Simon Johnson

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations:

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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.

Download Simon Johnson Interview | Jim Fleck Videos | Simon Johnson Podcast | Simon Johnson Review | Simon Johnson MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Brian Johnson

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon…

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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.

Download Brian Johnson Interview | Brian Johnson Videos | Brian Johnson Podcast | Brian Johnson Review | Brian Johnson MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Rich Schefren

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (11 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Coming Soon…

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.

Download Rich Schefren Interview | Rich Schefren Videos | Rich Schefren Podcast | Rich Schefren Review | Rich Schefren MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Dori Friend

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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.

Download Dori Friend Interview | Dori Friend Videos | Dori Friend Podcast | Dori Friend Review | Dori Friend MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Lynn Terry

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 Videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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.

Download Lynn Terry Interview | Lynn Terry Videos | Lynn Terry Podcast | Lynn Terry Review | Lynn Terry MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Erik Qualman

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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).

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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.

Download Erik Qualman Interview | Erik Qualman Videos | Erik Qualman Podcast | Erik Qualman Review | Erik Qualman MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Yaro Starak

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 Videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Coming Soon…

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.

Download Yaro Starak Interview | Yaro Starak Videos | Yaro Starak Podcast | Yaro Starak Review | Yaro Starak MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

John Carlton

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (8 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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.

Download John Carlton Interview | John Carlton Videos | John Carlton Podcast | John Carlton Review | John Carlton MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Yanik Silver

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (5 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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.

Download Yanik Silver Interview | Yanik Silver Videos | Yanik Silver Podcast | Yanik Silver Review | Yanik Silver MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

John Jonas

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

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.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

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 just have my team do it all.

David Jenyns: You’re right. I think you only need to actually do a few of those things and you’ll start to see traffic. So if you were doing all that, to get that traffic is almost guaranteed. The hardest part a lot of people have is tying it through to the actual execution. We talked about the different things to be done. To actually manage that process and I know you work with your outsourcers and I’m interested to know the process through which you go.

Are you at a stage in your business now where you’ve got your project manager guy who understands these steps, and you say, here’s a website, I want you to go through our process and just take it over time? I want you to farm the work out and I want you to manage it. How do you work that process?

Jim: So right now in my business, yes, I’m at that point. One of my guys has been working for me for four years, over four years. He understands everything. I can say to him, and to a couple of other people, here’s the website I want. Go through these steps and build the site and market it and tell me the plan of what you’re going to do to market it. They’ll do it.

To get to that point, there are a couple of super important things you’ve got to know. One, it is going to take time. Two, you can’t do this hiring contract workers. It just doesn’t work, it is too much effort. When I say hiring contract workers, I mean like hiring someone off Elance to do a single thing for you, or hiring someone off oDesk to get one thing done, or going into directory submissions by automating the whole thing all at once.

In what I do and what I’ve seen, it’s a process and you have to have one thing done today and you get another thing done next week and you get another thing done the next week. There are short cuts to doing things, but very often the short cuts are temporary, they only work for a small amount of time and then usually you end up getting punished for doing them afterwards.

Anytime I’m doing my work, I’m looking at it as a long term business. I want to work long term, I don’t want to put it out there and use some special magic silver, shiny bullet that is going to get me tons of traffic right now and then next week it’s going to die, because that is wasted effort in my opinion. So anything we do, we try and make it so it’s long term, standard, normal work. I just know that it is going to work.

In order to do that with an outsourced team, or in order to do it period, you’ve got to have other people doing the work. There are just too many things to be doing it yourself. This is one of the things I figured out was, I can hire full time people in the Philippines and train them the right way and do some certain things with them to where they can do all these things for me. It really lets me focus on working on my business and not in my business. That’s a really big deal.

David Jenyns: Yes. The process you go through for identifying those, you’ve talked about the different components that need to be done. I know you’ve got the systems in place as far as process maps and recording, Camtasia or ScreenFlow or whatever program anyone wants to use, recording that process, getting that system in place, training someone up to understand all those components and they can evolve to be more of a project manager and handle other assistants to give that person greater reach.

To find staff to do that, and I know you love hiring from the Philippines because of so many reasons, and you’ve outlined it on your blog, the jonasblog.com. There are so many reasons to go over there, excellent bang for your buck, very good work ethic, high quality output.

The process you go through for hiring those or identifying key players, because everybody who has read Top Grading, an excellent book on hiring, knows the importance of getting those A players. I think that is the biggest fear people have when going into some of these other countries overseas, especially with some experiences outsourcing to India and things like that, where you can have a very different experience than the Philippines. How do you go through that process of getting those stars?

John Jonas: Number one I want to mention that. If you’ve tried outsourcing before and you’re listening to what I’m saying about how I have my team doing this and saying yes, right, that is impossible, you’ve probably tried it in India before and you need to go try it in the Philippines. It’s a really big deal. There are huge differences between the Philippines and anywhere else in the world. That’s one and I go into more detail about that in other places as to why that’s so important. We don’t have time to go into detail on that.

So how do you get those A players? That’s not easy in the Philippines. There are 100,000,000 people in the Philippines, so it is a big place. But they don’t have the experienced workforce that you have in Australia or that we have in the US in terms of internet business. They just don’t have that experience.

So if you want to go to the Philippines and find someone who already knows how to do all these things, you’re going to have a really hard time. I’m not going to say that you can’t find them, it’s just that I have rarely found those kinds of people. My people that are so good, they’re good because I’ve conditioned them to be good. I’ve taught them, I’ve let them learn, I’ve let them shine over the years.

I have a guy I would trust with my life, but when he started with me, he told me a couple of months ago, I knew nothing when I started working for you. If you teach them, they are so eager to learn and to do well for you and to make you happy and to get the work done correctly, it’s amazing what they can do for you if you’re willing to work with them. If you’re not willing to work with them, it’s not going to work. You need to go and find that best person which doesn’t really exist in the Philippines.

If you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort, you can get people like my guys who I can tell an idea to and they can go and execute the entire project, with my help, from start to finish. When you get to that point, it makes it so much easier to execute ideas. You’re not going to get there right up front, but when you do, it is amazing.

David Jenyns: You mentioned a few different ways like Best Jobs Ph is a good way for hiring people and do you still have that service where you help identify potential resumes and things like that?

John Jonas: Let me tell you a little bit about where you can find good people. Again, I go into this in a lot more detail in other places. Currently the best place to find people is at Onlinejobs.ph. If you go there, you’ll see how it works. You can just search the resumes, you can find webmasters, designers. They speak amazing English in the Philippines, everyone speaks English, literally everyone speaks English in the Philippines. Everyone doesn’t speak it great, but because everyone speaks it, a lot of people speak it really well. At Onlinejobs.ph, that’s currently where I hire people from.

Where you’re talking about Bestjobs.ph where I used to hire people from until let’s say, six, eight months ago, Bestjobs decided they didn’t want to allow any new registrations. So anybody who is just getting started in this, can’t use Bestjobs right now because there is not a way to get an account and you need an account in order to contact people.

You’ve talked about Replace Myself. The only way that I know of to get access to Bestjobs is thorough Replace Myself, through my system, and that’s because we managed to keep an account. We give contact information for people you’ll find in Bestjobs. So those are the two best places to find people in the Philippines are Onlinejobs and Bestjobs in my experience.

David Jenyns: The way that you’re identifying them, are you scanning resumes to find people who meet your criteria and contacting them? Or are you putting up a job ad and then having applicants come through?

John Jonas: I do both. What I’ve typically done is, I will look through the resumes, searching through them and then scanning and looking at them and then emailing people, trying to find the candidates that I think are qualified and then narrowing it down from there. You can definitely post a job. The problem is you can’t post a job at Bestjobs, because they will delete your account. Onlinejobs you definitely can, but you’re going to get a hundred resumes and then you have to weed through them.

I just prefer to have the computer weed through them for me and I’ll just search through them. But I do both, depending on the kind of person I’m looking for, I’ll post a job and you will get lots of people applying, so you’re going to find really good talent doing that.

David Jenyns: Then the process for actually going through when you go through the hire process, do you do any initial surveying or questionnaires or do you go straight to an interview after you’ve identified someone? What is the process you go through? Ok, now how do we start to sort through all of that dirt to find the gold?

