Simon Johnson

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Name: Simon Johnson

Industry: Internet Marketing, Domaining

Website: DomainerIncome.com

Simon Johnson’s Bio: Simon Johnson has been active on the Internet since he started creating his own websites more than 14 years ago. He is the author of the best-selling book “Keep Your Kids Safe On the Internet” published by McGraw-Hill in New York, USA. He has contributed to a number of publications dealing with safety and security on the web. Today, he is the expert in domaining and through his website, www.DomainerIncome.com, he helps domain name investors evaluate, buy, sell and monetize domain names.

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David: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’m quite excited today. I’ve lined up an excellent interview with you guys. I’ve found out there’s a new bit of software that you’re probably going to hear a little bit more about which is coming down the pipe. It’s called Domainer Income and I wanted to find out from behind the scenes from one of the main guys over at Domainer Income a little bit more about it and I suppose find out a little bit more to differentiate between buying and selling web businesses and how that compares to domaining itself.

We’ve got Simon Johnson here, thank you for coming down.

Simon: That’s alright, thanks for having me.

David: I suppose just to dig in straight away. You’re a full time domainer, so perhaps you can tell us a little bit about, what is a full time domainer? Some people are in the internet marketing space and they’re familiar with buying and selling websites. How would you separate the two or is it the same thing?

Simon: It’s very similar. There is an overlap between internet marketing and buying and selling domains and websites and domain names. Essentially it’s the same thing. However there are some subtle differences in terms of domaining, in that some domainers may buy a domain name and park it at a parking company, in other words they might put ads on it versus building it out into a website or a fully fledged business. There are some subtleties and things you’ll pick up along the way but that is essentially the difference.

David: Yes, and it is your core business, isn’t it? You just buy and sell.

Simon: That’s right, we buy and develop domains. We’re full time and have people who do it for us, the development part. That’s all we do. We rarely sell domains. We only usually sell under exceptional circumstances but our core model is building out as many as we can.

David: So when you’re buying these domain names, if you’re not looking to sell, because often when you sell something you get a big capital hit at that point in time. These businesses that you’re buying, or these domain names, you’re monetizing and it’s really about adding it to that portfolio, creating a cash flow and then building that cash flow.

Simon: It’s literally about getting the domain name up to a certain point where it can sit by itself and you just get that passive income without us really doing anything to it.

David: I know you’ve been doing this since the dawn of time, starting on the internet way back when modems were around, dial up modems and BBSs and that type of thing. From domain name registering, we’re based here in Melbourne, Australia and before Melbourne IT, you were saying you were registering domain names through, was it Melbourne Uni?
Simon: Yes, Melbourne University was actually the place to register domain names a very long time ago before ICANN and before Outer and before any other industry bodies. You literally had to fax off your paper work or send it off in the post, sign your life away and eventually if, subject to their blessing, you may get the domain.

David: There’s been a huge evolution and we can see the way the market places change now. We were talking about some of the stories just before we started recording here. Just to get an idea of some of stories or maybe one of the stories you came across in your domaining history. It gives people a little bit of an idea that you know your material and I think that’s what I like to do when I talk to anyone, I always like to go to the source and make sure they know what it is that they’re talking about.

Simon: There are quite a few stories because I’ve bought quite a lot of domains but a couple do stand out. One of them was when we were bidding at an auction and it was a domain that I particularly wanted and I was very passionate about it. It was in a niche that we operate in. I happened to be on holidays with my family and kids at the Gold Coast and I ended up sneaking out of bed one morning because the auction was at 5am.

I’m sitting there in this big place looking over the sea belting away. At the time, there was only one other bidder and he was bidding against me at a really rapid pace. Literally the domain went from $60, which was the minimum bid, straight up into the thousands. I actually can’t remember the domain, it was a dot com but it was a generic keyword. It was one of those things at the time, now this was quite a few years back, there weren’t a lot of people around bidding in this particular auction platform. I won’t name it.

What ended up happening was the other bidder was bidding so much and at such a rapid pace I just thought, this is a robot, this is not some person who’s bidding, this can’t be real. So at 5am in the morning I ended up giving up on that, only to find later when I questioned the auction platform, the people who run the place, they said, oh, no, we can assure you it wasn’t. I checked into it and it was one of the world’s largest domain holders who operates out of the Cayman Islands who had a lot deeper pockets than I had.

David: To get into the space of one of the largest domain name holders, how many domain names are we talking? How many domain names do you hold?

Simon: The person I was bidding against, who I won’t name, I know owns in excess of 450,000 domains. So we’re talking people with very deep pockets who have had these over time, many of whom sell their generic keywords in dot com for millions of dollars. So this is not your average industry that buys domains in the hundreds, they’re very serious developers and they often sell their names to large corporates for that price.

David: So I suppose this comes down to how to make a full time income in domaining at the moment. It’s about identifying those opportunities, these domain names and seeing value in them, hopefully trying to get them as they’re coming up as expired or whatever or they’re about to expire. We can go into that a little bit more and then try to figure out a way, well how do I back end monetize then up until a point where we can then create a saleable asset for someone else? You were saying look, you’re adding to your portfolio, your long term view thinking, domain names are never going to go out of fashion, if anything they’re going to get more popular, so I might as well hold onto this asset. Is that where you’re at and what do you do to monetize that, develop, park?

Simon: It’s a really good question because it depends on what the end goal is in mind. We do lots of different things, so we might park some domains that we think are best put in parking companies. That’s often the less preferred option, we usually do that for international domains. Foreign language domains that we know have value or IDNs as they’re called, International, Domain Names, where we don’t necessarily have or want to obtain the expertise to develop in that language. So parking companies already have that and are a really quick and easy way for you to earn recurring income there.

If you’ve got keyword domains like we have in the com, net and org space or even in .com.au, then you might want to develop them out from CPA offers or make them into businesses or do something with local business.

David: Yes, and from a developing point of view, ok, so parking is one option and I know there are different parking companies out there. A parking for those of you who aren’t familiar, is there are different companies that you give them the domain name, they’ll optimize the domain name, running ads almost like in an AdSense type program to fully monetize any of the traffic. A lot of times when you’re doing domain name parking, you’re not going to get a huge SEO benefit. It might be that a domain name is previously expired, already getting traffic or it’s a single keyword that people are typing into your domain name.

Anyway, however the traffic gets there, these companies sit there and say, well, how can we monetize that as best as possible? That’s one way of monetizing. I can’t imagine that you could, or maybe you can, could you retire on the revenue stream that you get from parking?

Simon: Yes, you can, and people do. It’s often those people with those hundreds of thousands of domains that literally get sent their cheques every month. I know a lot of them personally, they’re quite happy. I would say they’re lazy but they’re quite happy to sit back and collect their cheque and not have any overheads, not have any infrastructure or development or anything, they just do whatever they like to do. They’re people who have acquired those domains many, many years ago, so they can afford to do that.

Times have changed and the opportunity really is in development. But having said that, a lot of those people are looking at parking revenue which is declining and if you’ve used things like AdSense you have seen that, so they’re now looking to probably the internet marketing space and developers to actually build out some of their portfolio.

But it is one of those risk return things. If you take a domain out of parking where you know you get revenue every month, then you develop it, you might not get that same revenue. So there’s a bit of a lifestyle choice for many of them.
David: From a developing point of view, how are we talking? Thinking, right here’s a good domain name, let’s build a web business on the back end of this? When you think of development, how do you think of it?

Simon: It really depends on the domain and keywords and if it gets traffic. Generally speaking, if you’ve got a domain that doesn’t get traffic, or doesn’t get back links, then the sky’s the limit, you can do whatever you like with it.

If you’ve got a domain that you know gets traffic, then you really need to ascertain what’s driving that traffic, what’s behind it? Is the traffic going to convert and how is it going to convert? So you look at the source of the traffic and you find out what they’re searching for and really what’s in the mind of the person that types in that domain and what do they expect to see when they arrive? Then you can make basically an educated decision on how you want to monetize it.

David: Yes, and we’ve talked before, some of those ways for developing, like creating CPA style offers is one way, building out a site is another. Are there any other ways that you see or it really is dependent on what the domain name is.

Simon: Yes, it is.

David: You personally, do you pretty much do anything?

Simon: We do anything, we do a whole lot of things. We have geographical domain names for here and for overseas, so you can build up domain names based on a town or a location. We join affiliate programs even in those places, it can be anything from hotels to airlines to the financial services niches. So it really depends on the domain and the type of traffic and what people really expect to see when they type in that, or when they go to it from another search engine or another website.

David: How many domain names, I know I’m putting you on the spot here, how many domain names if you don’t mind me asking?

Simon: Quite a lot.

David: Multi thousands?

Simon: Multi thousands but the funny thing is, when you collect literally domain names over time, you lose track of it.

David: I’m getting out of control with five hundred.

Simon: It’s crazy. To tell you a story, the other week I won an auction at an auction site, I won’t name the company. They assigned the domain to my particular account at a registrar and I thought, what is this and I logged into it. I found a couple of hundred names just sitting there and I said, oh, I didn’t even know I had those. I had to add them to the development pipeline so it’s just one of those things really.

David: It’s your core business, so I understand it’s easy for that fat to collect along the way and then there’ll be a time where you go through and clean it up.

Simon: It is.

David: Ok, we’re talking about lots and lots of domain names here. What is it that you’re looking for when you’re looking for a domain name? It’s trying to identify that little diamond in the rough out of everything that is coming out of there. That’s ultimately what your software does and we’ll definitely talk about that in a little bit more detail but what components are you looking for a domain name?

Simon: It really depends on your own investment philosophy and the risk that you want to take. For me, it’s something that’s ideally a keyword that’s brandable, that’s memorable. It would need to be in, say, a niche that has high traffic or high cost per click for example. So there are a number of different factors that we look at and determine, yes, we want to get into that or no, we don’t.

For example, if you’re playing in the CPA space, those people who know CPA well, could reel off the top of their heads the relevant CPA offers that pay you $20, $30, $40 a click. If you’re comfortable in that space, then those are the types of things you look for in a domain versus if you want to park it. You might say, well, I’m lazy, I don’t want to do any development as long as I’m earning enough to cover my registration costs for the domain, I’m happy and I’ll just keep on acquiring domains that way. So it’s really up to you what you want to get out of it. They’re the sorts of things that we look for.

David: Are there different areas, like markets that you focus on? That’s another thing, there’s huge scope. Do you pick two or three markets that you go after, and say, right, I’m operating in this space and I’m collecting as many gold nuggets as I can in that space?

Simon: We used to. When we were first starting out, we were looking at, this was a long time ago when I guess some of those high cost per click and high CPA offers were out there, we would say, ok, we want to go into the financial services sector, we want to go into the job market, there are some of those things that just don’t go away, flights and holidays and accommodation. They are the things people need day in and day out and they consume. So it’s really easy to do that.

What we’ve found is, yes, we’ve got networks of sites that do that. But nowadays, because there are so many domain names available, for us it’s literally, we’ve got the ability to look across the masses and say, you know what, we’re going to take that one, that one and that one, just simply because we don’t have the time to take all the rest.

David: You gave us one hint, making sure the keyword is in it. Other characteristics, do you say, I want a minimum PR of x?
Simon: Yes, there are some things we look at. PR, believe it or not, isn’t one of them and that may shock a lot of internet marketers. I had this conversation last night, an internet marketer got me on Skype and said, can you give me some page rank domains? I said, here you go, here is a bunch. He said, oh, this is PR7 and PR6, can I buy these? I said, yes, you can. Now can you make a profitable website out of them or a business and that’s what we look at. Well, maybe, it depends on the domain and the traffic.

There are a variety of things you can look at. You’re really going to look at, how am I going to monetize this, is it going to be offering selling physical product, am I only buying this name so I can resell it to a local business or am I going to buy it in the capacity as a wholesale domain for example? That may be some terminology that maybe isn’t well known to internet marketers.

There are wholesale prices for domains and there are retail prices for domains as well. A lot of domainers operate in that wholesale space where they might acquire a domain cheaply, sell it to somebody else, like a broker who then sells it to a retail customer. There are different opportunities in there, depending on what you’re playing at.

David: I suppose to keep pressing on that point, as far as the keyword, when let’s say you’re building for your own personal portfolio, what things do you look for, obviously keyword, PR not an issue, do you look at domain age?

Simon: Yes, domain age is a bit of a myth actually. It’s often touted as, buy aged domains and you’ll make a million dollars and retire. That is just simply not true. The real hardcore fact is, does it get traffic, does the traffic convert? You can get really old domains that simply don’t have traffic. They’ve been registered, they’ve been put in a parking company or they’ve been sandboxed by Google, there are a whole variety of factors that can influence that domain age.

Domain age really isn’t something we hold in high regard. We might consider it, we might sort on domain age when we look at a large portfolio and say, oh, here are some domains that are old, but do they have traffic, do they have inbound links are they listed in directories like Yahoo! and Demoz? Did the previous owner of the domain sell product on their website and what product did they sell? Did they have a shopping cart and delve down into that detail. We do that before we actually buy the domain. Then we’re making an educated decision to say, you know what, we do want to get into that auction.

That may change the number of domains that we buy in a certain time. You’ll allocate a certain amount of capital to an auction process. You might say, I’ve got ten domains I want to buy today and all ten of them are old, but these five are old and we know they’ve got traffic and we know they used to be websites that sold a particular product. So for us, there is an existing market there, that’s used to buying things and that the domain has already had a relationship with, so it’s really easy for us to monetize it. So that’s one way of looking at it.

David: Some of those things are easy to verify like, you’re talking back links, that’s easy to look at. Some of those other characteristics, one of them which you’ve mentioned a few times, is this idea of traffic. The other thing that popped into my mind is Demoz and things like that, you can check on whether it’s all listed but when it comes to figuring out traffic wise, how do you make that determination as to whether or not that site’s getting traffic?

Simon: It’s really tough. A lot of people ask me about things like Alexa and Compete and other traffic indicators. Realistically, a lot of internet marketers use Alexa and the Alexa toolbar so it’s not always an accurate measure of traffic, it’s just one indicator. More often than not you can look at, say, the upstream websites that link into that. You can look at things like, for example, if you’re buying a website, then you do a search on Google and you see all these back links and most of them are from article sites and there are a few foreign websites that link to it from different countries and it’s not a keyword that people are naturally going to type into their address bar, you can probably make a good guess that the traffic’s not going to be there.

David: That’s a good insight depending on whether the traffic would come in type in or through articles and so on.

Simon: One of the foundations of the domaining industry was around direct navigation. People back in the olden days, before Google, they would type in the name or what they wanted to search for directly into the address bar and thus type it in traffic was born. On that basis everyone went and registered dot com because of course all the early web browsers would divert to the dot com websites. The search engines picked up on that and changed their ranking accordingly. For us, direct navigation is a big thing and that translates nowadays into generic keywords.

David: I just imagine to get those generic keywords, I think the user now, a lot of them obviously are just typing into Google. That’s why you have a look in search data in Google and often you’ll see the url. It’s like people are typing in the url into the search bar. I’m just wondering, a lot of those domain names, especially single keyword, we’re talking about those domainers that got started many years ago and they had the opportunity to pick up these good domain names. For most people to get the budget to buy some of those is huge.

Simon: It’s huge. Nowadays what you can do is, you can apply the same direct navigation logic to that. So someone who’s looking to rent an apartment in Melbourne might type in real estate Melbourne to their address bar. That has your generic keyword plus the geographical name at the end of it.

David: That’s easier to rank for from an SEO point of view as well, if it’s got those keywords in it. It’s like a double whammy effect.

Simon: That’s right. So those domains are available right now. The opportunity is still there, it hasn’t evaporated just because a bunch of guys in the deep dark ages went and registered all the domains. A lot of domains are still out there.

David: Yes, where they’re springing up as well, there are different marketplaces and a lot of the guys who follow my material know Flippa is quite hot at the moment and there are other websites. They’re more selling existing websites as opposed to single domain names but what are your thoughts on some of the different marketplaces?

Simon: It’s an interesting thing seeing the evolution of internet marketing and the rise of Flippa. I love Flippa, it’s a great website and it really promotes buying and selling domains. There are lots of other markets out there, primarily used by domainers with deep pockets. They don’t necessarily sell the website or the back end or have any of the proof in say, the revenue that comes with it.

What it will be, is a website that will say, here’s a keyword domain and I want $10,000 for it. It may be an auction that you participate in or it may be, in Flippa terms or in eBay terms, it’s a BIN, buy it now. So there’s no negotiation. That’s the price and that’s it, where some other places may allow you to talk to the seller and have that conversation through a proxy. There are lots of different markets out there, all with their own little quirks and how they operate.

David: Yes. While I’ve got you, and we’re on the tail end of the interview of things that I wanted to cover, I suppose the big news in the domaining space at the moment is what ICANN is doing. They’re suggesting they’re about to open up some of the different extensions. I know you being in the space, I’m just interested to get your thoughts on how you see that affecting the landscape and maybe even tell us a little bit more about what they’ve got planned.

Simon: For those people who don’t know, ICANN which is the governing body for the internet have said that they’ll enable people to register dot whatever they like. Already we have say, things like dotmoby or dotjobs or dot travel – not sure if there’s dot travel but, we have those extensions and people will now be able to make up their own extension other than dot com. That comes at a cost, you have to pay ICANN fees and do all sorts of things to become a registrar.

What that will mean for the industry, a lot of people have said, oh no, this is going to devalue dot coms or what is it going to do to my Google search ranking? What say I own newyorkapartments.com and that might have been valued at a six figure sum, I don’t know. Now someone might register apartments.newyork. So where does that rank and what’s the value of that domain? There are the sorts of questions that are going to come up.

David: It’s still a question.

Simon: Yes, it’s going to come up in the next few years. That’s what ICANN is in the process of doing and a couple of days ago they were in Brussels trying to nut it out with various governments and trying to say well, what are we going to do. Actually at that meeting last week, dotxxx was discussed, and that’s been on the cards for many years. Finally, they’ve said, we’ll allow dotxxx for the adult industry, so that will be an interesting one.

The really interesting thing for me is how will it impact the average user on the street when it comes to searching for information that is relevant to them? Are they going to go out and register dotmelbourne or dotsydney or dotnewyork or dotwhatever? Is it going to be another land rush? What we’ve seen previously with say, dotmoby or dotco or pick another extension is, they haven’t really been successful. People still go back to dotcom.

I’m not a dotcom fan boy, I invest in a lot of different extensions, but I still look at the way we access the internet. If I access it on my iPad, there’s a little button that says dotcom.

David: Yes, people are trained to dotcom.

Simon: They are, it may have an impact. The other thing that it may have a negative impact on websites like fishing websites and other things that pretend to be banks or financial institutions, because you can insert non Roman numeral characters into domain names now. There are those sorts of things we’re starting to see in auction, where non Roman numeral characters are sneaking in there, particularly in the international space. So when you’re buying in auction, you think you’ve got this really great generic keyword.

David: That line is a 1, not an L.

Simon: That is exactly right. I looked at this very early on. A couple of years ago I almost fell for that same thing. There was a dot com which was dropping and it was a two letter dot com. I thought this is interesting and I saw that it had a little line through it. A number of people didn’t notice that, I did. I ended up buying it just for entertainment value. I ended up writing an article on it.

David: As it was an underscore or something.

Simon: Yes. It was a non Roman numeral character. I can’t remember the domain, I should be able to remember it. It looked like ao.com or something like that, but it really wasn’t. so that’s going to have an impact on the public and especially people buying and selling domains because there’s going to have to be some more, I suppose checking out there in the marketplace to actually flag those, to say, hey, these contain non Roman numeral characters or Cyrillic characters. So they’re the sorts of things that are coming up.

David: For me I feel like for the moment I think it’s still too early days to know what’s going to happen. One, we don’t know how Google is going to respond to it, and two we saw this with some of the other domain name extensions when they came out, people saw them as this land rush. What they would do is, they would go and register all these things, big domainers and then end up parking them and then the whole extension was full of parked domain names which obviously isn’t going to support an industry.

Simon: No, it doesn’t. I don’t like to pick on dotmovie but it’s really the easiest one because a lot of domainers did recommend it. I didn’t, but a lot of people said go ahead and register it. I’ve just bought my iPad, it doesn’t have a dotmovie button on it.

David: Whenever we’re buying, we pretty much just stick to dot com, dot net and dot org. They’re the three ones, we’ve never really ventured down dot info or dot biz. We do dotcom.au as well, but that’s more so for business here in Australia. Your thoughts on that?

Simon: Yes, we’ve always done com, net and org, largely due to the traffic and the globalization of it. I think a lot of Americans see dot com as America and not dot us. They’ve cottoning on to dot us. So there is an opportunity in dot us to get in there. We have a couple of generic dot us keywords and we paid quite a lot for them and I believe in that extension but I think it’s going to be something that will happen over time.

Dotcom. au has its own risks from a rules and regulations point of view, in terms of what you can and can’t register, so there are some risks in there that you really need to take into consideration. But largely com, net and org. it really depends on where the traffic is. We have some dotcoms that get a lot of foreign traffic and it’s not because they’re foreign words, it just happens to be that there might be, I don’t know, a campaign on a particular keyword and that’s what they’re typing in instead of their local international domain.

David: I think there’s a whole new world out there and a lot of people are starting to dive in. To find out more, I think you guys have launched just recently, it’s only just been opened to the public, you’ve been working on it for many years now, which is domainerincome.com and I’ll make sure I have a link to this website underneath this video.

I suppose the real key when being in the domaining space is trying to identify these domain names as they’re about to drop and these final auctions as they’re going through and then having an ability to sort and find out which domain names have the most value based on those key things that you talked about, having a look at back links, having a look at age, having a look at is it indexed in some of these big directories and things like that. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you’ve got planned with that platform. I know having had a look at it, I need to dig into it more, but it does look a superior system to what’s currently available.

Simon: Yes. Domainer Income is something we developed for ourselves many years ago. It was our own personal investment platform and we developed it because there was nothing out there like it and there still isn’t. We knew there were a lot of domains out there but we just couldn’t buy them all.

David: As hard as you tried.

Simon: As hard as I tried. I keep on doing it, not a day goes by. What we ended up doing, we created this platform, we kept it to ourselves, we just bought lots and lots of domains. One day my wife said to me, you can’t keep buying all these domains. I said, well, I can’t keep letting them drop, it’s a crime. We released Domainer Income to the public just yesterday actually. It’s a very interesting thing because it’s a complete domain investment platform so we look at multiple markets, auctions, we look at forums, we look at domains that have actually expired and you can register. So there is no participating at auction or buying it with the seller.

Or, and this is another thing with the domain life cycle, it may not have gone into an auction but someone’s actually picked it up and said, I don’t want to register this anymore and they’ve dropped and it maybe hasn’t gone back into an auction process for some reason. These are things that have expired and you can register right now. What we did, we created this system where you can find a domain, buy it and monetize it and keep track of it.

One of the problems that I had when I was buying domains and websites was we had so many and we didn’t actually have a system to keep track of them. We started out with an Excel spreadsheet. The problem we had was these things would expire obviously, and sometimes you’d get, depending on your registrar, the notice or sometimes it ends up in your spam folder or it just doesn’t get to you.

So we actually created this system where we could put these domains in to and say well, we just bought this domain and it tracks the expiring and tracks where it’s at, it does everything for you. That’s essentially what Domainer Income does, is the complete life cycle of buy, you find the domain, you buy it, you do whatever you want with it and you can track everything, it’s great.

David: I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this product is going to launch and be phenomenonally successful. From what I’ve seen and I’ve had a little look around the system, it really has some tools and functions that currently aren’t available elsewhere. So if people want to find out more about what it is that you’re doing, obviously check out domainerincome.com and you’ll find a link. Do you also have a blog?

Simon: Domainer Income has been a blog for several years of domaining, it’s at dominerincome.com as well.

David: We might wrap it up there but thank you very much for your time.

Simon: That’s alright, thank you.

David: We’ll be in touch. Thanks guys, hope you enjoyed it. Thanks.

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Brian Johnson

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Name: Brian Johnson

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.strategicprofits.com

Brian Johnson’s Bio: Brian Johnson is the Chief Operating Officer of Strategic Profits, Rich Schefren’s company that helps Internet marketers become better businessmen and make sustainable profits. Brian attended the Harvard Business School and has been known as a corporate turnaround expert, helping businesses in jeopardy become profitable again. He was once in charge of the manufacturing and distribution of AOL CDs mailed in the U.S.

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David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com. Today I’ve lined up an absolutely fantastic interview with Brian Johnson. So for those of you who haven’t heard much about Brian Johnson, I suppose he seems like he’s a little bit more behind the scenes over at Strategic Profits but I think he’s starting to step out a little bit more. He works over there with Rich Schefren, and is the COO of Strategic Profits. He’s got a really excellent business background. He’s been to the Harvard Business School. I think he’s an expert on business turn arounds, I suppose that is where his real core focus is, working with banks and things like that where he’s called in, they’re having trouble and he comes in and looks for those real key leverage points that can just turn their business on its head.

I actually saw Brian speak recently in Sydney at James Schramkos’s event. He pretty much blew away the audience with some things they were working on at Strategic Profits which is what we’ll talk about today. The final thing I wanted to mention about Brian and something I suppose I admire about him is, I love it when you see entrepreneurs who are out there who live outside of just the internet marketing bubble. They’re very much into I suppose you’d call it lifestyle design. He’s an accomplished musician, an accomplished pilot, does scuba diving and pretty much lives life to the full. So he’s definitely someone worth listening to. I just want to welcome you to the call, Brian.

Brian Johnson: Hey David, I appreciate being on and I’m looking forward to it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I suppose just to pick up from where you were talking at James Schramko’s event, I know a few people on my list obviously haven’t heard about the things you guys are doing with the evergreen event driven marketing and that’s what you were talking about at James’ event. I think it’s a fantastic way to think about business and it can plug into any business. Perhaps if you can talk through the process of what you guys are doing and how you’re implementing that.

Brian Johnson: Yes, sure, definitely just to give you a bit of background about the reason we got the company going. Richard and I were big in the industry and a couple of years we just looked at each other and felt like we were doing launches, we were releasing new products, constantly doing new products and releases and we said, you know we’re working too hard, we’re doing this over and over. We’re constantly doing a release and we’re constantly finding partners and we’re constantly working every single day. The results were great, no doubt about it, we were making really good money but we didn’t have the lifestyle that we really wanted and we definitely didn’t have the lifestyle that the internet marketing world touts, you can push this button and make money. The reality is that’s not the reality.

We needed to put things in place for two reasons. One because we wanted that lifestyle, we wanted to be living the dream so to speak but number two we thought it was our responsibility in our business to our clients to be able to find the right ways to build a long term sustainable business. That’s what we were about, that’s what people come to us for.

After they’ve been through the rat race and tried all those push button things, saying I work twenty hours a day and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere, that’s when they come to us. We felt it was our responsibility to actually test things, build these processes out and really show people at an ultimate level how to build a real, sustainable business that will take them into the future while they’re not working.

Fortunately we’ve been able to do that in an outstanding way and that’s what I talked to you about David at the event and we’ll dive into some of that now. That’s just to give you a little bit of background about why we did what we did and where we’ve got to today. Now we have a plethora of clients who are using these processes as well as many people in the industry who are building tools and things to be able to work and create the processes that we’ll walk through today. Any questions before I get into that background?

David Jenyns: The way that you guys came through and discovered this breakthrough, I am curious. Did it come from your business past? We talked about you going to Harvard Business School and the process that you’re going to go through now really reminds me of that whole business process mapping and that idea of actually mapping out the way that a client will move through the relationship with you. I’m just wondering where the insight for what it is that you’re going to talk about actually came from.

Brian Johnson: I think part of it is just that Rich and I are a good team and we use my strengths, we use Richard’s strengths and we use the different strengths of the team to be able to create the ultimate scenario. Part of what we teach when our clients come to our program is all about understanding strengths, understanding your core strengths and how to deal with those and properly deploy your strengths. We just really focus on our strengths individually to really do this but also it is we’ve taken all of the best practices from marketing to operations to processes and put all of those into one package, that’s what we’re doing here.

I’m glad you’ve brought that up because the important thing that these processes we’re going to talk about are built around are not all about technology. It’s not about a piece of software that you push a button on. What it’s really about and what makes these practices extremely powerful is the fact that we have not negated the decades or centuries of proven marketing and persuasion techniques that have worked on us as human beings. Those things will never change as long as we are human beings.

That’s a lot of what you’ll see in these processes because ultimately the most important thing in this process is the conversion, it’s persuading somebody to want to buy your products. Too many people right now in the market, in internet marketing or any business get too wrapped up in technology. They think it is all about technology, but it’s not. It’s really about the strategies and the techniques to deploy the most effective marketing techniques. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s really all about the best practices that we’ve learned and that we’ve accumulated from our partners like Jay Abraham, and Rich and some great people that we were fortunate to be around.

David Jenyns: Then to dive in because I suppose we’ve been dancing around the topic and some people who didn’t actually get to see you speak in Sydney are wondering what is it that these processes are about. Digging in a little bit deeper there, how would you break this down?

Brian Johnson: Ok, let’s start. What we wanted to accomplish is a few things. One, we wanted to build a process that is totally automated. I don’t mean automated like I go in and change a date once in a while or I get uploaded recordings. I mean absolutely totally hands off from the time somebody opts in somewhere in our systems, all the way through the marketing process, the conversion process, down to delivering the actual product. We wanted to build processes that are totally automated.

The second thing that we wanted to do is to make this an evergreen thing. Technically this is an evergreen practice that has been running and it doesn’t matter what the date it is or anything. That was the other thing we wanted to do.

The other things that we wanted to accomplish in these processes which are part of the marketing side which we know work through the conversions point are one, deadlines mean a big deal and you’ll see deadlines as I talk about this process as we go through. Number two, we know that events drive a business. Events make a difference. So that was another thing that we wanted to do. Hence this is why this is called the Event-driven Evergreen Marketing Process.

So we’re going to dive into this and keep in mind that the product I’m going to talk to you about right now are some of our more expensive products. These are $3000 to $5000 to $10,000 products that we’re using this process on. This process works even better for those because it’s very difficult for someone to came in on day one and for you to be able to sell them a $3000 product that same day or even a couple of days later.

So it’s our responsibility to bond with a client, to bond with that prospect, to give them incredible information so that they feel like we know what we’re talking about. It gives us a little bit of a longer cycle but converts extremely well versus just trying to sell something from a sales page.

As we go through, there are going to be a few chunks that we’re going to talk about. To keep things simple, these chunks are basically just put together. They are very simple chunks, four or five chunks that as people go through these processes, they connect one to another depending on what that person has done. So it’s going to be a little hard to explain this without a visual but we’ll walk through this.

Basically somebody will come into one of our sites somewhere, it could be a free report, whatever it is, we call this our front ends. This front ends bring people into our business. They go through a gauntlet series as we call it. This gauntlet series is basically a set of emails. Depending on the channel they came in it could be three, it could be five, it could be seven. But these emails, these gauntlet series, basically all they do is shape our ability to bond with the person who just came in, to get them to know us, to give them some more great information, for us to give them some things they can take action on that makes a difference in their business right away.

When they do that, then they trust us, now they see we’re real people and we have real products. So we take them through that bonding process called our gauntlet series. Then at the end of that gauntlet series they get put into one sequence that is our invitation sequence to a webinar. That’s what I said at the beginning, that events we know make a difference. So they get their first email which says, sign up for this free coaching program. It’s a three hour coaching program, two part coaching program and it starts in seventy-two hours, it starts on this Friday.

If they come in on a Monday it’s this Friday, if they come in on a Tuesday, it starts Saturday, if they come in on Wednesday, it is this Sunday, so it’s an automated process. Basically whatever day they hit that page, they click on that email, that Java script that we have on the page displays the date a few days out and allows them to register for that webinar.

There are four emails in the series I am going to talk to you about now which is the registration series. Each one of these has a trackable link. We track every single step of the way through the whole process that we’re going to talk about. The other thing that happens, if they click on one of those emails and they register, they no longer get the rest of the emails in that first sequence, so there is some intelligence built into the process.

So they click on the first email, they go to registration. If they don’t click on the first email, the next day they get another email. It says, hey, hopefully you heard about Rich Schefren’s coaching program, but there is only 48 hours left to register. Click here if you want to join. Then if they still don’t join, they get another email a day later, except this email has a recording. It says, hey, there is only 24 hours left to register. Now you see what I’m doing here David? There’s a deadline. I’ve got a deadline and hopefully they will respond to this deadline.

That’s 24 hours and then instead of this email having a lot of copy or a scroll of copy, there is only a little bit of copy that says, there is a very important message here from Rich. You’ve got to check out this video. Then it goes to Rich and there is a video of Rich who says, we have sent you a couple of emails about this, it will change your business or whatever it is that you want to say in that video, and it’s a video. We’re breaking the pattern a little bit right now.

The first two emails they have our typical header at the top. Then if they still don’t register they get one more email on the fourth day, except this is a text email, at least it looks like a text, no header on it and it basically says there are only 12 more hours to register. The reason it is text or looks like text is because we’re breaking the pattern. They’ve been seeing registration emails, now we want to put this one right in front of their face, just like a regular email to try to break that pattern.

Once they click on any of the emails and register, now they have gone into a different set of sequences, it’s another one of the chunks I talked about. The first thing that happens is they go into the registration page and it’s a basic squeeze page, join our seminar. Then they go to a thank you page and from that thank you page you can do all kinds of things, do a tell a friend process where they can share this webinar with other friends. If you’re not doing that, you definitely should do that, it makes a big difference.

After they register, now they start going into sequence number two which is a confirmation series. Most people will look at this as a reminder series. It’s the wrong way to look at these. They’ve just registered, four days left until the actual event that they’re going to attend. So you want to take advantage of those four days, not just to send reminder emails, you want to do what we call a reconsumption email. It’s an email about why they just made the best decision for their business. It’s all about the webinar. Or maybe the next one is grounding materials where they get a booklet with some questions that they are going to fill out on the webinar.

You have to be very careful about grounding materials not to put too much information in them because it will give people a preconceived notion about what they’re going to learn and they might not show up. You can give them a page and say we’re going to help you fill this out in the webinar. If you use those grounding materials in the right way it should help to reconfirm that this is really something they want to be on. What you want to do is get people who have registered to actually show up at the webinar. So these are just little techniques that we are doing and constantly improving to get people to show up.

The third email in this series is maybe a day before reminder. The day before reminder might be a video of Rich or whatever product we’re dealing with. The reason that we’re doing the video is not just to be cool and use a video but really it is because we want to give the visitor the opportunity to hear the voice of whoever is going to be on the webinar and see their face. We want them to come into this webinar comfortable and when they start to hear it, they have already heard the voice and seen the face and they’ve already bonded with that person.

So there’s a video the day before. Then of course they also get an email the day of, to remind them, so in the morning. We also send them an email about an hour before the webinar. If they’ve left us their cell phone or their mobile phone number, we also send them an SMS message to their number about fifteen minutes before.

So there are just some techniques we’re using right now that you could tweak, try, test, do all different types of things and remind me David at the end to talk about testing, because that is important. So that’s sequence number two, after they’ve registered, before they show up at the event.

Now it’s the time for the event. We have a little bit of code on our webinar page. It basically looks at a cookie that we drop when they register, we drop a cookie in the machine. When they get to that page there will be a countdown to that date and time for their actual event. It’s a really simple and you don’t have to do this. Even if you didn’t want to build a fully automated process right now, even if you just built this out and then changed it once a week and did one webinar a week, it’s all about the concept we’re talking about here.

Then they come to the webinar. Again we track, we know all the people who are registered, we know the people who have now showed up to the webinar because we’ve had them put their name and password to get into the webinar and then at the end of the webinar they go to another button and they click that and we know that they actually stayed. Why is all that important? Now we can talk about another couple of sequences or other chunks that they will go into, based on the habits that they did.

If somebody registered and they didn’t show up to the webinar, they automatically go into a sequence, I call our sequence five that basically starts to take them down the path areas of replay or you can reinvite them back to another set of dates. So that’s a whole other sequence. So they get the first one, sorry you couldn’t make it, obviously it’s something you’re interested in, so we wanted to give you the webinar. Here’s the replay. Maybe the next day if they haven’t clicked on that one, it says, we sent you the replay, maybe you just didn’t have time, so guess what, now we have an audio recording you can listen to.

These are the things we’re doing just to continually try to touch them, to get them to consume that webinar. These are just extra things. After that third one, maybe we send them one more email that they registered, didn’t show, they went through all those emails, they didn’t consume the replay, they didn’t consume the mp4. This sequence just does exactly the same thing I just talked about in sequence five, but it just talks to them a differently based on the habit that the person took.

So we could say, hey, we want to thank you for coming to the webinar. You probably would have learned this and this, but just in case you didn’t, here is the replay. Next email, here is the audio, next email here is the transcript and then if they still haven’t bought, then we down sell them to the Founders Club. So you see a pattern here. So they start at the beginning of the funnel and we always bring them to some kind of closure. They’re either going to buy at the webinar or buy from the processes or down sell them to the Founders Club.

If they did show up and they stayed at the webinar, but they didn’t buy, they go to sequence three. Hey, hopefully you appreciated what we talked to you about at the webinar, but you didn’t buy. Why not? Here’s your chance, buy our product. That’s email one. We’re always serving people. Who knows what the objections are to why people didn’t buy the product? They came to the webinar and didn’t buy.

There are usually about six or seven major objections that cover most people who didn’t buy. What we do here now, in the emails now in sequence number three is, we address those objections through emails. You came to the webinar, you didn’t purchase it but all I can think of it’s got to be one of these reasons. Let me talk to you about it: this or this or this. We surface the objections and then we satisfy the objections. Then we do that in one more email. If they don’t buy, we down sell.

The only other thing they could have done is actually buy. If they buy, they go to the sales page, they buy and they go through a sequence of welcome to Strategic Profits. Here’s what to expect, here’s how to get into your program. Then they go into what we call the sixth sequence that tries to make sure that we do our job in keeping people engaged in the program for the next eleven months.

After they’ve gone through all these processes and they’ve either bought the program or they’ve been down sold into our $49 a month Founders Club, if they still haven’t bought any of that, then they go into a sequence which basically starts to offer them our different products for the next seven to ten weeks.

So I really tried to encapsulate more about the concept of a very effective way to drive people into a funnel and how you bond with them, warm them up, try to sell them your product, down sell them and then after that make sure we extract what we can out of that process.

That gives you the overall view, David. I think if you have any specific questions, then we can get into specifics. One thing I wanted to talk about was testing. This is one thing that I try to make everyone I talk to understand that you can’t just listen to everybody that sells there in the market place. You can listen to them only from the standpoint of trying to see if they do some best practices that might work for you, that might work for your product, your market, your channel, but testing has got to be done.

You have to make decisions based on your own testing and not what everybody else in the marketplace says. I say that because, number one, from experience, I’ve listened to people and not found what they said to match my own experience. Number two unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that say this is the best, but they really don’t know because they don’t know how to test properly in the first place. It just irks me personally to see too many people hurt from listening to people who don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Even what we say, when we suggest you do certain things, we’re subjective from the standpoint to try this and test it. We’ve tested it, we’re confident in our ability to test it appropriately, but your market is different from ours, your channels could be different, the way you buy your traffic could be different, your AdWords could be different, there could be a whole different group of criteria that would make our test not as valid as yours. So it’s important that people really understand that.

They can be simple AB tests and that’s all that needs to be done. We don’t do multi variant testing. We do simple AB tests, AB tests, AB tests. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. I suggest that you do test. It’s a rule in our company that every time something goes up, that there’s a split test. There’s just a little bit there on testing, David, before we go on to some of your questions. Hopefully that gave a clearer picture of that as we go through the questions.

David Jenyns: That whole process that you went through and to recap if I may be so bold, whether or not we can even go ahead and give that graphic to the listeners so that they could look at it while they’re listening to this. I don’t know if that’s sensitive or not but maybe that is something we can chat about after the call but that might help cover it.

To do a recap, the idea being, that you start off having that bonding series. After they get through the bonding series, which is a no pitch bonding series, then you funnel them into a series of invite emails with the goal to get them to commit to a webinar. Then there is a series after that which is hey, making sure that they show up to the webinar. Very much you’re just tracking the response and what people are doing at every step of the way. When it gets to the webinar, you’ve really only got two things, either they show up or they don’t show up.

