing a piece, you are amazed how much easier it is. You are fuelling up your brain.

We know now how the brain is working. We know the brain requires fuel. We know, for example, scientifically, that writer’s block is really the brain equivalent of running out of fuel for your car. If you’ve got enough fuel, enough information, writer’s block is never a problem.

It becomes a problem when two things happen. One is a lack of information, and two is this internal resistance. You’re afraid to put something on paper because once you’ve committed something to paper, now you’re going to be judged. Now people will tell you if it is good or bad. If you don’t do it, nobody will judge you. Often your brain, thinking that it is protecting you, will say, I’ll tell you what, it is better not to do anything than be judged.

That’s important because, sadly, back however many millions of years ago, you’re sitting there and then you hear this crack and this guttural roar and you turn around and out of the corner of your eye, not twenty meters away is a saber tooth tiger. Now if you run, you are dead because it is that much further. Think about animals. What do they do when they’re caught out in the open? What do they often do, like a rabbit? It freezes and pretends it’s dead. It’s what you’re meant to do with grizzly bears. This is core. This is genetic material over millions of years.

Seth Godin talks about this quite a bit in Linchpin. This lizard part of our brain, that core, the oldest part of our brain is just about protecting you. It’s all it is, it’s so you can breed. It wants to keep you healthy enough so you can breed with somebody. When you’re no use for breeding with somebody, it wants to pop you off. That’s all it is and all it does.

The trouble is, in this modern world, that protection mechanism really causes some heartache when you’re in the business of creating content. It still equates you publishing that blog post with you staying still so you’re not eaten by a saber tooth tiger. Somebody writing some words on a computer somewhere, which has no physical impact whatever, your brain still sees the same way as being torn limb from limb by a saber tooth tiger. That is a problem. It’s a real problem.

Here’s the cool thing. By actually acknowledging that, and actually saying it to yourself and really believing it, that’s half the battle over. The other half of the battle is to sit in the chair and knock something out and acknowledge straight off the bat, this is going to be rubbish. This is going to total rubbish, but I don’t care. I am going to belt out for the next thirty minutes this article. I am not going to go back and edit.

Then I’m going to let it rest, then I’m going to come back and edit it with fresh eyes. I’m going to promise myself I’m not going to publish anything without editing it first. It’s even worse when you write something, and say, this is actually good. You want to get it straight up on your blog. No, sit on it. What do all the great copywriters do Dave? They finish off their first draft. What do they do?

David Jenyns: You’ve got to leave it time to simmer.

Ed Dale: Stick it in the drawer. And again, the science now backs all of this up. It’s how our brain works. The subconscious part of our brain is 70% of the processing power. It’s scientifically proven now, it works away in the background. When you sleep, it works on the stuff you’re working on. Your brain is there to help you. It really does, it wants to be your friend, it wants to look after you.

Sadly of course, it also wants to protect you. That is good, because you don’t want to walk up and slap a bear. You don’t want to forget what is dangerous. If you had no fear, your would continually do those things and we wouldn’t exist as a race for very long. I find this stuff so fascinating which you can probably pick.

David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head. I can see as we talk, some of the influences coming out. You’ve already mentioned a few people like Gary Halbert and Steve Jobs obviously, and Seth Godin. I know from our previous chats, another is Richard Bandler. I’m interested to find out in the world of online thought leaders, who do you keep an eye on and who you respect what it is that they’re doing in generating content and adding value?

Ed Dale: Look, in our little neck of the woods guys like, I hesitate to mention people in the sense that I’ll leave people out and it will be by my pathetic lack of memory as opposed to their lack of influence on me.

Frank Kern is one who immediately comes to mind who I’ve worked with extensively over the years. He is a dear friend and he has this ability with words which drives me crazy obviously. For example, I struggled with this talking about being a market leader. How does he describe it? He says, try to be the coolest person in your market. What a great distinction! Another phrase that he said just recently is, what have you done today to make your market a better place? What a great question!