John Jonas: What I typically do is I will email lots of people. I want to see who responds. I’ve done it enough to know that if you go and look for that one single person and you spend a lot of time weeding through and you find the single person you want to hire, there is a reasonable chance they are not even going to respond to you. In that case you just waste a lot of time.

So I try and find a pool of candidates who I think are reasonable and I’ll email them all and see who responds and then I will narrow it down a little bit more. I’ll say, what are your skills, and I’ll look back at the resume. I’ll ask for references and I’ll ask for proof. I want to see you write an article for me. Send me a couple of articles you have written before, I’ll see if they’re good enough and then I want you to write an article for me. Or let me see design work you have done before or let me see programming work you’ve done before or if they’re going to be doing phone calling for me, I want to talk to them on the phone. I want to hear you speak.

That’s the initial process. When I’ve narrowed someone down and I want to hire someone, I start by giving them a difficult first task. I tell them, you have a job, a full time job and my expectations with it. A lot of things go on there. Then I give them a difficult first task. This is super important. In the Philippines, they don’t want to disappoint you. There are a lot of reasons that go into this but they don’t want to disappoint you.

The difference between the Philippines and everywhere else, specifically India, when they don’t want to disappoint you, they don’t just say yes. In other places they just say yes. How’s the project going? Yes, sir, it’s going great, when it’s really not. In the Philippines what they’ll do is if they don’t know something or they don’t want to disappoint you or they don’t understand something, they just don’t say anything at all.

So the reason for this difficult first task is to set an expectation with them, where I can tell them, I’m giving you this difficult task. I know it’s difficult, I know you’re going to have problems with it and that’s good, I expect that. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go and try to figure it out first but when you get stuck, I expect you to ask me. Please come and ask me, I know that you’re going to get stuck. I’m here to help, I want this to work out, I want it to be a long term relationship. So come to me when you have a problem and I’ll help you work it out.

So the difficult task let’s me set that expectation and it also let’s them learn a bunch of things. They know they’re supposed to be learning and they know when they get stuck, they can come to me. Often I’ll give that difficult first task, it will be set up WordPress on my hosting account. Doing that, they understand hosting, they understand FTP, they understand WordPress, they understand a data base, they understand cPanel and scripts and themes. There is so much that they understand that they have to learn.

That’s really hard if you’ve never done it before. That’s the process I go through to get someone started the very first time.

David Jenyns: Yes, excellent, I think that is key. Then do you have any sort of trial period in which you work with them? Or once you hire them, like you said, I know you keep working with them because they need to be skilled up. A lot of times they don’t have that same skill set that we might find if we’re hiring locally. How do you manage whether or not it’s someone that, yes, this is an A player. Do you have a process for figuring that out over the first few months?

John Jonas: You know, I don’t. For me, they’re cheap enough that it’s not that big of a deal. I have eight full time people who work for me and they make anywhere from $200 – $600 a month. That’s full time work. I’m not paying benefits, I’m not paying insurance, I’m not paying utilities, I’m not paying taxes. It’s a business expenses tax deductible, so take off 30% of that and that’s what I’m paying them after tax saving. Really the average person, I’m going to start them off at $US250 or $US300 or $US350 per month and they’re going to work forty hours a week.

So for identifying A players, I haven’t been able to do it in the very beginning. I have, of my eight, I would say, probably half of them are really, really good. In my experience that is about what you’re going to find. About half of them are really good and the other half are still good, they’re just not amazing, like half of them are.

David Jenyns: Then from a working with them process, we talked a little bit about hiring them and that first initial week or so as they’re learning the ropes and getting their head around the way that you do systems, when you’re actually going from a day by day process, how are you managing them during the day? Obviously it’s not something where you’re sitting by Skype and making sure you’re there at their beck and call. How do you manage that?

John Jonas: That’s a good question. There are a couple of things that I do. I guess there is quite a bit of this, but I require them to send me a daily email. All of my people are required to send me an email everyday at the end of the day when they’ve finished working. In that email I require three things. I want to know, number one, what did you do today? Number two, what problems did you run into and number three, what can I help you with? That daily email is probably my primary means of communication with them.

Second, I use chat with them, either Google Chat or Skype with a couple of them. Pretty much every Filipino has Yahoo Instant Messenger but I don’t use Yahoo Instant Messenger, so I ask them to get onto Google Chat. I also use a project management system for communicating with them. That’s important where I can keep track of what’s going on in the projects and the status of everything in that system.

Those three are the biggest ways that I communicate. Typically I try and give my people a couple of different tasks that they can always be doing. So when they run out of things to do on a single one time task that I’m giving them, they have other things that they can do. Like all the marketing tasks are ongoing tasks. Article marketing happens every week, or directory submissions happen every day or social book marking happens every couple of days, or video marketing happens every couple of weeks or every week. So there are always things that they can do when they run out of things that are a single project.

Every day with my people, I get an email from them, on what they worked on. If they don’t have anything to work on, I have a pretty good idea, because I got that email and then I can assign them more tasks. So on a day to day basis, that is really important to me, that they’re working on things that are ongoing. Otherwise it means that it doesn’t let me live that lifestyle I want to live, if I have to be constantly involved with what they’re doing. That’s really important to me.

You mentioned the 17 hour work week. That is what I do and it’s very important to me. I like my lifestyle. So I try and keep myself away from their work. This is important and it was a mindset change, a total mindset change for me and it took a while to realize I can step away from what they’re doing and get my brain working on more important things instead of worrying about how well they’re doing what they’re doing. When you do that, you can focus your brain on making sales instead of worrying about grunt work.

It’s a lot easier to succeed in a business when you’re working on making sales than when you’re worrying about submitting to directories and how many got submitted for real today.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think that might be one of the big areas where you probably see a lot of people make mistakes. I know with your website, the Replace Myself, you’re going to be dealing with a lot of new people as they’re coming on board, getting interested in the idea of outsourcing. A lot of people do get caught up in that repetitive work that is probably not the best use of their time. Can you think of any other mistakes that you’ll see people make as they’re getting their head around outsourcing and also just building an online business?

John Jonas: Yes ok, let me answer those in two separate questions. The first mistake people make before they know what is possible with outsourcing in the Philippines, is they try to use Elance or oDesk or India. That is the first mistake, is not hiring a fulltime person in the Philippines. We don’t have to go into all that and there is so much that needs to be understood before you can really do this correctly, but you’ve mentioned Replace Myself. I cover it for free there about why that is so important and it really is. That is number one.

The second biggest mistake I see people make is they want to find a person who is everything. This is so funny. I literally got an email four weeks ago from someone who said, I need someone who can participate in forums and make twenty forum posts a day and design an e book cover and make it look good and do the graphics for a website, and write a sales page and write the auto responder emails and write a twenty page e book and program the back end so it is a membership site and do SEO for it and run the AdWords campaign. How do I find this person?

David Jenyns: If she finds out, you’ll have to let us know.

John Jonas: You can’t find that person anywhere in the world. There is no such person. That’s a big mistake I see people make, is they try and find someone who can do everything. Really what you should be doing is hiring someone who speaks good English and hire them for their English. So that’s a big mistake.

Another one I see is people who won’t let go of those minute details we just talked about. This isn’t necessarily your fault, this is how we’re conditioned to think. We’re conditioned to work ourselves so hard to make things happen. It really does take a mindset change to let them do the work and let them figure it out and deal with the mistakes they make later, where it took you still ten times less time and effort to get it done correctly, even if they made a mistake than it would have if you’d done it yourself or had you watched over their shoulder to make sure they did it correctly the first time.

Those are the mistakes that I see in outsourcing. There are quite a few, in fact I made a blog post recently about the seven mistakes people make when they get started outsourcing. You can find that on my blog at jonasblog. The biggest mistakes I see people make when they get started online, there are a couple of them. Number one is not focusing. So often people will get into a program and do it once and it doesn’t work for them, so they move on to the next bright shiny object that comes from a mailing list that day and tells them you can’t live without this.

All those distractions are the biggest factor in preventing success that I see. My advice is to find something that you understand, find a system that you understand, that makes sense to you that you can see the end from the beginning and stick with it. It’s a business. You’re going to fail in business. That’s important.