If they don’t show up, they get a series that they go through that ends up trying to get them back or getting the mp3 replay whatever it is or some sort of down sell. If they do show up, then you split it into the two, either they bought and then they’ve got the series for the bought or if they didn’t buy, you go through a series that then tries to address all of those objections. At the end of it, regardless of whether they didn’t buy or they didn’t attend the no show for the webinar then they go into a series that basically offers all of your products and this is a very automated system.

As a thirty second recap, did I hit most of those things on the head?

Brian Johnson: Yes, definitely and I think the most important thing in this process for us which you talked about, we track every single step of the way. We do. In our process here we’ve evolved to the point where we’re actually tracking something like forty-seven touch points or something. But in the beginning of setting up this process, it’s not that important to do that.

There are two points you need to look at in this process. It’s important your event converts. If that one event, that webinar or that teleseminar or that video or whatever it is that you’re using for your main point, your event, if that doesn’t convert, all the things that surround that event is only super charging something that is not working.

So we go through a two step process. We start with a very simple process because there is one thing we want to do. If our event converts and we break even or we’re making some money, then we know we’re starting with a winner and now we start to build all the peripherals around it, we start to super charge it. Then we can test the event, we can tweak it, we can try different versions of it and then we can test all the emails around it. So that is an important thing. One, the event has to work.

The second thing is, when we start this, we don’t track all the plethora of places I just told you about in the beginning. So there are only a few things we want to know when we start this process. Number one is how many people registered, how many people showed up, how many people stayed on until the end and how many people bought the product? That’s the only thing that matters. Why? When you start, you need to have clarity on what you’re going to focus your time on.

Too many people and a lot of people I talk to, they come to us for the first time, they’re just confused, they don’t know if this is the right thing to be working on or what I was working on, did that make a difference?

They’re just confused on where to work and spend their time. I have absolute total priority on what my team is going to do every week because I look at my numbers every week on these processes and I can pick two points that I call my highest leverage points and that’s what I’m having my team work on.

One right now that we’ve been trying to crack for a couple of months and that we’re doing test after test after test on is, we want to get our show up rate to our webinar higher than what it is now. I know that is my highest leverage point. If I can jump my show up rate up 10%, it all falls to the bottom line in your numbers at the end of the month. So I have a priority. I know that is going to be the most important thing that my team can work on because that is going to bring in the most money through the door. It’s not split testing an email subject line, it’s not the back end transcript email, none of those things will bring me the highest dollars. It’s focusing on that show up.

The second thing for us is to keep increasing our conversion on the webinar. Once we’ve exhausted those and we reach the point where split test after split test we didn’t really increase that, then it’s maybe that we end up starting to work on something else because now those are the highest leverage points. You don’t know any of those things unless you track this thing; you’ve got to track it and know your metrics and know your numbers and be able to make those decisions. So hopefully that makes sense David.

David Jenyns: Yes, with getting people to show up, no doubt you’ve tested this. I’m curious to know something like if you sell that webinar for $1 or something like that, have you guys done any price testing on that? Obviously it’s going to reduce the number of people who take it up, but you’d imagine the show up rate would be a lot higher.

Brian Johnson: Yes, we’ve been testing a lot of things. What we’re doing right now, we used to send people to the registration page and there was only the one date which was usually five days out that they could register for. Our script would just pick a date and that was five days out and that’s what they could do. The show up rate has now bumped as we’ve given them the option to pick three different dates with three different times. I’ll give the url so people can see the existing page so they know. I’ll give you the link and you can put it below this recording and you can send people to that.

Now it’s three choices. We also just split tested a fourth choice and the fourth choice is sorry, these times are not going to work for me, but I’d like to learn more. This is a perfect example of now being able to know what decisions can be because I tracked this.

David Jenyns: One thing that really sticks out for me what you’ve talked about there is the ability the way that you guys track everything down to such a minute detail. Critical path pops into mind where you can identify where that low hanging fruit is, those really key leverage points and then spend your time on what is going to make a difference.

One thing that Richard mentioned, that I’m keen to get your thoughts on, this idea that a lot of people when they get started, especially in information marketing or any business really, they’re always taught and had it drummed into them that the money is in the back end. But what you’re talking about here, it’s like you’re setting up a process and you talked about knowing the value of a client. Once you know the value of that client, can you tell us how that gives you extra power, because now you know what that client’s worth? How do you take that number and use it?

Brian Johnson: There are two pieces to that component. Most of the time you hear people throw around the term life time value and that is definitely an important thing. However, there is something else just as important that you never hear of much and contributes to the lifetime value of a customer is the life cycle of a customer. Have you ever heard that term before?

David Jenyns: Yes, please, dig into it.

Brian Johnson: First to answer your question, once we know the lifetime value of our customer, what we do with that, basically that gives us the knowledge to know how much we can spend to go out and acquire more customers or more traffic or more often more prospects. So if you have a really high lifetime value for a customer, you know, say you lifetime value is $100, then you know that you can spend up to $100 to acquire a customer. That is a good thing because now you can buy very valuable traffic at $15 registration or something. So that is very important.

The predecessor to lifetime value is life cycle of a customer. We get into high end marketing and things which most people don’t focus on but I focus on the life cycle of a customer because it helps to identify where a prospect or a customer starts to deflect from the public. What I mean by that is we track the normal avatar, the majority of the people coming to our site.

Now if we’re finding a point where they’re in the follow up for five weeks, six weeks, and then they suddenly deflect from us and they’re not engaged any more. That gives me the ability to find out where those points are in the life cycle, back up a week or so and make some changes in the text and do what I can to increase the life cycle of the customer. It also gives me the ability to identify spots that I can increase the amount of money the customer spends.

Once you know the life cycle, there are only two things you can ever do with a prospect or customer. One is you can either increase the life cycle of that prospect or number two, get them to spend more money within the life cycle that you have now. That’s all you could possibly do, so that’s what I want to focus my time on, is increasing my lifetime value and the way I do that is increase the amount of money they spend or increase the life cycle of my customer’s experience. So life cycle is a very important thing that too many people just don’t pay attention to. That contributes to the higher lifetime value of the customer.

Once you know those numbers and they’re not really difficult, but once you know those numbers, it goes back to your original question, what do we do with it? Well we know we average $126 per registration. I know I can make a lot of money. That is such a great feeling to have versus always hoping and wondering, I’m going to go spend this $1000, I sure hope that it works. I don’t have to worry about that because I know it works. This is a process that we’re tweaking to increase the lifetime value increases the registration. I know it’s going to work, now it’s just a matter of me finding the right traffic and taking this process and stacking it into different channels and continuing to do the same process for each channel.

It sounds confusing but it’s really not when you break it down to the simple fact of knowing your metrics, knowing where to focus your time, knowing what the lifetime value is of your customer. Those are components that really give you clarity about what to do next.

David Jenyns: Someone who is listening to this, regardless of what business they have, this can apply. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s internet marketing related or that’s in that little bubble. What you explained there, or information marketing even, that little bubble, that process can be plugged into any business. That whole idea that you were saying you and Rich were bumping your heads saying, hang on, we’re getting involved in these product launches, that seems to be chewing up a lot of our time. Sure we’re making great money but I’m so invested from a personal point of view that I can’t break away.

It’s the idea of creating a funnel, a series that basically enables you to have a sequence of events that you can gauge where the prospect is up to at each point. They get sold on the idea of your product or service no matter what it is and it’s all external of you. You then come in and pick up the pieces once they’ve self sorted them and self selected. It’s like the individual gets to self select before you even touch on that. I don’t know if you guys have ever tested it outside of the IM or even just the information marketing side of things. I’d just be interested to hear that.

Brian Johnson: Yes, we use the same exact process for all of our clients, whether they’re our coaching clients, all the way up to our million dollar clients we work with. We do this process with companies that are selling retail items, they’re fulfilling geo physical shipping to coaching companies to you name it, the same process can work for all of them. Maybe not the exact same structure but it goes back to what I said. We are human beings. The things that we like, the things that persuade us, that’s what the most important thing is, we’re doing that same thing. When it comes to metrics, numbers, understanding your numbers, that’s the same thing we do in building our company. there’s no difference, it just might be a lot more numbers, a lot bigger numbers, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same thing. The fundamentals are so important to running a business.

David Jenyns: I think a lot of people make a big mistake. They think, oh, that won’t apply to me. That’s one of the big mistakes. You talked about some of the other mistakes like people not understanding life cycle. People get caught very much up in the whole technology side of things. They hear about this process that you’ve just talked about and then they stress over the implementation rather than you mentioning, that’s not where we start. We start off with those core components.

Are there any other mistakes? You’ve had a very varied business career and your entrepreneurial journey to get to where you are. Are there any other mistakes that just spring to mind that you think when people are getting online and they’re starting up businesses, where they go wrong?

Brian Johnson: Yes sure, I can give you some that I see from my experiences working in companies. One big one is that too many people spend their time on SEO and all kinds of things. You’ve got to spend 80% of your time on marketing and 20% of your time on everything else, especially with a new company, it’s so crucial. We’re dealing with a couple of clients at the moment who have developed some major financial software and they’ve been running this for two years and have spent millions and millions of dollars. I asked them the simple question, do we know if anyone is going to buy this? They couldn’t answer the question.

I said, how about, guys, if we market this first and number one we’re going to know if anyone is going to want to buy it and number two you’ll probably save a lot of money because there might be a lot of features you’re building right now that these clients don’t want. So that’s one example. We see that quite a bit.

The other thing that I see is people spending time on the wrong things. They’re spending time on things that don’t matter. I just had a client last week, a new client actually say to me, I need to know what’s the best way to protect my intellectual property and what law firm do you use and so on. I said, tell me how much you’ve sold of this product. They said, well, none, but we’re going to go big. So I said, you’re telling me you’re spending your time right now trying to decide how you’re going to protect your intellectual property for something you don’t even know that anybody is going to buy?

That’s another perfect example of people spending time on the wrong things and not the right things. There’s another one. Those are really big ones. The other one we talked about today is not knowing your numbers, not knowing your metrics. That’s a key thing. Another thing is trying to get better in things they think the customer needs but they’re not good at. Forget that. Focus your time on things you’re good at, you’re going to be outstanding at, to drive the company and get somebody else to do the things that you’re not good at. A lot of people say, I can’t afford it, I have to do it all in the beginning. Your company will grow a lot faster, it will be a lot less stressful if you didn’t have that attitude and you actually tried to find somebody to do the things you’re not good at. It will grow faster without a doubt. So that’s another big one that we see quite a bit. Those are the major things David for sure.

David Jenyns: You mentioned that idea of focusing on your strengths which I think is really key and having gone through your business coaching program and things like that, that is one of the first things that I know you guys get the individual to focus on, find out where they’re strong. Rich has got that image that he is really well known for, where it’s you in the middle and then all of the tasks that you need to do. It really represents how a lot of business owners feel, that sense of being overwhelmed.

You talked a little earlier about some of those big leverage points and break through points. I think one of them was, realizing, hang on, I’m not going to be able to do this all on my own, I need to build a team with me. Then I focus in on my strengths. Over the years, if you think about some of the key leverage points, if you look back and you say, the point at which I started to, I don’t know, get my customer service outsourced or the point at which I started to look at these business process maps that we’re talking about now. I don’t know if there were any key leverage points or turning points that you could look back on and say, that was a huge discovery for me.

Brian Johnson: Yes, definitely, some of them were things like understanding the importance of copywriters and making sure you had the right copy. Definitely automating, automating as much as you possibly can was another big one for me. I’d have to say the other thing that was a really significant eye opener for me, the more I got involved in marketing and was part of marketing and really focused a lot more on marketing and a lot less on technology and operations, the better off in the company we were.

That was a real eye opener for me because in my whole career I haven’t always been in marketing, I’ve been in operations and back end. That’s not as important as marketing. If you’re selling things and making money, you can do all kinds of things at the back end. But if you’re not, none of the back end matters. So that’s a pretty significant thing for me.

David Jenyns: Yes, I always get the same feeling as well. The line that sticks out in my head is if you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So as an operations person, you think about how can I solve everything with operations. If you’re a design person you think about how can I solve all my issues with design. Sometimes you need to step back and that discovery, which is a fantastic insight, that idea that marketing really is where the money is when you think about it. You can have a perfect product but unless people know it exists, then it’s not worth anything. So marketing really is that central thing.

The other thing that I always find interesting, you guys are very much on the cutting edge. Thinking about what’s coming down the pipeline for you guys in the tail end of 2010 and moving into 2011. What you’re talking about here with the event driven marketing material, I think for a lot of people that’s very much on the cutting edge. You always find that you might be two or three moves ahead.

So I don’t know if you can give us any insight into any other little things that you guys might be working on or you haven’t quite planned out yet. I’m probably putting you a little bit on the spot there but I don’t know if there is anything like that which comes to mind?

Brian Johnson: We used to be in the mindset of always coming out with something new but now we’re fortunate to get to the place where we are now, where we really truly have an automated business. Now we’re spending more of our time on not coming out with new products or things, we’re spending more of our time just getting better at what we’re doing. It’s great, we’re continuing to tweak these processes, and just continuing to build on something that works.

We’re spending a lot more time this year on more media buys, ads, just driving more traffic and continuing to split test, tweak and just build the process better and being able to share all that material with our clients. So you’re not going to see this year from us any significant new products come out because what we have are outstanding. It works for everybody that gets on it.

Our Business Growth System has been one of the longest selling, most successful programs in internet marketing. That’s something that we’re focusing on and we’re going to continue. We have our Founders Club which is our monthly continuity, our BGS (Business Growth System). We’re in these programs every month with our clients. So we’re always bringing them new things, there is always new material coming out, but it’s all related to what we’re all about. We’re helping small businesses and large businesses get to a sustainable point and an automated point, so we’re always bringing the latest information.

What we are going to do from April of next year, we organizing a major boot camp event here in the States with Rich Schefren and myself and someone from Jay Abrahams office. So that’s going to be a really hard core three day event explaining everything we do in the business and not showing people fifty ways to build automation, but the one or two ways that work, that we’re using every day right now that people can implement. That’s something that’s going to be happening at the beginning of next year. Other than that I’m actually happy to say, that’s all we’re going to focus on.

David Jenyns: As much as you say nothing new, that in itself, there is a big, clear shift there from product creation to ok, we now have the product, it’s all about the system. For me, hearing what you guys talk about, a really big break through is that idea that getting clear on what that life cycle and that lifetime value of the client is, having your automated system and then going out and buying media buys. Get out of the notion that you constantly need to be creating new products and if you’ve got a system and it works, the aim of the game is how much traffic can I fill in the top of that funnel? I know you said you didn’t feel like too much new was coming down the pipe, but I think you’re leading by example which is that idea, you need to be focusing on that front end once you get that back end established.

One of the ways that I think is the best way that people can get started with what it is that you guys do and, I’m a member, is your Founders Club. I’ll put a link to it for people. They can find it at davidjenyns.com/strategic. That’ll take them through to the Founders Club, introduce them to all of your different products. It’s a really low end price point wise front end and they over deliver on value with the idea that it’s pre sell and that idea of here’s what we’ve got, now you can check out some of our material. It’s a little bit of a gateway drug for lack of a better word. It’s one of the best ones I think out there and the material that is in there.

There are a few presentations in there that I think are just key and I think all business owners need to check out. So that’s davidjenyns.com/strategic. But Brian if people wanted to find out more about you, I know, like I said at the start of the call, you’re putting yourself out a little bit more than you have been. But if people want to find out more specifically on the things that you’re doing, do you a blog or some way people can keep an eye on or is the best thing just to keep an eye on Strategic Profits?

Brian Johnson: They definitely want to be part of Strategic Profits and the Founders Club and I know you have a link for the Founders Club, so they definitely want to do that. If they want to found out more about what I’m doing, they can go to Facebook and my fan page is called thewinebloggers on Facebook and that’s where my blog is, thewinebloggers.com. That’s just my own personal little hobby that I have. It started with Strategic Profits and us wanting to test a lot of techniques. There was a lot of software that we didn’t know if it was going to hurt our rankings. We started to test it on this wine blog. The wine blog is one of the top ten wine blogs in the world.

David Jenyns: One thing if I may, talking about the wine bloggers. I think I might have even seen on your Twitter stream or something like that, you had the opportunity to catch up with Gary Vaynerchuk too. So I don’t know if you had any comments there because he has quite a prolific business mind, obviously coming out of the wine industry. I don’t know if you have any comments on that.

Brian Johnson: Gary is a good friend and we’ve done quite a few things together. Gary is a great guy and a great marketer.

David Jenyns: I love his work. You’re definitely someone worth watching over at Strategic Profits as well, so people can click the link below to find out a little bit more. I might wrap it up there Brian. We’ve probably taken up a little bit more time than we were planning, but once you get on a roll, that’s what I love most. You just get on a roll and all the good work starts to come out. You’ve been very generous with your time and all the information, not holding anything back. So thanks again and I’m sure my guys will love this, so thank you.

Brian Johnson: Thanks David.

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Rich Schefren

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Name: Rich Schefren

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.strategicprofits.com

Rich Schefren’s Bio: As a successful Internet marketer and entrepreneur, Rich Schefren gained his expertise through actual and practical experience. He once worked at the prestigious Arthur Anderson firm and left it to help with their struggling family business. He remodeled their clothing store and started selling techno clothing. It became a hit and the store was able to make $7 million within 3 years.

He then established his series of hypnosis centers, a project he started with his wife, Deb. Then in 2004 he started his company, Strategic Profits, helping Internet marketers organize and properly manage their businesses assuring them of steady and reliable income. Allowing them to have more free time to spend with their families.

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David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com. Today I’m very excited. I’ve lined up a phone call with Rich Schefren. Now I’ve been chasing this phone call for quite a few weeks, so I think it’s something I’m looking forward to just as much as you guys. For those of you who don’t know much about Rich Schefren, at least I think if you’ve been in the internet marketing space, you definitely would have heard the name.

Digging a little bit deeper into his history, Rich has got a really varied entrepreneurial journey that he has gone through, everything from starting a clothing store, or building up a clothing store around techno clothes and moving over into the hypnosis business and building that up into a business with a turnover of over $7,000,000. Then he shifted over into the internet marketing space. Around 2004, that’s when he launched his company Strategic Profits, but Rich really has coached some of the biggest names in IM, everyone from Brad Fallon, Mike Hussein, Jeff Walker, Ryan Dice, Marlon Sanders and that’s just to name a few.

Currently he’s working with Jay Abrahams, he pops up and he’s done a lot of work with Dan Kennedy, John Carlton, Alex Mendossian, Yanik Silver and a whole host of others. I suppose I was first introduced to Rich’s work, I saw one of his presentations that came out just before he released The Internet Business Manifesto. I think for a lot of internet marketers, that was a real pivotal piece in a lot of the puzzle for people building their online businesses and understanding the importance of a team. I think that’s one of the key ideas that I got out of what Rich did, especially early on, was the idea of building a team and how to select A players.

I then joined his coaching program. Another thing I got out of that was making sure you identify what your strengths are and as you’re building your team, you build on your strengths and building your team to complement that. He’s come up with tons of different reports. Some of the free reports that get given out are just as good as any other paid products. There’s another one I really like The Maven Manifesto. Some of these names I’m mentioning you might want to seek out because that Maven Manifesto is an excellent document for how to position yourself as an expert.

Another one of the key insights just to name a few was in the Business Acceleration Program I got out of that a whole host of things. One of the things Rich mentioned was the idea of listening to audio in two speed using faster audio. I recommend that to all of my guys now and Rich is pretty much the one who got me onto it. So suffice to say I’m very excited to have Rich on the call and I’d just like to welcome you. Are you there Rich?

Rich Schefren: Yes I am, and thanks for that introduction Dave, I’m glad to be here and sorry for the difficulties in tracking me down.

David Jenyns: I’m sure it will be well worth it. If we just dive straight into it, I know your real core area of competency really is building business and you do that very well. I suppose I’ll start off with a very broad general question and you can take it in any direction you want. When you’re building a new business, let’s say someone is starting up a new business, they might have an idea of the product and service or even the space, the niche they’re going after. Once they’ve got that idea, how do you coach people to actually go about building a business, where do you go?

Rich Schefren: Ok, well you know, first off what I generally like to do for myself as well as when I’m coaching others, is actually take a step back from there. I make sure that where the person wants to go, or if it’s me and it’s a business that I’m starting, that my strength allows me to really develop a positioning and offer a product that I believe can be the best option for a segment of the market.

So, you mentioned the clothing store that I took over, that was a preexisting business but I had to move that business in another direction to be successful because it was failing when I took it over and we were competing with the biggest retailers in the world. We were on one of the most competitive streets in the world, Broadway in Manhattan. The reason I was able to turn that business around, I ran the business correctly and that needed to be done. But the most important thing was really figuring out what could we do, what could we create, what kind of store would we really have an advantage over everybody else?

In that particular case it was the club kids. I happened to be a club kid at that time, so I felt like no one would be able to compete with me unless it was another club kid because I would know that customer better and I would know that market better and therefore I would be able to serve that customer better. So it always starts there for me. When I’m working with a client it’s the same thing. The idea is this, if the business runs right, we should make a lot of money. If you have the wrong positioning, wrong strength etc, you could run the business right and not make a lot of money.

So I always take a step back and make sure that this is something, if we do all the other things right, it should be very desirable to a segment of the market. That’s number one. That’s why we use tasks to help people figure out what their strengths are. Then after that, it’s about just figuring out where the positioning would be ideal. That’s an overlap of four different areas. That’s a little off where you were going, so I’m just going to try and tie it in really quickly and then we can go to the others.

It’s really a question of four overlapping circles and it’s your strengths, that’s primary, that’s why you need to know your strengths, the opportunity in the market place, which is basically looking at the competition and the landscape and seeing where there might be some pockets of opportunity. Your passion, because ideally if you’re going to start a business, you want it to be something you’re fully invested in, not just for the money, but that you will persevere and it’s much easier to persevere when you’re passionate. Someone once said, it’s not me, I don’t know who said it first but I love the quote, the number one productivity secret in the world is to be passionate with what you’re working on. I agree wholeheartedly.

The last thing is the resources. Do you have the resources? It’s resources, opportunity, strengths and passion. What you want to do is, if you’re starting a business, you want to find that place where you can start a business that has those four circles overlapping. If you’re taking over a business that’s failing or you’re in a business that’s not doing so great, and you want to make it great, it’s trying to move it in that direction. You can take that existing business, like I did with that clothing business and I moved it into that direction.

That’s where it starts because ideally where you want to be operating from is the constant that you really are the best at what you’re doing. Therefore it’s the default choice. People would have to be crazy to go somewhere else. I like to have that kind of situation especially in my head because it just makes everything else come from a place of conviction.

It’s funny, just as an aside, that people tell me that I often come off like extremely confident and don’t mess with me, I know exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t necessarily feel that way all the time but when I’m talking about business I do because that’s why I’m in this business because the things I know, I know. What you want is, you really want to have, whatever business it is, whatever service you’re providing, you want to have that kind of confidence, that kind of, you’d be crazy to go anywhere else. So it starts there. If that’s in place and you get that right, everything else is a lot easier. It’s downhill from there. If you get that wrong, it’s really uphill from there.

From there, I would say the very next step, and I never really went into this, I go into this in the Business Growth System but it’s scattered throughout, it’s not necessarily a whole module just on this. If I was to redo the Business Growth System I think I might actually create an early module about this and that is you’ve really got to construct your profit model. Ideally, how is this whole thing going to work? How is this going to be a sustainable business? Where are my clients, customers going to come from? Where are my prospects going to come from, etc?

You really have to have a marketing game plan and a sustainable marketing game plan. What I’ve seen especially online is that a lot of the gurus nowadays, many of them former clients of mine, they’ve built businesses that are really reliant on joint ventures and launches. You can make a lot of money doing that and I’ve certainly made a lot of money doing that but it’s not necessarily the most sustainable business and there are a lot of challenges with that type of business.

It’s almost impossible to break free of a business that’s a launch dependent business. Every launch is different and therefore you can’t really have a system for launches. You can have a perpetual launch but that’s very different. It’s really important to figure out your profit model. How are you going to acquire new customers over the long haul and get a sense of that? Once you know you’re in the right place, then you want to make sure that you’re going to have a consistent flow of new clients.

I’ve worked with some clients recently where they were launch dependent or they were situational dependent, in the sense that they had a certain base of customers but then the market changed or in the case of the launches, they couldn’t get the same JV partners. All of a sudden they were in a very bad situation. I always learn from my clients when they come to me with challenges of new things I need to make sure I mention for other people to avoid. So that’s another big thing.

One of my mentors, Michael Masterson, someone I spent a lot of time with, he wrote a book called Ready, Fire, Aim. He really talks about this exact thing. Until you have a way of buying customers, a scaleable way of buying customers, with a front end, a low priced product which brings new customers into the door, you don’t really have a business, you just might be building a house of cards. That’s step number one today and I don’t know that I said that a couple of years ago.

Once you have that model, once you have an understanding of exactly what it might look like, how you’re going to bring in the money, how you’re going to bring in the customers, then all the other elements of how to actually run a business become a lot more important.

That’s where you pick a vision of what you want to create for your business, a vision basically stating where you’re going to be when this thing is done that you’ve built. You can’t get too tied up on that because the world changes. Therefore the likelihood that it will come to fruition exactly as you dreamed and planned is not exactly the highest likelihood. However, you can have a trajectory, you can have, based on the vision you create, you can have a way to go, a line of direction.

From there, then it’s about really figuring out what really needs to happen in the business. This is probably how I would describe it today. If you know how you’re going to make your money, your profit model, and you know what kind of business you’re building, from those two points you can figure out really everything that needs to be done in the business.

I wrote a report about this recently, this wasn’t a free report, this was a client report called Your Business Blueprint. It starts a little bit further back than where I’m explaining now. Maybe we’ll jump back in a second but I want to finish this thought first. With those two points, your profit model and your vision, you really can figure out all the things that your business is going to need to do. You could write a long list. I like to put it in a mind map. What I like to explain to people is you put all the tasks that need to happen on that mind map and then you colour code it based on who is responsible and if you’re working by yourself right now, then you’re responsible for all of it.

What we do is, when I work with clients, it’s ok, let’s colour code this based on who is responsible. You’re going to be green and this other person who works for you is going to be red and someone is going to be orange and we just put different colours. The goal for the business owner is to get their colour completely off the map because when you get your colour completely of the map, you’re completely free. So you turn the game of getting free of your business basically into a game. It’s very clear that when you’re hiring people, that the goal is that they’re taking over responsibilities, they’re not just an extension of you being able to get more done but they’re actually taking things off your plate. That’s really important.

There are other issues that come into running a successful business whether it be having really good offers, having good marketing sequences, metrics, building teams, getting A players and all other elements involved but I would say those are the critical points.

The only other thing that I would add that I wrote in this report and that’s why I’m just reminded of it is, is really when you think about back to the point I was making earlier about the four overlapping circles and really finding your sweet spot, your positioning that’s going to work. The ideal scenario, maybe even before that, is to know what it is that you want to get out of life. What’s your purpose, what’s your goal, what is your outcome for yourself?

If you know that, and most people don’t, they never really thought it through to the level that they probably should, but once you know that, if you can learn about your marketplace and your prospects and know what they really want out of their life, it’s basically a pretty simple proposition that really you have to help them get what they want and figure out a way that that makes you get what you want. I walk people through things like this but it would probably take the whole interview for that one concept. But that’s how I look at business basically. I’m going to help a lot of people get what they want and by doing so I’m going to get what I want.

So I’ve got to be very clear about what they want and I’ve got to be very clear about what I want in order to make that happen. So that’s where we start the thing. Let me add one last thing and then I’ll hand it back over to you Dave. The Manifesto was the first free report I ever wrote, and I think I’ve written seven or eight free reports each of them to introduce a new concept and a new program to the marketplace. Generally I’ve brought material to the marketplace that there wasn’t a perceived need by the reader until they read the report.

The Internet Business Manifesto was all about treating your online endeavour as a business and the Maven one that you mentioned was all about becoming the thought leader in your market Attention Age Doctrine 2 was about the rise of social media before people were really talking about social media. The Attention Age 1 was about how attention is becoming the scarce commodity and you have to optimize your own attention and also figure out how to get the attention of the marketplace.

In The Internet Business Manifesto there were really two points that I think were often missed by a lot of people, so even if people haven’t read it and they decide to read it which to this day I still get a lot of testimonials just from people who have read the report, let alone go through our programs. One is that I had that You diagram. That You diagram is probably of any graphic I’ve made in my life has made me more money than anything else. I wish I could create graphics like that on a frequent basis but I guess I got lucky for that one. I actually personally liked the graphic I made a lot more for The Final Chapter which was all a self assessment. On the right hand side you listed the complaint of what you were feeling and on the left hand side it would show you what you were missing in your business.

With the You chart, my goal in creating it was to show people the lunacy of the approach they were taking and also to create a little tension in people so they’d have a little pain in order to change. I think that the solution to the problem that the You diagram services is two fold. One is that you have to build a team and I think we’re going to talk a little more about that based on what we were talking about earlier Dave.

The other thing which I think was missed and that’s why I bring it up, is you really need a strategy because you can’t do everything online. I think too many people try to do too much. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about those four circles and your strength. For the first couple of years of Strategic Profits we did $7,500,000 our first year and every other year since then we’ve grown. For the first three years, say two and a half, three years, we didn’t do any pay per click, we didn’t really do any SEO, we didn’t really do any of the other things, all we did was reports.

That’s why I haven’t really written very many reports any more because I don’t need to. I didn’t do 150 different things, I just did one thing really well and because I did that one thing really well I made a lot of money. It’s a combination that you really don’t even want a business that does everything in that You diagram, you want a business that is much more simple and then you want to have a team to do those simple things. I don’t even know if I ever even mentioned that in the actual Business Manifesto, I think that you can see that I meant it but I never said it specifically. I said if you’re following the wrong strategy.

The goal is to do the least, not to do the most. It’s different than an offline business. With an offline business, there are just different dynamics involved. Whereas in an offline business you might want to have as many different sources of customers, online it’s infinite the number of options you have and your reach is world wide within any individual channel. If you master a channel the potential is a lot higher in an online environment than an offline, therefore you don’t need to be doing twenty different things. You can do one or two things really well from a marketing standpoint and make a lot of money. So I’ll just add that and I’ll pass it back to you Dave.

David Jenyns: I suppose just to recap because you covered so many things there. You talked about firstly making sure you get your own personal purpose right and then find out what your strengths are so you know you’re working in that right, sweet spot. Make sure you construct the right profit model to build that out. Then also have the vision for where you’re going to be and I think the vision is going to help construct that profit model.

Maybe if we dive down a little bit deeper into talking about that profit model. I know that’s where many people go wrong, especially when they get started in internet marketing or anything online. Every new little offer and opportunity that pops up, it’s the serial entrepreneur, constantly feels like the last thing I need is a good idea, I need to be able to focus.

Building that profit model, I think you’re only the second person I’ve heard talk about the idea, it’s almost like you build that profit model upfront and you calculate and work out what your back end is going to be. Maybe you have that free report at the front and then it funnels down to different products and then you’ve got some sort of bigger back end at the back. But then and I think this is the real key and I think you mentioned you got it from Michael Masterson is that idea you need to start focusing on lead generation. Once you’ve got that back end in place, then to make sure you can keep tipping people into the top.

The idea of constructing that profit model once someone has got the niche, I don’t know if you could talk just a little bit more to that because I know that’s an area people overlook. They don’t sit there and map out their numbers and figure out what is it I’m actually building here?

Rich Schefren: Yes, sure. First off is the realization that people are familiar with, it’s the front end and the back end. The front end is the first purchase that someone makes with you. The back end is subsequent purchases and generally, often much more expensive purchases. It’s the realization that in business, the profit comes from the back end, it comes from everything you sell a customer after they’ve bought once. It’s the second purchase and it’s the big expensive things you sell them. That’s where the profit in the business comes from.

So it’s very seductive to spend all your time on the back end. Really what a big launch is for the most part, is you tapping into a lot of people’s back ends because they’re emailing their prospects, their customer base and sending them over to you. So that’s why you see very large amounts of money go there and that’s why lots of people do it and rightly so. But to have an ongoing business of your own where you’re not reliant on anybody, you need to have a front end. So if the back end is where the profits are, the life blood is in the front end, it’s generating that first purchase.

Michael Masterson wrote this book Ready, Fire, Aim and it’s a great book and I really recommend it to anybody who is interested in starting a business. I think it’s one of the best books as it relates to an online business, even though he doesn’t necessarily talk about online. He’s talking about direct response. One of the things that was very interesting though, he came and met with me, well we talk all the time, but we talked about a seminar that he was going to do on business building which the book was based on. He wanted to get my opinion because he had never taught business and so, based on the fact that that is pretty much what I do all the time, he wanted to get my opinion on what he should cover.

So we talked for a bunch of hours about it and from that conversation came the seminar and then the book. I actually think I’m in the book a couple of times. One of the things he did in the book that we talked about was he mapped out how long it took for him to grow his companies.

He’s got a company that does about $400,000,000, it’s Agora and he had a company that did about $130,000,000 in his thirties and he has a huge number of companies that do about, $20- $30,000,000 a year. What was really interesting about his chart, showing the growth of these companies, for me, not necessarily for everybody when I looked at them, all of my companies started a lot faster than his. It might have taken him a couple of years to get to the $1,000,000 mark. I don’t think I’ve ever had a company that didn’t get to the $1,000,000 mark in the first year.

But whereas mine topped off at $10,000,000, more or less, I’ve got one business at $12,000,000, but it was always around that number, and I got there a lot faster than his, when his got there, his took off. Whereas mine started to plateau, his broke out. The real difference was that he, and this might not translate to everyone listening, they’ll understand it, they might not find themselves in that mindset, but he wasn’t really interested in some fast profits. Fast profits that are not sustainable just build you a business that ultimately gets you into trouble. Most people fire people too slowly and everything else, so they’ll just watch all the money they made go away.

So he wasn’t really interested in having a business until he was certain that he could buy customers. The idea with buying customers is that you’re paying for advertising, so you’re in total control of your destiny. Today you’d be buying a customer if you get customers through pay per click or you get them through solo emails like renting lists, banners, you name it. If you’re paying for it and you have the ability to scale it upwards, that’s what he was looking for. The idea is if the money is in the back end, you don’t really need to make money on the front end but you need to acquire customers on the front end.

That’s the hardest part of marketing actually. It’s much harder to make a $40 sale to someone who has never heard of you before than it is to make a $2000 sale from people who have heard of you. He wasn’t interested in building a business until he had that nailed. I know there are people probably reading this now who say, well, I don’t really care if I nail it, if I can just make a bunch of extra money now, that would be great. If that’s your goal, then that’s cool, I’m not here to judge.

But if you want to have something sustainable where you work for a while and then you build something and then ultimately it can live on without you, then you need to have this element in your business. You need to have a way of continuously getting new customers. That can be through paid models and it can also be through free channels too. My reports still get downloaded an awful lot, so we have a unique advantage from that perspective. You need to have that model, like you were saying, of where do these people come from, and what does it look like how you make your money?

What’s interesting is, I taught a course on the theory of constraints, GPS was the name of it. GPS was a modified theory of constraints for an entrepreneur. People I don’t think are going to be that familiar with what the theory of constraints is, but theory of constraints comes from manufacturing and it’s about all systems have one thing that is governing how effective that system is at any given point. When you figure out what that one thing is, you’ve also found the leverage point. Business is a system and so the idea is that you can apply that concept to business and I’ve applied it to business for years, and I taught that whole methodology.

My version of theory of constraints, the typical theory of constraints doesn’t start this way, but the way I do it is that I get someone very clear about their goal, their outcome, what they want to create. Then the very next step is to say, ok, that’s the goal, why aren’t you there now? What is missing that you don’t have that you need to have to be at your goal?

What was really interesting to me in this course, and this is why I bring it up, we still offer it. Any time I release a new program, the first time I do it live, because I want interaction, I want to make sure that I end up making a course that can take anybody to where they want to go. In this particular case I was very fortunate that I did it that way because what was really interesting to me was that most people, it wasn’t the overwhelming majority but it was the majority, couldn’t figure out what was missing. I thought it would have been very obvious, exactly what they needed to be at their goal.

Most people didn’t have a thorough enough understanding of direct marketing, online marketing, etc to really even know what they were missing. I found that shocking. If you don’t know what’s missing, then you’re very much likely to fall prey to every launch that goes on, every product. You don’t need to become very knowledgeable about a lot of things. I’m saying have a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things first and then when you pick the right path, then you get very detailed knowledge about those specific things that you’re actually going to be doing.

Let’s say you have a really great personality and come across really well on video. If that’s the case, then that might be an advantage that you have. You might not need to learn copy writing, you might just need to learn how to sell through video. You’ve decided that you are very comfortable in front of a video. The research shows that they are both very effective, copy and also selling through video, but you know that you’re going to be able to do video. Therefore you’re never going to have to study copy writing, you’re going to study selling through video.

Too many times, I guess I’ll sum it up this way, too many times, too many people online are focused on how, before they focused on the what. It’s very inefficient to focus on the how before you’ve figured out the what. So you’ve got to figure out the what first, then you can figure out the how. The profit model is the definition of the what. What is this business going to do to get customers and make money off them? When you have that, then you can get very detailed knowledge about how to execute. That’s when you learn the how.

A lot of people get online and they start learning the how right away. When I say it this way, I think it makes obvious sense. If there are 10,000 ways to market and you start studying the hows of those and you haven’t figured out which ones you’re going to do, you could be studying for a long time before you find the right one. You could be wasting a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of frustration, a lot of struggles that could be avoided if you had some general knowledge first.

The challenge is that why you will not find a general comprehensive course on marketing, online marketing is because that’s not sexy to most people. It would also need to be continually updated. So the fact that it’s not sexy and it would need to be continually updated it’s not very appealing as a product creator to create a product like that. If it was, there would be material out there. If you could create it once and it would be up to date, then I think you would find material out there. But with each new vehicle that comes up, it changes the parameters and so therefore that’s why I’m saying you might be better off just reading a lot of online marketing blogs first, just to get that general knowledge, to see what’s out there, to get an understanding so that you pick what you think is the best one for you.

David Jenyns: As you start to build that plan and map it out, the next part and this shifts gears slightly, especially with a lot of what is happening now, once you’ve got that plan mapped put, you then need to go, ok, it’s time to start implementing it and that has to do with building the teams. Now you’ve been talking about building teams for a long time. At the moment it feels like it’s the hot topic, outsourcing, especially with John Reese’s launch which is coming out at the moment.

How do you teach and coach your guys to start building a team? I know you’ve talked a lot to me and you mentioned it briefly earlier on about choosing A players. Perhaps you could talk a little bit more to that?

Rich Schefren: Ok, sure, and even before I go there, which I’m going to go very quickly, some people say they can’t afford to outsource or they can’t afford that, they need to do it all themselves. To me that’s just the completely wrong way of looking at things, no matter where you are, no matter where you’re starting with.

Even if you have to take on a part time job to supplement your income so you can pay someone to do certain things for you. There are too many things online that take only a few minutes to do but could take many hours to learn how to do that thing in a few minutes. It doesn’t make sense to spend three or four hours learning how to do something that takes three minutes. You’re better off working those four hours in a part time job and paying someone in the Philippines or India or even the United States really, it doesn’t really matter, I’ve outsourced many times in the United States to someone who already knows how to do that because now it is a very quick, cheap job.

Just as way of shifting people’s perspective about it, there are just too many things, I think I created my very first web page, the first one I ever did. When I was doing a lot of e books, I paid someone I think about $45 to set up the whole website and load up the auto responders and integrate it with ClickBank. Even if I didn’t have the $45, I would have been better of working at the Gap and paying that guy the $45 than for me to spend three days trying to figure it out. I just throw that out there, and now let’s just talk about teams.

I came up with a distinction I think I put it in the Business Manifesto, I’m pretty sure I did, that I think really changed a lot of people’s perspective when they were thinking about outsourcing. Back then, everybody thought they were doing outsourcing but all the instruction from all the gurus at the time to me wasn’t outsourcing at all, it was out tasking. It was about off loading a task to someone who could do it cheaper than you. There is nothing wrong with out tasking at all. It makes a lot of sense quite often, but it doesn’t build the business.