Again, scientifically proven now, your brain will provide you with the best possible answer. Anthony Robbins has been talking about this for twenty years, but now it is science, hard, proven science. If you ask the right question to your brain, it will give you the right answer. Your brain will give you, with all the information you’ve ever collected over your entire existence on earth, it will weigh all of that up and give you the best possible answer.

David Jenyns: Ask and you shall receive.

Ed Dale: Exactly. It’s biblical. It’s fundamental. But, here’s the thing, for most of us, we don’t like the answer. Mine is, get out of the chair and walk for thirty minutes. Put down the Tim Tam. How can I be fitter, how can I not get these colds all the time? That’s what my brain’s telling me, it is absolutely correct. I just don’t like the answer. It happens to the best of us. Can I tell you who my greatest influence is?

David Jenyns: Please.

Ed Dale: My greatest influence is the Google Reader.

David Jenyns: Yes I know you’re a fan of Google Reader. You got me onto that one too.

Ed Dale: Now let me explain what that is, because a lot of people don’t know. My Google Reader is now my ultimate influence. Why do I say that? What Google Reader is, it’s a news gatherer. It gathers news from all the sites around the globe on the topics that I’m interested in and the people I’m interested in and the people I follow. It funnels it all into this one place. Rather than having to go to a hundred different websites like I did in the old days, this information is delivered to me.

Once you become a bit of a ninja of Google Reader, you can consume vast amounts of information in minutes. It is just amazing. You combine it with iPhone and an app that I use called NetNewsWire and it means any time you’ve got a spare thirty seconds, you can be getting fuelled up as I say. You can be getting inspired. You can be getting information from cool people about the topics and stuff that you’re interested in.

I use it for sports. I barrack for Arsenal in the English Premier league. I can maintain a brilliant conversation about what is going on with Arsenal even though I’ve watched two games this year. I follow all the blogs and the pod casts. In some ways, Google Reader is my greatest influence now.

Now, the thing about Google Reader is, it is not only your influence, it’s also like my own personal Encyclopedia Britannica. Every article, everything that comes into my Google Reader is recorded and for as long as Google does this, it means it is searchable and you can search it by criteria, it is sortable. This is so powerful.

We do some lessons in the Thirty Day Challenge Dave which are completely free on how to set up Google Reader and maybe you could send out some links for people. Let me ask you Dave. What’s Google Reader done for you?

David Jenyns: One, it is a fantastic time saving tool but two, it keeps you on the cutting edge. It means as things are breaking, you’re on that breaking edge because you’ve pretty much got your ear to the ground for all the things that are important to you in your niche. It is the most efficient way to consume information. In a world where we’re bombarded with so much information, that it would be impossible to consume it all, it’s just a godsend.

Ed Dale: Yes, I completely agree. If you talk about the single thing that has influenced my workflow, because I know nothing, I’m totally dumb. It’s only the work of others, yes, I’ve got so many influences. If I bring a skill, because I can barely walk and breathe at the same time, that is to say, ok, I just read an article about how penguins live in the Antarctic and then realize that there is a great lesson for photography in that because of these fundamentals.

If I’ve got any skill, it’s saying, wow, look at this cool thing this hairdresser did in the north of England, she got a whole bunch of clients in. For me not to put the blinkers and filters up, and to say this only applies to hairdressing, but to say what if we changed the word hairdressing and applied it to motor sports. Will it work?

You need to understand if you put the risk mitigation and everything in, that the worst thing you can do is a test that wastes some time, but it doesn’t waste because you’ve got a result. It’s just that particular result didn’t work. But then it might lead to something that does work. If I’ve got any skill, that is it.

David Jenyns: I think you’ve got a little more skill than that, and I know you’re definitely someone people should be watching.

Ed Dale: I’m really starting to get some chops in FarmVille.

David Jenyns: I’m holding off. I’m not too sure I want to be jumping into FarmVille.

You’d definitely be up there with all of those people you mentioned, even though you do play that down. Your skill is really quite strong in the way you can break it down and make it consumable for people at every level. If people want to find out more about you, they can follow you on Twitter, which is ed dale. What are some of the other ways people can keep in touch with you?