I still put up websites today that totally, completely fail. I put up a lot of websites that completely succeed. There is a lot of failure involved in success and so many times the mistake I see people make is they fail once, and oh, this internet thing doesn’t work. That is just not right. So that is a big mistake.

Another big mistake I see, and this is more detailed, is not getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. People will put their website up and this is about targeting. You put up a website about, I’m going to use mortgages. You’re a mortgage broker. So you want to target someone looking for a mortgage. That is so big and so broad and really what you want to target are VAs wanting to refinance. Then people go out and target in SEO or pay per click, they target the keywords mortgage, every keyword they can find, when the reality is, they only want to service VAs wanting to refinance.

Or if we looked at dog training, you have a product that teaches how to stop a dog from going crazy inside the house, and then they go out and bid on every single keyword related to anything dog training because this person who searched for ‘stop my dog from barking’ just might possibly be interested in teaching them how to stop going crazy in the house. Well, that’s not right.

I see so many people spend so much money and wasted time on things that were not targeted at all to what their real message was about. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see, is not targeting your message exactly to the right person with the exact right message when they’re looking for that message.

David Jenyns: Yes, you hit some real key ones there, like all too often you see people getting caught up in their emails with the latest and greatest fads and the idea of failing just once and then giving up. You see that all too often. Then a really key one is just targeting. A message to market match needs to be really quite tight for you to make a sale and that is where you’ll make the best sales and you’ll get the highest conversion rate. They were some really key ones there.

With some of the other lessons that you have learned, that’s where people go wrong. If you look back over your internet marketing career, I don’t know if you can think about times where there were turning points where you said, once I started to implement this particular thing my business started to change. Obviously outsourcing is a huge one for you. Are there any other insights that you’ve gained over the years, which you say, I wish I’d done that earlier?

John Jonas: Yes, outsourcing is a huge one and I realized just a couple of months ago that I’ve been outsourcing for four years and since the time I’ve started outsourcing, every year I’ve doubled my income. That was a really big one.

Another big one was when I realized how good the people that I was outsourcing to really were. This was a year and a half into it. It took me this long to recognize what I could give them to do. The things they can do are really shocking when you realize it. There was a three week period when I realized what they could do and that completely changed my business.

The other big thing that I did was when I started implementing everything, that really changed things for me. When I say implementing everything, I mean implementing everything. Every product that I buy gets implemented. All the tactics that I know about that we should be doing, get implemented. They don’t get implemented all at once but they get implemented over time and they don’t get implemented by me, they get implemented by someone else.

Those three were probably the biggest keys to success in my business.

David Jenyns: With the implementing everything, I know you’re an avid course consumer. A lot of people buy courses and then they sit on the shelf and never get round to it. You basically take these courses and then get them implemented. I am interested to know, of all the ‘gurus’ in the internet marketing industry, who are the key ones who you keep an eye on? I suppose it’s important, like we talked about earlier, to not follow too many, because then you can get caught up in chasing every new, shiny object that comes past your way. But who are the people who you keep an eye on?

John Jonas: I’m going to get into trouble here. I have a lot of friends in the internet marketing space, so I hear about a lot of things from friends. I don’t follow mailing lists though. That’s where I said I’m going to get into trouble. I unsubscribed from all mailing lists. There are a couple of people who I listen to when they talk.

Keith Baxter is one of them. Over the years, Keith has had different reviews about him but I know him personally very well and the guy knows his craft. He is so smart and when he does something, he’s amazing. John Barker is another one, the original Mr X. He’s another one I follow. He doesn’t mail very often, he’s not very well known, but that man knows so many good things. He’s at adwordsblackbook.com.

David Jenyns: He’s great.

John Jonas: I don’t really follow any of the big gurus. I keep hearing about these launches that happened and I frankly don’t even know about them. This goes back to what we talked about earlier. I just don’t want the distractions. I’m at a point now where I’ve found something that we can do and do it really well and so I want to focus on it. I don’t want to get the latest and greatest most awesome thing because I have enough things that my team can do to make money.

David Jenyns: Yes, it’s time to start implementing.

John Jonas: Yes, I don’t follow many people.

David Jenyns: Cool. I think the material you’re coming out with is really great and I know people can benefit from it. If people want to find out more and keep an eye on what you’re doing, what is the best way they can do that? Do you have Twitter, or your blog?

John Jonas: I have my blog at jonasblog.com. Really what most people are interested in, is how I do this outsourcing like you were talking about. How do I build a team like the team that you have? I haven’t been able to cover some of the super important things about this but I have a free eighty minute audio at replacemyself.com, where I cover the outsourcing from the beginning to the end.

There are so many important things that we didn’t cover and it is really important that you understand certain things about it, or it will be an exercise in frustration. I learned that the hard way over the last four years. I didn’t have someone to tell me, you need to do this or the person is going to disappear. Or you need to this or they’re not going to do good work, or if you do this, it will not work.

I talked to someone today saying one of these things I’m talking about, saying oh, I tried this, and it just didn’t work. Why? Well it doesn’t work with these people. There are so many things like that. You can find it all at replacemyself.com and I teach it for free.

There is a membership component to it if you’re interested, if it is right for you, with all these trainings that I’ve talked about that I give to my guys. Those are all available as a member of replacemyself.com. So you can give my trainings to your guys, the exact same trainings I give my guys to build me businesses that make me $5, 10, $20,000 a month, you can give those same trainings to your guys through my system.

David Jenyns: Very cool.

John Jonas: Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s good, it points people in the right direction and gets them started on the right track. So I just want to finish up. Thank you so much, John, for your time. I know it is very valuable and you like to keep to the 17 hour work week, so any time you do spare is much appreciated. Thanks again for that.

John Jonas: You’re welcome David. It’s been good talking to you. It’s always fun to talk to other people about how to help other people to succeed. It’s good.

David Jenyns: Perfect. Thank you.

Download John Jonas Interview | John Jonas Videos | John Jonas Podcast | John Jonas Review | John Jonas MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Jim Fleck

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Jim Fleck

Industry: Internet Marketing, Direct Marketing

Website: jimfleck.com

Jim Fleck’s Bio: You may call him old school in the business of Internet marketing, but Jim Fleck considered one of the direct marketing legends we have today. He has been active online since 1997, so much longer than most Internet marketers.

He is the author of ““How To Make Quick And Easy Money From Your Kitchen Table… In Your Underwear!” and the CEO of Instant Profits Marketing, Inc.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviewx.com. Today I’m very excited, I’ve lined up a call for you guys to listen in with Jim Fleck. Now he’s been around for years. He got started making his first dollar online all the way back in 1998, so way back when, well over twelve years now He’s the author of How to Make Quick and Easy Money from your Kitchen Table in your Underwear. When I first got started, I got introduced to him by seeing him speak at different events. He was actually invited to speak at Dan Kennedy, Jeff Paul’s things. He’s done a lot of work with Jeff Paul, Ron LeGrand, Robert Allen, and quite a few of those names are quite synonymous with information marketing in the real estate space.

So Jim Fleck’s actually really quite big in real estate and created a system and the way that he markets that. It’s funny, even though I got introduced to his stuff very early on, I haven’t heard too much from him in the world of information marketing and internet marketing as well. He’s been off doing infomercials and that sort of thing, so I was keen to follow him up and find out what he’s been working on for the past twelve years.

So I’d just like to invite you to the line and welcome you. Are you there Jim?

Jim Fleck: Yes, I’m here David.

David Jenyns: Excellent, well thanks for your time.

Jim Fleck: I’ve actually never really left the information marketing in the internet market. I guess I probably broke into that a lot earlier than most. I was a technology guy back in the mid nineties and I really broke into internet marketing in 1997. There were only a couple of us back then, Corey Rudl who is not with us anymore and Marlon Sanders and Jonathan Mizel, there weren’t very many of us back then.

At that time at the end of the nineties, I was getting out of my mail order businesses which actually started back in the 1990. I’ve been in the information business now for twenty years. I’ve been pursuing opportunities my whole life. I’ve run dozens of companies and even had my own company when I was thirteen, a real company with twelve people. That was a teenage lawn mowing thing, but a real company with twelve people working for me when I was eighteen years old putting myself through college.