Anytime you start a relationship with someone, even if they’re only doing one job, there is an element of risk. They could be a flake, they could disappoint you, they could do a bad job, etc. So part of inherent in business, is you want to build a team, whether they work full time for you or not, whether they’re just a freelance person that you can call on from time to time, you want to build a team that acts as a team of experts in different areas who will handle things for you.

One of the reasons I was very successful very fast was that was how I approached it. I wasn’t looking to get the task done in the cheapest way, I was looking to get tasks done in a way that, once I found the right person, that person would be my go to person for that thing going forward. I think that’s just a little bit of a mindset shift for people, but if you can get that mindset shift, the goal is not get the job done in the fastest, cheapest way, the goal is to find the provider that will consistently get that done for you in the best way.
The best being, price is certainly a factor in best, but reliability is also, execution is also, ease to get in touch with and work with, etc.

Most of us as entrepreneurs have more ideas than we could ever do. It’s probably a good thing we can’t do them all, but you want to have the ability to not have your own ability be the limiter on what your company can do, whether you’re a one person company or not. The way that you do that is by building people who you can just pick up the phone or shoot over an email and get things done.

There was a ghost writer and I’m not going to say who the other people were, because I think I would make them a little angry, but there was a ghost writer who had written for a few gurus including myself. She was on Elance and she used to write for me and a few of these other people. I didn’t know she was writing for those people and they didn’t know she was writing for me.

She did a very excellent job on this e book that I gave her and it was in the baby niche. This was before Strategic Profits and she did an amazing job, so amazing in fact, that I said to her, and I was planning on doing lots of e books, I said to her, you know what, you don’t even need to operate in Elance anymore, I’ll keep you as busy as you want to be. So she decided to work full time for me. She wasn’t working for me, she was a freelancer, but that was my commitment to her, that you want to write three e books a month, then we’ll give you three e book jobs a month. If you want to have five, then we’ll give you five.

The beauty of that was, and that’s why I don’t want to say who the other people were involved because I think they’d be upset because I’m telling this kind of story. They were all disappointed when this woman would no longer work for them. I didn’t even know she was working for them at that time. To me that was the obvious solution you always go in business. Once you have a good provider, why would you want and that was key for me if we were going to create e books, I need people to write e books all the time. Why would I want to keep going back to Elance and take a risk on every project when I already have it in the bank that she’s going to do a great job?

The other thing that was really cool about that, in this particular case was that, as most people, she was interested in making more money over time. What I did, I said, you know I could pay you a lot more if you could do some other things besides just the e book. She said, like what? I said, you know, you could write the email series for the e book. First she started writing the consumption series after someone bought the e book, how to get them to actually consume the product, so that we could sell them another product and so on.

Then after she got the hang of that, I bought her John Carlton’s copy writing course and then she started writing the emails that sold the e book. Then after she got used to that, she started writing the squeeze page and the sales letter for the e book. It got to a point where she would be delivering us a package. The package would have the product, the squeeze page, the sales letter, the emails that went to someone after they opted in but didn’t buy, and the emails after someone bought.

Then it went from her to my office where my assistant just approved it, went through everything to make sure we were on the same page and then it went right to the person who built the website, who I paid $45 or so to build the website. So my involvement was minimal. Ultimately it was because in that particular case in this example, I had two trusted freelancers and it totally allowed me to focus on other things.

Really if you look at business being that, that your goal is not necessarily to be the doer, your goal is really to be the orchestrator that you have to find people who are long term solutions for you to be focused on the things that are most important. Really building a team is all about that. The beauty of having a profit model first is that you don’t need a team of 2000 people, even if you want to build a small business, because you’re very focused on the things that your business is going to be doing.

You know what areas need to be covered and once you get those areas covered, you’re good to go, not really having to do a lot for your business. So that’s where it all starts for me, in the sense that the understanding that my goal is not to get the job done, although that is important, my goal is to find someone who can consistently get the job done for me.

There are some other distinctions and I’ll just share one other distinction and then I’ll pass it back to you and you can follow up on the question and take me where you want to go.

The other thing, and I alluded to this in the profit model, but I just want to say this specifically is that you’re not handing off tasks, you’re handing off responsibilities. I see this violated more so than anything else when it comes to teams and outsourcing or employees. I get involved in quite a few businesses that they’re already doing $2,000,000 but it’s really still a small business and the owner is really the driver.

Very often what I find is, the only person in the company that is responsible for profits is the owner. The owner has lots of assistants all handling different areas of the business for them. That’s not how a team is supposed to work or a business is supposed to work. Ultimately your goal should be to have someone else in your business who is responsible for driving profits. So it’s a full time job to sell, to get thing sold.

It’s mind boggling to me how pretty much almost all the online businesses that I see that were started by people who were ambitious, who were successful are still lacking that area. The owner is still the sole person responsible for profits.

It could be as simple as I create a product, we launch it, we make lots of money and then me handing it off to someone in the office who is now the product manager. You want to either call him the profit centre manager or product manager or whatever you want to call it whose job is to make sure that we consistently sell that product. So when we sit down for our team meeting, they’re going to tell me what they’re doing this week to sell more of that product.

That’s a big shift for a lot of people because apparently not too many people think that way. That’s one of the biggest violations I see. You could translate that into other areas, I just thing that’s a primary and I just see everybody violate that, not everybody, but close to it, especially in internet marketing. Same thing, ideally what you want to be handing off in any area, is responsibility, not abdicate responsibility, it’s not the first time you work with someone do you give them the responsibility. But long term, the goal is that you don’t have to be involved at all, in the business or in that individual area.

So the last thing you want to do is just have a lot of outsourcers or team members who are reliant on you for direction. Then you are still are very necessary to the business for it to function properly, even if you have three people. It’s a really important distinction that you are trying to hand off responsibilities as opposed to tasks.

David Jenyns: I think that insight that you gave there. as far as getting someone else to follow up and drive those profits leads into what you were talking about earlier, the idea that people get focused in on that back end. They forget you need to have someone out there drumming up that new business. That really dovetails quite nicely.

Rich Schefren: Yes and I would just add that really, and I learned this from Agora, because I worked a lot with Agora and that’s why I wrote that Final Chapter. I think as far as the content goes, probably the content it was the best of all my free reports, was in The Final Chapter. It had a lot of ideas in it so it was a little bit more of a difficult read for some people. What I talk about in there is that Agora, and this is really the way that it needs to be done, as evidenced by the fact that Agora is a $400,000,000 company now, Agora puts their best people on the front end.

Like I said earlier, it’s a lot easier to sell the back end. There is a lot more money in the back end, but here is the concept. The most difficult sale to make is the first sale, especially when someone doesn’t know you. Even a JV, it’s like nine day. If I’m on your .list, Dave, and I trust you and you say this person has got a great product, that is such a big step from me doing a search and pay per click and finding a product and now buying it. You need to be able to get people who have never heard of you, don’t know who any of your testimonials are, engaged and interested and then ultimately becoming a customer.

What Agora has already done is they put their best people on the front end, realizing that is the most difficult part. It’s also the part that lets you stay in touch with the market. This is the part that I wrote about in The Final Chapter, if I remember correctly, that the front end, making something work on the front end, beside being a vehicle to grow your business because it is the lifeblood of the business, it also lets you know what back ends are going to crush it. Your list of customers is a reflection of the market, the only difference is you have a relationship with them.

What Agora often did was, they would create front end promotion, until one rocked. When that one rocked, they would then take that $49 product and expand it out and turn it into a much bigger and better product, $2000, $5000, $10,000 product and then sell that on the back end to all their customers. That’s an incredibly effective strategy because their back ends crush it because of the information they’re getting on the front end and their business consistently grows because they’re constantly adding more and more people to the mix.

It’s a Drucker quote that the only two things a business does are marketing and innovation, all the rest are costs. I think it’s another Drucker quote that says the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. If you really buy into that, then the hardest thing to do is create a customer and that’s really where the owner needs to be focused and allow other people to do the things that are easier and where the business is not so dependent on for its lifeblood and survival.

David Jenyns: Yes, some really good insight there. With the building the teams and making sure that everybody is focusing in on that right area, so that way you structure things correctly so the main runner of the business, you and I or whoever is at the forefront of that business is working on the front, bringing in the new clients. Obviously you need to build that virtual team which we were starting to talk about.

The last question I wanted to ask you on this is how you see virtual teams fitting in together with people in your office? I know you’ve got people who work offshore and around the world but you also have people who work with you in the office. Everybody has these dreams of building up these Eben Paganesque businesses where they’ve got a massive entire virtual team so everything happens and they don’t have to worry about it because it s not front and centre with them. I’d just like to get your take on how you marry together virtual teams with physical teams working in with you.

Rich Schefren: Ok, yes, sure. Well it comes down to really the person. For example, I’m really good at getting businesses off the ground and getting them big, fast. I’m not the best person to run a company on a day to day basis, which is why I don’t run my company, because of who I am.

Once a company gets to a certain size, I’m really not that great of a leader because I’m more focused on other things than leadership. Not that I don’t think leadership is not important, that’s just not my focus. When I’ve had to do it, I can do it really well, but it’s not where I’m happiest. So I have someone else who runs the day to day of my company.

I think it goes the same way when we’re talking about in house versus virtual. Strategic Profits has both. For someone like me, I’m much better in person than I am virtual. You have to be a much better manager of people to really pull off a virtual organization and most people don’t pull it off well, very few people do. There’s a lot more complexity to it.

Anne Holland who used to own MarketingSherpa until she sold it, she used to be a virtual company and then one day she just had enough. She said you’re either moving here, I don’t remember where her office was, but she said to her team, you’re either moving here or you’re fired. It’s an added level of complexity.

It can be done and I know it’s a dream for a lot of people. The ideal scenario in my opinion is to figure out how you work best. Like I said, I have employees and I have virtual employees but really I don’t have a responsibility to go into the office if I don’t want to go into the office and there are many days I don’t go into the office these days. To me it doesn’t really matter how the company works. I would be extremely unhappy having a virtual company where I had to be managing people all day long. It’s really about how the company is being run as opposed to whether it is physical or virtual.

I don’t know if I’m making sense there but what I’m saying is that you can have a business that you’re completely free of whether you have a physical office with employees or whether you have a whole virtual team. Either way, you can be free of the business regardless. It doesn’t matter. You could also be tied to a business that is virtual or physical. If your presence is needed, then you’re still tied to the business. If you need to be interacting with all your virtual employees all the time, then you’re no freer than someone who has to go into the office.

So it’s really about what you believe is best for you. In certain ways, virtual has certain advantages because it’s very easy to establish results because you have to. You can’t get confused about anything else because ultimately you’re telling people to do certain things and if you give them the right responsibilities they either succeed at that or they fail. So it’s very easy to judge employees.

When they work in a physical location it can be a little bit more difficult to judge employees because your mind can get clouded about their work ethic and this and that. Really none of that really matters at the end of the day if they’re able to do their job well and they deliver on their responsibilities that you are fairly paying them for.

So in that sense it’s actually easier to be virtual, but then you really have to have a very clear plan about exactly what needs to be done. You need to know if this employee is handling this responsibility and this employee is handling that responsibility, then this business is going to work perfectly, and then these people just have to do these things then you have a virtual business.

If you’re someone who comes up with ideas last minute, and changes plans, which I like to do sometimes, then that becomes a scarier proposition, because it’s harder to get everyone in the same place because they’re free to work their own hours and that kind of thing. That’s why personally for me, I like physical location. Even in our company, in our offices, Brian, who really runs the day to day of our company, he has his own office, his private office, and accounting has their own office and we have conference rooms and video rooms and things like that.

Then there is a big pit for a bunch of employees. I work in the big pit because I enjoy working in the big pit. If we’re working on something big, I can call in audible and we can all focus on something. That’s just my preference. It really just comes down to preference. I think though that people shouldn’t be deluded by the fact that whether it’s physical or virtual, it necessitates freedom or being shackled to a business. You can be just as free with a virtual or physical or can be just as shackled with a virtual or a physical.

It comes down to you shouldn’t let that be the distinguishing point. It really should be based on how you work. If you work well virtually, and you really are someone who can lay out a plan, tell people with plenty of notice exactly what needs to be done, and they all do those things and it comes together well, then virtual is an option for you. But if you can’t do that, then I would be very hesitant to take that route.

David Jenyns: I think that was something I learned from you as well. There was a time when I was building that virtual team and I felt my day was spent more keeping the virtual assistants busy rather than getting any work done. So it wasn’t until I took a project manager and plugged them in between me and the virtual assistants that I started to get freed up. That was a really key insight that I learned over the years and I think came from some of the work that you did.

Talking about all the different insights that you have, and I suppose in the tail end of the interview, I’d like to try to think of some of those insights that you’ve picked up along the way. If you look back now, because you’ve got quite a lot of varied experience in the turning points, that you go, when I started to do this, that had a huge impact on the growth of my business and the growth of you personally.

Rich Schefren: Sure, well ok the first thing I always tell people when they ask me for advice, it’s not the first thing but it’s always in the beginning, depending on how long the conversation is, it might be the first thing or if we’re doing a longer one, it’s definitely still in the beginning, and that is something I learned over time. That is, nothing lasts, because a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake if they’re successful early, thinking that success is going to be ongoing forever and it never is. If something is horrible, they can get depressed and think it’s going to be horrible forever, and as long as person persists, it never is either.

So it’s the realization that if things are going really well, you should be very happy, but you should also know that it’s probably not going to last forever. Very few businesses last forever. They’re cyclical natures so people get hot for a while and then they’re not hot and then they’re hot again. So it’s a realization of that because I’ve just noticed in my own life that’s the case and also in a lot of clients. If they’re running really hot, and they happen to think it’s them and they think they’re always going to be hot, it often ends not so nice because they’re just not prepared.

By prepared I mean having a nice hefty financial reserve after because if things are going really well, you should be saving some of that and being prepared for when things start to scale back a little bit. How are you going to handle that, what are you going to do and having a plan B.

It’s not necessarily what everyone wants to hear, because I think most people would like to believe that once they nail something, it’s always going to work. Then they can retire to easy street and that only happens if you bring in a lot of money and you keep a lot of it. That’s one of the big takeaways that I learned over time, just through my own heartaches and also my winning streaks. I’d say that is a big takeaway that I’ve learned.

I think along those lines, when something does work, it’s really understanding why it worked so you can ultimately replicate your success. When something doesn’t work, really try to analyze why it didn’t work and see if any of that insight can really be transferred over.

I’ve always been somebody who has learned from his mistakes and I’ve always analyzed things that haven’t gone as planned and tried to learn from them. It took me to longer to realize I needed to do the same thing for my successes. The first report I ever wrote, the Internet Business Manifesto, brought back I think $3,500,000 or something like that. I wrote successive reports from that point forward but The Final Chapter didn’t make $3,500,000. I think it made like $2,000,000 and The Attention Age Document 1 only did about $2,000,000. I know that sounds like a lot of money to a lot of people and it is a lot of money but when your first one does $3,500,000 you feel a little bit like a rock star whose very first song went triple platinum and then is trying to replicate that success.

It wasn’t until about the sixth report or something that every report I’ve written since that has been a blockbuster for me and it is because I really had to keep going back to the Manifesto and try to understand why did this one work so much better than these other ones? When I finally figured it out, it made a huge difference. So it’s really about learning from your experience. That’s something that I’ve often taught but I always lean more on the negative side and it really is from both sides.

At the end of the day, your best teacher is going to be your experience, better than anyone else. Your experience really tells you exactly what you’re doing right and wrong. I think most people, especially in online marketing, but I would say in general in life, tend to discount what their experience is trying to teach them and look to learn from this guru or that guru whatever, without really realizing that their own experience can be the best teacher, bar none. So that’s a big one, to learn from your experience.

When you say it like that, it sounds somewhat generic but it’s about really spending time. When something works, understanding what steps were involved, and when something doesn’t work, the same.

I’d say the other thing is and this is not a huge insight either, but also something I see violated a lot, especially online, is to really have set hours. Not necessarily that you work the same hours every day, although you could, but to not allow your time on the computer to start taking over your entire life.

I’ve worked with a lot of business owners who ended up working more and more in their business. What tends to happen, the longer you work, the more inefficient you become. Nobody likes to think that they’re being really inefficient, but you just make a lot of bad decisions with your time when you feel like your time is unlimited.

I’ve helped a lot of people make a lot more money by working less. That sounds perplexing but it’s actually a lot easier than it sounds. I wrote about this one in my last report, The Entrepreneurial Emergency. The easiest way to become a lot more productive and it’s a counter intuitive strategy but it’s one that’s very effective that most people won’t try because they just don’t have the courage to do it, to figure out how many hours a day you are productive.

You work eight hours a day, how many hours do you really get things done and for most people it’s going to be a very low number if they’re going to be honest with themselves. Answering emails, doing things like that, that’s not really productive work.

Let’s say it’s 20% of your time, that you’re there for eight hours, you get two hours’ worth of work done. Let’s say your goal is to be 80% effective. It’s almost impossible to go from 20% effective to 80% effective, or 25% to 80%. You don’t even know how to be, a state of being, you don’t make decisions like that type of person, you don’t operate like that person.

If you get two hours a day of work done, and you’re there for eight hours, and you want to get 80% effective, my suggestion is that you cut down your hours so that your two hours are 80% effective. So you work two and a half hours a day or something like that.

What’s going to happen is this, and then I’m going to tie it back into the bigger point, what happens is, the first day you come in and you’re only working two and a half hours, you’re not going to get two hours work done. You still think the way a person does who is only 20% effective. So the first day you’re going to get very little done and the second day you’re probably going to get very little done and by the third day now you’re going to start feeling a little pressure. The odds are the reason you worked two hours a day of highly productive work is because that was what was necessary.

Now you’re going to start making better decisions in the moment. You know to keep the promise to yourself, you’re only going to work two and a half hours a day or three hours, that you’ve got to start making better decisions to get your work done. It’s when you start making those better decisions, you’re all of a sudden going to become a lot more productive.

If someone asks can they have five minutes of your time, you say no, because you’re really busy and you’ve got to get this work done before you call it the end of your day, two and a half hours later. It’s those decisions that ultimately help you become a lot more productive. They also help you prioritize and really make sure you work at the highest leverage things.

When you work too many hours in your business, it’s too easy not to work on the highest leverage things. It’s like having a to do list with fifty things on it. It’s very easy to do the least important things. But if your to do list only has six items on it and the goal is to get all six done each day, then you spend a little bit more time on what gets put on your to do list.

So in business especially in online business, where there is more potential than you could ever tap, more marketing strategies that you could ever use and learn, there is more of everything than you could possibly ever master, there has to be a really firm commitment to prioritization. If you don’t have that, you will often struggle. One of the reasons I’m so successful in helping people work less and make a lot more, is because it forces prioritization. It forces people to work on what is absolutely most important. When you work on what is absolutely the most important, you can work a lot less.

That I think, especially for people who are online, that’s just something to be cognizant of, that you always want to make sure that you don’t let the online environment take over your life. I’ve just seen it so many times. It happened to me when I first started out too. You end up getting worse at what you do and you end up working longer hours. I would say that was a huge takeaway.

There was one other thing but I’m drawing a blank.

David Jenyns: The ones that you touched on there, there was the nothing lasts, which is a key one and then making sure that you’re learning from experience and setting productive hours. I think that is one of the things that I recognize and respect most about you, you actually live and apply that. Even though we joke around, that it took a little to get this interview together, it shows you’re actually doing that. When you’ve got your attention focused in on something, that’s just where you spend your headspace and I think that’s a really valuable lesson there. I don’t know if that final insight popped up.

Rich Schefren: It did. This is something that I’m going back through again. It’s something I’ve taught a lot of people but even when you know something really well, you can fall victim to certain types of thinking. That is that the biggest leap in income often comes when you go from the doer of the thing to the marketer of the thing. For people who are just starting out, they have to do everything. When you’re doing something that you’re passionate about, oftentimes you can be pulled back into the doing of things. That’s a problem because it is the marketing of the thing that is the driver.

You just have to, one, know that. Know that the biggest leap in income will be when you’re no longer doing the thing and you’re actually doing the marketing of the thing. So that’s one. That doesn’t violate what I was saying earlier about your strengths and all that kind of thing. The idea is to apply your strengths to the type of marketing that you would excel at, based on who you are what you are all about, until ultimately you don’t have to do anything because you have other people doing that for you. Then you can decide to be the doer of the thing just because you love it.

I love creating content primarily because I find I learn best when I’m actually creating content. It forces me to synthesize my experience plus all the research I do, into much tighter information. It might not be tight compared to, sometimes people accuse me of being a bit verbose, but compared to what I looked at, and what I went through to get to that point, it is tight. I might read thousands and thousands of pages to get down to ten pages. I love that. So it’s very seductive for me to want to spend all my time on the content side. Oftentimes I get pulled in that direction and I have to wake up to the fact that the marketer of the thing makes a lot more than the creator of the thing.

So that would be the last piece of advice. If you’re still the doer, realize that the biggest jump in income comes from being the marketer and the freedom comes from being the owner. There’s a steady progression from doer to marketer to owner, and by owner I mean someone who has no responsibility in the business whatsoever. You want to go through that progression.

You don’t want to go from doer to owner because then you will always be a slave to who the marketer is because without the marketer your business falls apart. So you want to go through that progression yourself, so that if that person ever left you or whatever happened, you’d be able to jump back in and still be able to market this business. But that is the evolution from doer, to marketer, to owner and I would say that would probably be the last big point. I’m sure there are other ones too, but that one I wanted to make sure I mentioned.

David Jenyns: It’s very congruent with what you were mentioning before as well where you needed to focus your energy. The marketer is again someone who is focusing on driving those leads. I think someone who is the doer typically is that content generator, thinking about the back end. So it all flows together, quite a few of the things that you mentioned there. I think the final stage which is the ultimate entrepreneur is when you get that ability to step back out and let the business run itself and you become an owner. I think that was excellent.

Just to finish up, I know you’ve had your head down for a little while, especially over the past few weeks. I’m interested to know what’s coming down the pipeline for you. What sort of things are you working on now and should people start to look out for?

Rich Schefren: We haven’t done that much, we’ve done a lot internally but we haven’t done a big launches of late and so we haven’t been as active in the marketplace. That’s primarily because we’ve been doing a lot more on the acquisition side like we were talking about, doing a lot more advertising and generating customers through other channels so that the business could be a lot stronger. So that’s where we’ve been spending a lot of time.

Where I’ve been spending time recently is in area where we’ve been doing exceptionally well and it’s been an area that I’ve really been focused on the last couple of months. That is a process that right now has a really bad name but if we take it to market which we are thinking about doing right now, we’re actually going to do a beta group in the next two weeks. We have a group of people coming down to the office and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second. Right now we call it Evergreen Event Driven Marketing. So it’s EEDM.

What it really is it’s about creating events that are perpetual. It could be a webinar, it could be a seminar, it could be a lot of different things. It is event driven as opposed to a static thing that feels static. An event can be static but it feels dynamic. When I write a report, that’s static. You download the report, you can read it any time you want. You might not ever even read it. Whereas a webinar for example, there is a specific time and date that it’s on and therefore generally it’s more of a forced consumption.

What we’ve been doing a lot of recently and I’ve been spending a lot of time on, is creating marketing processes that leverage event driven marketing. The reason is that we have found that is the best way to sell higher priced products on a continual basis. That’s one. If we have a $2000 product or a $3000 product, it’s a lot easier to sell it through an event than it is just like a sales letter and an email.

The other thing is, it really is the holy grail of a lot of businesses like ours because you can continually improve the process. For example, we have one that was doing about $40 per registration for this webinar. Over time, and it hasn’t been that long, it’s now up to $60 per registration. I was working on a new one for a completely different product which my goal is $100 per registration. I don’t know if I will hit that or not out of the gate. But I know that when I hit it, it might not be upfront but my goal is to hit it upfront, but I might not do it, just depends and we’ll see how effective I am.

When I hit the $100 mark, I know it will hit a gusher like from an oil well standpoint. We have about 8-9000 affiliates with some level of activity, they’re not all super affiliates by any stretch. We have a lot more affiliates than that but those are about the ones who are active. If I tell them, for every person who registers for this event on your list, we’re showing that you will make approximately $50. If someone came to me and said, you’re going to make $50 for every person who registers, off my list I could probably get tens of thousands of people, and I would. Twenty thousand would be $1,000,000 so I would get a lot of people there.

So it would be the mother lode and it would be consistent because people would just keep sending traffic there, so there’s that part of it. You have this thing where you get a higher conversion rate because it is event driven. You have the luxury of consistently being able to improve it which is the antithesis of a launch because it is really more of a one shot deal and you don’t get the chance to go back and make it good again, and change things. You can do another launch, but you can only do that so many times.

If you tell the same exact story you better have a whole new list to be telling that story to. Here we can consistently improve it. Once it works, we put it and make it evergreen in the sense in a certain time, at a certain time in the sequence, people are going to be invited to that.

For example, the one I’m working on right now, when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it will possibly be on day seven of when someone joins our list and they’ll get an email saying, we need to talk face to face. I’ve got this webinar coming up next Wednesday, blah blah blah and I want to see you on it. So for them it’s Wednesday because they opted in on a Wednesday, and it was seven days later.

The next person who opts in on Thursday is going to get that same email on Thursday and say, we’re having a webinar and it’s Thursday. That’s what I mean. It’s time sensitive for the person but it’s evergreen for us. So that’s what I’ve been spending my time on.

I wrote a whole report on that process for our clients. We have a low price continuity program called Founders Club which is where the reports I’ve been writing recently have been for them. These are kind of a little bit different because the other ones all have the intention of selling something even though I still put a lot of good content in the ones that are leading to a sale, but these are just pure content. We got such a great response from it that we had a lot of members ask if we sold the product, and we don’t.

So what we decided to do was we picked a price, I think it was $10,000 and we offered it for twenty people to come down to our office and we would help them create their own version of what I just mentioned. So they’re going to come down in about two weeks. We’ve been preparing for that. If they do well, then we’ll probably do a big launch around that and create an evergreen process for it, but time will tell.

We don’t like to launch material unless we’re really certain that people are going to get the outcome that we promised. So the only way that we can know for sure, we know it works for us, we don’t know how other people will do. That’s what we’re working on right now. I was working on an event which I’m still working out the drivers of the event, how to make an event work best as far as for selling. So I had to go through numerous iterations of it til I got it right. That’s what I’ve been busy on just recently and that’s what I’m busy on even on a more global context right now.

Ideally it goes back to the same thing that I said about Michael Masterson. I’m not interested as much these days in just another big pay day. I’m just really interested in making my company stronger and stronger to go further and further without me, so that I really have the luxury of doing whatever it is I want. So evergreen type processes like the one I’m mentioning is a very big step in that direction. So that’s what I’ve been working on.

David Jenyns: Look, some tremendous insight there and you’ve been extremely generous with your time. I know we went a little over what we were expecting. I think once you get on a role, you just share some fantastic information there.

If people want to dig a little bit deeper and find out more, they can head over to Strategic Profits and you type in Rich Schefren in Google. It will be position number one and go to the blog to find out more. Are there any other places? Where is the best place to keep an eye on what you’re doing?

Rich Schefren: Well, ok, I go in spurts with the blog, so you might not see anything for a while. Recently there hasn’t been anything because I’ve been working on the webinar, so I just disappear for a while. When I start blogging, I usually blog pretty consistently so you can always check the blog and you can just check it from time to time. There are a lot of good things on the blog.

Then I would just say if you’re really interested to know more about us, I would say really that Founders Club, that $50 a month continuity program is really, I believe it is the best value on the net if you want to grow a business. I’m known for having expensive products. We could have easily made Founders Club a lot more expensive than what it was. We could have at least made it comparable to what people who generally have lower priced products charge for their front end, their low priced continuity which is $97 a month.

What we did with it was we really weren’t looking to make a couple of dollars from someone. We wanted to create a program that people would want to stay plugged into for a very long time. We thought at $50 a month it would be very easy to far surpass people’s expectations on a constant basis and so that’s what we do. What I do right now is I write a report once every other month just for Founder Club members. That’s where I lot of my writing has been going for the last, I don’t know, seven or eight months, is to Founder Club members. That’s the only place they go.

The reports that I’ve written have made a lot of people a lot of money and that’s where that goes. There is a lot of other material in Founders Club too, but I won’t do a pitch for it. Really if you’re interested in learning from us, I would say that is the best place to start. Obviously we have a lot more expensive programs and I’d be very happy if any of the people listening today want to join those but it’s a great place to start to get a sense of who we are and what we’re all about and what our philosophy is and what we bring to the table and what we can do for you. I would say that would be the best place to start out with a company like ours.

We’re not in it for the short term. We want to get people on board who have the same philosophy who are interested in learning what we keep bringing to the table.

David Jenyns: We’ll set up a link for that if they go to www.davidjenyns.com/rich and then that will redirect through to the Founders Club. But Rich I’d just like to wrap up. Again, you’ve been extremely generous with your time. Thank you so much for not holding anything back. Pretty much you just shared everything that you had and I think everybody who listens to this call would have got a huge amount out of it, so thanks again for that.

Rich Schefren: My pleasure, and that just comes back to a philosophy because I’m in my sweet spot, I could tell you everything I know today and obviously I can’t do that in an hour or an hour and a half, but I could tell you everything that I know and in a month from now I’ll know more. That’s ultimately where each person should be.

They should be in an area where they don’t ever have to feel the need to hoard whatever they know because they going to be constantly evolving because it’s their passion and it’s where they would be spending time even if they had all the money in the world. They know that they’re going to keep moving forward so there’s never a problem sharing anything you know right now. That’s always been my philosophy.

David Jenyns: Well, thanks again, Rich, much appreciated.

Rich Schefren: My pleasure, David, thanks for having me.

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Dori Friend

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Name: Dori Friend

Industry: SEO

Website: www.dorifriend.com

Product: SEONitro

Dori Friend’s Bio: Dori Friend is a veteran in the SEO war. While she may not be as popular as the other search experts, she remains at the top of the masters list. A self-proclaimed recluse, Dori devotes much of her time growing her site network which in turn fuels her SEO firepower. Her SEONitro is a proof of her success in this field.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’ve tracked down quite possibly the most difficult person to get hold of because she is out in the middle of nowhere out in the States. She’s got her own ranch. It’s Dori Friend who very early on in my internet career I got introduced to when she was aligning herself with Jeff Johnson and they started some software called Traffic King Pro and I went along to that very first seminar.

Dori’s skill set, she actually came from a background previous to moving into the internet marketing space as a software designer for Apple. So she was very much involved in the creation of that software and it just opened my mind as far as creating large networks of sites. She was doing a lot of things in the early days as far as building out blog networks and almost like AdSense farms, huge networks. Then she actually shifted into doing a lot of buying and selling of expired domain names. That’s becoming a little bit of the rage now but she was doing that a long time ago and it was helping to jump start her networks.

I have fond memories of Dori back at Jeff Johnson’s event. That was back in 2004 or whenever it was. At the end of the seminar we all went out for a pretty big night and they were some memories there. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call Dori. Thanks for your time.

Dori Friend: Thank you, thanks for that good introduction. I’m impressed that you actually have my history down quite well.

David Jenyns: Yes, I’ve been following you. I know you’re pretty under the radar. In addition to that, you run little workshops at your ranch because you are out in the middle of nowhere. I think I had to even give you a call back on your phone line because you ran your internet through the satellite, so the Skype wasn’t that clear. What sort of other things have you been doing? That was a very broad brushed stroke. Are there any other little projects you wanted to mention?

Dori Friend: My main stayer is my SEO business and that’s SEONitro. Recently I have been building networks for Brad Cowan. So it’s basically my technology, my networks with his branding. So finally I’m just focusing on my SEO business. Like I was saying before the call, I’ve had the shiny object syndrome that a lot of internet marketers get where I wanted to do a little bit of everything and so I was just making a little bit of money at everything.

I’ve always made a very decent income even way back when I was a software developer for Apple, so my sights have always been pretty high. Since I started really focusing, mindfully focusing on one business, my income has exponentially expanded to places where I’ve never been and it’s really exciting for me. I consciously have to keep doing that to myself every time I see something, I say, oh, I can make money doing that. Then I say, no, no, come back, come back. I’m lucky I have an assistant who keeps me in check. She does, she says, focus, focus, focus. Just the simple words like that, focus. It really has done amazing things for me.

It is all about SEO. I’ve done a lot of other things in Traffic. I was the host of Traffic Rockstars in May and that was a big distraction for me outside of my SEO business. It was an incredible event and it was a free event. But it was a distraction, it was just one of those things. But I’m definitely the SEO behind the scenes for a long time, doing SEO for a lot of the big guys and also for myself too.

David Jenyns: With the SEO, and maybe in a moment we can delve a little bit deeper into how you kick start a website to get your strategy, but as far as your core business, let’s say for the SEO component, is that selling your services as someone who can get your clients rankings?

Dori Friend: No, I don’t sell my services anymore. That was another thing because that was trading my time for money and I did not want to do that. Even though I did that for a while and I had other people working for me, right now I lease out my networks to people, not to beginners, mostly to other SEO professionals and people who have businesses that know what keywords convert for them. That’s my typical target range, my clientele.

I also did a report for newbies to start out, the first thing to do when they get a site. A lot of people think it has to be aged to get it ranked in a lot of these major industries, but we just proved that it didn’t. We just ranked Brad Callan’s weight loss diet within three months for a lot of weight loss terms and that guy is really banking it right now in that industry.

It was a new site and in three months we got it ranking and this is what I did. I found a nice aged domain that had page rank. I’m all about buying expired domains, things that already have authority. Then we did a 301 redirect for that. Now I know that sounds technical and so on but it is pretty simple, people can just google that. That instantly gives the domain age and authority and gets maybe some page rank because it transfers everything.

I do that on a pdf; it’s called sevenstepseo.com. You can get it there and it’s just a free pdf and it has five steps in it. That was the first one to get your site kick started. Then I tell people to start putting their sites in the directories just to get them indexed. Do a lot of lower level linking and then really pound it in with some higher level linking. But you’ve got to know what keywords convert for you. That’s the most important thing.

You need an SEO campaign because if your keywords don’t convert and this is actually going back to why I stopped taking on clients, too. We didn’t get paid until we got it onto the first page, but then they would say, oh that keyword doesn’t convert and they wouldn’t want to pay us anymore for that keyword after we’d worked maybe six months to get them there. So you need to know what keywords convert for you. That’s the most important thing.

David Jenyns: I can recap a little bit. You talked about making sure you know which keywords convert, so obviously that would start off with some sort of testing. With the clients do you point them in the direction of AdWords for something like that or you’re hoping that their business is old enough to know that?

Dori Friend: Yes, absolutely, most people have run AdWord campaigns and so they know what keywords convert or they’ve just been around long enough to know from their analytics what is converting from maybe different types of traffic that they’re getting. But I think the simplest thing is doing an AdWords campaign. Not something you have to pay a lot for but just to know what keywords are going to convert.

Another thing too, if you’re going after long tail, you can get some decent rankings just by some on page optimization and then go to SEMRush. They track everything that is in the top twenty. Get a report there and find out where you are. You might be listed for a couple of hundred keywords you don’t even know about, like on page two and then start doing a linking campaign to those and that can really boost your traffic too.

David Jenyns: So you pretty much look for that low hanging fruit as well, so you’re finding out what keywords convert, going through looking for the low hanging fruit for keywords you are already kind of ranking for but you haven’t got page one listings for and then driving some extra traffic to those. Then you mentioned using so the expired domain names as far as picking them up as they expire, trying to find something with some age, with a little bit of authority, obviously some good PR, doing a 301 Redirect back to the site.

Let’s say you’re kick starting a site. Do you grab multiple domain names? Do you start 301 redirecting?

Dori Friend: I might do one or two. I think I did two for Brad’s weight loss site and that was just to kick start it. It gives an added punch, just a little bit of authority to start it out with. Then we hammered that site with links.

This is another myth. A lot of people think, it’s a new site, I’ve got to start slowly. That’s rubbish, there’s no truth to it. There is a lot of rubbish in the industry, a lot of myths. That’s one of them. You can tell, if you start watching your rankings, if they’re going up, going up and then they start going down, then you know you’re over optimizing.

So what you do is start linking to your site using your url as your keyword, that means your domain name www.domainname.com, http, the url is your anchor text. You start linking to your site with that and it comes back immediately. It really helps over optimization so you can watch it and you can steer it until you can finally get settled in on top rankings. You can blast it, we do it all the time, we have a lot of success with it.

Another thing that is a big myth out there is people get content theory. People think I’ve got to have unique articles to link from. Unique articles one, in their site, and two, your unique articles to get links from. I think both are huge myths. Content doesn’t play a huge role in my SEO game, it’s all about off page optimization and that’s links coming in.

I have an example I’ve been linking to my Dad’s olive oil site and all it says is ‘This will be the site of blah, blah, blah.’

I’m already on page two for organic olive oil and I haven’t even been linking from my own networks. This is just something I’m doing and testing and I’m on page two for a lot of these major keywords without any content on the site. I’m not going to push it to page one until I get content on the site but it just goes to show people that I know Google says it’s about content, but it really isn’t.

David Jenyns: That’s key, it all is about, I think you call them external supporting links. After the 310 Redirects you move into doing some directories. Now directories, I’m assuming you guys used to talk about Directory Maximizer and we still use that. Is that what you use for directories?

Dori Friend: Yes, I still use Directory Maximizer, there might be some other sources out there that are cheaper. That’s 14c a submission. That’s also just going to get you low level links. I totally believe in low level links like forums, all that kind of thing, just massive amounts of links that don’t really have any authority behind them. I even go so far as to really value links from sites that are not in Google’s index. Doing my competitive research, this is how I figured that out. Probably up to fifty per cent of the incoming links to sites out there are from sites that are not in Google’s index. Most people don’t know that. So yes, you want to get a variety of links.

David Jenyns: With that Directory Maximizer, do you end up just rolling out as much as you can get from Directory Mazimizer?

Dori Friend: Yes, I do. Then other places too, there are other I call them low level linking from membership sites and so on.

David Jenyns: Like blog networks?

Dori Friend: Yes, blog networks, absolutely. There are tons of them, there are different kinds.

David Jenyns: Some of the ones we’ve been testing out and you obviously mentioned Brad Callan, so there’s SEO Link Vine and then there is AMA is well known and Unique Article Wizard, the Portal Feeder, the Syndicate Kahuna guys have one, plus you’ve got obviously your own and then we shift into the high level area. Are there any other of the low level linking material that you like to do?

Dori Friend: Linx Boss. I just started using them for getting links like that. They don’t put links in the content of the blogs, they put it on the footer of each post. That typically doesn’t work as well. There are some things about each one of those networks that are good and then that are not so good. But I think they all have a place. I wouldn’t say, oh don’t use that because that’s no good. I think all the linking sites have a place.

David Jenyns: Can you ever get linked to from somewhere that hurts you? This is that age old question.

Dori Friend: No, this is another myth. If that was possible, then we could take out our competition. I have linked to a lot of people in my career and I have lost a lot of sites from getting reported from my network. None of my clients’ sites have ever been hurt. It’s who you point to, not who’s pointing to you, if that makes sense. You can’t control who’s pointing to you, or we could take down our competition. I’ll get some of my network sites reported and it has to be a manual review at that point and Google will de-index them because they’ll see this is just a link site. So I can lose, but I’ve never seen a money site taken down for that type of linking.

David Jenyns: You mentioned as well, it depends on your mood as to how you hit things. Do you have a structured way that you go about the link building process? Are you just, hey, let’s monitor, see where that site is and we’ll keep on hammering links from a variety of different sources until we get what we’re after?

Dori Friend: Yes, it’s pretty much that, although there is a lot of monitoring going on. If we’re blasting with links and all of a sudden we start going down into the hundreds, we’re pulling our feeds. We’re going to pull the feeds that are feeding links out into the network and we’re going to go to my low level network and put in a feed that is using the url, the keywords. It is like a free for all.

I do like, though, to study my competition. I’ll go look at the top ten on that page of the keyword and I will look to see what kind of links they’re getting. I don’t want to waste my network links on my sites that I don’t need all that authority pushed to them. When we went into the weight loss industry, we knew that we needed a ton of links everywhere we could get them. But for olive oil, organic olive oil, gourmet olive oil, it’s not been really tough. So I wouldn’t go hammer that site with a ton of links.