Ed Dale: My personal blog, heaven help you if you want to go and look at it, is tubbynerd.com, a name given to me by Frank Kern, thanks Frank. The other place we’ve mentioned a bit during the course of the interview was www.thirtydaychallenge.com. I love this and I’m finding out lots more people are doing this. People are using this to train assistants to understand how to use marketing for their traditional businesses or whatever it happens to be.

There’s just so much great information. We spent so much time laying it out and doing it properly and of course the best part of it is that it is completely, utterly free. There are no catches and you’re not pitched anything at the end.

People think there’s got to be a pitch. We don’t. The Thirty Day Challenge is a sacrosanct thing we do. It’s I suppose the equivalent of doing pro bono legal work. For eleven months of the year, we try and make as much money as humanly possible, for one month of the year we give back.

The important thing to realize is that it’s the best possible information. There are no punches pulled. It really is, as you well know, the latest cutting edge information for that year. The good thing is, of course, even though the Thirty Day Challenge is in August, we set it up now, so if you want to go there tomorrow and start, start. That’s it.

If I can leave you with a final fundamental, we were talking about fundamentals.

David Jenyns: Yes, please.

Ed Dale: There are heaps of them, but the other one is, that content creation and creativity and all these things is not a gift, it’s a habit. What I mean by that is something very practical. We talk about this in the Thirty Day Challenge, but let me tell you this. If you get into the habit of spending thirty minutes a day for thirty days taking action, actually applying the stuff we teach in the Thirty Day Challenge, by the end of that thirty days you will amaze yourself with how you’ve done. Don’t think about the outcome, just think about the process of turning up, sitting down and producing for that thirty minutes a day.

You will be amazed at what you get because again the fundamental there is that too many people get focused on the end goal. I want to make ten grand a month or whatever it happens to be. The best, and this applies to Olympians, to sports people, to anyone who does really well, anyone I know who does really well in any field knows the secret. The part that they enjoy the most is the process. It’s the act of turning up, sitting down and knocking out some work every day.

The other thing that would stun a lot of people is the actual productive length of time for most high achievers’ days. You’d be amazed. For most people it would be about an hour of hard core, this is what’s making them the big money. The rest of it is communication, and dealing with staff and just the general hubbub of life.

If you knock out a solid hour a day of creation of product or content or traffic building or something and you do that on a religious basis, you’re going to be so much ahead of someone who just tries to do it haphazardly in thirty days, I can’t tell you. Again, it is a fundamental. Walk for thirty minutes a day for thirty days. You’ll be a lot better off than you were when you started. Eat properly for thirty days. It’s getting the habit of creating.

If it’s writing you look at the first piece you did on day one and you compare it to day thirty, and you won’t recognize it. Unfortunately, we’re in a quick fix society. People want to take a pill, wake up in the morning and have every problem solved.

Another fundamental is that it just doesn’t work like that.

David Jenyns: I think that fundamental is key. I remember sitting on a mat in my gym as I was learning my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I was still new, six months in, sitting on the mat, asking my Sensei could he please show me chokes, arm bars and leg locks. He said, no, you need to practice the basics for pretty much the rest of your life. He said you focus on the basics and then everything else falls into place. You need to find out a few of those key repeatable things, you master those basics and everything else falls into place.

If you focus on the wrong things, you end up chasing your tail every time a new email pops into you email box about the latest whiz bang, magic bullet system. You’ll be buying that and you’ll be chasing that.

Ed Dale: That is absolutely so true.

David Jenyns: I’ve kept you well over our planned hour, and you’ve give so much there, Ed. You’re extremely generous with your time so I thank you for that. If people want to check you out they can check you out at the thirtydaychallenge.com. You can just Google it and it will come up. That is thirtydaychallenge.com. If they want to find more interviews they can head over to davidjenyns.com. Thanks again Ed.

Ed Dale: No worries, mate. It was awesome, I really enjoyed it.

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