In the late nineties I saw the Jeff Paul mail order infomercial. He was in business with Dan Kennedy and that business had really come to an end. It was really only a short- lived business and designed for one thing only and that was to get an infomercial. They did that with Guthy Renker, the people that were doing Tony Robbins and Victoria Principal and a lot of the big shows here in the States. That really didn’t go anywhere.
A couple of years later we were actually invited out to Joe Sugarman, the creator of the BluBlocker sunglass craze, a legend in direct marketing I know you know. He created 800 numbers, the use of 800 numbers here in ads. We were at his estate out in Hawaii. Jeff had been invited, I’d been invited, Dan Kennedy and a couple of other guys. I told Jeff, let’s take that mail order product you’ve got and let’s sex it up a bit and throw the internet in there.

I’ve been on the internet now for almost three years and we converted that thing to the internet. Of course Jeff Paul in making money on the internet is now really legendary. Quite frankly I was instrumental in creating all that. I was the internet guy in that whole process. So for the last eight, nine years I left the straight information business really offline and went completely one hundred percent online. Quite frankly the majority of my time has been spent on TV because there is nothing that compares with that.

When you can get 15,000 buying customers a month, now some people say I could get 15,000 e book sales a month and of course we know most people are lying when they say that. But when you get people calling in to buy them, there’s nothing like TV. That’s where I’ve been for the last decade. I had Jeff’s products on the internet and there were guys like Sean Casey and Frank Kern and a lot of these guys were old customers of mine on the internet. I’m not taking credit for them, they are all brilliant guys, they went on to make a ton of money online.

A couple of years ago I decided well, I built this huge Jeff Paul business. I built these mail order businesses in the nineties, let’s build one for myself. My wife and I had already, I don’t know if we call ourselves prognosticators, but we saw the real estate crash coming and we started investing early on in what are called short sales in the States and getting properties for discounts from the banks and foreclosures and things like that which I’m sure your listeners have all heard of and probably experiencing there also. I just don’t know the extent of it.

So as soon as we started investing in real estate I said to myself, information is in my blood. The minute I figured out real estate I said, I’ve got to start teaching other people. I just couldn’t get away from it. The idea of investing in real estate came to mind in late ’06, mid ’06. February ’07 I decided to teach what I had already learned. In July of ’07, just a few months later, I had 225 people in a seminar and I was teaching them at about $2,000 apiece.

That was July of ’07. We’re not quite three years later. That first year we did about $3,500,000 in sales, home study courses and seminars. I don’t know what we did the second year but it was probably double that. I’ve got a coaching program that costs $19,000 to join. We’ve got a mini coaching program. The $19,000 is almost like a gym in a box. The person comes to my office and I really install an entire business for them into them.

Then I have a mini one that is $5,000 a year and it gets some ongoing coaching. We sell that by webinar and we did that just a couple of days ago and sold four of them. The beauty of that is, that’s $20,000 and we replayed it again on Saturday and I actually sold two more which is $30,000, but it is recorded. I’m not there, in fact I was at Little League coaching baseball with my son.

I’ve never really left. The beauty of it is what we got to is I have my own television show now selling my book Real Estate Riches in Under Ten Hours a Week and that is a lead generator. So I think that gives a little bit of background David. What I’d really like to tell your listeners though is what the core of it has been for me because in the early nineties I was just trying to start mail order companies and sell anything. I was buying back then,

I don’t know how far you go back. I was doing the one thousand reports on a CD, licensing those and being able to sell to your friends and family maybe. I moved from that into the Dan Kennedy world and that’s where I really learned direct response marketing from. I used to run in circles with Dan Kennedy. I was in his first platinum group, Gary Halbert, I hired and worked with him and Ted Nicholas and Jay Abraham, those were the guys I was hanging around with and learning from and speaking at seminars with them eventually.

There are a number of things I think, and I know we only have a short time today, but if it’s ok, I know we’ve got certain questions so if you want to chime in anywhere.

David Jenyns: You go.

Jim Fleck: When I get going, I get going.

David Jenyns: I won’t get in your way.

Jim: Ok. So I went and I saw that Dan Kennedy was doing certain things and we took direct response and I became the leading consultant in a technology niche and I won’t bore people with it, but I was the leading consultant. My clients were the US government, the Canadian government, the US Navy, AT & T, Great Western Bank and Arthur Anderson, big companies. They brought me in to set up their computer systems in a way where it no longer took twenty people to run them, it took one.

I was the guy they brought in the back door after everybody else screwed things up. When the internet came out, that was tailor made for me. I was outsourcing to Pakistan and India and the Ukraine in 2000. All kinds of people use virtual systems now, but we were doing that back in 1999 – 2000 – 2001. We were very early adopters of the internet.

For me it was bringing a systems approach. I had created what are called intranets which were internets but within a company. So everyone in a company, if they were in a high rise, no matter what floor they were on, they could literally be around the world, but they could all communicate via their little internet. That was before the internet really became huge commercially.

So I knew the internet when it came out. I had been on bulletin boards and places like that since 1990.

David Jenyns: Classic BBSs with the dial up modems.

Jim Fleck: Yes, 2400 board modem. You’d type download and then you’d go have dinner and go out for the night and come back and it would be downloaded.

The consulting business required a lot of travel, it required a lot of me. I made a mistake there building myself up as the expert. There was no way out of that business for me. I had people doing work for me that I was able to expand the company but the real core of it was me. So I didn’t want to do it anymore. I gave up $3 – 400,000 a year and decided to build mail order from home. I became the leading consultant to heating and air conditioning and plumbers and went in and did that niche and killed that niche.

It was crazy, we were doing $50-60,000 per month the third month in business. That’s when Jeff Paul was basically hanging out looking for what he was next going to do in life. I said, let’s take that thing and put it on the internet. Then they asked me to help change their show from a mail order infomercial to an internet infomercial. So I created that.

From there I went on to sell membership sites. I had a $10 a month membership site, continuity site in 2001. I still remember when I was in Dan Kennedy’s flat, him betting me a steak dinner I wouldn’t have that membership site six months from then. Granted I went from ten members to two members, but I still got the steak dinner.

Then I did everything you see now, landing pages, you’ll see people promote a webinar, they’ll send three emails, they do the webinar, then they tell you that their server crashed or people couldn’t get on to do a replay or an encore. That all came out of my teleseminar system that I created in 2002.

My longest running teleseminar ran from May 2004 to June 2009. The same one, recorded, ran at least once a month and sometimes I didn’t even know it was running, I’d just get an email saying we made $25,000 or we made $45,000.It just ran over and over again and of course we do that with webinars now too.

I think the value for your listeners, is the fact that I’ve made a lot of mistakes since starting these businesses and online businesses. I can take anybody and create a new business for them. That’s what I did, I turned myself into a real estate guru and was on TV three years later. So it doesn’t matter what business, the heating and air conditioning, and plumbing, I wasn’t either of those guys. So it’s not important what you do.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes and entrepreneurs often make mistakes obviously, it is part of the learning and growing process. What I want to talk about is a mistake most people make and it has certainly cost me a lot of money and we don’t do it anymore. It’s a mistake that is probably costing many of your listeners money. I’m going to skip over how to get into the business because I could go on for an entire day on how to pick a niche and analyze a niche but obviously you’ve just got to pick a market and try to get into it. That is not hard to do.

The mistake people make is they hear some of the old teaching and online marketers are just regurgitating what they heard from all the mail order guys in the nineties who were talking about the mail order guys from the seventies and sixties. I’m no different, I don’t like to come up with stuff on my own. I think it was Einstein who said there was nothing new under the sun. There’s not.

So what they do here is you learn that the majority of your money comes from a back end promotion, send to your own customers. There is some truth there. Now there is front end and back end. Front end is a first purchase, first product you make with a company, maybe they run ads or you see some Google Adwords or you get a Joint Venture email from someone and you make that first purchase. It might be low cost or it might be higher cost but it’s a first purchase and that person had to market and they had to do work and they had to do all kinds of things to maybe get you in to buy that thing.

Now these days with the internet and with a Joint Venture that is pretty easy. Your listeners may know this, but if they get an email from you for one of my products and they come over to my site and buy it for $1000, the secret’s out of the bag here David, but David’s going to get $500 out of that usually. It’s usually a 50 – 50 split so that did cost me $500 to get one of your people to buy my product. So there is a cost there. Now if I email that person, they’re probably on my list David, and obviously if they buy a $1,000 product from me I get to keep the whole $1,000.