I started linking to it with a low level linking thing, I’m getting to the second page. I’m probably going to put a feed in from my network for a week or two, see where I’m at and then pull back. Does that make sense? But I do study my competition. I also know in the olive oil industry too, their sites were very old. Even though my site was a 204 site, I went and got an older site and did a 302 Redirect for that, just because it helps out a little bit.

David Jenyns: That initial start, that’s a great little start there, you’ve got the 301 Redirects after obviously doing appropriate research and knowing the keywords and competition. Then doing the directory sites, you looked through Directory Maximizer, then you start off with your low linking material which is your blog networks.

You mentioned Linx Boss and then as part of your own network you have some low level linking style sites. Before we shift into the high level linking material, are there any other low level linking? Obviously you’re very big on automated material, so it’s either a service or a blog network where you can use something like Traffic King to be able to pump the feed out through to your own network. Are there any other things outside of that?

Dori Friend: You’ve basically covered it. There are a lot of different linking programs, I can’t name them all right now. I did write a report on the whole linking thing. People can get it if they opt in to my list. I don’t have the url off the top of my head for it. It was a free thing I did, part of the Seven Step SEO Quick Start Guide, actually number seven, it was the seventh step. I talk about where to go get back links, how to go get them and things like that.

There’s a cool little service out there called Fiverr, fiverr.com. That site is just about people doing crazy things for $5. If you punch in SEO back links, you’re going to get these kids, students at colleges and so on, willing to put links on their dotedu site, the school site, pointing to your blog or something. That’s a cool way to get some dotedu links and things like that very cheaply or inexpensively. It’s just a little tip that I found and I’ve been doing that.

David Jenyns: Fiverr’s fine, you can get lost in there on ridiculous things too, getting people to write things.

Dori Friend: So you know about Fiverr?

David Jenyns: Yes, we used it for a product launch. I didn’t actually look for SEO material, but we got some girl to write the SEO method on her forehead and a few other people to do some ridiculous things.

Dori Friend: Oh, yes, I know. It’s amazing what they’ll do for $5. It’s crazy, sometimes I just look around the site and laugh, oh, I have to do some practical jokes on my friends.

David Jenyns: So the Fiverr, and shifting into the higher level linking material and this is more the importance of building your own network. You guys were talking about this a long time ago. Even now, there are a few people who are starting to talk about it and they’re effectively just rebranding what it is you’re talking about. They have their own names for it but really when it comes back to it, it’s very much what you and Jeff Johnson and a few other people were talking about. That whole idea, even coining your own terms, your money sites, your feeder sites and building out that network of sites, that basically support it.

I know that’s a big part of what you’ve been doing. You’ve been building a massive network and you’ve had a few times when a few of them have got linked together and you lose parts of that network but you keep building and where you are now, especially acquiring all the aged domain material. As far as the way that you talk through, I don’t know if you can talk a little bit about this high level linking material?

Dori Friend: I can talk about SEONitro and what I’ve just done for Brad. We have a network of sites that are mostly PR3s, 20% PR4s, 20% PR2s and then PR5s and PR1s. You can definitely over optimize a site from that. Manual linking, a lot of the SEO professionals that lease out these networks from us, they will manually link to their clients. It goes on a post and in your post it’s best to have the links inside the post instead of at the bottom or the top. The best way to get authority from the site is getting a link from within the contextual block. So we do that.

These kind of sites, these high powered networks which are totally automated except for manual linking if you want to do that, but this is not a sales pitch here. You talked about the fact that we’ve been doing this for a long time and we have. Traffic King was built just to automate sites and networks of sites. In fact it was a cloaking system way back in the day. We were doing these networks, it was an AdSense type of thing. It’s turned into more of a white hat publishing, grey hat. Any time you’re trying to manipulate the search engines, I think it’s grey hat.

It’s an incredible content domain management and publishing system, Traffic King Pro. I spoke at Yanik’s in 2007 and it was Underground 3 and what I spoke about was building your own SEO link network. I thought that was really important and really crucial for people to have to start building those kinds of networks because then you have the power on your own. You don’t have to go out and beg for links.

So now when I want to hit an industry, I have my networks that I can go do that. I thought it was important for other people to start building that and you don’t need Traffic King Pro to do it, you don’t need all these fancy tools or expensive tools, you can start base level just by using Fantastico and installing a WordPress blog or a Joomla site and there is other software out there that you can automate postings if you want or just manually post. Sometimes I put up sites and I’ll put up one post, that’s it and I’m done with it because I don’t want to share it with anyone else, I want those links going to my site.

So, yes, we’ve been doing this a long time. There are certain things you want to look out for when you are building your own network like getting different hosts. We use SEO Hosting a lot, it works really well because then the sites in your network are coming from different IPs. Be sure to change your name servers on that.

David Jenyns: With that, that’s a big thing especially with people building out these networks and I personally hold you and Jeff responsible for this. When I was setting up a network because we rolled out a large network of five hundred sites and we ended up segregating them, making sure that you had different hosts, so that way they were on separate IP addresses, registering them in Mum’s name, brother’s name, everybody else’s name, basically to try and keep these separate.

You can spend an incredible amount of time trying to keep these separate and then you can do something really stupid, having the same Google analytics account installed on it or there are so many little things.

Dori Friend: Or the same AdSense account. I don’t put AdSense on any of my network sites that I’m just trying to push in the rankings.

David Jenyns: It stitches them all together and then once that happens you just see it drop out, especially with some of the elaborate linking that we were doing very early on. You’re still going down that path. These days I’ve really shifted away from that. We still build our supporting sites but perhaps it’s to do with the volume, the point at which you need to go, alright, now we’re getting to a point where we need to separate this. I’d be interested to get your thoughts on how important it is for most people to be going down that road? Is it more trouble than it potentially could be worth?

Dori Friend: You mean building your own network?

David Jenyns: Yes, but then also trying to protect the different divisions of it. Building your own network, but then saying, right I’m going to try and split it across ten different hosts, different IP addresses, different domain name registrars. Unless you’re excessively cross linking, does it really make that much of a difference?

Dori Friend: It does actually. I don’t do any cross linking in my networks at all. I put about ten sites on each IP. The reason you want different IPs in different names is so Google thinks that they are owned by different people. It’s not like you’re going to be penalized for linking to your own sites but it’s been tracked that if you have a hundred sites and they’re all in the same name, all in the same server, and you’re linking to your money site, that’s not going to give you the boost that you want.

So we’ve been doing this for a long time. It was a hassle before SEO Hosting came about, finding those hosts was horrible and it used to be different registrars too. Finally having different profiles so you can just create a profile, like Host A profile A, Host B, profile B type of thing. That kind of thing, I don’t do that anymore, I have assistants who do all that. It can be hired out once you create a system around it. So it’s still important if you’ve going to build a network, to have it look like it’s not all on that same person. I hope I answered your question and I understood it right.

David Jenyns: I’m interested then as well, do you ever look at, sometimes an easy way to get around, especially if you’re trying to do it on a shoestring, is setting up a web 2.0 network where you look for some of the different properties like WordPress and Tumblr and Posterous, a few of those ones that actually have no no follow issues and they’re actually sending some quality links. Do you dabble in Web 2.0 at all?

Dori Friend: Not so much, social sites and so on because I’m so focused on building my own type of networks, buying deleted domain ns, expired domains right now, the acquisition part is really what I focus on. I do believe if you’re on a shoestring budget and I see this all the time, that if you put up an article on ezinearticles.com is an authority site. It’s going to be easier for you to rank that article than probably on your branding site. So you can do those types of things, Squidoo lenses and get those ranks.

Easy, what’s easy? There’s an Ezine article for Medifast. Medifast was a huge seller, the diet thing that Commission Junction people were all after. So you get the article there, they click on the link which is a referral link, they get commission and boom.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, when we break it down, your core whole SEO thing, a lot of people out there will make SEO more complicated than it needs to be. Usually they talk in terms of on page, off page, but pretty much you’re saying, for you, you focus 80% on off page.

Dori Friend: Except for the title tags. I can still rank something that the title tag doesn’t match the keyword, the keyword that I’m ranking to it. It could be apples and I’m linking to it saying it’s an orange. If I keep linking to this apple site saying it’s an orange, it’s an orange, it’s an orange, pretty soon Google is going to think it’s an orange, even though it’s an apple. So you can still do that. If your title tag says it’s an apple or an orange, then it’s easier to rank. It will be easier to rank something if your title tag is matching the keyword of that page. That I still highly recommend and believe. But other than that, the content on the site, blah, blah, blah.

People get content, blah, blah, blah. Unless the site is identical, you have two identical sites, the duplicate content myth I’ve never seen it take action on anything. The Stomper Net guys demystified the Latent Semantic Indexing, that whole thing that was happening in 2006. They totally dismantled that. It went through our industry and everybody was so scared about what was going to be happening. It never even came to fruition. There was one conversation that Google had about it and it just went through our industry like a headless pumpkin man or something.

David Jenyns: It did, and a lot of people came out with these little tools.

Dori Friend: They said, it has to be themed, and it has to be this and it doesn’t really. You can l link a flower site linking from a mechanic site, you can, I do it every day, all day. Maybe not flowers to mechanics but you know what I mean. So that took care of the content myth. I’ve only seen sites get, not de indexed but one won’t rank as high as the other if they’re identical. Identical sales letter, like you do a site and then you duplicate that site. Google does not want that to happen or else if it was totally on page optimization you could control the front page.

Back in the day, and this is why AdSense is not as easy to go after as it used to be. Back in the day it was all about on page optimization. You could figure out what kind of on page optimization you needed to do to rank your sites. That’s why it was easy for us to rank our sites. We were cloaked because of course we gave the search engine candy and would rank and show to the people something else to make them quick. That worked brilliantly until you had to start getting back links. It just wasn’t as quick, you couldn’t do it in the massive amounts we were doing it in and make it work since the back link thing.

David Jenyns: That leads to, I’m thinking about the changes in search. Since back then, apart from the idea that on page may be not as important now and it is still about the links. Every now and then it feels like something new sweeps through the SEO community. Most recently it was Google Instant. From your eyes, have you seen any significant changes in SEO or the way that you do it?

Dori Friend: No, I’ve not seen any significant changes. I’ve seen things that have opened my eyes, like realizing that pages that aren’t in Google’s index still work for some reason. This is when I had a whole network get de indexed because one of my client’s customers was linking to a trademark term and they shouldn’t have been. That person had the trademark term, complained to Google, Google did a manual edit of who was linking to their competitor’s site and of course it was me and they de indexed my pages. Nobody in that network’s rankings hurt or were affected from the de indexing, which is totally opposite of what you would think.

So it lead me to believe that de indexed sites are not totally devalued. I’m still getting my head around that whole thing because it’s kind of weird to think that. Back when I do my competitive analysis, I do realize that the majority of links coming into a site are from sites that have not been indexed or are not in the index or have zero page rank. So that goes back to your low level linking, get links from low level blogs that may be not in the index, zero blogs, ones, whatever. Get your sites going and then hit it with PR3s and PR4s. See what’s ranking in your industry. See how many PR4s or 3s you need to get to rank that site.

David Jenyns: As part of that testing, and you were saying once that blog or that part of your network got de indexed, did you also have a look, let’s say you’ve got a normal website operating and you remove links from some of your networks. Is it easy for you to see like turning on a light switch on and off, hey, I’m adding these five links here, my rankings go up. I remove these five links, my ranking goes down?

Dori Friend: Yes, it’s pretty much like that. It is pretty much like that, in fact. SEONitro is a year program and if people leave before the year is out, people have to quit for different reasons and mostly I don’t take their links down, but if they’re mean I say, ok, I’m taking your links down and they would drop right out of the rankings. Mostly it’s been clients we work for really hard to get them on the front page, then they’d say their keyword didn’t convert so those are really actually the people we take our links down from and they would certainly drop like a lead balloon.

What else is also interesting is I’ll be linking to somebody for a long time. Of course if I stop linking, you would think, ok, they might start dropping down. In some cases they will, depending on the industry and how competitive those keywords are. But in a lot of cases, because of all the past linking and because the linking is still there, even though they’ve ruled off that front page, the link is still coming in, their rankings will still stay the same for a lot of the keywords, for a lot of the mid range to long tail. So it’s not that you have to continually link like you do in competitive industries.

I do see that in the competitive industries like weight loss, you have to continually keep your linking going, keep it going, keep it going.

David Jenyns: What’s your gut feeling, what’s changing in the community online, like we’ve got the emergence of these blog networks? They’ve been around for a while but they’re very much becoming front and centre and there are different little services and things coming out which very much automate the process and they’re tapping into these blog networks. The longevity of this style of linking, it’s like you said, it can’t really go away because they are really the foundations of what search is built on. It’s built on links and back links and that’s why you need a mix of your low level and your high level material.

Do you see a point at which, if you’ve got a small business I think you probably get about ten requests every day for SEO services from Indian companies that are going to be rolling out masses of links through their networks. Are you thinking the music has got to stop at some point or what are your thoughts?

Dori Friend: I don’t know, I have no idea. I used to teach I can rank an apple with an orange link. I used to say, I know this is going to come back and bite me for saying this, but it hasn’t yet. It’s been five years, six years that I’ve been teaching this material. That’s on top of the time that I was cloaking, the AdSense years in 2003-2004. Even before that we were doing Commission Junction. The AdSense was really traumatic in those days.

I don’t know, I keep thinking it’s going to bite me and something is going to happen, it’s like an arms race, Google switches this and switches that. But it really hasn’t seemed to have changed for quite a while. I have had my blog networks up that I’ve leased out to people since 2006. It’s still working and it’s still working really well for myself and for my clients. I call them clients but they’re mostly customers, it’s not like I take on clients. They are other SEO professionals who lease my networks out so they can link from them.

So a lot of them are probably making their own networks at the same time because you can never have too many links if you are in the SEO business.

David Jenyns: That really comes down to the core of what it’s all about, building those links and building them out. I know you dispelled a few myths there. Shifting gears slightly, because I know you’ve been in the game for a long time. I always like to find out, and you hinted at one of them when we were talking about before the call, but some of the big mistakes you see people doing when trying to create wealth online. You mentioned one of them, which is chasing the shiny objects and whatever is newest and brightest is where people seem to jump.

You had a big shift in your income when you really narrowed that focus. Are there any other mistakes where you see people going wrong?

Dori Friend: Not testing, believing the myths, believing what they hear, I think really undermines the industry a lot. One person will say something and it will go through like wildfire. Even when I’m teaching, I’ve said, ok, you guys I’m going to tell you what I’ve experienced or the things that I’ve heard and then you can base that. I like to do my SEO from what I’ve tested, not from what I’ve heard. That’s where I get my results from. That’s why I know the content methods are stupid and so on.

So I see people doing that. I see people just buying into everything that gets sold. I think my best advice for somebody coming out, just starting, yes, one, there is a sense that you do need to buy into a lot of education because you do need to educate yourself in the internet marketing industry. That doesn’t mean you’re going to educate yourself on how to sell other internet marketing material. But say you want to start a business, like my Dad is selling olive oil, we’re in the olive oil business. He has the business going on and he’s learning about how to do that online.

So I think I would recommend if somebody was coming in, yes, get educated first. You’re going to have to spend some money probably. I don’t know, there is an awful lot of material online. Look at this interview. I’ve just really told you a lot of things that normally just wouldn’t be out there I think. Even a little bit on how to build networks. But focus on one thing. Focus on one business.

I think if I was to do this all over again, and this is how I started. I came into this business as a logo designer, because I was a designer for Apple. I designed interface software, interface and visual design. I did logos and then just graphics. I was an art major and I thought, ok, what can I do online? I can make logos. So I started that and that’s how I started educating myself and somehow I just got so into SEO, it really matched my personality. I was talking to David, I’m kind of a recluse. I’m really fun at the bar.

I don’t do many phone calls, I don’t talk to many people on the phone. I sit in front of my computer and I love that, I’m like a cave person. So I get out and go to the bar. If you come to meet me, I’ll buy you a beer.

David Jenyns: I can vouch for that.

Dori Friend: Yes, you can. The logo design business and if I didn’t get so caught up in SEO, I keep saying I’m going to go back into the logo design business because that’s where my talents are, that’s where I could have really done something. It’s not like I’m not doing anything now, because I am and I’m doing very well. But I see these guys that started back when I started in 2000, who built these companies, design companies and sold out and I know they sold for millions and millions of dollars because they got huge.

Pick a business, stick to it, learn how to promote that business online, that would be my best advice.

David Jenyns: That was exactly what I was asking. It kind of leads into the next question. If you look back at those key turning points for you and you look back over your career and the point at which you started doing this, that had a marked effect. Obviously one of them is making sure that you do focus on what it is that you’re going to be working on. Obviously testing I another important point. Were there any key things? I don’t know, maybe you started to outsource your customer service or maybe when it was when you started working with certain people.

Dori Friend: That’s a really good question. There are two things that have really changed my business and that is one, yes, outsourcing and two is creating systems, creating systems that I can outsource. That’s what I’m very big in now, that’s exactly what I’m doing in SEONitro which has, I think, helped me grow exponentially and has also given me the freedom to take off when I want to. I have a person who can run my business because I have a system that I set up, the outsourcing, the customer support, everything about that.

First you have what you need to do, you sell, then you maintain your customers. So the system is around everything. You outsource to try to bring people into those spots that will take care of that. So I have my main person, I call her my VP who manages everybody but she does mostly my customer support. Then there are other people who build sites and things like this. We have a process, like a list, like a checklist that they go through.

When I buy sites and I still do that, it goes to person A and then to person B and then to person C and they each have individual jobs that they do, it’s like a system. So creating systems is really important and I didn’t know that until I heard somebody talk about that at a seminar. It was systems, what on earth is that? I don’t know, I’m an art major. So really I had a hard time learning the business aspect and creating something like I’m going to sell sooner or later.

So I think that’s important, outsourcing, definitely, systems definitely. That’s not something I came into this industry knowing and it’s still something I’m working on, management. I always liked to think I was a one man band and sat in front of my computer and got lost in it all day. That kind of thinking really limited me, but I had to be that to create my system to pass on.

David Jenyns: Now that you’ve got that system, it sounds like what you’re working on over the next six months or so I imagine, is just further automation of those systems. Is that’s what’s coming down the pipe for Dori in late 2010 and 2011?

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s actually my goal, creating systems and documenting those systems so I can sell the company. So I have all my ducks in a row and that can be difficult too. Oh, book keeper, taxes, who wants to think of those things? I certainly don’t, but now it’s ok, this is getting bigger, I really need to get these ducks in a row. So it’s not only about creating systems, but documenting them so I can replace anybody.

David Jenyns: Are you thinking about selling out and just riding horses and having your cocktail parties on Friday afternoon? Is that really what’s going to happen?

Dori Friend: Yes, that could happen. But you know what? I’ll sell out but I’ll probably build something else. I’m going to go into logo design, I tell you. I think once you learn it then you can do it over and over again. You hear about all these entrepreneurs, oh, yes they’ve built and sold five businesses and so on. I’m finally getting to know how they did that and it’s taken me a long time to understand how they did that.

Once you realize, I think, it’s all about systems, creating systems, creating something you can make a profit with and creating systems on how to automate it, and take yourself out of the equation is really what it’s about. For me it’s like a puzzle and I really like that. That’s why I really like SEO because it’s kind of a puzzle, I test things and so on.
So I am really a geek, I just got a telescope too. I watch the stars. My friends laugh at me. I am front of the bar but I’m also a geek.

David Jenyns: It shines through in the work that you do. You do operate at a very high level. To wrap up, I can’t thank you enough for your time. Like you said, you’re a little bit of a recluse and you don’t hop on these calls very often, so I feel quite privileged that I managed to be someone to get you on the line. You are very generous both with your time and information you give. If people want to keep an eye on what you’re doing, there is SEONitro. But where are some places they can go to find out what Dori’s up to?

Dori Friend: Well, dorifriend.com is my blog and that is where I report everything that I test and ramble on and people ramble on back at me. Actually I don’t tend to ramble on that much and I only post every month or so because I’m more visual than I am a writer. But I do like to share my test results with the people on my list because then the people on my list will tend to get better and better and then they’ll buy into SEONitro. That’s what I sell is SEONitro and that’s the network that I lease out on a monthly basis.

It’s mostly always closed, though, because I only let fifty people in at a time. My list is dorifined.com, my blog, they can get on my list. Even email me at dorifriend.com and I’ll send you my process map. Actually you can get it at the blog, you don’t have to email me. It’s a pretty good process map, it’s a seven step SEO quick start guide. It talks about buying a deleted domain, doing a 301 Redirect, all the things we talked about, submitting to directories, choosing keywords, studying your competition, creating a baseline and developing SEO pages and back links and it goes into detail with that. It’s a report that I did. I actually did that with Brad, he did an email for me and I said, I’ll build my list, I‘ll get something out and it was really good.

David Jenyns: Well, we might wrap it up there. Thanks again Dori, we covered some awesome material and I know people are going to love it and they can check out dorifriend .com. Thanks guys.

Dori Friend: Thanks.

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Lynn Terry

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Name: Lynn Terry

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.clicknewz.com

Lynn Terry’s Bio: Lynn Terry is a super affiliate in every sense of the word. She has been doing online marketing since the 1990′s and as she herself said, there is nothing online that she has not tried for a business.

Today it is with affiliate marketing that she truly shines. Her website, ClickNewz.com, is the place where people go if they want to learn about affiliate marketing and Internet marketing. She is always glad to share her knowledge.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’m very excited today because we’ve lined up an amazing interview with Lynn Terry. If you haven’t heard of Lynn Terry, she’s been online coming up to her thirteenth year now. She’s been interviewed on numerous online things, including Entrepreneur Magazine Biz radio. I think she’s most well known for her website ClickNewz.com. On that website she covers a whole host of different topics, everything from affiliate marketing through to search, building traffic from other means, internet marketing strategies. I think one of the things I like most about Lynn Terry is the fact that she’s got such a varied skill set.

A lot of people pigeon hole themselves into being known as, they are the affiliate marketer or they are just interested in social media. Lynn Terry really has a very varied skill set and you’ll see that – it will come out through the call. I’d just like to welcome you to the call Lynn.

Lynn Terry: Thank you so much Dave, I appreciate it. It is true that I have a varied skill set and the reason is I started out in web development and doing marketing strategies for Allfinders back in the nineties when they first wanted to get onto the internet. I had an international web development team at the time and I would walk into businesses and assess what they needed specifically and then go from there. So I had quite a bit of online marketing experience before I started teaching internet marketing. A lot of people just enter internet marketing and they have a favourite method.

I do have a favourite method or model if you will, and I am a super affiliate and my absolute favourite model is affiliate marketing with SEO, which is search engine optimization, to get free search engine traffic.

David Jenyns: Very cool. I’m curious about what made you make the jump over into shifting online, I know you were working with some of these companies. Was there something that happened that made you think, now is the time for me to make the jump?

Lynn Terry: It was circumstances actually. I was married at the time and I had a local business. I had an electronic shop in the city. I went through an unexpected divorce and became a single mother. That was a really rough year, my son got very sick and I ended up closing down my store front uptown and taking it to a home office. Over the course of the next year or so, I did a complete shift towards more of a passive income model so that I could be a full time Mum.

That was the best choice I could ever have made in my life. We have an incredible lifestyle, I travel the world, I run my business from mobile devices and things like that. It was a really big shift from being hands on in an office, or meeting clients to working virtually, completely virtually, and I think it is the best thing I could have ever done.

David Jenyns: It sounds like you’ve gone from working with clients to being a super affiliate and basically selling other people’s products. Some people talk about the idea that you’re building someone else’s business when you’re an affiliate marketer. I’m interested to get your thoughts and comments on that.

Lynn Terry: Well, yes there are different models and everyone has their opinion or their preference and that’s ok. Back in the nineties when I was doing service based business, I was still an affiliate marketer. There were still services I couldn’t personally provide, such as hosting and mailing list management, secure servers. Back then we had to have payment processors and various things and so there were still a lot of services I couldn’t personally provide that were already being handled by other companies that specialized in that.

As an affiliate, I worked that into my business model even then, even back in the nineties. So it was a natural shift for me to turn to affiliate marketing when I wanted more of a passive model. When you get into selling your own products, it’s a very active model. If you’re not personally handling the customer service, customer support, product development and updates, and things like that, then you’re handling the outsourcing team, one or the other. So I think it is a different business model completely but there is a lot of profit in both.

I think one of the great things about working online is that there are so many different options for the different personality types. Some people love to be working with the customers, some people do not. So there is really a model out there for everyone.

David Jenyns: Yes, and I think the way that I’ve watched your development and being that super affiliate, I think that’s helped you develop a system that you go through that I’d love to really dive into. The way that you build up and drive traffic to new niche websites, perhaps you could talk us through the process about how you drive traffic to a new site. I know it’s a big topic, so just start wherever you want and then we’ll dive in from there.

Lynn Terry: Ok, great. As I mentioned, my favourite traffic method is SEO, to get free search engine rankings and get good search engine rankings to get free traffic. My marketing to get traffic begins during site development. So when I’m creating a niche affiliate site, I will start with keywords and I will take the most general keyword for that particular topic. I do build sites around topics not around products and not around specific merchants, but around topics.

I’ll take the more general keyword phrase for that and make that the primary keyword phrase for the main page, that’s what I want the main page of the site to rank well for in the major search engines. Then I’ll select categories from the next keyword phrases down, usually two to three word phrases. This will be the categories or the topics of the website or blog. Then I’ll have a third tier of keywords which is the long tail keywords. That’s for the content that goes into each category in the navigation there.

When I’m creating a site I start with keywords. I optimize as I develop each page and I actually have a pyramid type structure of keywords and then I create the pages for each of those. My marketing begins in the beginning of the development phase, the optimization. On page optimization is really very simple, whether it’s a web page or a blog post or what have you. It’s just a matter of putting your keyword page into specific places. I just do that right from the beginning. When I create an affiliate site, generally I’m going to have those third tier pages, those long tail keyword phrases, in no longer than six weeks, ranking well and making sales.

David Jenyns: Yes and specifically, when you’re targeting those longer tail keywords, are you going after things like product name with modifiers like reviews and buy and things like that or are you particularly just going for the product name?

Lynn Terry: Well, not always. It really depends on the market, it depends on the searches that they tell me what they’re looking for. So it really is niche dependent. But let’s say for example the niche is baby bedding and so that would be the keyword phrase for the main page of the site. One of the categories might be Princess baby bedding. One of the pages within that category would be very specific like Lambs and Ivy Princess baby bedding if there was search volume. But it all goes back to what the market is searching for as to how I create it. I just get more and more specific.

With those long tail keyword phrases which are very specific searches, you have a highly targeted market that knows what they want and they’re looking for a place to buy it. That is commercial intent, which I think is very important when you’re creating a niche affiliate site. A lot of that goes into developing a site. You want to develop a niche affiliate site around a topic or a market that is in the buying mode when they’re getting online.

David Jenyns: That initial set up, because we talked about the few different pages, you go for the overall topic, then you go for the category, then you go for the longer tail keywords. When you’re first setting up a site, again is it niche specific as to how many pages you build in? Do you have a way where you typically say, before I really start my off page optimization I like to get the site a little bit aged with a certain number of pages, or how does that work for you?

Lynn Terry: No, and it’s funny that you bring that up because it’s actually one of the stumbling blocks for a lot of people who are new to doing niche marketing, whether it’s their own products or their own blog or their affiliate site. The stumbling block is that they get hung up on numbers. Let’s say, for example, someone told them that a mini site is ten pages minimum. They get hung up on that and feel like they have to create ten pages. That’s just simply not the case.

I have sites that are as small as five to ten pages that are in very tight niches about a very specific topic. Then I have affiliate sites that are over five hundred pages that could probably be five thousand if I really dug into it. So it just depends on the size of the market or how niched you’re getting, micro niched within that market. Whatever the keywords support, whatever the market requests, is how you build. It does take a little bit of intuitive creativity really. You want to look at what’s out there, and then you want to deliver exactly what they’re searching for, exactly how they’re searching for it.
It’s less about the models or the methods or the blueprints or mini sites versus affiliate site versus blog, those are all just words and platforms and things like that. Really what the goal is, is how can I serve this market and then you just go at it from that direction.

David Jenyns: I suppose building on that, the idea of how can you serve the market as well. Similarly, I suppose you’re adding value with these pages that you’re creating. It’s not so much about generating the clicks through search and then once they land there trying to get them as quickly off your page as possible, exiting through an affiliate link?

Lynn Terry: Yes, that’s right. You have to add value to the process and that’s really the job of the affiliate marketer. An affiliate marketer is going to bring the market to the merchant, or they’re going to bring the product to the market. In that process they have to add value. A lot of times for an affiliate marketer, that means helping the market with their buying decision or introducing a product that is a solution to a problem that marketer is having.
Or it is comparing similar products in a market so they can choose between them and make a good choice.

It basically boils down to you bringing them solutions or helping them with a buying decision. That’s what most people get online to search for.

David. Yes. And I know a lot of people really do connect when you see someone’s face and their name associated to it. Are you building personality into these blogs as well?

Lynn Terry: Not in most of my niche affiliate sites. Most of them are done under a pen name and most of them are done with the intention of getting the traffic from the search engine to the merchant as quickly as possible with the information they need. Basically I want to pre sell the idea that this is the product you should get and it’s the merchant’s job to close the sale.

So I do want it to be a quick process. There are a couple of different things there. It really depends, and again it goes back to creativity. If you’re targeting informational keywords, then you want to offer them a free report or write blog posts or get them on your mailing list and build a relationship with them so that they’ll buy products from you or through your recommendation.

But when you’re targeting commercial keywords, then the goal is to get them to the merchant to close the sale. Again, it depends if it is commercial intent or if it’s an informational search.

David Jenyns: Yes, and the other interesting thing is, I’m curious to know about the continued generation of content for that site. Is it something that you will then continue to build that site, assuming you start to see your initial results and monitoring Google Analytics and you’re starting to see some affiliate sales come through. Is that something that you then keep on growing, or typically do you just set them up, start your off page and then just forget about what is happening on the site?

Lynn Terry: Right, the latter usually because it’s a myth that you need fresh content all the time in order for a site to rank well. I have a page that I put up over four years ago. I’ve never touched it since. It took me about half an hour. It ranks in the top three for three different keyword phrases and I make sales every week. I’ve never touched the page, I don’t edit the content all the time, I don’t change the page or anything like that.

So it is a myth that people have come to believe that you have to have this constantly fresh, updating content all the time in order to rank well. That’s not true. You do, every once in a while, need fresh links to that page, fresh back links so that it continues to hold its ranking. So I do that. I might get a handful, less than a dozen a year, maybe a link a month at the very most to this one page, and like I said, it’s held its rankings for four years straight.

Basically I start with all the keywords in that market. I create the site and from there I do the marketing. This might be, depending on the niche, if it’s informational, I’m going to have a social media presence. If it’s more of a commercial site, I’m just going to do SEO and I’m just going to work on back links to keep that site ranking or to continue to get it up in the rankings. So it really depends on the situation.

Let’s say I created a niche affiliate site three years ago. Every once in a while, once a month, I like to sit down and check my stats. Every once in a while I’ll look at new keyword phrases that are coming up, or new products that are coming up. I might add some pages to the site. For the most part I like to create a passive income model.

So create the site, get all the pages ranking well, make sure they’re tweaked and tested so they’re converting the best that they can and then I just let it run. I get fresh links to it now and then and things like that.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I think what I’m liking most about this, is the way you’ve really broken it down into that step by step process. You did talk about building links and I know we’re focusing in on SEO and everyone talks about that being the single biggest ranking factor, is getting good quality back links. Once you’ve done that initial setup, how do you start that process?

Lynn Terry: There are two ways to continue getting quality back links. There are a number of ways, but there are two ways to do it. You do it yourself or you outsource it. Unfortunately it’s just that simple. Everyone likes to over complicate that process, but it’s just that simple.

I have a friend Paul Shaw, and he and I work together quite a bit. We were working on a package for ourselves, just of back links sources for a variety of niche sites that we own or affiliate sites or various things. We have this huge resource of over five thousand back links or link opportunities, places we can get quality back links.

I told him, you know, we’ve got to put this out there. This is just ridiculous, this is such a resource. Since I outsource, we have it in pdf files which is very convenient but then since I outsource we also have them broken down into text files made out so I can easily copy and paste and send out jobs. We actually released that as a product last month at fivethousandbacklinks.com. It just sold like hot cakes. Everyone is really hungry for that, either because they’re doing it themselves or so they can pass it along and outsource it, since it’s very outsource friendly. But that’s basically all there is to it.

I will tell you one of the best opportunities if you’re in a personality or reputation driven niche where you’re making a name for yourself in that market, is guest blogging. That’s one of the best ways to get a content base, a contextual link of the highest quality from a other domain.

David Jenyns: Yes. With the fivethousandbacklinks.com, is that the type of links that you were going through? You mentioned about having the different processes and we know the importance of having a variety of back links. Where are some of those different links coming from?

Lynn Terry: Everywhere. Everything from social media profiles, to edu sites, to high PR blog comments. It’s a very big variety, obviously with over five thousand back links, there’s a huge variety and that is incredibly important. The one thing in your marketing that you never want to do is just the same thing all the time.

That is another big mistake that people make. People make the mistake of saying, ok, I’m just going to do blog commenting and get lots of back links and traffic that way. Or they say I’m just going to focus on article marketing because I know how to do that. But what you really must do in order to get a good social media reputation, which is important for SEO now, but also get good search engine rankings, is have that wide variety.

It needs to be very natural. There need to be links from niche forums, niche blogs, social media sites, authority sites, directories. There need to be a wide variety in order for Google to say, this is a natural buzz, this is natural growth for this site. If it’s all coming from ezinearticles.com or all coming from blog comments, Google can very easily look at that and say that you’re trying to manipulate your page rank.

David Jenyns: Yes, and I suppose like you were saying, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to say that if you’re building from a variety of sources. I think one of the hardest things that people have when it comes to the implementation of building those back links, is coming up with that system and then, as you mentioned, either getting in there and doing it yourself or outsourcing it.

Since you guys have built up this particular system, how do you manage the outsourcing of that? You mentioned breaking it up into text files and then having individual outsourcers handle individual components. How do the mechanics of something like that work?

Lynn Terry: Well I think the absolute best thing you can do when it comes to back links is not have a system.
David Jenyns: Yes, similar to what you were saying about the number of pages and things like that. You can’t have those set numbers.

Lynn Terry: Right, so it all depends on what you’ve got going on. It’s best to not really have so much of a system. I’m not that organized probably, but I really like variety. Now if I’m trying to really get a page ranking well, let’s say it’s a review that I’ve done on ClickNewz, and I have some contacts there. I can go to forums and people know who I am and things like that. In that particular case, a lot of times I will purchase advertising. I hesitate to say buy links but I will purchase advertising.

What I’ll do is, I’ll put it out there for bloggers, of any level, of any page rank new or old whatever and whether they have a MySpace account or a Facebook following, or get Twitter following, or groups that they’re involved in, discussion groups or forums or what have you, and I will pay $10 for mention.

One thing I don’t do, is I don’t specify anchor text, I don’t specify the angle. I’ll just say, if this page interests you, and you have any kind of a reach at all, it’s an easy $10 for lots of people. There are a lot of blogging services that will pay people $10 for a sponsored post or something, but this is a lot more relaxed and easy and simple.

So I’ll just have a budget and that gives it a lot of natural bias. The reason I do that is, I’m going to get links from forums, from MySpace, from Twitter, from Blogger blogs, from high PR, from WordPress blogs, wordpress.com. It’ll be more of a natural buzz. So that’s one way to generate that. You just set a budget. One time, I think it was about two years ago, I spent somewhere between $800 and $1000 doing that. I still hold the number one ranking for that particular phrase and it’s awesome what it produces. It was a very good investment to do that.

For the most part, with my niched affiliate sites, I don’t have that kind of reach with my pen names. So I just do it or I outsource it. It’s a matter of getting some variety and doing it over time. It’s not something you want to get a hundred back links in a day or a thousand in a month and then nothing again for eleven months. Then it gets very obvious that it is page rank manipulation. So the key to it is not to have a strategy but to continuously look for link opportunities and link sources.

That’s the power behind our product because you just have it at your fingertips all the time. You can open it up once a week and do a few. That’s basically it.

David Jenyns: With that particular link service, is it a resource, or do you guys build links for them?

Lynn Terry: Oh no, I’m not for hire. It’s just a resource, and like I said, it was one we created for ourselves and so it’s basically five thousand different link opportunities, places you can potentially get back links,. They’re not all going to be relevant for everyone. A lot of them are going to be general enough for most. Some of them are going to be really good, specific niche links for others.
It’s a really good resource that we use between ourselves our sites, dozens and dozens of sites that we have between us for back link opportunities. It’s just one of those things, on a Saturday afternoon I might open it up and get fifteen new back links set up. On a Monday morning, I might outsource five different small packets to five different people and know that they’re going to get them done on their own time, just give them a deadline of ten days. I just spread it out like that. So I don’t really have a system, I just go with it.

David Jenyns: I think one of the unique link back methods I just heard you talk about was the idea of putting it out there. I suppose it works more when you’ve got the following of people saying, hey guys, I need some links back here, $10 a post. There are plenty of people who’d love to be PayPaled $10 for putting a mention somewhere. I think that and also the guest blogging, both of those were really excellent ideas for building back links.

Do you have one, and I know the importance of getting a variety of back links, if there was one method you had to say, this was one of my favourite methods, where you got the best bang for the buck, would you be able to say something like that or because there are so many to choose from, it’s difficult?

Lynn Terry: I do have a favourite in any of my niches under any of my pen names, that is guest blogging or doing interviews. So just to give you an example, I just got a Droid, it’s the Verizon’s version of the iPhone. I can’t get AT &T service in the valley here, so it’s AT&T’s loss. I got a Droid, I absolutely love it. One of my Facebook friends has had one for a few months and we were talking back and forth about things we could do with it. So then I got followed on Twitter by Droid Women. She has the blog called womenwithdroids.com.

I’m interviewing Rachel, in a conversational style to help me with the Droid. I thought why just talk behind the scenes Facebook message when everyone that has a Droid would love to hear this, or that’s interested in getting one. So I asked Rachel, can we do a Q & A and I’ll put it on my blog? Then I found womenwithdroids.com. I got in touch with them and I said I was just about to post this unique content. It’s a conversational interview between two women with Droids. Perfect, so it will be a guest post and we’ll both get a back link.

So you want to look for those opportunities all the time. Guest blogging is the best and I’ll tell you why. When it comes to back links, they’re not all created equal. The back link that you get in the footer or in the advertising section or the navigation or any static area of a site or blog, does not hold as much value as a contextual link within a content area of the page or of the blog. So if you can get within the content area of a web page or within the blog post on a blog, that is the highest quality link you can get that’s relevant.

Guest blogging would be number one and another thing I do a lot of is interviews, so Q & As or things like that.

David Jenyns: Very cool. Both of those are excellent ideas. I suppose there are a lot of different things you can do online, and you talked about some of the favourite things you had there. As far as when it comes to ranking, where do you see the biggest opportunities online for people doing SEO?

Lynn Terry: For people who are doing SEO as a service?

David Jenyns: Also building up their own niche sites or trying to rank their own different websites. Is there something where you can say, I can see the low hanging fruit here?

Lynn Terry: I think the one thing that a lot of people miss is the long tail, even low search volume keywords. You can take something that gets eight searches a day and you just blow it off. But if you look at that and you say, you know, I could rank number one for that without even blinking an eye, number one. My thing is it only takes ten or fifteen minutes to create a page, an hour at the most if you’re slow.

You create the page, a one time investment, it ranks for years, like I told you about the page that’s been ranking for four years now. I make sales every week off that page. It’s a very low volume search phrase. All three phrases that it ranks well for are low volume phrases, low search volume. So I think that’s one thing that a lot of people really miss that I hit big and earn a lot of passive income from.

David Jenyns: Yes, and with those longer tail keywords as well, do you typically find a lot of them have a higher conversion rate as well?

Lynn Terry: Huge, yes. They convert incredibly high because the person who has searched that phrase is very specific about what they want. They know what they want. All you have to do is deliver that to them exactly, and you have it, that’s it.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, because we’ve talked over quite a few things and you really clearly outlaid the strategy you go for. With having worked with so many people, especially on your blog and getting started with newbies and into affiliate marketing and marketing online. You no doubt see a lot of mistakes that people are making. I know one of them you talked about was the idea of trying to get caught up in having this system, this idea of, you need to create ten pages before you can then move on.