That’s the same thing prior to the internet. With any Joint Ventures there is some expense in getting that customer and that is the front end. But once they’re there, you just ask them to keep buying and that is the back end. I always teach that is where the real profit is. Even though a majority of the profits come from the back end, the long term growth and really keeping your online business alive comes from the front end customer acquisition. Not focusing on that and not building a dependable, predictable way to acquire customers is almost certain death for your growth.

Many big name marketers, and I could drop a dozen of them that people on here know, they probably would think are wealthy and are killing it, but they are barely surviving. The reason is they only do Joint Venture marketing. Eventually someone is not going to want to Joint Venture with you or you’re going to have time when there are big huge lags or you’re going to send the same Joint Ventures or the same offers to your list and they’re going to get tired of them. So you must acquire new customers.

The way to do this is, everybody is always trying to, I want to get Google Adwords going or I want to get some Space Ads going, I want to automate my front end so I can automatically have leads coming in and I can spend all this time creating new back end offers because that’s where the real profits are, don’t I? Jim just said I get to keep all those profits.

The purpose of the front end marketing is to acquire new customers, it’s not to maximize profits and it’s also not to make a sale. Its purpose is to bring in new customers, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for profit, for break even or for a loss. The purpose is to just get a new customer. The purpose of the back end marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of the customer to your business.

So you get customers who spend more money, you give them greater and greater value and additional offers and that’s what happens. That’s just what I said a second ago, but let me tell you why people really look at it wrong. Front end get new customers, back end more offers, generate more money. It’s really deeper than that and that’s where most companies place their priority on creating new products and offers. I fell into this and David you probably fell into it too, you’re thinking what else can I create, what else can I do, what other services and products?

But the problem there is, that’s not really how the biggest and most successful companies operate. I didn’t always know this. You have to be careful who you mimic and who you model yourself on. The most successful ones, they understand what we just talked about. The long term growth and security of your business, your online business comes from front end customer acquisition. So what you’ve got to do here is, you’ve got to know what it’s going to cost you to get a customer. That is your cost per acquisition. There are things that go into that but mostly it’s just, right, what am I spending to get that person on my list?
Then there is the lifetime value. You’ve got to add up everything someone spends with you. It’s pretty easy to do that. You just take all your sales for a certain period of time, divide it by how many customers you have and alright, that is what each customer is spending. What most people can’t do is, if I say what is your business currently paying to acquire a customer? I’m paying $110. Most people can’t even begin to tell you. I also can tell you that it’s $130 from TV, but it’s lower from AdWords and it’s lower from direct mail which averages us out to $110. The lifetime value of our customer is $450.

So I put them on my list for $110, and over the next couple of years they spend $450. I make $300 and some dollars. So every person I put on, I’m making $300. So I want to put on as many as possible. And for the back end, the profits come from different areas. So a simple way to think about the metrics we just talked about, is the cost per acquisition tells you how well you’re doing on the front end and your lifetime customer value is a measure of how well you’re doing the back end offers.

The question is, which side of the business can you put on auto pilot, the front end or the back end? So you want to think about a couple of things. Which sale is the harder to make, the front end or the back end?

David Jenyns: The front end.

Jim Fleck: Correct. Which end faces more competition?

David Jenyns: The front end as well.

Jim Fleck: Yes. Which end required constant innovation? A lot of people think it is the back end but it is the front end if you’re going to keep ahead of the competition and you’re going to keep making the sale and keeping the cost down. Which one has the higher conversion rate? That is going to be the back end. Which end are you going to make bigger profits on? That is going to be the back end.
But many people say, alright bigger profits, higher conversion rates, I shouldn’t put that on auto pilot, that is where the real money is. People will say, let’s put the front end on auto pilot. That’s wrong. You want to put the back end on auto pilot. I know I can get $350 or $400 per customer. Then if you’ve got a home study course, you’ve got a service of some kind, you’ve got a restaurant, and you know you’re going to make x amount of dollars when people come there.

If someone comes to my restaurant, this doesn’t have to be internet marketing, David, and I know they’re going to eat there for the next three years and spend $200, I just need to get more people in. So you get your back end established as quickly as possible and then you focus all your time, not all your time but a majority of your resources on as many front end activities as possible.

We’ve got a funnel that gets people in and then, I don’t have the figures in front of me, so let me paint a picture from memory, I think I can get most of it, they get in and they get an opportunity to buy the front end, I’ll come back to the front end. Once they’re past the front end they get the opportunity to buy a $47 e book. Then it takes them up to a $297 home study course that we ship to them. All of these offers are finished at the end by an opportunity to join our monthly membership for $47 a month. We don’t really tack on products anymore. There are a lot of problems with that with merchant accounts now.

We let the continuity be a separate sale. So they’ve got to buy it. We have the $297 home study course and then we have several $700, $800, $9000 courses. Then we have a $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000 seminar. They also have a chance to join my $5,000 lower end coaching program and then there is a pretty highly filtrated way to get into a $25,000 a year and I put four or five of those a year in. They come to my office, work a day or two with me and that’s done and it’s not a bad way to make $25,000. They get to watch me do what I would have done anyway.

Along the way we filter the people out that actually are in a position, either because they have liquid cash or they have good credit and they can invest in real estate. We put them over into our track where they get to buy houses and apartment complexes and things like that.

All these things I just mentioned to you are all promoted via either auto responders or some of the seminars are just once a quarter so you’re already on our list, so once a quarter you’ll get promoted to that event. It’s all basically automated. I’m not coming up with new seminars, I’m not coming up with new e books or new coaching programs. Even my coaching programs, everybody in the Mastermind program shares their information with me and they know one of the things is I get to share it with everybody else. Everybody is sending things in all month and almost all I have to do at the end of the month is send it all out to the whole group. So I don’t even have to come up with my own content.

I do answer questions and advise them on whatever real estate deals they might want to talk about and things like that. So it’s that back end that is automated. Now we also have basically a DVD, it’s got four or five days of live training we’ve compressed down into Flash or something and it is on one DVD and we sell it for shipping and handling. That is our front end offer.

That’s not automated, we’re constantly trying different Google AdWords, we send postcards for people to come to that landing page. We do personalized urls that are also called pearls on those postcards, we run TV that point to those websites, I do Joint Ventures, I do what is called CPA, cost per acquisition, I do CPV, cost per view, all kinds of things keep feeding to that same landing page that gets that person to buy that DVD for just shipping and handling which is $8.

That page, we’re just getting ready to design up a new looking landing page to test against the old one. So we’re constantly changing that, changing the copy on it and looking for more and more places to run banners on the internet and get people into that funnel. Really the way to do it is get your back end established as soon as possible, and then focus all your time on the front.

So if you’ve been involved in marketing for any time, this is really backward to, David, you were probably taught the opposite way as I was. Get the front end, get some ads running and then start working on selling more and more stuff. The biggest companies I finally discovered that’s not how they work.

Which sale is harder to make? The front end. Which end faces more competition? The front end. Which end requires constant innovation? The front end. So how can you automate those things? You just can’t. Hopefully that’s something that your listeners, and I know if they’re beginners and don’t have a business yet, that may not help them right away, but I can tell you that long term, you’ve got to have new customers entering into relationship with your business or you’ll be out of business.

Most of these internet marketers are constantly scrambling, that’s why you see some internet marketers constantly coming out with new products because they don’t have new customers. They’ll get Joint Ventures with other people, they’ll maybe do a product launch and they’ll get those customers in there. By the way, product launches don’t generally make a ton of money on the front end. Many of them actually lose money but a lot of them don’t make much money.

The last three product launches, one person did about $450,000 in sales. Now he gave away about $125,000 in prizes and that $450 was split at least two ways, 50 – 50 plus he had 20% refunds. So the $450 had $90,000 in refunds, that comes down to $360, that was split so that’s about $180 and $110,000 in prizes, he was up about $70,000 and worked for three months. Three months on that launch. That’s some continuity but that is split 50 – 50 every month. So I just want to impress on people they’re not always as huge as people think they are.