What are some of the other big mistakes that you see people making when they’re trying to get online?

Lynn Terry: I think one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they start is wanting to study everything. They want to know what they’re doing before they start. Considering I started back in the nineties, there were no e books, there were no webinars, there were no events, there were no experts. So we were winging it. I wanted to know how to make a web page and all I had was Netscape Composer.

David Jenyns: Just you and the code.
Lynn Terry: Yes, so I learned how to view the source code on a web page and I pasted it into Notepad and examined it. I would change little things and then put it on the web and see what it changed. That’s how I learned how to bold text, or how to make italics, or how to make a blind break. So I think the most important thing a person can do, is implement as you go. If you read an e book, be committed to implement the strategy right there on the spot while you’re reading it. Use it as a guide.

There’s no money in being the one with the most e books. There’s no profit in knowledge. It’s only in action. So study, implement, take action right away, otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re going to be bogged down in emails and e books and strategies and ideas and numbers and things and you can’t put it all together.

Figure out what you want to do. Study what you need to study in order to figure out how to do that and then do that.

David Jenyns: Yes, that hits the nail on the head. A lot of people really get caught up in trying to get everything perfectly set up before they start. It really does come down to the implementation.

Lynn Terry: If you could see, and it’s somewhere on my blog, my very first blog post ever. I still laugh at it. It’s a shame I’ve left it up on the internet. The thing is, it’s never going to be perfect. If you have a profitable online business, it’s never going to be finished. So you can’t expect to get it right and get it done before you get it online. So the most important things you can do is, register that domain name, install WordPress or create the website and get something out there and get started.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, because you see this time and time again with a lot of people you work with. It’s one of those things where you can keep saying it and saying it. I think the good thing is, someone who reads this, you’re going to hit the right person at the right time , and they’re going to say, yes, I can see this. I just need to get started.

With your huge experience of thirteen years or more online, looking back over that internet marketing career, can you see some of the big leverage points where you look back and say, once I started to do that, that had a really big impact on my career? It might be the point I started to outsource my customer service or perhaps a few things where you look back and say, I wish I’d done that a whole lot sooner.

Lynn Terry: Yes, there are several. Number one is to have an accountability partner, someone who does internet marketing and gets internet marketing, even if you’re both completely newbies. It’s good to find somebody on your level because you can share ideas, you can get some positive feedback, if you have someone who gets it. So it was a long time I was working solo before I met a few people I could connect with and talk to at least once a week and just touch base with.

Otherwise you go completely crazy and you’ll second guess yourself and things like that. I think my productivity shot through the roof when I connected with someone who was on the same level as me with different skill sets. We were able to go back and forth and brain storm and share resources. It really made a huge difference. That would be number one.

Number two would be outsourcing. A lot of people go at it with, I can’t afford to outsource. I’ve got to a point in my business where I can’t afford not to. But somewhere in the middle, it’s this leap that you take, a leap of faith. You will make so much more money. I hired a full time assistant on site to come in and work forty hours a week. I thought, I can’t afford that. But the minute I hired her, it freed me up to do all the creative work in my business and my income really dramatically improved and increased.

I was not only able to afford her, I was also earning more money by hiring her. It’s a leap of faith thing, but outsourcing is huge. I will say this. This is a big lesson I wish I had known a long time ago. Don’t create your business or your model expecting to be always sitting at your computer running it. At some point, if you’re doing any good at all, you’re going to outgrow that position and you’re going to have horrible growing pains.

So if you have everything set up and you have access to everything and no one else can, it’s really difficult to outsource. So from the beginning, or wherever you are right now, it’s a good time to use a ticket system. You can use osticket.com which is free, or go to youth project management sources and I know base camp is a paid product. It makes it easier for you to run your business solo but when you are ready to outsource, you’re not scrambling and going through a six month pull your hair out, go crazy thing trying to restructure everything so that you can outsource.

Scalability is very important from the get go.

David Jenyns: You mentioned outsourcing and the idea of getting the full time assistant coming into the office. We have some people came in here to the office as well and I find you just get so much better reach that why.

But I find a lot of people are sitting there, dreaming about the internet lifestyle and the idea of running this virtual business with no one coming in. I’m just interested to get your thoughts on the difference. You work with both virtual assistants and assistants who come in to the office. What are your thoughts on the differences between the two?

Lynn Terry: My thoughts are I’ve done both. Both worked out for different purposes depending on what’s going on and what your business model is and what you most need. At the moment I don’t have anyone hired to come on site. I’m also not running a service based business anymore so I don’t need someone to answer the phone and things like that when I’m traveling. So it depends on the model.

Right now I have virtual assistants. I choose people who are in my country, who speak my language specifically because I’m comfortable with that. I usually choose people out of my pool of peers, because they know me and they know my business well enough to do things without asking me a million questions. They say, ok, Lynn will probably want it done this way, so we’ll just do it. I give them that creative freedom because I’m comfortable with that aspect.

So, like I said, it just depends. If you’re running a service based business, you need someone to answer the phone. You need to be set up to be prepared for that even if you’re the one doing it now. But if you’re running a completely passive operation online only, even under a pen name or what have you, outsourcing, virtual assistants really is the best way to go. There are a lot of benefits, you don’t have to worry about liability and the whole payroll thing and so on.

David Jenyns: So the two real key leverage points you found over those years were the accountability partner and outsourcing. Did you have any other key ones or were they the main ones?

Lynn Terry: I think they are the main ones, plus scalability. A lot of people think, well, I’ll grow when I grow. The problem is that growing pains are the downfall and the death of a lot of businesses. So I think it’s very smart to scale things out from the get go, to be prepared to grow, to have things set up knowing that eventually you’re going to have to outsource. So having that scalability in your mindset as you’re growing and creating and running your business I think is one of the biggest keys.

I personally have gone through so many growing pains, let me tell you it is terribly painful in thirteen years. That’s one of the reasons I say that that is one of the biggest leverage points. I do that now. Now when I create a new site or a new business model, I don’t dump everything into, let’s say, Outlook, where it can only be accessed on my computer. I use a g mail account for each business. That way I know I can outsource that g mail account for two weeks, or I can outsource it permanently and various things like that. So it’s really important to be prepared to scale up.

David Jenyns: As far as scalability, and I suppose that leads into the idea of systems. As much as you said you’re quite disorganized in that there is no set system, I do know the way you break things up. You have to. To be successful working with virtual assistants, you need to be able to have that outsourced, otherwise, if systems aren’t set up in place, usually what ends up happening is, you spend all of your time trying to keep your virtual assistants busy.

So the idea of having those systems there to help that scalability, how do you handle the execution of getting things done through your virtual assistants?

Lynn Terry: I’m lucky in that we use Skype and I’m in the process of moving over to a ticket system. I just have a wonderful team and they’re very intuitive. They can pretty much keep an eye on the business and know what I need, or I can get in touch with them and say, I need this and it just gets done. That came through trial and error and it took quite a bit of time. You’re not going to get that lucky right off the bat. You’re going to go through people until you get to that point.

I say I’m disorganized in things as far as I don’t have a set link building schedule or anything like that. But the thing that I do every day is, I get up early and I start my day by looking at my master task list. I take the three priority tasks off that list and get them done right away. So I’m actually a very structured person and a very consistent person.

But the one thing I do is, I take my master task list and I look at everything that I could possibly outsource, something someone else could do and I put that on a separate list. So when I get up in the morning and I take my three priority tasks, I also look over to my outsource list or my tasks that could be outsourced. I know a handful of people, about a dozen people, who do various things and I just send them off first thing in the morning. Then I do my three tasks.

I know that those things are getting handled and I’m doing my three priority tasks. I’m usually done with my work before 10am and most of the time before anybody else ever gets to their desk.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, as you dig deeper to find out these sorts of things, that right there, you might not have realized, I would see that as one of those huge leverage points. The idea of this master task list that you have, how do you go through the idea of brain storming? Do you map out maybe at the start of the year what it is that you want to achieve, break that down into your master task list and then just chew through a few each day or are you not that structured? How do you that.

Lynn Terry: No, I’m not that organized. If I were doing that I wouldn’t get anything else done, right? Basically I’m just like everyone else. I jot down ideas in an idea notebook. I carry it with me everywhere I go, when I’m traveling, when I’m in the car. I have an idea notebook that I keep with me everywhere. I call it my million dollar notebook because it is just full of ideas. Then once a month, at the beginning of the month, I sit down and I analyze stats from the previous month. I sit down and look at all my notes, and add things to the list in the right priority,

So the master task list is constantly growing, constantly changing, it’s constantly shifting and I add things to it as I think of them. So once a month I do have to re prioritize it and I do have to think, maybe I’ll save that idea for later and put it at the bottom and things like that. But I just go with it. It’s important to sit down once a month and analyze stats from my business from the month before and see where I am and determine what needs to be done next. I just go at it from that angle.

David Jenyns: Yes, I suppose, like a lot of online entrepreneurs, they have fifty million ideas, and I know you said, like everybody else, you have a notebook. A lot of people don’t carry that notebook around.

The ideas that you’re able to capture doing that, then the idea of how to choose which ones are worthy to run with and which ones aren’t, do you have a process where you think that it happens intuitively or is it something you plan out? How do you identify those? Does it need to be in line with what an overall goal is or does a certain project have to generate a certain amount of money for you to take it up? There are just so many ideas out there.

Lynn Terry: It’s going to be different for each individual person. If you’re just getting started and/or if money is your current goal if you haven’t quite reached your financial goals yet, your priorities are going to be in a different place. When that is the case, you have to start with the money making tasks and do those first. It doesn’t matter if you get the little Twitter plug in added to your WordPress blog, that isn’t the money making task. The money making task is creating a new affiliate page on your domain, that’s targeting a keyword phrase and getting back links.

It’s very important to do what’s in line with your particular goals. My base income is covered by passive income sources already and so my goals will be different than someone who is just starting out. I might be in the process of launching a new site or I might get the idea to go and redo all my affiliate sites or something like that. But it’s just going to depend on where you are.

I think it’s very important to know your objective. If you don’t know your objective, you’re just going to be mindlessly doing tasks or reading blogs or trying to figure out new things when really you need to be doing whatever it is to get to your next goal. That’s where the priority tasks come in for me. The top three things that I need to do today to get closer to my current objective.

David Jenyns: I think again you hit the nail on the head. This is something I do talk about, especially when someone is first getting started online. The first thing you need to be focused on, regardless of what business you’re doing on or off line, needs to be cash flow. That idea, you call it money tasks, but focusing on the cash flow, cash flow, that comes first.

Once you get that basis down where you know your overhead expenses are covered, you know you don’t have to worry about paying for your rent or where that cheque is coming from, that’s what frees you up to that point and you can move to that next level. But you first really need to focus on those money tasks and not get caught up in installing the latest piece of software or reading the latest sales letter that you get pushed into your email box.

I think that was some amazing advice there, the idea of the money tasks, the idea notebook and having that master list as well, along with making sure you’re implementing everything as you go as well. I thought they were some really key ones.

Coming to the tail end of the interview because I suppose you would say you were on the leading edge when it comes to different things when they’re coming out, and the way you’ve positioned yourself to be in front of new media as it’s coming out. What do you see coming down the pipe in 2010? Are there any new trends you can see, or is there anything you can see that holds in 2010?

Lynn Terry: There are a couple of things that are on the forefront of my radar right now. Number one, service based business has become huge again. So anyone who has internet marketing skills, those skills are going to be highly valuable this year. So you have two choices. You can take on the tasks and let other people outsource to you because outsourcing is really going to see a tremendous growth spurt this year. So if you have any internet marketing skills, you can work virtually and make good money.

The second is that the offline world all of a sudden after ten years or so, is now needing to get online again and do it seriously. They need consultants to come out and tell them what to do, who to go to, how to do it or to do it for them. There is a huge need for people with internet marketing skills to go out to these offline businesses and tell them some truths.

The people who, the very few sources they have out there, are really raking them over the coals. They are really charging them outrageous, ridiculous prices. So offline consulting, and/or outsourcing is going to be huge this year. Anyone who has any internet marketing skills like I said, you’re in a very valuable spot in 2010.

The second thing that I think is huge this year is your social media reputation. Anyone who has studied SEO knows about the link reputation. You have different qualities of links and things like that. Overall link reputation for your site is something that Google looks at in their algorithm. Now that the major search engines have licensed the feeds from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, now your social media reputation plays a part not only in your search engine rankings but overall in the online game.

So you don’t want to be using automated programs, you don’t want to be spamming social media sites or book marking sites. You want to have a really solid, strong social media reputation in 2010.

David Jenyns: Yes, I agree, and especially you can just see it right now. Google is obviously getting a little bit concerned about the idea that people are not using the search engines as much because they can go straight to their safe little social community. I think Buzz, which only got .launched a day or two ago, is a great example of Google trying to snatch at that, wanting you to plug those social media networks into their system. Without a doubt they’re going to be monitoring that.

I know in Socialnomics, Eric Qualman talked a lot about the idea of customizing a search and personalized search based on a lot of what your social group is doing. I think we’re going to see that come in for sure.

Lynn Terry: That’s a phenomenal book, Socialnomics by Eric Qualman. On Twitter, he looks like Equal man, E.Qualman. That’s definitely worth a follow, and grab the book if you haven’t read it already. It’s excellent. I just got through giving away a couple of copies because I’m such a big advocate of the book. It’s a fabulous read, very eye opening.

David Jenyns: I loved it and I actually heard about it first when you were talking on Internet Marketing This Week. I think you were on that call when they interviewed Eric.

Lynn Terry: I sure was. Yes, it was my pick of the week a few weeks before, and then of course Ed and Paul Boots had to grab a copy and loved it so we got Eric on the show, that’s internetmarketingthisweek.com, it was a very fun podcast. We had him on the show and it just was a fabulous hour.

David Jenyns: Some of the other people that you keep an eye on in the internet marketing world, are there any that you see as thought leaders as far as online? Eric is obviously up there and probably the team over at Internet Marketing This Week. Are there any other people you like to keep an eye on?

Lynn Terry: There are a lot and I think it’s going to be based on personal preferences. I actually get most of the emails or newsletters or updates from the major internet marketers. I just filter them into a folder so that so that I can go in and check them out sometimes. I don’t want that to sidetrack me from my work. I just like to keep an eye on what’s going on in the industry as a whole. I do that via Twitter as well. I monitor how things are going and what people are teaching or talking about and things like that.

I don’t have specific people that I follow. You come to like certain styles or certain people’s styles after a while and I love to read and follow Brian Clarke at copyblogger.com. I’m a huge fan of Darren Rowse at problogger.com. Of course I work alongside Ed Dale and his Thirty Day Challenge through Internet Marketing This Week podcast. There are lots of great people to keep an eye on and to keep on your radar and see what’s going on.

I could sit here and name names all night long. I think the most important thing though, especially if you’re doing niche marketing, is look at the experts in your market and follow them for examples and for JV opportunities and things like that. A lot of people, make the mistake of getting so caught up in the internet marketing space that they forget their niche and they don’t work their niche. I think that’s incredibly important.

If I’m out there selling dart supplies, then I want to be reading the blogs of top dart bloggers. I want to be keeping up with Phil Taylor and what he’s doing over in England and things like that. I think it’s incredibly important that people don’t get caught up in the internet marketing space and buzz and hype and things like that and more so that they focus on the experts of the niche they’re working within so that they can capitalize on all the great opportunities there.

David Jenyns: If people have read this and find that they resonate with you and they’re liking your style, if they want to find out more about you they can head over to the ClickNewz.com and there is Internet Marketing this Week podcast and on Twitter. Where are some places people can find you?

Lynn Terry: Those are the best places. clicknewz.com is my blog and from my blog you can find my YouTube, my Facebook, my Twitter, my podcast, all the things I do, like webinars every week. I’m all over the web. The best place to go is clicknewz.com and you can find all those buttons there on the right at the top. I am /lynnterry everywhere, Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, it’s /lynnterry. You can find me pretty easily or Google me. I certainly welcome comments and visitors. So if you do stop by ClickNewz and you find something you like, leave a comment. You’ll find it’s a really great community. It’s more of a community than it is just a blog. There’s a really great group there that comments regularly and get involved with each other.

David Jenyns: Very cool. Alright Lynn, I’d just like to wrap it up and thank you so much for your time. You are very generous with your time and I know I like to keep an eye on your blogs, so if they keep an eye out, they’ll probably see a comment or two from me over there. So thanks again for that Lynn.

Lynn Terry: Thank you Dave, I appreciate it.

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Erik Qualman

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Name: Erik Qualman

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.socialnomics.net

Product: Socialnomics

Erik Qualman’s Bio: Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Socialnomics made Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List only after three weeks of publication & has been in the Top 100 Best Selling Business Books List. He is currently the Global Vice President of Digital Marketing for EF Education based in Lucerne, Switzerland and a Professor Digital Marketing at the Hult International Business School.

He previously worked at Cadillac & Pontiac (1994-97), AT&T (1998-2000), Yahoo (2000-03), EarthLink (2003-05) and Travelzoo ( 2005-08).

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. Today I’m very excited because I’ve lined up an excellent interview for you with a social media expert. He’s been highlighted in Mashable, Business This Week, New York Times, Forbes, and that’s just to name a few. He’s worked online in marketing and with e business for over sixteen years, having worked with Cadillac, Pontiac, A T & T, Yahoo, Earthline, Travel Zoo. He’s a columnist for Search Engine Watch and Clicks magazines. Most recently, he’s very well known and how I got introduced to his work, he’s the author of the book Socialnomics which became an Amazon bestseller within three weeks of publication which is quite an achievement in itself. I’m actually talking about Erik Qualman. I’d just like to welcome you to the line. Are you there?

Erik Qualman: I’m here. Thanks for having me on David.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I’ve got to say your book has created quite a lot of buzz in the world of social media. One of the big things to dive straight into it that I suppose I got out of it was that you talk about this idea that you’ll no longer search for products, they’ll find you. I know that’s a pretty big piece in this social media puzzle. I’m keen to get your thoughts and insights on what you mean by that.

Erik Qualman: Yes, when I sat down to write the book Socialnomics, I wanted to look at what was the here and now which was back in ‘08 and ’09 but then also looking forward, what is it looking like a year, two or three years down the road. Part of the reason I was doing that, I was trying to shake companies, shake the CEOs. I felt like physically walking up to them and shaking by the shoulder and saying, you’re not getting this, it is going to be huge and here’s why. The main reason is just like the news. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us. We don’t go down to the end of our driveway to pick up our newspaper anymore. People, our friends and peers push us information that we think would be relevant. So we rely on our friends to push us that information. So people get that now in terms of the news and magazines and whatnot but they didn’t get that four or five years ago.

We’re in the same position now in terms of social media pieces. A couple of years from now, and we’re already starting to see this way faster than I ever thought was possible, is if I do a search today I get a bunch of results. If I use Google I get a bunch of paid sponsored results and I also get the organic search results in the middle.

Think about what would be more powerful than that is that what comes and augments that also is that if you’re searching for a new child seat, if you’ve just had your first baby and you’re looking for a child seat, it also comes back and says, thirty of your friends in the last two years have purchased a child seat. Of those thirty, twenty have purchased the exact same brand and they all give it a five star review. All of a sudden for me that’s really exciting from a consumer standpoint. From a company standpoint it is huge because if you’re the one producing that, that great child seat of value, all of a sudden you don’t have to waste a bunch of money and marketing dollars, the people will market your product for you.

David Jenyns: You mentioned you were surprised how quickly this has all come about. I know we’re all starting to see a little bit of a shift to some of the things you’ve talked about. You’d actually written the book Socialnomics at the end of ’08, so even though it’s only been out for a little while now, relative to when you wrote it, it was very much forward thinking. I’m thinking about how quickly it’s got to this point. Before we actually see that integration into our search and our online experience, do you have any insight as to when you think that might happen?

Erik Qualman: Yes, you’re exactly right. In ’08 when the book came out, I was sitting there saying, we’ve got to get to this thing because it’s printed. It’s funny because you have e readers. The beauty of e readers is that they can get it out like that. But still most people buy the hard copies, so I was going back to the publishers saying, this material moves so fast we’ve got to get this out the door.

Fortunately I took a stab at some of the material and it came to light. It was good to see that I wasn’t crazy and off my rocker.

But to answer your question, we’re already starting to see some of the stuff in the form of there’s companies like Blippy that’s starting to track everything you’re doing with your credit card. It will send out tweets of what you’ve purchased. There are tools like Bazaarvoice which is a rating tool so that if you’re a company you can use Bazaarvoice as a rating tool to rate anything on your site. What Bazaarvoice already has, it’s connected to Facebook Connect so that it will pull in your friends if they’ve rated something it will show you, this is a person in your Facebook network and they rated this product.

So we’re really starting to see the early seeds of this starting to happen. When you think about Facebook Beacon, that was a product that Facebook rolled out and they rolled it out poorly because they opted everybody into it and that’s the product that was made famous by the kid who bought the engagement ring for his soon to be fiancée. Obviously she found out about it because it broadcasted on his Facebook account. So Facebook rolled it out poorly, but the thing to know is that they do have the technology that can do that. If you look at Facebook Beacon, if you look at Blippy, if you look at Bazaar it’s a beautiful thing for me to see that we’re starting to see that first step. These guys are the pioneers but we will see it progress rapidly in the next year to two years to where this material will be enabled.

The big question will be on the privacy side. They’ll have to ensure there are tools to enable the user to say, I don’t want everyone to know I’m buying this diamond ring, but if I stay at this hotel I want everyone to know what my thoughts are on it. But also foursquare, for those familiar with foursquare, that’s a tool you use with your mobile phone where if you go to a restaurant, if you go to a hotel, wherever you go, you ‘check in’. It tells you where your location is based on your GO location reading your GPS on your phone. You can put in detailed information about that restaurant that says, if you’re a healthy eater, order this instead of that because this is fried and this is actually not fried and it is whole wheat. You can do that for hotels. That’s another piece where we’re starting to see with foursquare, you’re starting to see those first steps in what I say is a social dynamic world where the products and services will find you rather than you searching for them.

David Jenyns: You mentioned the idea that a lot of businesses still aren’t getting it. You talked about a few different things there and some of the technology that is just starting to pop its head out now. That’s not to mention things like Twitter and Facebook that have been around for a little while. Where are some of the businesses getting stuck on this or how are they not quite getting it as far as the implementation of it perhaps? I’m interested to get your thoughts.

Erik Qualman: At first, this is the beauty of how quickly this material moves. If you look at ’08, one of the top questions I might have got from a company is, why do I want to do this? I don’t know if we want to do social media. At the time I’d say, it’s not a choice whether or not you do social media, the choice is how well you do it. It’s a different thing if you’re seeing it. It’s that it’s not you enabled this, it’s going to happen with or without you. So you can be an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand or you can do it. That’s ’08 where companies were saying, we’re not sure if we want to do this. If you look a year forward in ’09, all of a sudden they’re saying, ok, we understand we have to do this, what’s the ROI or how do we track this like we track everything else, how do we shout when we’re messaging like we’ve always done?
That’s where a lot of companies get it either they take old marketing constructs and force it onto social media. So that’s where we find ourselves today. There are some really good companies that are doing some progressive things and there are also companies that have gone to the step, most have gone to the step where they understand they have to play in social media. It isn’t a choice, the choice is how well they do it. They have to figure out how to do it well, but where they get hung up is they’re trying to have control. Control is the major word. They want to have control over their brand, over their messaging and they don’t realize, in order to excel in this new world, you have to relinquish some of that control that you’ve always had.

David Jenyns: Yes, so the biggest thing I suppose is that business is a little bit worried by letting it go and letting it go to the people. That could ultimately end up harming their brand which it may or may not depending on whether they have a good product or not. Are there any other areas where you can see businesses going wrong? Is that the biggest stumbling block for them?

Erik Qualman: No, there other things. I don’t blame them, this stuff is new, it’s a complete paradigm shift you’ve ever seen so I’m with them and feel the pain. Some of the places they may stumble too at first, they may just assign it to interns, they’re young, they get it, let them figure it out. Most have progressed beyond that but some get caught. They either haven’t progressed from that or some of them say, let’s just give this to the marketing department, let’s give it to the PR department, or let’s just assign three people who are focused on social media. Really that’s a big mistake, because it touches every piece of the business from customer service, to customer research, to product development, to sales to marketing, to public relations.

It really has to come from the top down. It has to come from the CEO down because it affects everyone and get everyone on the same page. Sometimes they develop strategies that are not in line with the entire strategy of the entire business.

David Jenyns: There are companies out there doing it well. I know you had a really good video that you put on YouTube. I think Socialnomics ’09 was the channel that has some good videos in there. What are some of those companies that are doing it right and how are they making it happen?
Erik Qualman: Yes, I think one company that is really interesting to look at is if you look at Ford Motor Company. Sometimes when people ask me what is the ROI of social media, I’ll give some glib response like, what is the ROI of your phone? If you took that call in from your customer, do you always give an ROI of what that is? Should you get rid of your phone? Sometimes I’ll say the ROI is that your business exists five years from now. Ford is a good example because they went full on, whole hog with social media. From the top down, the CEO said, I’m not an expert on this and I’m not a digital guy but I know that it matters more what people say about us than what we say about our product and service.

They have some smart folks in James Farley and Scott Marny and they’ve done some fairly progressive things in social media, which I won’t go into the details of. What they’ve been able to do is essentially, what is the ROI of changing the complete culture of a company like Ford? If you look at them, they were at $2 stock where now their stock is at $13 – $14. They’re the only US based automotive manufacturer that didn’t take a government loan. There are other things beside social media, don’t get me wrong. When you look at Alan Mullaly, their CEO is speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year. Those spots are normally reserved for the Steve Jobs of the world, the Bill Gates of the world. All of a sudden, if you had told me, the CEO of Ford is going to be speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, if you’d told me that three years ago, I would have lost a lot of money because I would have taken that bet every day of the week.

Now they’ve changed their culture by doing some progressive things where they give a lease of their car for free for six months to a hundred influential bloggers, and say, look, if this car is rubbish, tell us it’s rubbish. All we’re requiring you to do is write about the car and take photos for six months and you have a free lease. They do this with their Ford Fiesta, and before this product even comes to the United States, they did this internationally and all of a sudden thirty percent of generation Y is aware of the Ford Fiesta before it’s even launched in the United States.

They’ve shifted their marketing spend so that twenty-five percent of their marketing spend is in the digital and social arena, whereas most auto companies spend less than ten percent in the digital and social arena. That to me showcases the beauty of social media. It is not just a one off campaign but it is a holistic approach. Now they’ve got their product developments aligned with their marketing department because they’re taking all this information. Now they’re developing a digital cockpit so that if you’re driving you can actually verbally speak and it sends out a tweet. When you pull into your garage, the music automatically syncs in with your iTunes music at home, so it syncs up with your car.

That’s some of the beauty of some of the things that’s actually affecting how the product is being developed when you have that cultural shift. That’s Ford. There are other examples. If you’re a small business, and there might be some listeners who are more small business related, if you look at Vaynerchuck, he’s interesting because he is a family wine business. He took it from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 primarily just using social media. Gary has spun off and now does his own Vayner media company where he actually consults on how to do these things. But he took it mainly from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 using what was called Wine TV instead of just developing videos. He’s a great character and has a great sense of what wine should be, he’s not the usual boring wine expert. So he’ll get out there and eat dirt and show you why he ate dirt while he was growing up so he could develop his palate.

What’s most intriguing for Gary is that he understands what’s called the second layer of selling. The videos themselves don’t sell any wine. What sells is he goes on Twitter and sees people passing along the video or talking about the video and then he starts doing that second layer of selling which is rolling up your sleeves and doing a lot of hard work, but in the end it can really drive success. It drove him from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 specifically. For me, I’ve developed videos that fortunately have taken off virally on YouTube, so the videos over two million views Social Media Revolution, that in itself doesn’t drive book sales but it helps drive book sales a second layer. I go into a tool like Twitter and Facebook and see the conversations happening around the video. I can reach out and say, look, I’m so excited you like the video, if you read the book, let me know. They might come back and say, I didn’t even know there was a book. I just bought it and I will let you know.

So you can develop those relationships that way.

David Jenyns: It sounds like there are a few people doing it right. Probably for every success story there are ten other people who are doing it wrong and just sinking money down into a social media black hole. I think a big part of that is not understanding where to actually start. I don’t know if you’ve got any tips or if you’re doing any sort of consulting or anything like that, but how do you go about recommending where people start with social media?

Erik Qualman: The first thing I encourage people to do is, if they haven’t jumped in the water, the water’s nice, come on in and play and jump on in. The one thing to understand with social media is that you’re going to have failures. So it’s key, like you mentioned, you don’t want to sink a ton of money in something, so it’s important to keep at a beta level and to keep this stuff light and quick. Instead of sitting in your meeting rooms like we traditionally did and try to vet through things until we think it is perfect, you might have three to five months of meetings if not years. I think for a thirty second television commercial generally it takes fourteen months from conception to actual shooting to get that thing out and get it perfect. That’s not the world we live in today. I would say, fail fast, fail better and fail forward. So it’s important to know that some of the things we’re going to do and test isn’t going to work right away. But the beauty is that our consumers are going to tell us what is not working well and we just need to adjust that quickly.

So in my mind there are really four basic steps to social media success. It doesn’t guarantee success, it just helps you keep these constructs. Even if you’re what I call social media genius, by the end of the day, you should always revisit these things no matter how long you’ve been in this space to make sure you’re going back to the basics and the fundamentals. The four steps are listening to what’s being said about you, your company, your brand or product or service. The second is interacting. Once you’ve listened, then you can join that conversation. If you don’t listen and just join the conversation, it’s analogous to being that guy or girl in the room that goes into that housewarming party and sees four people talking and goes up and says, hey, what are you guys talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about, but why don’t we talk about what I want to talk about? Let’s talk about this.

You don’t want to be that type of girl at that housewarming party. You don’t want to be that person in social media room who does that. So the second step is really joining that conversation. The third step where a lot of people trip up, is actually reacting to that conversation. Reacting meaning are you adjusting your products and service based on what’s being said in those conversations? If ninety percent of people are saying, I really love this about your product or brand, then make sure you go back and talk to product development and say, let’s get this thing adjusted more. We need more of this, they love it. Conversely, if ninety percent say I don’t understand this, I hate this about your product and service, make sure you’re getting that vetted out and adjusted quickly. That’s where a lot of people trip up. They’re not quick enough to react to what’s being said.

The fourth piece is really selling. If you do the first three, if you listen, interact and react properly then the fourth is almost going to happen on its own. You just need a soft push out the door for that one. Now, when you look at that, if you listen, interact, react and sell, the beauty is, and that is why I call it four steps, because I call it the social media escalator because on the flip side, your customer does the exact same thing. They listen to what they think your product and service is going to deliver, so they have an expectation set, then what they are going to do is interact with your product and service, i.e. they’re going to use it and the third thing is they’re going to react. Did they enjoy their experience based on their expectation, did it do what they thought it was going to deliver?

That reaction, whether it was good or whether it’s bad is then going to determine the fourth step which is they’re going to sell for or against you using these same social media tools. If you did things properly, the first four steps, then all of a sudden you see this escalator. If you think about an escalator in a mall, then it keeps going around and around and that’s the beauty of it. Then you go from word of mouth to what I call world of mouth and you have the power that enables all that.
It’s important to adhere to those four steps, again, even if you’ve been in the space for a long, long time.

It’s important to revisit those. A lot of times when I talk to people they’ll say, oh, yes listening, we’ve got that. That is so 2007. I’ll say, ok, are you giving your CEO a listening report? Are they going to report once a week that’s one page that says, here’s what most people say they like about the product and here’s what most people say they don’t like about the product? Are you also doing that for your competitors? A lot of times they will say, oh yes, I guess we’re not doing that as well as we should be.

David Jenyns: I guess to break it down even more, to almost like a step by ste, when you say listen and you talked about a listening report, what does that involve? Are we talking setting up Google Alerts or how are you keeping an eye on those sorts of things?

Erik Qualman: That’s a great question. On the listening side, if you don’t have a ton of budget or are just starting out, you can get by using tools like Google Alert, so you sign up for terms around your product or your brand. Those are extremely helpful. You can also go to Twitter and do a search on your product brand or the names of whatever you’re interested in, or your competitors or a name in your vertical that you think there is going to be a conversation about. So that’s the other way you can do that and pull that information in. Then there’s also the third thing you can do, you can use a tool like Technorati that’s designed to go after all the blogs.

There’s also Google Search for Blogs, so you can use that as well. So those are all free tools that are out there that over time you get a sweet spot. It’s a lot of work to listen to all that , but over time you’ll get a sweet spot, where, ok, I’m going to get the major component mainly from Google Alert and when I do a search on Twitter. If you have a bigger budget, you can go and use specific tools that are designed to listen across the web for this type of thing. A tool that is really at the forefront right now and who knows if over time it is going to remain there, but a lot of companies use called Radian6. What that does, it not only allows you to pull in information that is being said across the web but you can also write up sentiments, was it a positive post, was it medium, was it negative? Also some of these tools have workflow capability to where you can assign a task to someone to actually respond to that person.

Those kinds of tools enable you to have these listing reports. At the end of the day, with all these tools, sometimes you have to have that final person that actually puts it together. This is fairly laborious, that executive report. It’s laborious but it’s good in that it forces someone that’s at that level before they hand it to the CEO to review and look at it to be aware of what is being said out there.

David Jenyns: When you’re looking for what things are being said, and then you talk about joining the conversation, are you then talking about wherever there is any mention of your product, services or company, or here is where the bulk of the conversation is going on over in Twitter or perhaps on this particular blog. Now let’s assign someone to jump in there as a representative or how does that work for the interact side of things?

Erik Qualman: The interactive side is interesting because the beauty of starting with that listening is, the reports will showcase what’s the scale of what’s being said out there and for a lot of companies it can be overwhelming and somewhat daunting. Social media is actually causing not a reorganization but a repurposing of talent. So if you think about it, it is analogous to when email came out and you always had that call centre and customer service centre that answered the calls. Then they realized, wait, email is a more efficient way to do this. They repurposed a lot of that personnel to start using email. Obviously they started with the best and brightest to start off this new tool. You’re seeing the same thing happen on Twitter. That’s why with Comcast they assign their best and brightest. Once Frank Eliason said I’m going to use this tool, then all of a sudden it took off then they started to assign some of their best and brightest within their customer service centre to get it right from the get go. Jet Blue, Zappos has also done a good job of doing that.

It definitely affects the organizational structure in terms of, ok, how do we repurpose some of our existing talent to utilize this? What they’ll find is that just like email before it, when we look back fifteen years ago, at the time we were wrestling with the same thing and then all of a sudden we said, wait, this is not a problem, this is a huge opportunity where it is quicker, faster and better for us to respond to our customer using these types of tools.

One example I like to showcase, a personal example which happened to me in the last two weeks, even surprised me in terms of the power of social media. My wife was on a call, she was on hold for two hours with Jet Blue, she had a wait time for two hours. There was a lot of bad weather where she was flying. I said, that’s ridiculous, let me see if I can send out a Tweet to Jet Blue because they’re one of the best at this. I sent this Tweet out expecting not to get a reply and I didn’t get a reply. So I was a little disappointed. I sent a Tweet that said what are our options? We’re trying to fly out of Austin, Texas and get back to the north east but we know all the flights are cancelled for Sunday. I sent that Tweet out.

I didn’t get a response from them, but thirty other people who were in Austin who were wrestling with that same problem who had already got through on the phone with Jet Blue. They replied and said, look, all the flights are cancelled not only for Sunday but the first available flight on Jet Blue which is a local carrier in the United States, is on Thursday. You’re going to book a two hour drive to Houston on Continental to get that done. So what that did was save us two hours’ waiting on hold and started us to do our action to get things completed. It saved Jet Blue at least one call because the people who were on Twitter answered our question for us. Even though it didn’t come on Jet Blue and shame on them, it did answer our question. I’m sure there were other people who saw that answer who also hung up their phones as well. It took a lot of calls that were coming into their call centre out so that’s some of that exponential return that you don’t even think about when it comes to social media along that interactive piece.

David Jenyns: You talked about the step after that and I suppose the idea to react and how Jet Blue would handle that same situation next time if they were monitoring that and getting their listening report. I suppose is it just taking that information that comes from that listening report and then feeding that over to whoever is creating the product or service or the offering for the client?

Erik Qualman: Yes, that’s the key, trying to figure out, ok if I listen to this specific example and how do we resolve this the next time there is a monumental storm out there on the east coast and we’re going to get the same question over and over again. Is there a way? And that’s when they need to go to talk to the folks that actually run the operations. Also, think about it, they’re going to have to talk to the legal, because they’re going to say, ok, can we just send out a tweet that helps to blanket and answers most people’s questions quickly with their options or how does that work through?

Sometimes it’s easier to look at a physical product. If you see a ton of people complaining about, saying this thing always breaks off. If it gets over 80 degrees, this thing has the capability to break off. That’s a lot easier to resolve, you just go down to product services and say, look, we’ve got the world’s biggest focus group on steroids and we’ve got two hundred people on different areas of the web, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, even someone posted on Wikipedia, that this thing has fail points at 80 degrees and it seems to break off when it gets warm. So you can give that to your product development team and get that fixed.

So marketers’ jobs change to where they’re going to sit very close, instead of sitting there trying to figure out the greatest messaging of all time, they’re going to sit closely with the product development team to quickly get to these problems because that’s going to be a beautiful thing for the consumer as well.

David Jenyns: And then I suppose the idea that the best type of marketing there is, is just having a really good product and then hopefully using the internet to get that word out. I suppose that leads into that idea of what you call the soft sell and then how does that then interact? Obviously there is a big faux pas that a lot of people make in the social media space which is very much, and you talk about it , the idea that people go wrong, businesses go wrong because they go for this really hard sell. How do you incorporate the soft sell into this process?

Erik Qualman: Sometimes with the soft sell, within the first three steps you’re already in a relationship with these folks. So that soft sell can be easy. Jet Blue is a good example where it pulls a thirty minute segment, just all the different tweets. It showed thirty minutes and it didn’t touch every piece of that business. A gentleman during that thirty minutes tweeted, ‘Hey, is Jet Blue still running that all you can eat special?’ That’s the push. All they need to do is say, ‘Hey, look we’re still running that special. You’ve got two more days to do it. Here’s the link and how you do it. Any questions let us know.’ So that’s a good prime example, one that I just came across recently to where it is that soft push to get those folks to get over the line.

But also too you can look for other stuff like that, if you go back to that first step listening, sometimes a lot of what’s being said is questions about, ‘Hey, has anyone tried this line? Is it any good?’ Then you can jump in and reply to that quickly because they do want to hear from the company. You just have to make sure you’re not shouting that message. If you reply to that, you can put ‘Yes it’s good’ with the wink, and then say, ‘But don’t take our word for it, here’s a listing for all the current reviews for that specific service or product you’re wondering about.’

David Jenyns: I think the hardest thing for companies to take what it is that you’re talking about here is then, what’s the ROI going to be? You talked a little bit about that. When we compare it to things like SEO and pay per click where you’re driving traffic to a specific landing page with a very clear outcome or objective you’re trying to achieve, so it is very easy to measure those analytics and that conversion rate. With social media it feels a little more like a branding exercise. People always talk about, when branding, it’s just like the people with the deepest pockets win. What are your thoughts on that?

Erik Qualman: My thoughts are that some pieces of social media you can measure hard and fast like we’ve always traditionally done. Some of examples of that are Mininovo, their achievable cost savings, 20% reduction in call centre activities, as customers go to their community website for answers. If you look at Burger King’s Whopper sacrifice Facebook program. Their program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32,000,000 media impressions which roughly amounts to $400,000 return, so $50,000 you get $400,000 out of that. Dell computers sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.

If you look at the stuff down the line, you can do it that way. What I like to stress to folks is, if you’re doing that, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice because this stuff is much bigger than any of that. The way to look at it is really how do you look at it holistically to drive it back to how many sales resulted in it in total? So what I like to look at, you mentioned SEO. It’s very similar to look back ten years ago when Google really became huge. A lot of good companies didn’t jump into search engine optimization right away. Seventy per cent of the clicks happened in the organic listing, thirty percent happened on the paid side. So some companies were slow to jump on the paid wagon. Good companies jumped on the paid wagon because it showed in ROI right away but search engine optimization in the middle where seventy percent of the clicks happened, is somewhat of a black box. Yet they’d put in time and effort and take IT resources off the desk to adjust your site so that you would show up high in rankings for cheap travel, for mortgage lender, whatever the main term is you were trying to go for.