It’s not a bad way to boost your income a little bit once or twice a year, but again, our product launch, I run the same thing to my new leads constantly because they’re brand new to the internet. They’re brand new to my list. They don’t know that I did a product launch last month. They don’t know that I did it last week. So part of my auto responder series is people get into my product launch as if it’s brand new. They get that same sense of anticipation of this thing is brand new that everybody else did when they participated in my launch.

Our product launch goes continuously, it never stops, just a perpetual launch in fact.

David Jenyns: So really it sounds as if you have this model down, You’ll start off and the person will have carved out their niche. Then they set up their product offering and having that funnel where you’ve got the entry level, lead generator front end book or low cost course to get them in. You progressively go down that funnel, sell courses, seminars and coaching and also continuity for that.

Once you’ve got that system in place, you then swap over to spending the majority of your time building up that front end and coming up with as many creative ways as possible to generate those leads.

One of the ones, and I know you’re an expert in, and this is something that I think a lot of internet marketers never head down that track, so I’m interested in getting your thoughts on the way that you use TV and infomercials. I know you’ve had a lot of experience writing copy and long form sales copy and direct response, all those types of things. How do you see that compare and what are the differences and similarities when you look at the way that you work with video? I suppose there are two parts there, both video just online selling your products and services and also video through TV through infomercials and things like that.

Jim Fleck: TV is extremely difficult and extremely expensive and it’s not really accessible to 95% of the people. I was fortunate enough to get in with a company that ran many of the successful thirty minute infomercials here in the United States. Their infomercials were about mail order and about real estate and about other things. I happened to be there at the right time when they wanted to convert them to the internet. So I was able to work on other shows for eight years before I got my show on the air.
That’s a difficult thing to teach people. For instance it cost $1,000,000 a week to run the show.

David Jenyns: Yes, you’ve got to know your numbers for that.

Jim Fleck: Just so people don’t think I stuttered, that’s $1,000,000 a week. You’ve got to have a pretty serious operation to make television in that form work. But what lessons we can learn here is, and I’ve been on the internet since before we could really sell things, so I can remember, many of the young listeners aren’t going to remember this because they’ve had fast internet pretty much their whole young lives, but it was extremely slow. If you tried to use video it was just ridiculous, it just didn’t work.

I even remember the first company that came out, they were called Crushed Media. They could make things work, what we would consider now, excruciatingly slow, but when they were done with it, it seemed like it was a revelation. We couldn’t believe how much faster the videos slowly skipped for us. But now we can stream video the same as television. Television is such a powerful medium, that we don’t put almost any page up of any kind anymore without video.

If you were to go to my support site, there’s a video of me explaining things to the people. You know we have so many different products that sometimes people get a charge on their credit card, I’ve done this, you look down, and I don’t remember what that is, so we list our website on the credit card.

They can go there and there is me talking, saying, ‘Hi, this is Jim Fleck I’m glad you stopped by my site here. I just wanted to let you know, in case you need some help with a product or registering for a seminar, just open up a ticket over here and send us an email and someone will be on it right away.

If you’re not sure what your charges on your credit card are, it was probably real estate related. If you’ve been looking around, you might have purchased,’ and I name a couple of products. ‘If you simply don’t remember, just open a ticket here and tell the person your name and give your email address and tell them your question and they will tell you exactly what your credit card charge was for.’ Things like that.

We use video everywhere. Thank you pages, thank you for buying. ‘I want to let you know we really value you actually using some of your hard earned money or your hard earned time with our company. Because of that, I know you’re really excited about your purchase and we’ve got a product that we normally sell for $197, but now because I know you are interested right now and want to make a change in your life and I’m so excited that you’ve just joined our company, I’m going to make you a special offer.

I want to put it in front of you right now. This $197 product all included in your order is $49. Just click on it right now and it is my way of saying thanks for joining the family, blah, blah, blah.’

That’s a thank you page. Normally people would just let the merchant account or the authorized.net or Infusion or whatever just go to a thank you page. I use those two examples because those are areas where people wouldn’t even think to use video. We do most of our selling by video now. I don’t write almost any long form sales letters. When I started in ’97 I took a forty page mail order letter and put it online continuously, one page, they didn’t even click through.

So we learned tricks about creating html tables where you’ve got your first table up there and it showed your first bit of your text and the rest was still loading down below. I think video is a must and I think for beginning marketers, David, it’s easier. There are some things that have changed. I know people would argue with me but what I’m finding, empirical evidence selling people information on how to make money is, they’re not responding to much of the hype anymore.

I want to temper myself there because I’m an old marketer and I’m used to direct response copy, I’m used to crazy headlines of all kinds. I still use crazy headlines to get people’s attention but my sales letters are very much just like you guys have heard on this interview today, this recording, the same language.

It took me many years and anybody who has studied any copywriting has been taught to pretend you’re writing to one person. Try to picture your person and I can do that now. I’ve met so many of them through seminars, I can picture one of them and I write to one person because I know only one person is going to be opening my email at a time. It’s extremely hard to do for people. It’s so hard to do. You just have to rewrite and rewrite.

I’ve had emails David, that have put fifteen hundred people on a webinar and it’s taken me five minutes to write. I’ve had emails that have put people on a teleseminar or sent them to an order page that have brought in $50, $60, $300, $460,000 and they’ve taken me ten minutes to write.

David Jenyns: It’s the 10,000 hours that you had to put in to get to that point now, because it is almost like you are unconsciously competent.

Jim Fleck: Now don’t let the cat out of the bag for everybody! But I tell you what, it is only partly the 10,000 hours because I don’t go through and say, right, am I using the right headlines, am I using the right call to actions? Some of that, you’re right, comes out automatically. I will tell you what the key is, it’s real, down to earth speaking to people. Let me see here if I can just pull up a couple of emails, a couple of short ones. I will use a headline.

Here’s an email I just sent out: Three Killer Deals in Thirty Minutes or Less, Can You Do It? So you’ve got a little curiosity in there. Three Killer Deals, so I don’t want to say I’m not using any kind of copywriting technique anymore. You’ve still got to get people to read the email. So that’s a decent subject line and my from field by the way is Jim Fleck, they know it’s from me. There are no doubts about it.

It says, ‘Hello David. I haven’t given out any juicy, secret tool I use in quite a while. I want to show you one of the things I use every single day. It helps me do things much faster than it did even six months ago. My competition is valuating properties in a certain way. I got this software tool that I use every single day. It allows me to duplicate my strategies and multiply my strategies and techniques which gets the same amount of work done in a lot less time. It makes my hours of work become minutes. I just want you to join me tonight so I can reveal this tool. I’m going to show you how I use it everyday. It is one of my most valued real estate tools.

Let me ask you, how many offers did you write this week? How about this month? If you’re like most average investors, the answer is probably zero to one. It’s an absolute fact that the amount of offers you make is a direct reflection of how much money your make in this business. You want to know how many we made? Over two hundred. So the bottom line is if you’re not writing offers, you’re not making money.’ I didn’t use a whole lot of headlines in there and a lot of superlatives. That’s just me speaking and getting a point across. Now this email is just killing.

I’ve got another one that says, I’ve got one here, this is one of my favourites.

David Jenyns: It’s funny as you read these, that first one it still felt like for people who have studied old school direct marketing, you can still get elements of it. I can see it’s toned down hugely to where Dan Kennedy and Jay Abrahams used to write these really outrageous sales letters. But it feels like a lot toned down version but you can still feel some of that language in there.

Jim Fleck: Yes, and I think that’s where you hit it on the head. There is no doubt I’ve written these for years. Maybe it is harder to write this way than the old way. I find it easier to write this way but again I’ve been writing for twenty years. They do say in the old days when we did mail order and we did sales letters, you had to pay someone more money to write a four page sales letter than a twelve page, because it was harder to sell in four pages. You didn’t have enough room.

I have another one, the subject line of this, ‘The response was overwhelming.’ This was for a replay of a webinar. ‘The response was overwhelming. Here is the replay you asked for.’ So there are definitely some copywriting techniques in there. I’m being assumptive. ‘You asked for it’. Oh, people are asking for this, I need to go check this out. ‘Response was overwhelming’. What did I miss? Inside the email it says, ‘Finally the government and banks help us do deals.’ This is real estate related. ‘And I have the program to make it happen. The government is beginning to realize that without us investors, this real estate mess will never turn around. The government needs you. Jim Fleck needs you. Hear my sold out webinar tomorrow. Go here. Thank you. Jim.’ That was it. This probably brought in $17, $18,000 over the space of the first twenty-four hours.