But what the great companies did, they didn’t sit back and say what is the ROI of organic search engine optimization? Great companies jumped in and said, ok, I understand this is going to be a game changer for us if we can get ranked high in these and it’s good for our brand. So they jumped in and started to make those investments. Those companies that did, even though it’s tough to track that actual hard return, they just knew if they ranked high in those organic listings that probably served them well. It did serve them well in billions of dollars if you ranked for cheap travel, if you ranked for mortgage returns. So I like to use that analogy with companies. Now companies say, ok, yes, everyone understands SEO. Why wouldn’t you do that? I say, well, at some point in time not everyone did, and we’re at that point in time with social media. So you need to look at it across all different facets.

There are other things like for causes, tweets for a cause. They sent a tweet out in Atlanta Georgia and they got 11,000 visitors in twenty-four hours to their site, a brand new site. So they chewed that all out from scratch, 11,000 visitors just by doing that. If you look on down the line, even looking at the election here, not to be US centric, but if you look at the election here Barak Obama would never have defeated Hillary Clinton without the internet and probably not without social media. Ninety-two percent of his donations were increments of less than $100. Obama did that not because he was brilliant. It’s the only thing he had in his toolbox that he’d be able to beat Hillary with from the standpoint that she controlled the Democratic party. He had to do that strategy. It turns out it was brilliant because it showcased the power of social media.

On down the line there are those hard and fast examples, but I always like to tell companies, if you’re just looking at direct return, this stuff is so much bigger than that and you’re really doing yourself a disservice.
David Jenyns: It sounded like there are, I suppose, two parts to social media bubbled up for me there. One part is very much talking about what you were saying, the listen, interact, react and your soft sell. The other part is the strategic plays like you talked about in one of those videos you talked about a Facebook application that helped sell the Whopper. There are different examples of applications and actual strategies for using social media versus just interacting with your customers. Are they two separate things do you think? Or are they very much interwoven with what you were talking about with the listen, interact, react and soft sell?

Erik Qualman: Yes, you want the whole strategy to be holistic in nature but there are definitely some things that you can one-off. Where you can buy Facebook ads. You can buy ads on Facebook where you can target down to I only want to show this ad to people who went to this university and graduated within this timeframe. If you’re very savvy you can actually, if I knew enough about you, David, I could probably get it to where it actually served an ad only to you. So if you look at those things, that’s kind of hard and fast stuff on Facebook ads to where it will show that direct return and quickly do that.
What I like to argue with them is, yes, do that but you don’t understand that the other pieces of the puzzle are much bigger than that. That’s why a group did a study and what they showed was who was deeply and widely engaged in social media. What they saw was those companies that were deeply and widely engaged in social media on average increased their revenue by 18%. They only looked at public companies, 18%. Companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline by 6%. Statistics will tell you anything you want, but I thought it was interesting that this group who had studied public companies showed that those engaged highly in it showed an increase of 18%, those that weren’t, showed a decline of 6%.

David Jenyns: It sounds like there is a huge amount of opportunity there. Still we’re very much in the early days. One of the questions you ask in your book is, can Google predict the next president or the flu outbreak? What is it that you were trying to suggest there?

Erik Qualman: These things always get me super excited from a standpoint of if you look at a tool like Google Insights and they provide the search data over time. If you’re looking at the flu outbreak, historically what they’d have to figure out at least in the United States is that the Centre for Disease Control is out of Atlanta. They would look to see where the shipments were being made or requested from. They would have a six weeks’ delay on where they thought the flu was going to go based on that data. That’s historically how they’ve based where the flu is going to outbreak.

What we can do now in the here and now, we can see what searches are occurring where. So if more searches were occurring on the flu in certain geographical areas, they’d be able to figure out the regressions shows that ok, this is now two weeks faster than anything we’ve ever historically been able to tell just by looking at where a search is for H1N1, where a search is for flu vaccine increasing. Instead of relying on shipments based on requests from doctors for flu vaccine, now they can see, ok, where is that search data happening?

That goes back, even when I worked at Yahoo, we saw a bunch of searches increase for an unknown person at the time named Brittany Spears. What we did was work with one of our major clients at the time which was Pepsi and they were abler to sign Brittany on the cheap because they were able to see we didn’t know who she was but there was a ton of searches occurring on or about her.

As you look forward into the social media, you get more robust from that standpoint. You will be able to see, within Facebook there are more and more searches happening around this new celebrity that is coming from fourteen year olds. There is that data that’s already inputted into Facebook where they can aggregate that data. So it is a powerful thing. They’ve also shown stuff with Twitter. They can’t tell before the movie comes out which is intriguing to me, but they can tell once a movie is released, based on the amount of tweets that are happening around that movie they can do a better regression to indicate how big that movie is going to be from a box office sales perspective. So they don’t have to wait for the box office sales to come in. They can actually see, if this amount of tweets happen within three days of the movie release, it’s got an x percentage chance to be successful.

It excites me that way from a data perspective. Also something that excites me is, how can we live in a world today and not have online voting? If you get to that online voting piece, it will be interesting to see how we handle that. We are going to have online voting in our lifetimes. The question is, do you start to release data for people who voted early? It will be intriguing to see how that works moving forward.
David Jenyns: It almost feels like using that data you can, like you said predict things that are about to happen or there are the early indications and then get on that wave and then ride it. Coming from my stock market background, I always find that sort of thing interesting because that’s effectively what you’re doing when you’re looking at stock charts. You’re looking for things that are starting to break out and then you get on very early and then continue to ride that train. You mentioned some of the things. You mentioned foursquare before, and I know there are other things like Yelp as far as these geo targeting or geo applications that are popping up on phones. That’s a big opportunity. Do you see any other opportunities or even to delve deeper into that one of things that are coming down the pipe because you’re very much on the forefront?

Erik Qualman: Yes I think the big opportunity there is to go on foursquare. If you go locally obviously people are talking about if you go into or near a restaurant or near a store, it will send a text to your phone or a tweet whatever you want to have it come to your phone and say, hey, you can have 10% off if you come in right now and order this, or there’s a free appetizer available. If you think about Minority Report, that movie with Tom Cruise, that’s the deal where they’re reading out that RO5 tag that he removed from the shirt that said, ‘Hey Tom, welcome back. We’ve got a pants on special that matches that shirt.’ That movie was cool because they only used things that were already in the making that actually could be possible. Everything they used in that movie actually had to be presently possible to do.

Looking one step beyond foursquare, I think that people might be missing the boat or they’re not talking about yet is that actually everything in the future is going to be rated. The question is how do you get buy end from your customer to rate something? The best way to do it is to make it as easy as possible. So if you use technology like a foursquare to when you’re leaving that standard hotel in Sydney Australia, you’re leaving that hotel in Australia, you’re asked, ‘Did you stay at that hotel? Do you mind answering these three questions and it will take forty-five seconds.’ If you had a company do it they’re going to ask you fifty questions and it’s going to take you ten minutes and you’re not going to do it. But you can utilize that technology and once you leave it’s actually in your hand held device to actually rate that hotel quickly. That’s where I think some of that technology can be better enabled.

The one thing that really excites me, I talk about e readers. So you think about the Kindle and the iPad. Some people say, why do you talk about that? It’s not social in nature. I say, these things are hugely social in nature down the line. When you and I went to school, we walked into a used bookstore and hoped that the person in front of us was half way smart and highlighted and took notes in that text book. But now if you have those e readers and those iPads, you can actually grab all the notes and all the highlights from the A+ students’ notes and highlights. So from an educational standpoint that is huge. The author can actually say, give me that data because I’m rewriting the revised version of that textbook. So I can see, well, this is where people got hung up, this is where people love it, so now I’m going to rewrite this based on this data that is coming back.

The other thing about e readers and also iPads or tablets or whatever you want to call them, a book didn’t historically have that product placement capability like a thirty minute sit com. We see product placement in movies and TV shows now. You can now have that in books and it won’t be intrusive because it is up to the reader whether they want that. But it is another revenue stream for the publishers and authors. If I’m going to write about an Italian restaurant in Sydney and I don’t know the area very well, I can go this new repository that says, here are fifteen Italian restaurants. You can pull a specific name of a restaurant and put it in your book. You might get paid for that brand awareness from that restaurant. But then the beauty is that the reader, if they want to, they can roll over that in the e reader and it can actually show them an image of that restaurant. If they want to see the menu, if they want to click through they can. It’s not a zero sum game, it will be up to the reader if they want to do that or if they want to picture it in their mind when they read. It’s all up to them so it is freedom of choice. There are some exciting things that are happening on the e reader side as well.

David Jenyns: Yes, there were some fantastic insights there and I think just that whole idea, especially getting clients to rate things, it’s almost like an instant testimonial and testimonials are extremely important for driving marketing. To keep on the front of this wave, in the world of social media, I’m curious to know how you keep on top of it. Who are the people who you keep an eye on and watch?
Erik Qualman: There are so many great people out there I love to read up on. Some of the top ones are Guy Kawasaki, he’s a great one to follow. He’s been in the digital space for a long time. Chris Brogan, he’s the author of Trust Agents. He’s one of the world’s top bloggers, so he’s in the space. He’s just a really great guy as well. Marie Smith is someone good to know. If you’re reading up, some good work is Mashable, that’s great, it is Pete Cashmore. You can follow Pete as well, he’s a great guy and has a lot of great insights. Mashable is fantastic. If you want to get more of a different spin, sometimes The Huffington Post, they still cover technology but they have more of a political spin on those things. But those are some of the main things and people I read.

David Jenyns: I know a little while ago you had a post on your blog where you were talking about some of the main people. So people should definitely head over to your blog. Where are some places people can find out more about you, blog included?

Erik Qualman: The best place to find out about me is if you go to socialnomics.com. You’re exactly right, I’ve got a couple of posts that talk about the social media allstars. I also had a bracket run against where people got to vote for who the best expert was. It was fun to see that play out. If you ever want to get hold of me personally, I love talking to people, listeners, but also readers. Equalman on Twitter, gmail, Yahoo, it’s just e and my last name Qualman, so it’s equalman. My parents were on the forefront with the foresight to see we were all going to have email addresses and Twitter accounts, so I got lucky with equalman.

David Jenyns: Well, I know you’re definitely someone who keeps their finger on the pulse and you’re someone I keep an eye on. I’d just like to thank you for your time. You’re very generous and I’m looking forward to seeing what else you come out with down the pipeline.

Erik Qualman: I appreciate it David. If you’re ever up in Boston, definitely swing in, but hopefully I’ll be in Australia before then because I love that part of the world and I’d love to meet up with you face to face.

David Jenyns: Sounds like a plan. Thanks again.

Erik Qualman: Thanks.

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Yaro Starak

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Name: Yaro Starak

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Product: www.membershipsitemastermind.com

Yaro Starak’s Bio: Yaro Starak is one of the top professional bloggers today. Since 1998, he has created, managed and sold several Internet businesses. His blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, is making $20,000 each month. His ebook, “Blog Profits Blueprint”, has taught thousands of people how to start and earn a healthy income from their blogs.

Yaro Starak teaches people how to earn a full income by blogging part time through his Blog Mastermind coaching program. He also teaches people how to launch online membership sites through his Membership Site Mastermind course.

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David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com. I’m really excited today because I’ve managed to line up an interview for you guys with Yaro Starak. I first met Yaro Starak at Ed Dale’s event which has just gone past now and Yaro was in town. We talked about catching up and recording an interview for you guys just to bring you up to speed with what he’s doing. Also the hot topic at the moment is flipping websites and buying and selling websites and Yaro Starak has had quite a lot of experience with that. Having done my first one, I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk about that.

Before we dive into that though, for those of you who don’t know much about Yaro, you should definitely take a look, check out his blog. We’ll give some of the details at the end of the interview. I think what I most like about Yaro Starak is, you can see it from his blog and all of his posts, is the personality he injects into there. He very much shoots down the line, tells it how it is. He doesn’t hype things up. I think he really speaks from the heart and I think that’s one of the reasons I really resonated with Yaro’s work. I’m really looking forward to digging in with what we’ve got.

Yaro Starak: Thanks for having me.

David Jenyns: So to start off with, I know you’ve done a few blog posts on your website, about buying and selling websites. Perhaps you can take us through the process of maybe starting with, someone’s got a little bit of a float together. Maybe they’ve got $3,000 or $5,000. What are some of the things they should look for when wanting to buy a website?

Yaro Starak: I probably should start by explaining how I got into buying and selling websites. First it was something I didn’t even realize was a possibility. Basically it is a very simple story. I was crossing the street. I’m from Brisbane Australia. I was in the Queen Street mall in Brisbane.

I was at a stage in my internet marketing where I had a website focused on a card game. I had a forum; there was quite a bit of use. Maybe five hundred people were there trading their cards every day. I was making about $500 a month in advertising roughly, around about that. It was like a hobby that I had when I was in university and high school as well. It meant I didn’t have to get a job but I’d well and truly got over that card game and I wasn’t really interested in developing that website any further.

I didn’t really know what to do. I was managing it myself. It wasn’t too much work but I had some other business projects going on that I was more interested in. I could really use the money. I was thinking about traveling, I was thinking about maybe hiring some more staff and things like that. One day I was walking across the street and I thought, I have a website that makes $500 a month, that is $6,000 a year. It’s fairly auto pilot. I’ve got staff writers, it pretty much generates value without me. It’s a forum, so it generates traffic by itself, people come and use it every day. I thought, this is a saleable asset.

It was like a light bulb. I’d never really considered a website before that as a saleable asset, especially the lower level websites. I thought obviously around that time there was the dot com boom, so you had all the stupid valuations of multi million dollar websites. That wasn’t something I considered I would do at the time just coming from Brisbane. But I had this website making a bit of money so it had value.

So what I did was, I sold that and it was the first time I had ever sold a website. I got about $13,500 for it. At the time that was about how much money I made in a year as a university student. It was a fairly big lump sum of cash and it was eye opening. That was the biggest thing. It made me realize it was possible. So that’s an important thing to mention because it’s your mindset. You’ve got to think about your website as an asset which is something I hadn’t done beforehand.

David Jenyns: When you first built it, you weren’t building it with the idea to sell it. When you know that you’re getting into buying and selling websites, if you think of the end person that you’re going to sell it to and then that way you can market it to them. With that not in mind, and you built it up, obviously it had value there. How did you identify someone who would buy it? Did you go to a market place?
Yaro Starak: The first example is probably the most typical. Maybe it is typical but not what you would expect to happen. This makes a lot of sense. I was probably a little bit ahead of my time there. The Sitepoint marketplace which became Flippa wasn’t in my radar at the time. I’m sure it was around but I’m not sure if it was established yet as a website flipping trading community.

My initial thought for selling this website was to go to the people who would currently stand to gain the most from owning it. From my point of view these were the current sponsors of the website, so people paying money to put banners on the site. Also they were perhaps any of the current readers, so people who were trading cards in my forum. Basically it was the audience around that community.

The first thing I did was, I went and contacted my sponsors, I put a little post on the forum. I also went to some of the stores in Australia that sold the cards. I figured if they’re selling the cards and they have an online presence, they could benefit from owning this website.

Eventually I found a buyer through that method. They took over the site. In fact the buyer ended up being one of the largest forum card traders. So they spent quite a big part of the day buying and selling cards and had an inventory $20,000 worth of cards for sale in my forum. So they went and bought the whole website and continued to grow it and as far as I know they still own it.

That was a case where it was the existing community where I found the buyer. Later on I did more specific flipping style trades I went from there and in fact I guess this is a nice connection to how I eventually started a proper strategy of website flipping, the experience I had owning a forum. I really loved that because for me that was a very low labour method of having a self perpetuating website. People came to the forum for a reason. In this case they came to trade cards. I didn’t do anything to market, it spread word of mouth, search traffic brought in some visitors and basically the site ran itself once it reached a point.

I had to deal with a few technical things now and then when something went wrong, but most of the time it was just every day people coming there because they wanted to be there. That was great, it was free traffic and I really loved that model.

When I went looking to deliberately acquire some websites, I actually tried to replicate what I already knew. I knew two things at the time. I understood forums. I knew how they worked, how they could potentially make money without you doing much work. I also knew blogging because by the time I was doing this I was already running my own blog. I understood blogs are based on content, and how to make money from them. They were the two things I focused on. More forums to be honest.

Every day I watched, it was called Sitepoint at the time, now it’s Flippa. I just watched to see if there were any sites that flagged the right criteria for me. That’s A were they a forum, B, did the forum have a certain number of daily new posts and replies? So I just wanted to see repetitive action, people actually participating in the community, how many active members were in the community at any point in time, how long the forum had been on line, what was the unique visitor count, and was it making any money, what market was it in?

Those are the sort of criteria I look for. I knew if I could find a forum which matched my criteria, I could take it over, usually improve it by adding some more monetization, perhaps increasing the number of banners I had on the site, maybe adding an email list and even adding a blog to it.

So that is what I did and I started monitoring Flippa and in fact I will tell you a couple of case studies from my experience with that. The first site was a package deal. It was on the subject of mini bikes. It was very niche. I had no idea what it was when I first saw it. These are basically full, proper motorcycles, but in miniature. They are designed for kids basically and it’s a huge and popular thing to do.

These sites which I bought were actually forums based in Australia, so it was on the Australian mini bike community. Kids were coming there and they’d talk about mini bikes; they’d sell parts, they’d sell bikes. It was not huge as a forum, not a massive niche, especially when you focus on Australia only, but there were two forums in this case in the deal. They were popular and they were making money. I saw avenues to grow the revenue and I acquired them for $12,000. I think at the time they were making $1,000 a month, so I paid twelve times that to acquire the sites.

I then went to work improving the income. In this case it wasn’t a dramatic increase. I think we went from $1,000 to about $2,000 a month in revenue. I owned that for several years and eventually I sold them for double. So it was a nice flip, I ended up making twice as much money as I invested. I made a consistent income stream. In fact they paid for themselves by about month eight of holding them. I’d actually paid for how much it cost to buy them.

David Jenyns: When did that happen? I know you mentioned holding them for a couple of years. Obviously, like I mentioned at the start, buying and selling websites is quite hot at the moment. I’m wondering if that helped fund the increase that you got? You said you sold them for double the value or was it you adding the value into the site and then the way that you remarketed it? I’m just wondering where that value was created.

Yaro Starak: It was definitely increasing the amount of money it was producing so that increases the asset value. Most sites out there, if they’re not run by a person who understands internet marketing, they’re not going to inherently know how to improve the performance of a website. In this case, the advertising was Google AdSense and there was one sponsor, maybe two who were paying a monthly fee to put a banner on the site.

So I had a guy, I wasn’t partnering with him, but he was put in charge of these websites and I’d pay him a percentage of the money generated from the advertising, the AdSense. The onus was on him to increase the advertising performance, he got paid more from that turn around. It took the management role off my hands.
What we did was fairly simple. We bought a site and we said ok, let’s go do some googling and find any potential sponsors. Usually there are other sites out there that are retailers of products, and in this case they were miniature bikes. There were other sites selling mini bike products.

All we did was send them an email saying, we’ve got this website, it gets this much traffic, it’s the type of audience you want, we’ve got two more banner positions available, it’s first come first served, it is $100 a month or whatever it was. We increased the amount of inventory we could sell and we increased the amount of sponsors we had.

That immediately had a bottom line effect without doing anything else because they were just paying money to access the existing audience. That’s a simple thing to do, just try and find more sponsors and also add more places to sponsor your site.

I can’t remember the specifics, but we probably had a banner in the top somewhere and maybe one in the footer. We added a right sidebar, maybe we added some text links, maybe we added some banners in between posts. So we just increased the inventory so we had more to sell to more sponsors. You might get a bit of complaining from the community but usually they adapt pretty quickly. If the sponsors are on target they don’t mind because they get exposed to places they can buy what they’re there for anyway which in this case was miniature bike products. That worked well.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think there are a couple of things there. Both examples that you were talking about, the common element seemed to me to be the idea that you are making these check moves. You’re getting out there and making an offer to someone.

As simple as it is, it is rare to get out there and send an email to someone and say here is an offer, apart from spammers and spammers are getting out there and sending it. To do it in a classy way and targeting it to the individual and saying, hey, I know you’re interested in this particular niche, I have a website, here’s what I have to offer you, that in itself is very targeted. I think that creates the opportunity there.

The good thing about flipping websites, I suppose it’s like the real estate market in that it is an illiquid market when I compare it to the stock market. The stock market has a market that is traded and the buy and sell prices are very much regulated and it’s a lot more liquid because you have a lot more buyers and sellers and it’s a lot tighter. When you look at an illiquid market, real estate is a good example or even websites. Websites are even less known and the industry is still in its infancy, there is a lot of opportunity there.
I’m wondering have you ever thought about the idea of even approaching websites that aren’t listing on Flippa and then saying, I want to buy this particular site and then reselling them straight on Flippa?

Yaro Starak: I got out of buying and selling websites a couple of years ago to focus on my core blogging business. This buying and selling websites was never a full time thing for me. It was always a part time thing. I reinvested profits from blogging from my other business into buying these acquisitions.
At the time I think my goal was just to say, if I can buy a website and make $1,000 a month from it, let’s have ten, let’s have twenty, why not? I ended up not chasing that goal to the very end because I realized every time I bought a new website, it was almost like starting a new business in a way.

You basically create, not necessarily a lot of labour. I was good with having someone help me manage the sites. It was more a case of mindshare. I had to think about owning these sites and that created stress, simply put. I wasn’t after much more stress. So in the course of my website flipping experiences, I bought and sold three packages. That was buying a site, building it up and selling it, plus I had two of my own creations, websites I built up from scratch myself and then sold. So I did about five or six deals in the time frame I was doing this.

To answer your question from before, we’re talking from the first time I built a website which would have been about 1999 – 2000, to maybe 2006, 2007 was the last time I sold a website and liquidated all my assets beyond my core blogging business. I don’t think it was a case of it suddenly becoming more popular to buy and sell websites. Flippa, Sitepoint helped. It found me places I could buy sites from.

Most of the time I sold sites, though I didn’t go back to Sitepoint. I would actually sell them through the contacts I had. A good thing about being a person who makes money online space as a teacher and writer in that area, I knew other people in internet marketing. I could get on to someone and say, do you know anyone who wants to buy a miniature bike site? It makes $2,000 a month. Have you got anyone who might be keen to take it over? Eventually you find a buyer just through your contacts.

David Jenyns: It’s funny to say the way you’ve gone through that evolution and I think I like your domain name for that reason. It’s like the Entrepreneur’s Journey, it’s that idea of the evolution. We looked at where you’ve moved to now, and again that’s another thing that I admire about what your do. You build the business based around your lifestyle. Rather than feel like you’re tied to a particular business, if it’s not helping you achieve what it is that you want, you leave it. There’s extra time for skating and going on holidays.

Yaro Starak: Yes, freedom is my core motivation. I always choose to forego an opportunity if it means it’s going to create excess stress. I’m not willing to take on something like that for the potential reward. So right now I do very little, to put it bluntly.

David Jenyns: The two hour work day.

Yaro Starak: That’s the one.

David Jenyns: It’s evolved now and what are you working on right now? You’re doing the professional blogging I suppose and it’s almost like you’re building up that personality and that brand. I’m interested to get whether this is something you had thought through, the process of yes, this is the direction I’m heading, or did you just kind of fall into that space?

Yaro Starak: It was definitely a case of falling into it, more than anything else. It really is hard to look back and say I knew anything would happen. My blog was started as an experiment into SEO, something you got into. I was running a proof reading business. Actually a friend came to me and said, these blog things are really popular at the moment. They’re great for search traffic and you should maybe check them out and get one for your proofing business.

I didn’t know what blog meant. I googled and found out. Then I found some software you could install called Moveable Type. I added that to my proof reading business and for three months I very sporadically tried to write about the subject of proof reading, not really the subject of proof reading, but what I thought would bring customers to a proof reading business. This was the driest and most boring subject matter ever, so it didn’t last very long.

That is why that blog wasn’t really successful but it was a great experience to own a blog and know how it works and what the software does. It was good for getting your head around the difference between a blog and a website, which for some people is very subtle.

I then decided, I actually liked this blogging thing. I’m just going to start Entrepreneur’s Journey. The domain name is terrible. It is entrepreneurs-journey.com. First of all, no one can spell entrepreneurs, it’s got a hyphen in it, I don’t own the version of it without the hyphen, so it’s just not a great domain name in terms of what you’d advise people to register nowadays. But it’s turned out to be a very accurate brand for what the blog is about.

I’ve been writing to it for five years. It has become and always has been, a chronicle of my entrepreneur’s journey. The reason I can’t say I knew anything would happen in hindsight, is because it literally started as a hobby. I decided to tell stories from the different businesses I had run. I found out that I liked writing. I hadn’t had any experience as a writer. I got a grade A in high school for English. That is the extent of my qualifications as a writer.

It turns out people enjoyed the writing style and they subscribed to my writing. I just kept leveraging that and kept enjoying it. Five years later, everything else I did has been sold off and I basically leverage, as you said, and I brand, my blog’s brand and traffic to build an email list, sell my products, sell affiliate products and do advertising. Everything is all around, you could say it is my name, but it’s not just the name, it’s how you write, what you talk about. You do video, you do audio, you do interviews like we’re doing now, and your voice and your face is on screen.

All these things come to have an impact on the people who come into contact with your work and that can influence their decision to buy from you later on. You’re obviously running a business around your blog.

David Jenyns: So you’re building a relationship obviously with those clients and potential clients in this industry, this make money industry. We talked about the idea of building your brand. You said you’re building your own personal brand, but you’re also bonding with the style of writing you’re doing. Have you thought about shifting over into the yarostarak.com? No doubt you’ve registered that.

Yaro Starak: It’s rather hard to spell. Are you saying, not just changing the domain but changing the direction of what I’m doing?

David Jenyns: Yes, because it sounds like you’ve moulded now. You fell into the Entrepreneur’s Journey and now you’re finding your voice and people are listening to you as Yaro. You’ve created that brand now. If you look at people like, I think at the moment, Gary Vaynerchuck is a perfect example of someone who is leveraging his own personal brand. We’re seeing a lot more of that and I’m wondering whether you’re falling into that space?

Yaro Starak: I definitely have to think that a lot of my success is based on leveraging personality power which Gary is obviously a big proponent of. It is probably the strongest point of differentiation we have, not necessarily as business people unless your business is focused on maybe expertise, it’s training based, it’s information based.

There are examples we can obviously cite in the business world where the personality brand can take you across as many different industries as you can think of. Richard Branson is the obvious first choice. Virgin, that brand, and Richard himself, just goes across any market you can think of, from weddings to travel to mortgages to insurance, mobile phones, it’s ridiculous. He can do whatever he wants and the brand carries weight and has value in that marketplace.

Right now if people come in contact with my work, they think of me first, as there is the guy who teaches people how to make money blogging. That’s it because that is often the reason they are directed to my work. They download my free reports, they study that and then they take my course, they read some blog articles. That’s great. That is the basis of how I can make a living. Obviously I teach more than that. I do think that in the future, in the very near future I’ll branch out to subjects other than making money specifically.

The beautiful thing about it is it will be what I’m interested in at the time. I’m enjoying the personal development more as the subject matter. One of the funny things is, hopefully if you’re reading this someday you can experience this too, is when you reach a level where your income is fairly constant and you cover your bases in terms of your financial goals. If you’re clear headed enough not to get caught into that cycle of always wanting to make more money for the sake of making more money, it’s a dangerous one when you start making money. If you break that and you sit down and realize, I’m financially secure, you no longer have to think about whether life is just about becoming financially secure.

For a lot of people that is the number one thing. They are suffering, or they’re frustrated, they’re working towards paying off the mortgage, getting a better job, advancing in their career, whatever it is, it’s all to do with making more money. Once you take away that money issue, you’re faced with a bunch of questions you never thought you’d have to try and figure out.

David Jenyns: What do you do now?

Yaro Starak: If I made money and I just traveled around the world all day long, you realize that’s not fulfilling forever. Sure it’s nice to have a holiday. I traveled for eight months in 2008, but I didn’t want to do that forever. Some people think you’d buy nice cars, you’d live in fancy houses and eat nice food. I love the example, it’s funny I think I may have done a law of attraction as to manifesting my life similar to this as an example. Do you know the movie About a Boy with Hugh Grant?

David Jenyns: No, I haven’t seen that.

Yaro Starak: It’s one of those British comedies. Basically Hugh Grant’s character in it, is playing this guy who is essentially living off the royalties of a Christmas carol, his father wrote. His house is paid for, he’s got a steady income stream. It continually, perpetually comes in every year because at
Christmas time the song always gets played and the guy spends his entire life pretty much going and getting his hair cut and watching DVDs and just buying stuff. He’s got nothing else in his life. He tries to pick up girls, and that’s pretty much it.

I’m not debating whether that’s a good lifestyle but you can tell that he’s lacking a little something because it’s not a driving force behind what he’s doing, it’s just instant gratification kind of behaviour. So that’s great for a time, it’s nice to have a bit of that in your life but you realize it’s not all. You have to figure out what it is you want on top of that. That’s a challenging question for anyone to answer so I think we spend our lives trying to figure that one out.

David Jenyns: You could almost tell I was about to ask, so now that you’re there, yes, what is there?

Yaro Starak: We can talk about the meaning of life now. That’s going to be one of the questions.

David Jenyns: We’ll leave that for Part 2, the uncut version. So I suppose moving through now, you’ve done a lot and you’re in a position now where you’re comfortable enough to be choosing what it is that you’re working on. You’re enjoying giving back to the community, you’ve built up that following. You’re getting a lot of people I suppose who come to the blog. They’re very new to blogging, trying to make money on line, still trying to make their first dollar. Where do you see people going wrong? There are a few elementary mistakes that just get repeated again and again.

Yaro Starak: From my own experience, both going through the process myself and from students and members and my readers coming up and seeing what problems they have, I think a lot of it, 80% of it is just mindset. It’s the self belief, they don’t think they can do what they’re trying to do and they’re not clear on what they want to do or they think every one else is doing it better or there’s no market for it, they can’t make money from it. All these things can be true if you decide they are, or they can be worked around if you decide to work around them and get over them.

First of all, you’ve got to get through the mindset. I’d almost say focusing on your own self belief, this is a hard one to teach people. You can’t get self belief just by trying to. You have to actually do certain things, take certain actions and get certain results. When you start getting practical outcomes from doing actions, and realizing that, ok, A results in B. If I do enough of A eventually I’m going to get C.

David Jenyns: You get a bit of momentum.

Yaro Starak: If I write to my blog once a day, five days a week and manage to that for an entire year, at the end of the year I’ll probably have an audience. It will work but people don’t necessarily believe that will happen because they spend five days doing it and don’t get anything from it. So I think the first thing is to get the mindset right. The second thing is do it anyway. Even when things are going bad, stick to your goal, work your way through it. That’s the important thing.

Once you’ve go that over with, then there are a few very practical things. Technology, we’re all dealing with it on the internet. This is something I struggle with myself. I still struggle with it in lots of ways. They say the biggest road block for getting things done is getting the technology to do what you want it to do.
I’ve been very deliberate with what I do now to find the simplest systems I can, so technology has the least opportunity to get in my way. That’s the way I work with it at the moment. It’s still an issue and I spent at least five years of my internet career making very little money and making websites myself, doing all the email support myself.

I’m not a programmer, I’m not a tech guy. I managed to teach myself html. Then these things like PHP and CSS came up and it was too much. Basically I got other people to do that but it took me five years to drum it into my head that you don’t do tech if tech is not your strong point. It’s a big lesson.

Another mistake I made and it took a while to understand this as well because I came from a background where I was watching bloggers do what bloggers do. What bloggers are great at if they’re good bloggers is creating content. They just write and write and they build up an audience but they very rarely have a good business and marketing mindset behind that to make money.

I was fortunate because I studied internet marketers as well. David, you mentioned some of the guys before, Frank Kern and Geoff Walker, Eben Pagan. Rich Schefren and John Riesse, all these guys were influential throughout, in the middle of my marketing experience because I was blogging and studying internet marketing.

I learned to build an email list. That was a huge mistake I made because it took twelve months of constant work blogging before I decided to add an email list to my blog. After that I started building a list and within twelve months I had two assets. I had a successful blog and a nice subscriber base in my newsletter.
When it came to selling on line products I probably would sell two or three times more than anyone else would with just a blog because I had the email list as well as the blog. So my business today is pretty well based around those two assets, email marketing and blogging. I’ve got my products and I sell and those things are what fuel everything and it took me a while. Adding an email list to your strategy from day one is a smart idea, so try and not make that mistake.

David Jenyns: Yes, I suppose you probably would have seen as well, there are a lot of the mistakes. Looking back, finding key leverage points where you made certain changes. Obviously one of them is adding in an email list. That had a huge impact into what it is you’re doing. Were there any other key leverage points where you go, I wish I’d done that sooner?

Yaro Starak: Not really now, but when I was running a proof reading business. It was my first real business in the sense that I came up with this idea, I created a website for it. It was a service that basically connected international students studying at university writing academic English when English was their second language or third language even and PhD students and graduate students, people who were really good at writing academic English.

My service was to connect these two groups, so the academics would edit and proof read the writing of the international students. They would benefit usually with better grades as a result of the editing service.
I actually read the book about ebay, I think it was called The Ebay Story, I’m not sure if that was the name of it. It’s the main book written about how ebay started. One of the biggest influences on me in that book was the idea of a many to many business model. This essentially means you can have as many customers as you basically can take because there is no cap on your ability to deliver the service.

So in ebay’s case you can have as many people selling things on auction as you can get buyers to buy them. The technology handles the transactions so as the owner of the business, you’ve got infinite scale. I wanted the same sort of thing with my business. My proof reading business was my first attempt at that. I could take as many students’ papers as I could hire editors and I could basically be the middle man with that transaction.

That is what I did. I did that for a long time. I ran that business. My day to day business, it was quite funny, I forwarded emails. I did a bit of marketing, I put up posters at campuses. But most of my work for that business when I was running it was, here’s a job from a student, I’d forward it to the editor, the editor would forward it to me and I would forward it back to the student. I did that all day. I’d answer customer queries and I’d check the email twenty-four hours, making sure that the service was getting delivered.

It made me enough money to pay me a salary for quite a while. I didn’t really think about this. I had plans, I was studying Rich Schefren, I knew systematization was important, and you could make the more automated income streams if you had other people help you. But I always had this silly mentality where I thought I’d rather keep the money than pay people to do work for me.

However, when push came to shove, I was going to travel and visit family in Canada. I decided I didn’t want to be boring about the email. I had a friend who just had a baby and said, listen let’s do a trial. You can run the email service and do that job while I’m traveling.

She had the baby and a week later I was training her how to run the business, it was crazy and the week after that I was flying to Canada and she was running the entire show. It worked really well. I was paying her, so I probably lost maybe thirty percent of the salary that I had for myself but I still pocketed a lot. Basically I did zero work after that.

David Jenyns: How did it feel letting go of that baby? Letting go of the business baby and stepping away from it can be hard. I know for me personally, it’s a big step when traveling overseas and letting the team handle everything while you’re away. Is that something you had to work on or were you just, baptism of fire, throw yourself in the deep end, you had to do it?

Yaro Starak: I guess I didn’t have to. I could have spent twenty-four hours in a plane and landed and gone and immediately tried to catch up on the emails, and being jet lagged, it would have been difficult. But it was good because it pushed me to try it out. More so, I guess I didn’t really realize I could afford to do it and I did it. It was probably one of the biggest door opening moments I had as an internet marketer. If there is anything stressing you out about your business, don’t do it.

Not only is there leverage and gives you the capacity to grow and scale, I could then go out there and spend all my time marketing. We could hire more editors, she would handle all the communications between the customers and the editors and the business could grow as big as I felt like growing it to. Or I could just travel and do what we were talking about before.

That was very liberating. I finally tasted from start to finish creating a business, making it profitable, making it successful and then systematizing it so you no longer have to run it yourself. I stepped out of the business completely.

It was nice to have that experience and I’ve successfully done that by myself.

David Jenyns: You then registered the domain name for the two hour workday.

Yaro Starak: I do have that as a potential.

David Jenyns: You have that as a potential. To evolve into that space, to be able to do two hours a day, you’re clearly going to have to be focusing on the twenty percent that gives you eighty percent reward. I know you talk about that on your blog as well, the 80-20. How do you identify what it is that you should be working on? Everybody is bombarded. Everybody gets emails every second day on the latest launch and what is coming out. Sometimes it’s hard to know where exactly to apply that focus.

Yaro Starak: There are two considerations I find with this. You’ve got the very economical side of this. The 80-20 rule is an economic principle, so you can look at it from a very numbers based assessment. You just look at the numbers, where you’re getting value. Do that, don’t do what you’re not getting value from.

I threw in a little emotional component. I decided what I personally wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do. To tie that into an 80 – 20 rule, it works well because it means you can find what you personally enjoy doing which hopefully will also be something that will be high leverage as well. Then you can hand everything else to other people.

For example with blogging right now, it’s not as hands off as that proof reading business was because I did eventually have someone running it for me. Blogging I still write the majority of my content to that blog. However, I’ve realized that writing is what I enjoy, what I’m good at, it’s a very high leverage point for me and with the 80 – 20 rule, it’s probably safe to say that the blog articles I’ve published for the last five years are the single highest point of value derived from my business long term.

You can’t put a value on two thousand articles individually, but you can say, everything that has come as a result of my business has come from those articles, getting traffic for me, bringing people to my email list, eventually some of those becoming customers, getting invited to talk on stage, getting me to do interviews, letting me meet famous people all comes down to writing those articles. That’s a very high leverage for me.
David Jenyns: Now it feels like the way that you’ve gone, you’ve evolved from an entrepreneurial point of view. I can see you’ve stepped out. But then you’ve stepped back in and you’ve started to assume the role of Yaro and that is your main business. It feels like you’re further tying yourself into this business. Have you thought about long term? You’re not creating a saleable asset that will work outside of you. Is that a strategy that you’ve thought about?

Yaro Starak: It’s a concern more than a strategy. To sell the business right now would require a transition period to move it away from based on my brand to either based on someone else’s brand or maybe even change the model slightly. I’ve thought about this because I’ve got the five year itch. I’ve been blogging for five years and so I could move on at this stage.

David Jenyns: This might be the last interview.

Yaro Starak: My writing will be definitely part of what I do but maybe not in the same area forever of course. I’ve thought about obviously if my blog at the moment is primarily my content, it would be transitioned into a magazine or maybe one expert would take over. There are a lot of available business models and if you go to a website that is already ranking well, if you just get good content, it doesn’t have to necessarily come from me. It is possible to rejig the blog a little bit the branding so it’s not just about one person, it’s more about the site itself or maybe a new person.

There would definitely be a loss of some audience, they would only want to read that person. But a lot of it could come down to the income. From a business point of view if you’re going to buy an asset you care whether the income will keep coming, whether it’s going to grow and how much work is required to maintain it.

So if I stepped away from what I do and the income disappeared, my asset’s not worth very much. If I step away from it but they find a way to write one article a day from another source and the income continues to come in fine, that’s a great asset. It’s a very low labour high return business that could have multi million dollar valuation. So I’m not too worried about that in the sense that I guess I have taken a choice to be less systematized than it could be. It’s something I may change in the future.

What I do like about this though, and this is another aspect that you’ll find. Creative people who are good at making money can find it sometimes a little bit unfulfilling, once they do make good money, just sitting at home and they’re not really getting a lot of paid contact with people, they’re not getting recognition for what they do, so they actually become teachers. It’s quite surprising how many people good at something also want to teach it.

The reason they do that, sometimes it is for more money because, sure, you can make great money teaching how you do what you do but it’s also for interaction with other human beings, it’s for the recognition you get which is a core driver if you study Tony Robbins’ material. He’ll tell you recognition is in the hierarchy there. It’s one of the most important things which as humans we need. We need to be recognized, appreciated and given attention by other human beings. Not everyone has the same amount but everyone needs something, otherwise you go insane.

I think there is that aspect too and that’s what’s great about blogging. It’s a great platform for you helping other people and in return you get recognition and if you want to be famous, everyone I think likes a little bit of fame, that’s what recognition is. So it’s a great platform for getting that outcome.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think the good thing about mentoring as well, or teaching other people, is it really does take you onto the next level as well. If you get to a place where you can share that knowledge, it goes into your mind at a much deeper level.

Yaro Starak: The best way to learn is to teach.

David Jenyns: Yes, exactly right. I’m trying to get a feel for the direction you’re heading. As far as what is on the horizon, maybe you can give us an insight as to either opportunities you see on the horizon for yourself or even for other people as well. I find it’s good speaking to people who are already on top of their game and then getting an insight into what they’re thinking about next. What’s ahead in the curve?

Yaro Starak: Yes. It’s actually a hard one for me to answer. It hasn’t been specific and it’s been a lot based on what’s working today and how stable it is. Just literally as we’re doing this, I opened my last closed product. I’ve launched it before but it’s now open, so right now I’m in a situation where every product I’ve created, I’ve got three courses, they’re all on the market, they’re all for sale. All I really have to do now is the responsibility to write my blog and write my email newsletters. There’s nothing else I really need to do to keep the machine running.

I keep making money from what I do now and it’s fine. So I’ve got a clean slate in a lot of ways. I’ve played around with moving to, obviously creating another product, potentially either doing webinars, the two-hour work day was a focus we talked about before, there are certainly avenues to teach more in that area. It’s similar, but I guess that’s a little bit more of a lovely branded package, the two-hour day, everyone is excited about. Obviously Tim Ferris and The Four Hour Work Week was a very popular book, so that idea of the lifestyle business is something that’s really popular. I’m certainly capable of teaching that.
I’m also interested in personal development. I’m definitely writing more in that area so my next peer report will likely be in that subject area but that will be given in a different website under a different brand, it won’t be under Entrepreneur’s Journey.

So a long story short, I might be speaking on stage, I might be hosting an event. I’ve been saying that for a long time and it hasn’t happened. If I tell you something now, chances are it may or may not happen. So I can’t even tell you for sure. All I can tell you is I will be blogging still. It’s something I still enjoy and I will be writing content.

I’m here in Melbourne right now attending events. I’m still immersing myself in this world and gaining experience and knowledge in this world, which gives me the content I use for the blogs, so it’s important for me to stay up to date and I’m still motivated to do that. It pays the bills, I can’t complain about that.
Right now I’m just enjoying partying, I hate to say it. Really the business is so well automated that I’m hanging with friends, I’m skating, I’m riding bikes, I’m going to the beach, I’m traveling a bit here and there. I’ve eaten probably way to much bad food as well as eating healthy food as well, I’m just having a good time. I’ve been to music venues and concerts and shows and whatever.

David Jenyns: If people want to keep an eye on what it is that you’re doing, checking out the blog, where is the best way to find you?

Yaro Starak: As I said, entrepreneur is a really hard word to spell. I don’t spell it out, I keep it very simple. Just remember my name: Yaro, very simple, it is my brand and if you google Yaro you will find my blog as the first result as well as all my free reports and my products and things like that. That’s definitely easier to remember than my domain name.

David Jenyns: You can find your Twitter and YouTube there.

Yaro Starak: My Twitter, my Facebook all those things are there. Yaro.

David Jenyns: Excellent. It’s definitely worth checking out Yaro’s material. I’d just like to thank you for your time. You’re very generous with time, ideas and thoughts. That’s one thing that I like, you’re very open, you tell it how it is and you don’t hold anything back.

Yaro Starak: It’s fun to talk about. Thank you for having me.

David Jenyns: Pleasure. Alright.

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John Carlton

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Name: John Carlton

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.john-carlton.com

Product: Simple Writing System

John Carlton’s Bio: John Carlton is one of the highest paid freelance copywriters today. It is a status he earned after more than 20 years of being in the copywriting and marketing industry. He is the guy who the top Internet marketers go to when they want great copy for their websites, ads, email campaigns, sales letters, product launches, and more.

John Carlton refers to himself as “the most ripped-off writer on the Web”, and no one on the inside of the online business world disagrees.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. I’m excited today, I have lined up a fantastic interview with a copywriting legend. He’s pretty much taught anyone who knows anything about copywriting who is big in the internet marketing space. He’s worked with Rich Schefren, Eben Pagan, Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, that’s just to name a few. He’s worked with some of the greats, some of the guys who started off in direct mail and evolved. We’re talking Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert. He’s worked with them for years.

I think what I like most about John Carlton, and that’s who we’ll be talking to today, is he really earned his stripes writing copy back in the day for some of the big boys, some of the big companies. So it’s just not that he’s only worked in the online space. He’s done a whole host of things and I’m sure we’ll dig into that sort of thing.

When I first got introduced to John Carlton’s work was quite a few years back. I think the first time I actually heard him speak live was at Ed and Frank’s seminar here in Melbourne, and that was a good number of years ago. When you see someone in person, it really gives you an opportunity to see their material shine through. That is what I saw with John Carlton. He wasn’t faking it; he lives and breathes this type of thing.

I’d just like to welcome you to the call John.

John Carlton: Thanks Dave, I’m glad to be here. Sorry for making you get up so early in the morning.

David Jenyns: No, I’m getting used to these early starts. I know we’ve only got a short time today, so I’m going to dig straight into it, no fluffing about.

John Carlton: Ok.

David Jenyns: Your expertise obviously is in copywriting, and I think one of your skills is interweaving storytelling into the way that you do copywriting and I would be keen to get you thoughts on why you actually do that and how it works in the whole selling process.

John Carlton: Ok, Dave. First of all just to give people a basic idea of where I came from, I am not a natural salesman. I was one of the original slackers in the world. I didn’t get my act together until I was thirty-three years old. I was lost, I was broke, I was literally sleeping on someone’s couch, I was homeless. I’d lost my girlfriend, my job and my place to live all within a two month period and I was a lost boy. I just made the decision that I’d better get busy making a place for myself in the world or I was going to be a bum for the rest of my life.

So I didn’t have an early start, I had no advantages, I did this all on my own because there were no courses back then. We’re talking about the early 1980s, back when you guys were still gleams in your parents’ eye. I had a lot of job experience because I kept getting fired from every job I had. The entrepreneurial world of becoming a freelance copywriter working with a number of different clients appealed to me on multiple levels, not the least of which was the fact that I couldn’t work for anybody. I had a problem with authority, I didn’t do well wearing a tie, having to show up somewhere at eight o’clock and having to work til five.

So I had an early start and I’ve been doing this for a long time. As you mentioned I’ve worked with some of the biggest clients out there. I’ve written controls for some of the biggest mailers in the world. By mailer I mean people who use direct mail which is still king by the way in most of the direct response world, although the online world is catching up quickly.

So I bring an old school sensibility here and by old school I mean that when I start figuring out how to make advertising work offline. By the way I wrote some of the first infomercials on TV; I’ve written for radio, I’ve written for everything. When the web came around, I realized the web was just another vehicle for spreading a sales message to a wider audience. So I got online in a hurry as soon as I realized the potential there.

Writing for the web is no different, essentially, than writing for anything else, for any other medium, except for the advantages of technology. We can talk about that later if you want, but basically being able to use video and being able to use audio and animation and all kinds of things is great and makes for a very vibrant multi sensory experience when you’re trying to get your sales message across to somebody.

The basic salesmanship hasn’t changed since the first caveman traded up to a cave with a better view for a slab of mastodon beef. My big discovery early on was that the real secret to being able to sell things, not to get people excited about something, not to just start a conversation, not to just become a moderately good person at doing so, but to be able to sell, to be able to close the deal, to be able to get people so excited that they say, hey, what you have, that’s exactly what I want. You’re the guy I want to deal with and you know what, you’re right, I’m going to buy this right now.

To get to that point required hanging out with some of these, what I call old school salesmen. That’s why I started getting really interested in this. The things that worked long ago, it worked while you were growing up, it worked pre web, is working now on the web. These are the kinds of things where you begin a sales conversation where you just start talking about things and get people to understand that what you have is really something that can change their life.

When we talk about products that change people’s lives, if you’re building a playhouse for your daughter out in the backyard and you’re out of nails and you need nails, and I have the nails you want, then your life has been put on hold, at a very mild level. It’s not super life changing but it has changed your life. You wanted to get the thing done, you can’t get it done, you’re stuck. I have the nails. It’s my job to make you understand I have the nails, it’s a good deal, let’s get that thing done. That’s one level.

Another level is, if I have a dire health emergency or problem and you have some answers about how to take care of it, what to do, all of those things, that is a very urgent problem, that’s very high on the trauma scale. The conversation that you have to have to let people know about what you offer, whether it’s a product, a service, whether it’s information, whatever it is, you have to begin a conversation that has the goal of establishing yourself as the person they want to deal with, as establishing that what you have will fix the problem, that it is a solution, that it is what your prospect is looking for, and you’ve got to be able to close the deal. You have to make them understand that. You are the guy to deal with and they should do this now.

The best way to have this conversation, I just went around the block to answer your question, we are naturally wired to listen to stories. Before writing was invented, back in Sumeria five thousand years ago, where they stuck sticks into clay tablets and started creating alphabets, before then and even during the early days, the only way we had to communicate was by telling stories.

This was to spread information, to keep the history of the tribe alive, to be able to tell Bob who lives on the other side of the forest something you know that you’d like him to know and you’ve never met Bob. The story you’re going to tell Bob is interesting to the guy who is going to tell Bob, he remembers the story. He tells Bob the story. Now he gets the story. Bob tells his kids and they tell their kids etc.

Our brain is actually wired for listening to stories. Now that doesn’t mean any old story is going to work. Most of us in the modern age have lost the ability to tell stories. I was pretty lucky, Dave, I grew up in a story telling family.

I was the youngest by ten years and that meant when I was little, I learned very quickly that I was not going to hold the attention of the table about what happened in the sandbox that day if I didn’t get a hook going and tell a good story. They would look at me and interrupt and go on with their own stories. They didn’t want to hear what a kid had to say.

That stuck with me and I’ve always been interested in storytelling. So when I got into the marketing side of life, and I became a real entrepreneur and I learned that the best salesmen that I would meet or read about or find out about all told stories. So it all made perfect sense. So the storytelling needs to be short, sizzling and stay within the pocket of your listeners. This is not you telling a story, this is you being the conduit. You are the translator of the message. So the story you tell is not about you, it’s about what is going on in the head of your prospect when you’re trying to sell something.

So the story you tell, now that you know this and you start reading some really good things online, you start seeing some videos that are really good and hold your attention, start thinking critically about that. Go ahead and listen to it but stop yourself and say, wait, why am I interested in what this guy is saying or writing? Why is this hooking me? When you start looking at it critically like that, in almost all cases he will be reading a tale for you. And it is like you’re thinking, what happens next, oh, ok and he’s taking you down a path.

Of course if what he has is something I want but I’m not quite ready to buy it, then that story involves all the things I need to hear in order for me to make an intelligent decision that, you know what, yes, I do want this, I want it now and he’s the guy I want to get it from. Does that make sense David?

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head. I’m curious though, you talked almost about weaving this hypnotic story and that’s effectively what you’re doing. You might not have even noticed it, but at the start of the call, you even opened up by telling your own story and I think that drew the listeners in. It’s a really good way to draw people in.

The elements that make up that story, I know there is that classic old formula you hear, the AIDA formula, the Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. When building those hypnotic stories, what are the actual elements, the building blocks for that?

John Carlton: I don’t hear that AIDA formula much anymore, but that was one of the first ones I learned. I believe it was John Caples who wrote back mostly in the 40s and 50s. I may be wrong there, but it’s a very old thing. It’s a basic formula and it’s one of the first formulas that I use. Just to repeat what you said, the letters are AIDA and that stands for Attention, you have to get their attention. In most ads, that means the headline or whatever comes first and when I talk about hooks or grabbing their attention, that’s what we’re talking about, the attention.

Then Interest, you must build interest immediately. The formula AIDA or Aida as we call it, is mostly about the first half screen page if you’re writing a letter or the first minute if you’re doing a video sales letter. So you’re grabbing attention. You’re not sharing information, you’re grabbing attention, you’re finding some common ground or some curiosity value or something that is going to make the listener say, what? He’s going to stop and hopefully he’s going to drop whatever else he’s doing, he’s going to stop multi tasking and he’s going to pay attention to you. That is very, very important.

By the way, just as a side tangent there, most video watching, movie watching, most reading, reading magazines, even reading books, that is a passive behaviour. It’s like information goes in, settles in your brain for a short time and then leaves. You don’t have a lot or retention, there’s not a lot going on. As a marketer, you need to take your prospect out of that passive state and get him into an active state. Like the last letter in the AIDA formula, you’re going to ask for action.

When you watch a movie, the movie doesn’t ask for action. It’s entertaining you, you get to veg out. When you’re reading a book or magazine, it’s not asking you for action. When you’re reading an ad or watching a video that is actually trying to get you to click on a link or make a decision, you have to be in an active state.

Let’s go back to that AIDA. The first letter is Attention. Next is Interest. You have to build the interest. That is the first word out of your mouth after you’ve got somebody’s attention. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say I have a product for bowlers. You guys have tenpin bowling over there. Let’s say you have a product for bowlers. Let’s say it is an information product. To get attention, you might do something as simple as, hey bowlers, how would you like to, in tenpin bowling it is to roll a 300 game or get a 200 average.

‘Hey bowlers’ is getting attention because if I’m a bowler and I’m passionate about bowling, then that perks me up. So it could be something as simple as that. That’s getting attention. Now building interest, then you would say something like, hey bowlers, how would you like to add fifty pins to your average in three days without changing the way you bowl or without going through any painful body re education process, just using a couple of secrets from a professional who won the bowling tournament three years in a row and has since been secretly teaching other professional bowlers these things for thousands and thousands of dollars…

That would be building interest. That would be finding out what the guy is passionate about, he is a bowler. All bowlers want to get a higher average, so you start getting into it. That would be the attention and the interest. All that takes place in the first couple of sentences that you’re laying out there.

The third letter is D and that is Desire. By building desire, that’s where you really start kicking in the salesmanship. You start saying, how would you like to have this? You can have this tomorrow. Here’s what you’ll get when you buy this product. I’ll show you the secret of doing blah…I’ll show you six different ways you’ll solve the problem of blah, blah, blah for this and that. You start making a storyline in my head where I am not now the blundering bowler who is lucky to get a 150 game and I’m embarrassed to go out and I always lose bets with my buddies and things like that.

I am now envisioning this pretty picture in my head of me being the guy who wins all the money on the bets, who is the guy that other people whisper about behind my back when I walk in, hey, here’s that guy who bowled that 280 the other day, blah, blah, blah. So that is building the desire.

Finally the A we already talked about, is the Action. That is what separates the men from the boys, the losers from the winners, the all-so-rans from the spectacular successes. Action, actually to get people to act. Everybody knows this. Now there is so much advertising out there, there are so many sales messages swirling around online, especially if you’re in marketing and you’re on anybody’s email list or you’re paying attention to social media, there are all these things that come out.

These people are saying, you’ll click here to get the secret or make sure you get in on this, it’s only going to be available for an hour and a half on Friday and all these launch sequence things. The reason those things last, and as much as they sometimes irritate people, if you understand why marketers do that, you feel a little less angry about the fact that there’s so much of it because they’re trying to get you to act. They are trying to get you from this passive state where you are listening to a story and maybe you are all full of desire, we call this getting someone up on the fence. You’ve got to knock them off the fence.

They can’t be saying, well, this is a pretty good product, someday maybe down the road when I’ve got nothing else to do, maybe I will even buy that. That’s something I really want to do. It’s easy to get them to that state. You have to get them through that state and into that state, where you know what, I’m clicking right now. You are absolutely right. I’m buying this right now and let’s get going. I can’t wait to get this going right now. That is the Act thing. That is the AIDA more thoroughly explained.

David Jenyns: Yes, and I think what you’ve described there is a really good basic building block for someone to start on their journey to become a copywriter. I think it is a skill everybody needs to learn if they’re in business, even in life. That storytelling and that salesmanship just flows through everything you do because really at the core of it it’s just persuasion and persuading people to take the right action or the action that is in line with what you want them to take.

To learn that skill, we went over that formula there, and it just rolled off the tongue for you and I know you’ve had a lot of experience. There was a time when you went through the trashy novel writing as well. What does it take to get to the point? I don’t know if everybody is going to spend the 10,000 hours to get to that tipping point, but what does it take to become a good copywriter?

John Carlton: Well, there are a couple of different ways to do it. I have a saying that I would rather take a near illiterate but street wise salesman and turn him into a guy who creates ads, I’d rather do that than take somebody with a PhD in English literature and try to turn them into a salesman.

That is especially with the advent of video. The reason that video newsletters are so hot right now isn’t because there is anything magic about video. It’s merely that it is a multi sensory experience for the listener. You hear a voice, you can watch the scroll as it goes down, you can read analysts at the same time and there is a lot or retention value in that.

But the advantage of video of course is the technology. It used to be hard, you had to wait for a video to load. It’s still hard for a number of people, but we’re very close to that situation where video is just a no-brainer now. It loads fast, you click on it and it gets going. That’s why video is hot right now because most people have the band width to be able to handle it.

The advantage to people who are afraid of the writing part of copywriting, and that is why I don’t even use the word copywriting anymore David, I use sales message, creating a sales message. It takes the heat off the idea that somebody says, I can’t write, I hated writing at school, I’m bad at it, therefore I’ll never do this. Well, it’s nonsense. At the very worst, you can record what you want to say. If you know how to sell it face to face, then you can record that and have somebody transcribe it. Take out the ums and ahs and you’ve got a pretty good ad right there.

Especially with video now, you can just get on video. If you can sell face to face to one person, you can sell face to face now on video to everyone in the world at the same time online. The idea of copywriting, while it scares people, it’s more salesmanship than anything else.

All of us have an inner salesman. He exists, he is in there. For most people he is fast asleep and will remain asleep for their entire lives. However, if you’re married, you sold someone on marrying you. Even if you have a really good girlfriend or boyfriend, you’re very happy, you’ve been together for a while, you sold them on going out with you, you sold them on going out on a second date, you sold them on moving in with you, whatever situation you’re in.

If you’ve gone through an interview and got a job, then you sold yourself at that job. So we bring out this inner salesman at certain times, but he usually goes right back to sleep and we don’t even realize what happened. We just wing it. Salesmen, conscious salesmen, who understand what they’re doing and understand that persuasion isn’t just a word but it is really a communication device, salesmen lead better lives, Dave. They are more conscious than the average person out there. They understand human behaviour because they have to and of course they see the world as it is.

Most people see the world as they wish it was or they think it should be. So they wander around being constantly upset at the way things are going because it doesn’t make sense to them. They’re constantly at odds with the way things turn out and a salesman just stops that. He isn’t trying to change people’s behaviour, he is trying to understand people’s behaviour and realizes the persuasive nature of being able to sell something.

Salesmanship has a bad name and rightly so. There are a lot of scams out there and a lot of people use their salesmanship chops in a psychopathic way to sell something that people don’t need. That doesn’t mean that the thing they do isn’t the right thing to do.

I tell people, Dave, when I speak at seminars, I always ask people to raise their hand if they’re selling an unethical product or scam. Of course everyone chuckles and no one raises their hand and I say, I’m deadly serious about this. If you’re selling an unethical product, then I hope you die and rot in hell, because you’re making it really rough for the rest of us, who have good things, really good, solid products. We really care about people and advertising or marketing is the way we get the word out.

There’s nothing mysterious about this. You don’t know, Dave, that I exist. You feel you need help creating sales messages. You’re looking around for help and you don’t know I exist and I’m sitting here with all this help that I can offer, this advice, these courses I have, all these things that are meant to shortcut it, all the experience that I brought to everything that I offer.

If you don’t know I’m out there, you may never find out and you may go the rest of your life without realizing what a great opportunity it would have been to meet me. If you just hear about me and I don’t do everything I can do to make sure you realize that I am the guy you should be dealing with, that what I have really can change your life, and this is an opportunity right now that you can jump on, if I don’t do everything I can to make you aware of that, then shame on me. I am not a good marketer if I don’t do that. I will not be a marketer for very long anyway because I won’t survive in this noisy, crowded marketplace of the global online market that’s out there.

It’s not necessarily the noisiest guy that’s going to win, it’s going to be the guy who understands salesmanship. It doesn’t mean you shout louder. It means you have a real conversation with people and you let them know what they need to know, again to understand you’re the guy they should be dealing with because you have the experience, you’re a nice guy, you’re fun, it’s a great world to be in and you’re hip and what you have really is what they need. You’re going to be there to watch their back, all these things that you know, your prospect doesn’t know and it’s your job to make him aware of that.

So when we get back to salesmanship, it’s all about being able to communicate the way that most people don’t know how to communicate. That word influence is huge. You mentioned the tipping point. I think you were referring to Gradwell’s book The Tipping Point where he talked about the 10,000 hours to become an expert. You don’t have to be an expert at this to make it work. If you can tell any bit of a story, if you’ve ever told the story about the last time you were on a cruise ship, and it tipped over or pirates tried to rob it and you held the attention of a room for three minutes, then you’ve got the beginnings of being able to weave a story about what you offer, to be able to get the attention and build the interest and desire of someone listening to you.

If you learn a few more tricks, you’re going to be able to weave that story in a way that leaves them gasping for breath and ready to punch the button and do whatever it is you want them to do or sign or opt in or click to buy or get the free report or whatever. You don’t have to be an expert.

However, you do have to understand something which is probably the primary directive for anyone who wants to be a successful marketer. You need to understand the basics of salesmanship. If you don’t, a lot of people out there just think, I’ll job out all the creation of my sales messages. I’ll outsource it, I’ll find some writer on Elance for $50 to write it or I’ll get my niece who is majoring in English in high school, she knows how to write. You think it is just something that goes out there. You’re going to be out of business really soon because that doesn’t work.

However, if you take the next step and hire a really expensive writer, to do all these things, to write your video scripts, to write your sales letters and all those things, you’re only going to be as good as what he creates for you. What is that old saying, you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

If you go out and buy expensive freelance copywriting services, you are essentially having someone hand you the fish. You don’t know if it is any good or not until it works. If it works, you don’t know why it works. If it doesn’t work, you don’t know why it didn’t work. You don’t know if what this expensive writer has turned in is any good or not. You’re just operating entirely on faith. That is just really a poor way to conduct yourself in business.

You should at least understand salesmanship and how to tell a story, how to have a conversation with somebody who is a little bit interested in what you have, to be able to let them know that what you have is what they want etc. Have that conversation. You don’t need to do the actual writing, but if you don’t know what a good ad looks like, if you don’t know what a good video script reads like, if you don’t know what the elements are that need to go into these things, then you’re just a babe in the woods.

You might have a great organization. You may have a big staff, you may own the building you’re operating out of. You may have the warehouse lined up. You may have the best product in the world. You can’t sell it, you’re still going to die a slow, agonizing death.

Most of the top marketers online, the brand names that you hear out there, they’re one man bands. They maybe have an assistant, maybe a staff, they outsource a lot of things. All they need is a pencil and paper really, although they can work on computer, or a recorder. They just need some way to translate their salesmanship into a mass produced vehicle, a website, a video, a mailed letter, an email, that is all they need. You can take away everything else and a lot of entrepreneurs do run into problems, not everything goes swimmingly for everybody all the time.

You talk to anybody who’s been around for a while, who’s been through multiple businesses who is a successful entrepreneur You can take everything away from him, all of his money, all of his staff, all of his equipment, his place to live, everything and leave him naked in a cornfield in Brisbane. What do they grow in Brisbane?

David Jenyns: Sugar cane.

John Carlton: You leave him naked at Wolf Creek. If he can just make it back to civilization, his ability to sell, his ability to actually create a message that lets people know he’s the guy they should be dealing with, what he has is what they need, that they should buy right now, that’s what you need. You can start rebuilding immediately. Everything else is nonsense. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Knowing how to sell and all the elements that go into that, and you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to understand the process.

That’s why I became a guru. I wanted to start sharing these things. I was a very successful freelancer, one of the highest paid freelancers out there. I walked away from all that to teach because, I know it sounds rubbish, but it’s true. I get more out of teaching than I do out of anything else. Every other writer that I’ve dealt with, I’ve talked into becoming a teacher too. They say the same thing, we really like it, we do it, we do it well, it’s a lot of fun.

I get to see the aha lights go off in people’s eyes as they figure this out and go off into the world to become totally independent, not sort of independent. They know how to get the websites up, they have membership sites, they have a product, now all they need to do is to sell it, so let’s go find somebody with the magic box who knows the voodoo of how to sell.

Forget that, learn how to sell first, everything else is easy. All of those things are easy, creating products, getting online, all the technology, all of those things are easy. Actually learning how to sell is easy, but most people don’t approach it, they think it is voodoo, they get all screwed up in their head about how it is.

It’s really the simplest thing there is and salesmen lead better lives. You are more aware, you are totally conscious, you understand how things work, you see the world as it is, not as you think it should be or some fantasy. You can actually get what you want. It’s the other side of the goal setting. You’re not just dreaming and setting goals, you’re actually implementing actions to go get the goals.

That was the big thing for me, Dave, by the way, when I turned thirty-three. The big realization I had was reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The lights went off in my head. Up to that point I didn’t think I could want or desire anything and then go and get it. It was just not in my brain, the thought was not even hovering around the edges of my thought patterns.
The idea that I could now actually want something, that I could desire something, make a plan to go get it and then implement that plan and then go get it, that is what real goal setting is all about. That blew my mind.

Within months I was off to the races. That was the big realization I had. So once you understand how these things work, part of implementing, part of making your goals come true, is to become a conscious, good salesman who understands how to weave a story that influences people because you’re going to help people. If they don’t know you exist, if they don’t know you have the best product or service out there, they’re not going to figure it out on their own. They’re going to go to your competitor or they’re going to go somewhere else, or they’re not even going to get involved in these things.

Shame on you if you think that you’re going to build a better mousetrap and the world will somehow magically beat a path to your door. It’s not going to happen, especially in this noisy, crowded online world.

David Jenyns: Wow, I’m dumbfounded. You just got on that roll right then. As you were telling that story just then, there were those hypnotic story elements that were all interwoven. That’s clearly someone who is a master of their craft. It takes years to develop and get to that skill. I’m imagining when you first start out, having those simple formulas and structures for writing the story might be a good way to start. I’m imagining over the years you start to develop different ways of telling the same story.

For someone who’s just starting to get their feet wet in copywriting, is the idea of trying to get one basic story structure down that you like and then apply that throughout what you do, or does that become stale? You talk about not becoming an expert. To get to where you are now, everything we talked about now, you embedded so much into all those different layers, you were just selling on multiple layers. It’s probably even at a subconscious level. But for someone to do that who is just coming in, you’re in a different league.

John Carlton: Actually, I’m not. I started out really clueless. I didn’t know how to sell, I didn’t understand a lot of things. I had a tiny little experience in an art department in a computer supply catalogue. I was actually living in Silicon Valley in the late seventies, but I wasn’t writing. I was creating the art for the catalogue that was being mailed out. I met a copywriter and I started getting interested in it. It wasn’t a head start, I had a little bit of an idea of what was going on. I thought, I can do that.

I’d never met a freelancer, I’d only met some copywriters who had been hired and worked within a company. I knew freelancers existed and I thought, I could do that. I could work out of my house and this was where I was at that point in my life. I didn’t have any resources or anything.

What I did, Dave, I started researching things as much as I could, hanging out with old school salesmen. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, I’d moved from Silicon Valley down to Los Angeles. There was a thriving freelance market down there, so I started meeting some freelancers. I’d just started risking things and I just started beating down doors and just made that happen.

You don’t have to do that. People doing that now don’t have to do that. What I did back then was, every time I had a success, I wrote it down. I kept thorough notes through my entire career. I still keep notes, that is what my blog is. It’s six years worth of notes. I wrote a newsletter for five years before that. This is all about sharing my notes. My life is my career.

What is interesting about this is, very early on, those early notes I took became a check list that I would go through much like AIDA. I used that for a while. Very quickly I started adding to it and massaging it around. I came up with this seventeen point check list that I started referring to. It helped me understand what I needed to say, who I was talking to, what was the position that I or my client or the ad was going to be in. It had all the elements that I had to do to make sure I had covered all the points that I knew, that were going to make this sales message as powerful as possible.

What’s interesting is, I mentioned I came from a storytelling family so I needed to do that. That doesn’t mean that it immediately translated. I was not an expert storyteller back then, especially trying to translate sales messages into stories. My career started before NLP was started, so while I have friends who were conversant in NLP, I’ve never studied NLP. I understand all about thrown anchors and all those things because I hang out with these guys.

I have never been thoroughly impressed with that and I never tried to do trickery or anything in this. One of the advantages you have as a marketer is, if you want to get into weaving stories that sell, which by the way is the only way you will become really successful, one of the big advantages you have is not some 10,000 hours you’ll be able to spend with master mentors who take you to a secret hill somewhere in Tibet and teach you how to do these magic things.

No, it’s having a simple checklist like I had, which is the essence of the Simple Writing System. Just a simple checklist to watch your back and then bring the passion that you have for what’s going on, for whatever your product is, whatever you’re into and realize whatever you’re doing, you really are changing lives.

If the person you’re talking to is a prospect for what you have, then his life is either on hold, he’s got some level of trauma, he is in need. His life is incomplete to some level, it might be a low level, it might be a high level, without what you have. He’s looking for something. He’s either going to get it from you or he’s going to get it from someone else or he’s going to wander off and do something else.

At the point that you are in front of him, either your website is in front of him, your video, your email, your letter, whatever is in front of him, at that point the advantage that you bring to the table if you know just a few things that you need to cover, is your passion. It is your ability to say, you know what, here’s what happened to me, or here’s my tale and blah, blah, blah.

People get confused. In that situation, the key point here is that you care about what you offer and it’s a legitimate, ethical, good product. The person you’re talking to is in your target market. You don’t care if he’s not. If you’re selling nails, for example, and he doesn’t need nails, then no matter how good your story is, it’s not going to have any effect on the guy. If the guy needs nails to finish a project, he may be looking at a number of different possibilities for getting those nails and you’re one of many. As you tell your story, his need and your offer coincide. Whether you close the deal or not doesn’t matter.

Let’s make it different. Let’s say I’m a business owner, a brick and mortar business owner in downtown Melbourne. I sell meat pies. I need to get online because my competitors are actually catering meat pies to places outside Melbourne and I’m losing out big time on this, so I need to get online. I haven’t got a clue how to get online. You can tell me how to get online, how to get my business going, how to do it right so I don’t have to spend a year to two years making all these mistakes and wandering down blind alleys and trying to figure this out on my own.

You can teach me in two days everything I need to know. Our passion intersects at that point. I have a need, you have the ability to fulfill that need and now it’s up to you to make me understand that the price is good, it’s a genuine value, I don’t risk anything if I come on board. You really are the guy to deal with. How do you do that?

Now think about the passion you can put into this. You’re not trying to convince me I need to go online. I know that. But that is about as much as I know. I don’t understand anything else. You can’t talk jargon with me, there are a lot of things you are going to lose me on and I’m going to be paying really close attention because I really want to leave. This is making me nervous and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be ‘sold’. But I’m interested, I need to find out about these things. So you can have that conversation.

Just pretend you’re in a bar and I’m next to you. You hear me say to the bartender, wow my life is miserable. I need to get online or my meat pie business is going south in a hurry. You turn to me and say, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. You need to get online? That is what I do. What do you say after that? Remember in the real world, I’m not your best buddy, you’re a stranger to me and I’m actually appalled that you would interrupt my conversation so I am not ready to sit down and listen to you.

What you have to say to me in those first few sentences needs to be able to capture my attention, start building my interest, and give me a reason to listen to what you say next and give me a reason to get interested in you and what you have to say. In the first hit are you going to sell me something, or are you going to come across like a used car salesman? I’m out of there. I can bolt at any time. I can say, wow, that was miserable I went in for a pint and instead this guy rips my ear off trying to tell me about some weird online thing he has.

If I’ve already identified myself as a guy who needs what you have to offer, helping people get online, think about how you could blow it, and then think about how you could make it work. How you make it work is all salesmanship, telling a story, making sure you’re paying attention to me, not to your story. It’s not about you, it’s about me and my needs.

Once you understand these few basic elements of weaving a good sales story as we call it, or a good sales message within a story, then you’re off to the races. But until you learn those things, or if you think, I’ve been in business twenty years, I know these things, well maybe you do and maybe you don’t. If you’re not doing well, if you have gaps, if you know you’re leaving $10 or $100 on the table for every dollar you bring in, if you know your competition is smoking you and about to leave you behind, then you better learn these things. It is very easy and it’s very quick.

If you deal with a guy like me, I’ve been around the block so many times I can’t even remember how many times I’ve been around. The knowledge and advice I give you is not theory. I’m still in the frontline trenches of marketing. I’m a major online marketer. In fact I’m a super affiliate. Even though I’m old school, I’m the guy the younger guys go to in order to learn the basics and then they go off to weave their magic.

It’s an opportunity. There are a lot of opportunities out there to learn how to do things, to be taught things. It can be really confusing, it can be time consuming. But please, my message to anybody, and I say this is in all sincerity and all urgency, get the basics down first. It’s not tough, it’s not voodoo. It’s not magic, it is easy but you’re probably not going to figure it out on your own.

Even if you dedicate yourself to figuring this out on your own, in other words going to talk to old school salesmen, trying to read all the books that are out there, trying to do trial and error, trying to go down the dark alleys and do all this, it’s going to take you a very long time to learn it all on your own. Over a very short period you can get the short cuts delivered to you from a guy who has already been there.

David Jenyns: One thing you mentioned, coming from that old school background, and I think old school especially with the direct mail, back in the day we’re talking fifteen, twenty A4 sales letters, I feel like it’s slowly starting to morph. I can only judge it by my own experience. Back in the day I’d read through those, because it’s the old line we’ve all heard before, copy can never be too long, just too boring. Right?

So if it hooks you and it drags you in, you’re going to read all the material. Even with that said, I feel like there is an evolution. I don’t know if it’s coming from my own self, or whether it’s happening across the board, we are seeing a lot of shortening of sales letters. When we’re told to write a good sales letter, we are told to have the appropriate sub heads because the chances are, the person is only going to read those sub heads anyway.

I’m wondering about your thoughts, especially coming from that old school, writing long sales letters, is there ever going to be a change in the shortening and the tightening of that copy where you almost embed the entire sales process into a video with short copy underneath it? I’m interested to get your thoughts on if I’m picking it up or if it’s not actually there.

John Carlton: Here’s the story, and I’ll try to keep it as short and precise as possible. Old school direct mail letters were not fifteen and twenty pages. They were four, eight or twelve pages long. The reason they were four, eight or twelve pages long, that’s how printing presses work. They work in things of four. A four page sales letter front and back would be two physical pages printed front and back. The number of pages you had mattered, because the heavier your letter was, the more you would pay in postage.

Old school copy and writers learned to write, eight, sometimes four, usually eight or twelve page letters, occasionally up to a sixteen page letter. There would be other things in there, like a return envelope and an order form and often some other elements. The price of the package mattered. So guys learned to write very concisely.

I should also tell you that a full page newspaper ad, where you see a lot of copy, you’ve probably seen them. What is the name of the local paper there?

David Jenyns: The Age or the Herald Sun.

John Carlton: Yes, the Herald Sun. A full page of copy seems like a lot, but it is not. A newspaper, full page of copy is about an eight page letter. A full page of copy in a magazine is under three pages. So you think about that, so even though it’s long copy, it’s very dense, it’s going on. It’s not what you think.

What happened online, Dave, was that there were not constrictions on the length. So I definitely remember when I saw my first thirty page scrolling website. It was thirty manuscript pages on a single scroll. What happened was there was no physical reason not to write until you were absolutely exhausted and you could stop writing. Online you were not penalized for length. So people got longer and longer.

The old school guys like me, we’ve never gone beyond the old thing. I type out in words, so it’s page by page, and I’m still writing eight and twelve page letters. Now sometimes I’ll go up to twenty because I can and I’m adding things. But that adds testimonials or other stories or things like that. I’m still as concise as possible.

The rule is not to be boring, but you start at your story. You start at the beginning of your story, you get attention, you start building interest and desire. You work through all the things you need to establish in your prospect’s mind that you have credibility, that what you have is something he can start picturing in his mind and you work up to and in to the actual sales process. Here’s what you need to do now, and you start working through that.

When you’re done, you stop, you sit back and you look at it and how long was it? That’s how long you need it. Now if you’re really good, you can go back and start chopping things out.

Here’s a tip for newbies out there writing. Drop all the adjectives. Just stop relying on adjectives. If you don’t know what an adjective is, look it up and then realize those are the colourful words that people get caught up in when they think they’re describing something. Really what they’re doing is just adding words to the message. Make your verbs do all the work, and that is just one tip. That’s something I can maybe talk about in another call, Dave.

If you show me what you’re talking about, I’ll bet if you add up everything, especially in a launch, that a launch could be a series of three minute videos and then a final video that is maybe twelve minutes long or something like that. A minute of video is about a page of copy if you wrote down what the person says. If you add everything up, all the emails, all the videos, all the written work, all the testimonials, everything, in a launch, even though each element is short, when you add it all together, you’ve still got a classic long form sales letter. You’re just spreading it out over time.

That’s the magic of a launch by the way. It’s just taking the sales process and spreading it out. Nothing’s changed, it’s just a different delivery system. It’s a different method of delivery.

What you bring up is worthy of an entire book or even a documentary. Old school thinking was, what’s the most cost efficient way to get to a person? When it was mail, it was, you’ve got to have your whole message in the mail. You’re not going to mail three different letters and hope they get one. They don’t open the one on Monday, then they open the next letter that comes around on Wednesday and they open the next one on Friday, like you can do with email. So it’s a different process. Time is on your side online.

Also the costs are on your side because email is essentially free. You can broadcast 70,000 emails for the same price as one, for essentially nothing. So when you add all the things up, you’re still dealing with what people say is long copy. It’s not long copy. I don’t like long copy because I like to write, I just do what works. If I woke up tomorrow and the universe had shifted and suddenly I could say a happy phrase and people would go out of their minds and start buying, if that worked, I’d start doing that.

So I’m all for short things. I was one of the first guys to jump into video. I did one of the first marketing podcasts on iTunes. I didn’t do anymore, but I did one of the first ones. It was up for a couple of years. I’m an early adopter of things. I had one of the first marketing blogs up. I love online, I loved it, I love all of these things. The only thing that rankles me a little, is when people forget all the things that used to sell things, that’s all over with and everything is new because you’re online. That’s fine. They’re just trying to sell something. All is fair in love and war and advertising and that is great.

The truth is, humans haven’t changed. We still crave stories, we’re hard wired to hear somebody tell us a story. Before we pull out our money or our credit card or hit the buy button, we need to have certain emotional, physical, intellectual, rational, irrational, logical, illogical, emotional things covered. Most buying decisions are emotional but to get to there, you have to go through an intellectual process. So most people make that, yes, I’m going to get it! That is an emotional thing, that’s where you shift parts of the brain that you’re going to.

But to get to that point, you have to have enough information where your brain is ready to say, yes, let’s do it, gosh, let’s do it. You have to be able to supply, if you want to make the sale stick, you still have to use stick strategies. You have to supply your now customer with enough sound bites so that he can go back and tell his skeptical wife why he bought, tell his nosy neighbour who would make fun of him if he made a bad buy why he bought, and especially his jerk brother-in-law who thinks that everything he does is wrong. He’s going to have to explain himself in the real world.

What, you bought something online? Why did you buy that? You’ve got to give him sound bites, you have to give him ammunition for why he bought. Even though the reason he bought may be not what he’s able to say. He’s not clearly able to say it because once you understand basic, not advanced, but basic salesmanship, the psychology that goes on, once you understand these things, it’s all aha experience. It’s oh, that’s why. Of course, now it makes sense but it doesn’t make sense until somebody has presented it to you.

Once it starts to make sense, then you realize how that buying thing happens. How someone goes from not even knowing who you are five minutes ago, to suddenly being rabid about what you have and wanting to deal with you, wanting to actually get involved. That’s going off down another rabbit hole. I could talk for hours about this, in fact I do in my products.