I wouldn’t say much hype. I try to go for sound bites. I try to go for short sentences. My emails are all cut in about fifty characters wide and very rarely do they go over three lines. There’s ‘Finally the government and banks help us do deals.’ That’s one line. ‘And I have the program to make it happen.’ That’s another line. ‘The government needs you’ is a line.’ Jim Fleck needs you’ that’s a line. Obviously in regular writing that is all one paragraph. People like the short sound bites.

But I think the thing to take away from this, the people that have not really done much copywriting is to start out talking like yourself. My favourite book is John Caple’s Tested Advertising Methods. Personally I think that is the only book you need. Take my advice in trying to sound personable and I think you’ll find you’re very successful with your email communications for sure.

David Jenyns: Yes, you touched on some key things there and some great advice for people to get started. The idea of keeping them short and simple. Everybody these days is running out of time. We’ve always been busy but there are so many different things fighting for our attention now, so those shorter emails are really what people need to actually read through it. Sometimes seeing that really long form sales copy can turn them off. People who have had that old teaching, it’s like you talked about, two things came out of the old teaching.

One is maybe those really long form sales letters and the second thing you mentioned was the idea of people following that old teaching. We’re getting it around the wrong way; they were focusing a lot more on the back end than they were on that front end. Do you see any other really big mistakes when people are getting online, where they’re missing the boat because they’re just not focusing on a particular part of their business?

Jim Fleck: Yes, there are certainly .lots and let me say something about the long form. I’m not saying long form is dead. Obviously if there is a video, even if it is seven or eight minutes or nine and a half minutes, that could be eight, twelve pages of copy. So that is really long form. I’m guilty of it myself. I can’t read eight or twelve pages of sales copy on the internet anymore. I’m too used to the videos. We’re of the YouTube generation now.

It’s no different to sitting down to your TV and flipping through. Think about it, if you’re watching TV and you flip through to a commercial and they were scrolling text, how much of it would you read on a commercial for something? You wouldn’t read any of it. It should be as long as needed.

I’ve got good at being very short and getting to the point in my emails. There are some technical reasons for that. First, the fewer words I have in my email, the less chance there is of being caught up in a spam filter. If you write it enough and create just enough curiosity, people’s internet and everything is so fast they will look at it and say, I don’t know what this is, but it’s from Jim so let me click through. Then you do the rest of the selling on the site. Those are some of the reasons behind my short emails also.

Everybody makes this mistake and I’ve made this mistake, and it’s planning out the company or planning out a promotion. More than anything else, you’ve got to get clear on the purpose of your business. I’ve got an entire document that says why I’m in business. If not, you’re just working a lot and you’ve got a different job.

A business should give you everything you want out of life. As much as I love writing copy and I love teaching real estate and I love investing in real estate, you know I like coaching Little League, I like lifting weight, I like going on vacation with my kids, sitting first row at the Yankee game, going out to the Rocky mountains and seeing Mount Rushmore and vacations and fun things we do here in the States. The business isn’t my life. I can walk out of the office and forget about it until the next day or several days for that matter.

So you have to have a purpose and then you have to design that, and I would say it is about lifestyle not work style. It’s called lifestyle. Designing that is really important to do up front. I see most people actually ignoring that and not paying attention. There are five steps. You’ve go to get clarity on what it is. You’ve got to define what you want out of life. Then you’ve got to start looking at what kind of customer or client am I going after for whatever I’m selling. You can’t just say I’m going to sell this and that’s it. You’ve got to determine who you’re going to go after.

We have a very clear vision, and we do every other year, it doesn’t change a lot but we take our customer list and we send it off to a company that does the demographics of it and comes back and tells us the average age of your customer is fifty-five, they make $45,000 a year, they’re male and whatever. So we know who buys from us. We have that clear vision. When you create things in your business, you truly have to measure them.

I don’t know how many, again, even big names that I’ve consulted with, I shouldn’t say secretly, but behind the scenes, that I sit down and say, alright, well, what are your numbers like we talked about earlier, what are your front end numbers and back end numbers? If you’re not doing it now, you’ve got to start right away. If you’ve got to be brand new, you’ve got to start from the very beginning at measuring what you’re doing so that you know what you’re trying to improve.

If you just try different campaigns, at the end of the day all you’re looking at is how much money is in the account. I assure you at some point, money won’t be in the account and you won’t know what is wrong, so you won’t know where to improve it.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you mentioned, not wanting to put you on the spot there, I think you said there were five steps. Did I miss one there? You mentioned measuring things in your business.

Jim Fleck: I think I mentioned measuring and analyzing. Did I leave a step out?

David Jenyns: You had, to get the clarity, define what it is you want. What customer are you going after and then the measure.

Jim Fleck: My five steps are getting clarity for what you want and designing your life. They are a couple of personal steps. If you don’t do that first, you know what, the next thing is you’re sixty-five years old, seventy years old and you never had any time. You didn’t do it first. I know. I worked in corporations and I was into my thirties working for other people and killing myself and kept saying I’m going to do this and that.

Then I started my own businesses and just made a lot of money. It wasn’t until the last five years when I said, wait a minute, this is just crazy. I’ve made more and more money. I went from making pennies to millions and I’m just too busy. I’m not enjoying life. So I gave up $40,000 a month business, got out of it and started over. I just gave it away. It wasn’t easy but I gave it up and designed everything and said this is what I want. This is the end result and this is the kind of business I want. I really got good clarity there.
I said here is what I want in my life and I want to be done working at 3.00pm in the afternoon because my kids get home at 3.20pm. I want to have already been to the gym for a couple of hours. I don’t want to be waking up with an alarm clock and I don’t want to be tied down every day by meetings.

That was step two and three was, I said, alright, this is going to be my business and I got clarity on which direction I wanted to head. What is the client and customer I’m looking for? This is a little bit different. People start thinking about what am I going to sell? I kind of have an idea what I’m going to sell but I really want to look at the customer. I want someone who really wants to change their life. In this case, in this business, they want to do it through real estate and buying and selling houses or apartment complexes, it doesn’t matter.

From there, then I start thinking about the product and the company and the vision, this is step four, the vision that will support those clients and customers. I think that is the step I left out. From there, in that vision I’m really creating the company and the products, the ideas for them anyway. The fifth step is to measure everything.

David Jenyns: That’s a really clear set of actions. It’s interesting to hear those different insights that you made over the years. When you look back over your really extensive career, are there any key points where you can identify something important? Obviously putting this five step plan into place would have been one of them. Were there any other key discoveries or key points where you say, as soon as I started to do this, building my team or whatever it may be, those were those key leverage points that had a huge impact on your career?

Jim Fleck: Sure. A couple of key points are whatever I’m doing full on, play full out. If I’m going to coach a group of people on real estate and maybe I’ve got a group that has only twenty people in it and I wanted fifty, I can’t complain. I’ve got twenty people who have paid me to help them. So I don’t care that there are twenty when I wanted to do a promotion and I wanted to put fifty in there. My focus now is the best job, in this case it’s a kind of service as much of a product, although they get a product. Make that service the best it can be and get inside it be involved in it and enjoy it.

Get inside it and really enjoy it and experience it and don’t let it just be a task. In that process, depending again on what your product or service is, in this case it’s a service and it’s teaching someone, I have to get into it.

You have to be focused on that customer and you need to make sure they’re getting it. I don’t get annoyed when people don’t get it and I have to repeat it. I just don’t get annoyed. I’m hearing myself explain it and they’re not getting it and I’m asking them and trying to explain it a different way and sometimes I have to have a private conversation with them outside of the coaching group in order to, and these are usually done by phone, in order to get them over a certain point.

But I won’t give up. It’s almost like no student left behind, only I actually do it. So that is one thing. Letting go of things is right up there as one of the biggest things possibly ever. What I mean by letting go of things is first of all, of course, getting quality people. Sometimes you don’ know if they’re a quality person yet, maybe they aren’t and they end up being replaced down the road but you’ve got to let go of things and let other people flourish and have a chance to do what you’re doing. Let them grow and be and experience and flourish also.