The basic things are so intellectually and emotionally satisfying to learn because they explain everything about human behaviour. It explains everything about why we do what we do, why the capitalist system really is the best one out there and how people act. Not how you wish people would act or even how they say they will act. You know a lot of people say oh, I’d never buy anything online and then you dig into their lives and they’ve been buying things online a lot.

They’re doing all their banking online, they’ve bought a lot of things online. They research everything online. Their first stop is no longer the Yellow Pages or even asking friends, their first stop is online and then when they have a conversation with their friends about what they’ve researched, then they’re more knowledgeable and their conversation changes. Depending on how good they are at search engines, they either come away with nonsense or they come away with solid info.

But they’re still looking for someone to get it for them. So you arrived as the hero. You’re the guy who says, hey, I’ve been there, I understand what you’re doing. I like these things myself. I just took the extra time or energy or I was able to go deeper than you’re able to go. Now you could probably get to where I am too, but it might take you a couple of years. So how about you get there by Monday, next Monday? I can help you do that. I’ll shortcut everything and we can share our passion.

Usually when you’re a marketer, you are a window to a world that me, the prospect doesn’t otherwise have access to. So you’re the guy who is going to let me hang out with other people who share the passion or I get to find out all these thing. This information really has changed a lot of the ways we behave and a lot of the ways we look for things and a lot of the ways we buy product. But we still buy product, in fact we’re buying more of it. Just a lot more of it is information based and so on.

I think I’m going down another rabbit hole there David. So I probably need to wrap up.

David Jenyns: One last thing you had said, and it opened up a little door in my mind if I may be so cheeky. I’ll just finish with this last question. Is that alright?

John Carlton: Ok. Sure, sure.

David Jenyns: I was keen to find out, you being on the cutting edge and things as they’re starting to evolve, it does feel with the way things are going online and the way Google is so entrenched in people’s mindset these days, you have to be extremely transparent. If you do one thing that is wrong, and that gets out there, it gets plastered all over the internet and what happens on YouTube stays onYoutube. Once it’s in there, it’s very hard to get it back out again.

So I think a big part of that sales process, again I can only talk from where I’m coming from, but you’re able to see a lot of the shifts with a lot of the different copywriters. I’m wondering what your thoughts are as far as the need for transparency and building that proof. For me now, when I write copy, it’s all about proof. Really I just have the initial hook story to draw them in and then after that it’s just, how can I prove what it is that I’m saying is true?

John Carlton: Yes, it’s what I was finishing up on that last rabbit hole we went down. My blog, I share this, it’s not some super secret, but I don’t make a big deal of it. The reason I started my mailed newsletter back in 2001 and why I picked up the blog, I think I started the blog in 2005, I can’t remember now. The thing in the back of my head was, I wanted to leave, not a legacy, but I wanted to leave the story of my life, of what I know, not for my nieces and nephews but my grand nieces and nephews who are very, very young and have no idea what is going on.

I keep thinking in my head, I write to them. I write in a way that I’m not saying or sharing anything I wouldn’t say directly to these people who I care very much about and I have a stake in making their lives better. So the transparency there becomes natural.

People like to think it is because of online and social media and things, but people are not easily transparent. It is a bit of an effort. Even people who are into texting and Facebook and all of these things, even though it seems like we’re sharing more, we’re really not. Life is mostly shallow. Most people live their lives in the shallow part of the pond.

When you have a passion, whether that passion is from trauma, you need something, something is broken and you need it fixed, or you just really, really want something, you haven’t been able to find it and you want somebody else, you’re looking for help in getting there. When you come as the guy who is willing to lay it all out there and tell your story and you’ve been somewhere I haven’t been and you’re offering me a chance to come into your worl, where you’re going to be the guy who is the perfect guide.

It’s like, yes, I’ve been there, I know what this is like. Let me tell you what happened to me. If you can use it great, if not, at least you know what my experience was and you start laying this out. This is what we call either the hero or the go to guy, as I called it. That is what I called it when I started teaching. You become the go to guy.

It’s like for a few clients that I was able to work for who didn’t inhibit me in what I was writing. The letter would arrive, or the email would arrive in the inbox or people would find out about it and they didn’t say, oh boy, I’ll bet they’re going to try to sell me something. Rather the response, and we know this because we ask people all the time, the response was, hey, what’s this nutcase got to say today? What story is he going to tell me today?

What that means is, even though you know I may have a pitch or I’m going to sell you on something, or I’m in marketing, so somewhere along the line I’m going to have something for sale or something, you don’t care. The content that I’m laying out is so good that if you never buy anything from me, your life has been enriched invaluably by just connecting with me, by being inside of my world. If you do buy, it’s even better.

I become the go to guy. You think, hey, I have a question about copyright. I wonder what Carlton has to say. Let’s check on his blog and let’s go there. By becoming the go to guy, you become that resource, that constantly desired, welcome resource in people’s lives, where you’re just the first thought that comes up whenever they think about these things. So, when I have something for sale, you don’t automatically buy, but you’re going to give it a look. You’re going to say, ok, let’s see what he has to say.

You’re certainly going to be entertained and you’re going to learn something during the process. It’s never a waste of time, and who knows, you may become a customer and the new BFF in my life.

David Jenyns: I love the way that even when you talk about those things, and I know you said you hadn’t done any study of NLP or even further back the Eriksonian hypnosis work, just the way you layered that last little bit, positioning yourself, whether it is conscious or subconscious, it shows you’ve embedded this in the core of who your are. You’ve just effectively told us that you’re the go to guy when it comes to copywriting. I truly believe that. If people want to find out more, they should head over to your blog which is the john-carlton.com or just Google John Carlton and it will be the number one position to find out more.

Also I wanted to mention, you mentioned your Simple Writing System as well, which is a fantastic course. It’ll break down that checklist that we did talk about. If you want to find out more about that, I’ve got a special link I’ve set up through davidjenyns.com/sws. Yes, that is my affiliate link, but hopefully, if I’ve introduced you to John Carlton, it’s only fair that we keep that relationship going. I go out there to get these interviews for you guys so that I can introduce them. So it is a little bit of a win-win.

John, I just wanted to finish up by thanking you for your time. You are the go to guy when it comes to copywriting and you share that information so freely, so thanks for your time.

John Carlton: Well thanks David. It’s always a joy to talk to someone like you who is interested in this, who knows a lot of things and you don’t ask the same old questions. That was a riveting interview, one of the best set of questions I’ve been asked and I appreciate the opportunity to share the answers with your people.

David Jenyns: Perfect, thank you.

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Yanik Silver

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Name: Yanik Silver

Industry: Internet Marketing

Websites: surefiremarketing.com, www.internetlifestyle.com

Products: Instant Sales Letters, Copywriting Seminar in A Box, 33 Days to Online Profits, Public Domain Riches

Yanik Silver’s Bio: Yanik Silver is one of the most successful, and also visible, Internet marketer today. He is considered a serial entrepreneur, launching exciting new products every now and then.

He is a self-made millionaire, having sold over $13,000,000.00 of online products to date. He did that with only the help of his wife, Missy.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’m extremely lucky and honoured today to have, almost I suppose like a household name when it comes to internet marketers. Yanik Silver has been one of the very early pioneers in the internet marketing community. I actually listened to an interview with him a while back, where he talked about feeling like when he first got into the internet marketing that he was a little bit late to the party. Corey Rudl and Mark Joiner and a few of the other big names had got on board but, looking back now, he really has been one of those pioneers there from the start.

I think all of you will probably come across a few of his different products. One of the early ones, Instant Sales Letters, I think that was one of the first big successes Yanik Silver had. Then there was Auto Responder Magic which I think has been included as a bonus for just about every internet marketing course under the sun. So you’ve got Yanik Silver to thank for that. There’s the 33 Days to Online Profits and he’s also written a book, Moonlighting on the Internet.

I suppose when I really got into Yanik Silver’s work was I purchased just about all his public domain Goldmine CDs and they ended up forming the basis for the five hundred odd domain network that we use for building up for the SEO purposes. Yanik Silver’s course there for that public domain work really was the whole back end driver for that. He did all the research for his team, and his partner for that one did all the research to make sure the niches were good and got the content together.

He also runs loads of different workshops. One of the more well known seminars in the internet marketing community is the Underground Seminar where he uncovers internet marketers who are on the rise and he uncovered loads of people. The first time I actually heard of Jeff Johnson next to listening to the Traffic Secrets, a course by John Riess, then hearing his first presentation, was at Yanik Silver’s. He creates these amazing themed events, so the Underground is fantastic and I think he just ran the last one which was number six.

The biggest thing that stands out for me for Yanik Silver, apart from if you look on his blog, the internetlifestyle.com, he really does live a full life and does a lot of things; he is a little bit of an adventure junkie. At the core of that, he is an internet marketer with a big heart. You always hear that from everybody. He has great integrity and he supports charities and all that type of thing. I’m very honoured to have you on the line Yanik. I know it was a pretty big intro but thanks for your time.

Yanik Silver: I appreciate it. It was a very glowing intro. I appreciate it and hopefully I’ll be able to live up to it when we do our interview here.

David Jenyns: I’m sure you will. I’ll dive straight into it. The biggest thing I’ve seen, you’ve really positioned yourself, you’re an info marketer, you have a lot of educational material for the internet marketing crowd. A lot of people I suppose, are trying to build up these info businesses and I think you’ve done it really successfully. I just want to get an idea of how you’d recommend if someone was looking to build their info empire, how do you go about it and maybe draw on some of your past experiences. It is a pretty big question, but if you want to take it wherever you feel you want to start.

Yanik Silver: Ok, sure. I definitely love information marketing, publishing. It is one of the best businesses out there. You mentioned one of my books Moonlighting on the Internet, it is like a $15 book on Amazon or wherever you buy books. In that, we have a really good road map for info marketing. The reason I love it so much is, you can get started for pretty cheap and you can take your passion or your hobby or whatever you’re really into and start selling information to other people around that.

What I’ve found, took it with the best, and we’ve had students, everything from potty training to guitar lessons. One guy was selling information on how to take an engine out of a particular car and put it into a different car because the engine blocks were the same or something like that and I didn’t quite get it, but the guy was doing $100,000 after I helped him out.

That’s what’s so exciting about the internet right now is that all these people will self identify. He was selling to Honda Civic owners to tell them how to take an engine out of an Accord and move it to a Civic. That’s pretty specific. Ten years back or fifteen years back, you’re not going to be able to do that, but today I can target people who are just interested in ferrets or just interested in particular guitars even and that’s what gets really exciting.

You mentioned public domain and that is one of the ways of tackling the information business. When I start talking to people about the info business, first of all I think most of us have something that we’re either an expert or an authority in, or enough of one that we can go out and sell a product on. We’ll hit on a couple of these after this question, but I really look at some of the big hooks and some of the big ideas that have to be there. With the ease of selling information online right now, there comes more competition, so that means you have to stand out and differentiate yourself, so we’ll talk about that in a second.

A lot of people have skills and talent that they just don’t realize other people would be interested in. So I always start off on a little brainstorming session where we just get them to think about the jobs that they’ve held, the passions that they have, the magazines that they read, any sort of problem that they’ve had to overcome, whether it’s personal or business, anything ‘how to’ related. Anything that their friends or family ask them about for advice and so forth and in there is typically a kernel for something that could become an information product for sale.

Then of course there’s the bigger question of, ok well how do I package it up and sell it and do I make it an e book or should I make it an audio program, should it be a full blown home study course and so forth. So it’s almost like there’s the cursory review of info marketing which is, hey we’ll put something out there, maybe we’ll put together an e book.

As a real world example, about nine years ago, I had an idea of a workout program for people. It started off as an idea I read on CNN, that traffic was 200% or 300% worse in the last couple of years. I thought, oh, people should have an exercise program while they’re in the car. I was talking to my personal trainer and he said, yes, that would be a bad idea. Then I said, ok, and we started talking and he said, what about people who are in the office all day and sitting at their computers or watching TV. I said, yes, sounds great.

So I literally went out and just wrote a quick little sales letter and then I told him. I said, figure out some exercises that would fit the bill for what we just wrote here. So he figured out the content part. That little e book is a simple way of getting out there and doing things and we sell it on ClickBank which is one of the marketplaces which handles all the logistics for you and will handle all the affiliate payments and the credit card costings and so forth. It’s a really good way to dip your toe in the water.

So that’s been selling for nine years straight now. It doesn’t make us a fortune but we don’t really market it anymore. But the last cheque I got was in the neighbourhood of $100 every two weeks or something like that. It’s not much but after nine years, it’s still pretty interesting. That’s one thing and so I’ve been helping him actually on a brand new program. He’s going to take his information for really advanced fitness people. His last name is Ball, so we’re going to call it The Big Ball’s Workout. It’s totally different.

It’s also a good segue into my other point about differentiating and having something out there in the marketplace that has a good hook or a good angle. There’s obviously a whole lot of fitness information out there, so you have to pick off your market and then also come at it from a slightly unique way so that people can immediately get it. So for him, like I said his last name was Ball, so we instituted the Big Ball’s Challenge which is this workout which is so hard that you can’t do it and it plays to these guys’ manhood. Throughout the sales presentation, he calls them Cupcake and Princess. So it is kind of funny and plays against their ego and there’s a Hall of Fame if they can prove they actually completed the final advanced version of the Big Ball’s Workout.

So it’s got a unique place, a slightly unique hook in the marketplace. I don’t know how it’s going to do, we’re going to release it in the next couple of weeks, so we’ll see. That’s something that I’ve always been a big proponent of, that there has to be a unique aspect to it. So for my very first ones, the Sales Letters that you mentioned, that really took off, the unique hook there I call it a fish product. There is the old saying if you hand a man a fish, you feed him for a day or if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That is kind of rubbish; people want the fish handed to them. That’s one way you can create that hook. So that’s what that product did. We’ve had a lot of success doing that.

Actually way back, my very first info business was actually selling to cosmetic surgeons, dermatologists and plastic surgeons, helping them grow their practice. The very first thing that really took off was, I gave them different toolkits for all sorts of procedures , so it had pre done ads and postcards and scripts and press releases for liposuction or breast augmentation or all sorts of other procedures. People loved that; if you can do that for them that makes a big difference. That’s one of the hooks and one of the ways that you can create a different information product.

Believe it or not, you probably have a lot of this material on your computer. So if you’ve been doing anything and you’ve had success at it, there are a lot of other people out there, you can go back into your same marketplace. For me, I actually sold medical equipment so I worked with doctors every single day so that was my in. I have other clients who are actual doctors and they went back and sold to their profession because they’ve done different distinct things in their business, from how they trained their staff or how they market their practice or whatever the case is. To go back in your hard drive and start looking at things you’ve got on there, that could be the basis for a kit or an information product, if that makes sense.

David Jenyns: When you break it down, like the steps there, it’s quite easy. You outlined how it is that you go about creating your first info product. You start off doing the brainstorming to find the niche and then making sure you find the hook and I think you’ve got that knack also, for you bring that little bit of fun to a lot of the promotions that you do. Then figuring out how you’re going to package it up and then getting it online is definitely a good place to go.

It’s funny you picked out all of these little niches, everything from cosmetic surgeons to Getting Fit While You Sit. I know you’ve built up a pretty big name just in the internet marketing space as well, so I’m just curious to know your thoughts on splintering, I mean going for all these little sub niches as opposed to focusing on that one niche and then going deep and if that’s helped create your business or what your thoughts are looking back on it now.

Yanik Silver: The way that it started was definitely not strategic. It was more about, ok, what are Yanik’s interests and what is exciting and interesting and let’s try a couple of different things, let’s prove to people that this actually works with the public domain material or whatever the case was. So I became my own case study.

For people who are trying to figure out the best way to go at it, I’m a big fan of having a mini empire, I guess, so that you’re in a general market. That’s where you play and it doesn’t mean that you have only one product but you can have a whole slew of things and it makes it a whole lot easier when you have. I think to myself the least risky way of building your business, is think of this as 2×2 matrix. You’ve got your product on one side and your marketplace on the other side. The most risky is to go, new product, new marketplace. So if you’re moving two steps, it is pretty tough and that’s where you’ve got the most risk.

I would either like to take my existing product to a new marketplace, or have my existing marketplace and bring them a new product. That’s been typically the way that we’ve grown what we do. You’ve got your built in base where at least you know if you’re taking your existing product somewhere else, at least you know your product is successful. It’s riskiest when you’re trying to do both of those at once: new product, new marketplace.

David Jenyns: The other thing as well, if you don’t mind me digging just a little bit deeper, the products that you have created, because they’re so varied, and like you were talking, small e books that sell from $20 all the way up to high end products to high end coaching, to seminars, those type of things, I know it’s important to have a good mix because you make sure that you have the funnel and making sure that you can monetize at each different stage. Is there any particular part of your business, you say that area is one of the more profitable parts of your business?

Yanik Silver: Absolutely, yes it is the high priced material for sure. We have a $20,000 Mastermind program which is for high end achievers. We’ve got our Underground seminar which, if you wait until the last minute, costs you $3500 to get a seat there.

David Jenyns: Do people buy tickets at that last minute?

Yanik Silver: Yes, some do, which really surprises me. We try to put as many incentives in place as we can to buy early because it helps us set the room right and do all the rest of the things. If you buy early, it is $2000 versus $3500, so there’s definitely a big difference there. We’ve done different coaching programs and all of those things. The higher price material definitely is more profitable. The lower end material is typically easier to set up as a front end, as a way to start building up your funnel and building up your customer data base and so forth.

Lately when I’ve been working with people and if they have something really unique and it has a significant ROI to it, I’ve been pushing them towards creating a higher priced something first, instead of going a traditional funnel route, where there’s a $20 e book and then a $200 course and then a $500 something and it keeps rising from there. There’s a significant psychological component to pricing. With high priced products, you typically expect to get the best and there’s definitely a correlation it seems with that.

So if you can jump in immediately, one of my rules is that we have to, in my planner, one of my values is I get rich by enriching others ten times to hundred times what they pay me in return. So even at the high priced material, that’s one of the questions I’m always asking myself and I get my students to ask is, well, how do I make sure this is creating a ten times to a hundred times value for the end user? If you’re thinking like that then, why couldn’t you charge more for it,as long as you’re delivering what you promised?

David Jenyns: I think at your Underground seminar, Jeff Johnson did that really well. When he burst onto the scene, he launched it at your seminar, that $25,000 coaching program and that was his entry level product.

Yanik Silver: Exactly, yes that’s a great example. Yes, Jeff was very unknown. He was a friend of mine, he still is a friend of mine. I knew him in passing at that point but we became a lot better friends and that is why I asked him to speak there at that very first Underground. That positioning that he got was very powerful. It’s like, ok, you can sit here and listen to me or you’ll get the recordings of this if you want but if you actually want to work with me one on one, it’s $25,000 and that sets up your positioning for a lot of things in the future. If afterwards you’re selling a $5000 program or a $2000, it seems cheap in comparison. There’s definitely a strategic element involved in deciding what you’re going to do.

We were talking about the guy who teaches people how to take the engine out of the Honda Civics, he couldn’t come out of the gates and say, ok, for $25,000 I’ll show you this. You have to have a correlation to the return on investment or the value for somebody. People don’t always buy info products just for an ROI, they buy it for a lot of reasons. They buy them to avoid embarrassment, to look good, to get the inside skinny on things.

It’s good to be a buyer of different things to see what models people are using. So I’ve previously been a purchaser of this one thing called the Andrew Harper Hideaway Report, which is this anonymous guy who goes and travels under an anonymous name to all these little hideaways around the world and then he shares them with you. His clientele are really high end, like CEOs and executives. It is a $300-$400 a year newsletter for a travel newsletter. You’d be surprised what people will spend money for. I’m into wines, so there is a Pinot Noir report for maybe $200 a year to find out about the best Pinot Noirs coming out. So you’ll be surprised.

David Jenyns: Once you’ve brainstormed it out, you’ve figured out what your niche is and you’ve figured out where the hook is going to be, you’ve got your pricing strategy right, you’re starting to package it all up, you’re getting ready to bring it to market, whether you have a look at your copywriting course or get Instant Sales Letters, once you’re at that point, then I suppose the next piece of the puzzle is making sure that you drive traffic. Now there are fifty million different ways to drive traffic. I’m just curious to get your ideas on, when you’re launching a product, what are the ways that you like to try and drive traffic to a site?

Yanik Silver: Yes, there’s definitely, would you say, fifty million ways, that sounds about right. I think for most people, that is part of what slows them down. They see all these different ways of driving traffic, there are all these different ways of doing online marketing and it stops them like a deer in headlights. For me, I’ve totally always been and I still am, non technical. I’d be looking at different traffic strategies and some of them will resonate with you and some of them won’t. For me, one of my key questions I always like asking is, who else can I piggy back on that’s already doing things in the marketplace, where I can jump into their stream of business.

Very early on, that’s exactly what I did for Instant Sales Letters. So back ten years, maybe ten and a half years now, at that time Alta Vista was the big search engine, so I went to Alta Vista and Yahoo! and typed in my keyword, which is sales letters. I just picked out, who is already on top here? I said, I don’t want to do the work to figure out how they did that, why don’t I just contact them and see if they’d be interested in getting a profit share for my product? I contacted people who were on the first page or checked out their sites to see. Some of them were colleges and it would be hard to do a deal with them and different people who didn’t fit.

The ones that fit, I contacted them via email personally and let them know about our product, let them know I’d be happy to give them a review password to check it out and see what they thought. We had one or two people respond and then after that, they would promote it and I’d use those results and go back to the rest of the people on my little hit list of fifteen to twenty prospects or ultimate prospects that I had, and tell them about these other people. After a few months, we had about 30%-40% of the people on there. So we had a good amount of impact just around that keyword.

One of the other things that I did a lot of, was articles. I always think about traffic in three general ways. You can buy it, you can borrow it, so I was borrowing it by going to these people who had existing rankings already, or you can create it. Articles are creating traffic, things like viral marketing and so forth. Typically you have either more time or more money. So I’m typically happier to spend some money to see, instead of waiting for rankings to come up.

You’re a pretty good SEO guy, but I know nothing about that. For me it would take a while to get the rankings but I would imagine you’ve got something that would do it a lot faster than I think. I would rather pay for traffic right now because I know that then it is something I could track and measure right away and see what’s up. I can see what’s my conversion rate, how’s this doing, can I test some pricing, can I test some different things and get it right before I want to market it on a bigger scale?

David Jenyns: I think a lot of people get caught up, it’s almost like you said, they get caught in that deer headlights. Even though you broke it down into the three, and that’s as simple as it needs to be, people have this habit of over complicating things. You identified that as a big mistake I suppose a lot of people are making on a regular basis. No doubt you see a few of these recurring themes. Are there any mistakes that you see people make?

Yanik Silver: Yes, there are definitely a lot. One of them is thinking that it takes a week to become an internet millionaire.

David Jenyns: Yes, that might be Frank Kern’s fault. He makes it look so easy I think.

Yanik Silver: Yes, you have to work at this. It has so many great advantages and benefits. For me, it’s something you don’t have to give up your day job for. You can spend some time building up your assets. It creates an asset for you that you can profit from for a long time but it’s not going to be an overnight thing. You’ve got to build up the relationships with partners, you’ve got to build up traffic sources and test different things.

What I tell people all the time is, you can do just one proactive thing a day, just commit to that, you’ll get there pretty fast. Just don’t get stuck in things that you think are proactive or you think is work but really it’s not. It’s pretty important, especially when you’re starting out and you have limited time. I’ve been refining this over the years because I have a little five year old boy who just walked in and a little three year old girl. When they were born, my time available just kept getting whittled down.

Every year I’m trying to figure out, what are the big 20% activities that make me 80% of our income, or the 20% products that make the 80% income and so forth and really honing in on that. You have to be ruthless about what you spend your time on. The internet is like a Pandora’s box or something and if you have a connection on, all of a sudden you might be working on something that is proactive, like you’re writing an auto responder message or you’re writing a sales letter. Then you might say, this looks like a really interesting angle for this, I wonder, what is the research on how many whatever, tons of con men are tailed by, and then all of a sudden you’re off on eighteen different websites and you just get off track so quickly.

So you’ve got to bring yourself back in and really hone in on what you’re doing and making sure that you’re building up your assets that keep paying you for a long time. Instant Sales Letters, it’s ten and a half years now and last year it just dipped below six figures, $95,000 we did. So it’s still going pretty well for a $40 downloadable product.

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s amazing.

Yanik Silver: I haven’t touched it in six years.

David Jenyns: You hit the nail on the head with the whole idea of the critical focus time. I know you live it because when I was chatting and lining up this interview with you and we were chatting with Chastity, she was talking about this idea of you’re trying to build in or you are building in, she’s helping building this one day when you have the focus time. She’s telling the other team members, if Yanik is calling you on this day, do not answer the phone, he’s supposed to be working.

Yanik Silver: Yes, sometimes it helps if you get someone around you who can help police some of that work too. There’s a good program that I’ve been going through called Strategic Coach by a guy called Dan Sullivan. In there, he’s got three different days that you should be thinking about in your week. One is a focus day where you are hammering things in and getting things done that make you money in your business. Then there are buffer days when you are doing all the rest of the things that you need to do, whatever the case is, it’s all other additional things. So for me it is team calls or different phone calls or interviews or other things like scanning in my credit card, that was a buffer day activity, because my assistant needed to get me a new credit card.

Then there are free days when you don’t do anything and don’t think about work and just rejuvenate and reinvigorate what you’re doing.

David Jenyns: You mentioned that you tried to identify that 20% or those 20% of activities that are giving you the 80% return. I suppose that’s trying to identify where those key leverage points are. I’m interested to just dig a little bit deeper to find out what things you’ve discovered. You’ve had a very varied entrepreneurial past and you’ve learnt a lot of things along the way, so what sort of things have you identified as those key ones?

Yanik Silver: Some of the key leverage points, I love that idea of leverage because that is part of what got me so excited about info marketing, is you do the work one time. We wrote the letters one time and we keep selling them year after year and a lot of the products were created one time and we keep selling them. So for me, leverage is a lot in work related tasks so what else can I use this information or content for?

So for instance, I’ll be taking interviews and we might take the entire interview and sell it to subscribers who are buying it. But then we might take pieces of it and add it to my blog, transcribe it, add it to the blog. We might make it a chapter inside a book I might want to release, so thinking about it in all sorts of ways. We might make it an article that we release out into the wild, so thinking about all sorts of ways you can leverage what you’re doing. That’s one thing.

Leveraging your team is another way. Up until about three years ago I guess, two and a half years ago, it was pretty much me, my wife and a couple of virtual assistants who were running a fairly good size operation. I’ve had some pretty big new lofty goals around what we want to accomplish in the entrepreneurial space. For that, we need to bring a team in. So now for me, the leverage is about finding the right people, the right culture, the people who fit what we’re doing, so they’re able to be working when I’m not working and pushing through to the common vision.

That’s probably another leverage point, is I spent a lot of time creating what one of my coaches calls a painted picture and this is where our business is going to be in the next three years. Now everybody has read it and they’re all on board with it and so they know, instead of me as the boss or the CEO always having to get a final say in everything, if it fits the painted picture, they’re free to work on it at will.

David Jenyns: So there are three real key ones: reusing the content as best as you can, making sure that you’ve got the team and getting the right people and then painting that picture. I suppose they’re real key leverage points.

Are there any other things you’ve learnt along the way? It’s amazing that you could build such a huge business with a very small team to get to the point at which you are now. I think one of the things a lot of people say, is, when I first started getting my e support answered, my customer support as it came through, that was a big stepping stone. Are there any big stepping stones like that which you can think of, if you looked back over your journey and say when I started to do that, that was a big shift for me?

Yanik Silver: Yes, that is a great point. One big leverage point that we didn’t cover and would totally make sense is copywriting, getting that skill. I learnt early on when I sold medical equipment, that I didn’t like just walking up and being toe to toe, belly to belly with someone making that sale. I could if needed but I didn’t look forward to the rejection.

So when I learnt about direct response copywriting, I said, wow, this is really exciting. So then I just learnt everything I could on psychology and writing sales letters and sales copy and so forth. That was a big leverage point because that actually took my Dad’s business from a regional player to where we wereable to compete nationally because I was writing ads for them to sell. Also, the medical equipment my Dad would look and say, nobody’s going to buy this. I said, let’s just try it and see what happens.

That was a big leverage point and learning that skill of copywriting or having that in your business, I think it’s a very learnable skill. That’s a huge leverage point because now, you get tens of thousands of people coming to your website and they all get the exact same sales message delivered perfectly.

You mentioned people having emails answered and so forth. Yes, when you start off you’re typically doing everything, and there are definitely parts of your business that you’re better at and you have more leverage at. I would much rather have somebody I paid, $8, $10,$12 an hour handle my customer support because that’s not really my unique ability or something that I’m incredibly good at. I limited my time to product creation, to copywriting and striking deals with other people because that is where I saw the biggest, highest leverage of my time.

David Jenyns: Very cool. I suppose there are some really key insights there. To shift gears a little bit and to finish up on a lighter note because I know you get into some crazy adventures with everything you do. I know you’ve got the Maverick program as well where you go up and you do all these different crazy things with other like minded entrepreneurs. You’ve done everything from halo skydiving to running with the bulls and going zero G and you’ve signed up to do the Virgin Galactic. Was there any one experience that if you were going to say to someone, hey, if you’re going to do something, you should do this because it had the biggest impact or memory?

Yanik Silver: There are so many. I think what I’d really tell people to do, is create a big life list. On the blog at internetlifestyle.com, we have a little giveaway book, if they just search for Life List.

David Jenyns: It’s on the home page at the moment but maybe I will link to it with the audio.

Yanik Silver: We have a book that outlines this. My whole philosophy is banish the ordinary and create a life really worth living and for me that means rich experiences and rich relationships. Just coming up with all the cool things that you want to do in your lifetime, whether it’s an experience, whether it’s someone you want to meet, whether it’s a skill that you want to have, whether it’s an organization that you want to help or how you want to be of service and impact others. I keep a lot of that on my blog. On the right hand side is a running tally of my ultimate big life list. I don’t know if there’s been one in particular that’s been more monumental than others.

David Jenyns: Scuba diving in the Barrier Reef? That would have to be pretty special. I’m a bit biased.

Yanik Silver: Yes, I haven’t done that one yet. I’ll have to give you a ring when I go over there to do that. Maybe one of my very early adventures was doing buggy racing in New Mexico. I went with someone you mentioned at the beginning of the call, who was Corey Rudl.

Corey and I were pretty good friends and I went with Corey. He had to convince me; my Mum was really sick with cancer and I wasn’t sure I should leave her and Mum said, oh, yes, you should go. So I went and I had a) an amazing adventure, but b) it was a terrific bonding experience with me and Corey and I just got to know him on a much deeper level. Unfortunately a couple of months after that, he got killed in a car racing accident. So I look back on that trip as a really special time that we were able to share together.

It was also a catalyst to start up Maverick Business Adventure because I met a couple of other high level CEOs on that trip and we bonded right away. When I got home, we emailed back and forth and those relationships were built outside of a seminar room, or the typical place where most entrepreneurs meet. I guess that probably is the one that really had a pretty good effect on me for multiple reasons.

David Jenyns: Yes, Corey has still got some great material out there and I know his company lives on. People should definitely Google his name. I think it is Internet Marketing Company.

Yanik Silver: Yes, Internet Marketing Centre.

David Jenyns: Your material is definitely worth following. I know you’ve got your own personal blog at internetlifestyle.com. But are there any other ways, if people want to keep an eye on what it is that you’re doing, that they could find you?

Yanik Silver: That’s probably the best spot is the blog to keep up with what we’re doing and all my crazy adventures and all the things we’ve got going on. Of course my site, yaniksilver.com and .org is a good place too.

David Jenyns: Alright Yanik, we might wrap it up there. I can’t thank you enough and you’re very generous with your time, I know you’re about to fly out. Where are you off to next?

Yanik Silver: I’m going to South Africa for the finals of the World Cup and cage diving with Great Whites. So that should be pretty interesting.

David Jenyns: Very cool, well I’ll look forward to the stories. Thanks again Yanik,

Yanik Silver: Alright, thanks David.

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Name: John Jonas

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.jonasblog.com

Product: www.replacemyself.com

John Jonas’ Bio: John Jonas is a major proponent of outsourcing most of your daily admin tasks so you can focus more in growing your business. He has found success in outsourcing to the Philippines and is actively sharing his experiences on his blog.

With top Internet marketing gurus finally revealing that outsourcing is one of their best kept secrets on how they are able to expand their businesses more efficiently, John Jonas is at the forefront of informing people on how to do it right and get the most out of your investments.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. Today I’ve lined up a call with John Jonas, really who is an expert in outsourcing, specifically outsourcing to the Philippines. I first got introduced to John Jonas’ work through a website of his called Replace Myself and it really teaches people how to outsource to the Philippines. It introduces them to different tools and gives you the systems to be able to pass to your outsourcers to get specific tasks done.

It was a great way for me to get my feet wet in outsourcing, specifically to the Philippines, and we’ve used some of his suggestions going through to Best Jobs Ph. That’s the way that we hire our staff now. He’s modified a little bit of the 4 Hour Work Week to be a 17 hour work week because he’s a big proponent of Tim Ferris’ work and getting things done. He’s really figured a lot of things out, so I’m excited to get him on the line and talk about how he outsources his business. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call John.

John Jonas: Nice to be here with you Dave, I appreciate it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well I’ll just dive straight in. Usually I just like to jump straight into the meat of it. So one of the first things I wanted to talk about is tying it a little bit into what we do, which is driving traffic to our businesses. When you’re first setting up a new project, and I know you have lots and lots of different websites, but maybe if you think of one of those websites, maybe take us through the process for how you launch a new website and how you drive traffic to it. It is a pretty big topic so just dive into it wherever you feel comfortable.

John Jonas: Ok, so one of the big things that I have found, is that I don’t wait until the website is perfectly done. This is something I’ve seen people do over and over again where they’re a little bit scared or hesitant to start driving traffic until it’s perfectly done. So that’s the first thing I do when I start driving traffic is I do it before the website is complete. I know that it is going to take some time to get traffic to it and so I can start the traffic generation process before it’s completely done and then I can work on finishing the website.

Second, I make sure I have a plan in the beginning. That plan is partly knowing the market and knowing where people hang out in the market and how they’re going to come to my website. Every market is a little bit different. Some markets will allow you to go into forums and participate in the forums and you can get a lot of traffic that way. Other markets, people aren’t necessarily hanging out in forums, they’re just searching. You can get them through pay per click or through SEO.

I’m not going to talk about the forum or the social method of driving traffic, I’ll talk about the SEO method that you talk about. My plan for any website that I’m going to launch includes starting off with article marketing. We’re going to do at least one or two articles right at the very beginning. The website is up, there is something there, there is enough there that the article directories will accept our work. We’re going to do some articles. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit our articles.

David Jenyns: Great service.

John Jonas: Immediately after that we are going to do directory submissions. We’re going to start doing social book marking and beyond that, we’re going to start building a mini net. I don’t know if you’ve talked about mini nets. We will build an extensive, extensive mini net. We will do video marketing so creating videos and submitting them to all the video sites and linking them back to us.

We’ll use a couple of different services that are out there to help automate link building, 3 Way Links and One-Way-Links and Linkvana and the Free Traffic System and Content Spooling. There are quite a few of them. We’ll include all of those in the plan for doing this. Those get used consecutively over a period of time; they get added to the sites, the site gets more and more links. Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes. To dig in a little deeper, you start off with the article marketing you mentioned. You probably write those articles, just are we talking standard posting to Ezine Articles? Is that where you first start, because you mentioned doing one or two articles before you shift into the Unique Article Wizard?

John Jonas: Ok, here is how we do it. We always use Unique Article Wizard for everything. Every article we write gets submitted to Ezine Articles first, and then it gets submitted to Unique Article Wizard and then it gets submitted to numerous other websites, although I don’t know which ones those are, because I don’t do the work. My guys, my outsource workers, are doing all that work for me.

In fact, just today I got an email from one of them, it was actually sent from one of them to another one and they cc’d me. One of my guys has taken over as manager and he was pointing her to four other websites that the articles should be submitted to, like GoArticles, or Article City or something like that. Every time we do an article we submit to Ezine Articles, submit to Unique Article Wizard and then I think they submit it to four or five other websites also.

David Jenyns: Cool. And then from there, the directory submissions, do you do that through Directory Maximizer or are you guys hand submitting those?

John Jonas: We are hand submitting, so that they get done over a period of time. I’ve given very specific instructions. We use a piece of software called Directory Submitter and I’ve instructed my guys to submit to ten to fifteen directories per day and not to more than that. I want the links being built over time. I don’t want to slam thousands of directories all at once so Google sees that we just got three thousand links this week. I want it to be done over time. It’s a pretty permanent thing that my guys are going to be doing in submitting to directories.

David Jenyns: Then it moves into the social book marking and is that something again hand done? I know the way that you’ve structured yourself with your team, a lot of what you do is hand done, which means you know it’s getting done, and getting done to a very good quality. But social book marking is one of those things where it is a lot more effective than it was. It’s got certain benefit to it now, so I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.

John Jonas: We use a couple of different things. I haven’t done this myself in a long time but I know my guys have used OnlyWire in the past, and I think we may be going back to it now. We’ve been using Ping.fm to do some work. I know that we just started using SocialBot and I don’t know the results from that. Another thing that we’ll do is use packet sites, high page rank sites to get high page rank links. That is a whole lesson in and of itself.

So my guys do some of those things by hand. I know they’re using tools to do them, like Ping, SocialBot and OnlyWire and I believe there is one other but I don’t know what it is.

David Jenyns: Then you mentioned moving into the mini net. I’m assuming that’s through a combination of Web 2.0 and building your own sites as well?

John Jonas: Yes. It is a combination, but most of it we do on other people’s sites, so this is something I have a huge training on how to do this. In fact everything I’ve talked about I have a big training I give to my guys on how to do this. For the most part it is built on other people’s sites. I’ve found it is almost the exact same effectiveness and there’s a lot less hassle and headache.

People talk about, you’ve got to spread this out on different IP addresses, you’ve got to have all these different hosting accounts, make sure you do them right. I don’t want to deal with that, so we just use Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and HubPages and Squidoo. There are tons of places out there that let you build a website and link them back to our site.

We’ll do article marketing for those sites. We’ll submit those to directories and we’ll book mark those sites. Now those sites are getting traffic and they’re more authoritative than they were before, so now they’re pointing to us, which makes my main site more authoritative. That’s the process that we’re using.

David Jenyns: Then shifting into video marketing, which is an excellent way to get some quick rankings at the moment, is this something you’re outsourcing, the content generation of the video, or do you create it and then your team helps to distribute it, uploading it? I know you mentioned Traffic Geyser and things like that in Replace Myself.

John Jonas: It depends on what the website is. If the website is me, for my blog or for Replace Myself, I will create the videos, but otherwise I have them create them. There are quite a few different ways that you can have videos created by people overseas. They are effective, they’re well done. My guys do a great job of it and again I have a whole training that I give to them on how to do this and how to do it correctly so it gets done well.

They create the videos and they submit them using Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul. We use both, because I just get the feeling that we get different results using both, so that’s even better. Anything that I can let them do, I do.

David Jenyns: Then I suppose the last one you mentioned was building links through alternative services, things like Linkvana, Free Traffic System, the 3 Way Links. That is just a gradual process where you just get them to drip out those links and go in there and post to those different services.

John Jonas: Some of those services are automated and some of them require constant work. Linkvana, for example, requires any link you get requires a piece of content. My team knows how to do that. They do it for me and I don’t ever touch it. One of the things I learned over the years, and this is one of the things that I realized really made a difference to me and my success, when I realized I don’t have to do all of this at once. I just know that I need to know all these things.

They need to be done over time. All these things get done in a new website that we do, but they don’t all get done upfront. We do one thing at a time. That’s important because if you’re trying to do too many of them, you don’t do anything and it doesn’t work. What I just described is a six month to a year’s process. If you start and systematically do them one by one, you’re going to get traffic to your website, there is no question. You’re going to get traffic and that’s how I approach it.

I know if I do all these things, it will work. I’ve done it enough times to know it will work. If the market is super competitive, I know I’ll just have to wait longer to get more traffic. But otherwise it’s all the things you’ve heard of, that people have heard of that they know they should be doing and they’re not doing because there is not time in the day to do them all. I j