I have a woman. Natalie, now who works for me. You have a meeting set up with her David. She can write copy, she can organize webinars, she comes up with product ideas, she makes my company money without me having to have anything to do with it. She’s been with me for about five or six years and when she came on she was more or less just a customer support admin. She’s pretty much capable of being a CEO at this point or at least a marketing manager.

She would just say, hey I’ve got this idea and I would say, for a long time I had all this past direct marketing and direct response and copywriting knowledge and I would say, well, you know, that really doesn’t work. Now that you’ve given me an idea, let’s try it this way. Now I look at things and sometimes the things she was trying through experience would work. But you get into the habit of thinking you are the expert. You know what? I just know a lot of things, but you know what? Natalie knows a lot of things. She’s learning on her own and she’s got an interest in the business. She wants to make it work.

Letting go and letting people, your team do things, that’s probably the best piece of advice I could give anybody David, is to do that. There’s something a friend of mine sent me and I don’t know where it came from, but I tell you, if you’ll indulge me, I might read it.

David Jenyns: Yes, please.

Jim Fleck: It says, ‘One day I had a date with friends for lunch. May, a little old blue hair about eighty years old came alone with them, all in all a pleasant bunch. When the menus were presented, we ordered salads, sandwiches and soups, except May who said,’ Ice cream please, two scoops, chocolate.’ I wasn’t sure my ears heard right and the others were aghast. ‘Along with heated apple pie’, May added, completely unabashed. We tried to act quite nonchalant as if people did this all the time, but when our orders were brought out, I didn’t enjoy mine. I couldn’t take my eyes off May as her pie a la mode went down.

The other ladies showed dismay. They ate their lunches silently and frowned. The next time I went out to eat, I called and invited May. I lunched on white meat tuna. She ordered a parfait. I smiled. She asked if she amused me, and I answered, ‘Yes, you do, but also you confuse me. How come you order rich desserts while I feel I must be sensible?’ She laughed and said with wanton mirth, ‘I’m tasting all that is possible. I try to eat the things I need and do the things I should, but life is so short my friend, I hate missing out on something good. This year I realized how old I was.’ She grinned.

‘I haven’t been this old before. So before I die, I’ve got to try those things that for years I had ignored. I haven’t smelled all the flowers yet, there are too many books I haven’t read, there are more fudge sundaes to wolf down and kites to be flown overhead. There are many malls I haven’t shopped and I’ve not laughed at all the jokes. I’ve missed a lot of Broadway hits and potato chips and cokes. I want to wade again in water and feel ocean spray on my face. I want to sit in a country church once more and thank God for His grace.

I want peanut butter everyday, spread on morning toast. I want untimed long distance calls to the folks I love most. I haven’t cried at all the movies yet, or walked in the morning rain. I need to feel wind in my hair. I want to fall in love again. So if I choose to have dessert instead of having dinner, then should I die before nightfall, I’d say I’d died a winner because I missed out on nothing. I fulfilled my heart’s desire, I had my final chocolate mousse before my life expired.’

With that, I called the waitress over, I’ve changed my mind I said, I want what she’s having, only add some more whipped cream.’

This is my gift to you. We need an annual Friend’s Day is what my friend said, if you get this twice, you’ve got more than one friend. So it’s just one of those emails that gets sent around. They typically don’t last but it came from a very close friend of mine. I’m at an age now David, where if I indulge in all those things I’m not going to be able to get out of my chair, without going to the gym for a little bit.

But the point is, you’ve got to remember what it’s all for. I didn’t always do that when I was younger. Of course I didn’t have children either. But there was my spouse and there were times that maybe our relationship was strained or friendships were strained because you don’t remember what it’s all for. It’s not about business. It’s not about making money. And yes, maybe it’s easy for me to say that now that I have it, but there have certainly been ups and downs.

I see now that it’s about lifestyle, not work style. So if you can remember that, that’s why we’re here on earth. We’re here to experience earth itself and our friends and loved ones, and we’re not here to work. That’s not what we’re here for. I’m nor an advocate of just finding what you love and you’ll be paid a fortune. I love baseball but I’m forty-six years old and I don’t think I’ll be breaking into the big league. But I do love teaching people and I’m fortunate that I get paid to do it. So I know we went overtime here, but once I start teaching, I just love to do it. Hopefully I’ve helped your listeners.

David Jenyns: Yes, a tremendous insight there and a great way to finish. I know you’re someone people should probably keep an eye on, even if they’re not necessarily interested in the real estate area, or if they are interested in the real estate area. What are some of the ways people can find out more about you and see what you’re up to and just experience more of your content?

Jim Fleck: By the way I do several times a year teach internet marketing and do a number of things like that, so the best way to get onto to my list is just simply to go to my name jimfleck.com. You’ll see a landing page there which talks about earning extra cash and simply fill that out. You don’t have to put your phone number, just put your name and email address in.

You’ll find out about my real estate things, get my regular newsletters where I just talk about the economy and things going on in the world and what I think is going on. Then you’ll see marketing that I do and periodically you’ll see back end pitches and you’ll see funnels. At the very least it will be educational, but I’ve got to warn you, you’ll probably buy something.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well, I’d like to thank you very much for your time Jim. You’re very generous with your time and you’re extremely busy as well so I appreciate the time we’ve had today, so thanks again.

Jim Fleck: You’re welcome David, it was my pleasure.

Download Jim Fleck Interview | Jim Fleck Videos | Jim Fleck Podcast | Jim Fleck Review | Jim Fleck MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Darren Warmuth

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Darren Warmuth

Industry: Internet Marketing, SEO

Website: www.internetmarketing.com

Product: www.uniquearticlewizard.com

Darren Warmuth’s Bio: You probably have not heard of Darren Warmuth’s name before, but if you are serious with your Internet marketing, particularly with your article marketing then chances are you have heard of his greatest product so far. It’s the Unique Article Wizard (UAW). It is currently one of the most popular article distribution service today.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon…

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from the SEO Method. I’ve got another call here. I’ve just been going through contacting all the people behind the services that we use in our business and for the SEO method. So I’ve got Darren Warmuth on the line and he’s one of the guys behind Unique Article Wizard, which is an extremely powerful tool. He works with Noel on that particular project and has been for the past three years. I’ve been chatting with Darren Warmuth over the past four or five months now and he’s extremely generous with his time. He’s very helpful and really knows his stuff.

I think what I like most about him is that he’s all about testing. They run a lot of tests over at Unique Article Wizard, where it’s not just theory, it’s let’s take a site, let’s aggressively try to market it, let’s try and drip out the marketing over a period of time and let’s compare the results to see what happens from that sort of marketing. I’m really excited to have him on the line and welcome you to the call Darren. Are you there?

Darren Warmuth: I am. How are you David?

David Jenyns: Excellent. I’m really looking forward to finding out a bit more about the way you rank sites. If you’re ok about it, I’ll just dive straight into my usual questions.

Darren Warmuth: Sure David. I’d just like to first say thank you for your time. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and I’m very honoured that you feel the work we do at UAW gets a high rating in your books.

David Jenyns: Yes, well we only select the best of the best with the services we work with. When it comes to blog networks, I always find it hard to say this particular service is the best, but you’re in the top three with Article Marketing Underground with the guys over at AMA and also the Portal Feeder Network. You guys are at the top of your game and I very much love the service.

I’m really interested to find out how you personally drive traffic having said you run a lot of tests. When you’re first taking a website, and maybe it’s a brand new domain name or it may have a little bit of age to it but you haven’t really done much to it. I would love it if you could walk me through what you do to rank a site. It’s a big question I know.

Darren Warmuth: Yes, it is. In general, because we do everything three months in advance, we do our quarterly planning. What we like to do is age a site like you said before we do any SEO on it. What we do is fully plan what we’re launching.

We have the keyword research done of course. We put up our blog in WordPress or whatever platform we’re using. Then because we have the Unique Article Wizard, we set the Unique Article Wizard plug in to start receiving content on the categories we’ve chosen for that niche. That normally gets the site indexed in a couple of days. In any case, it’s long before the site is ready. Then we just literally let it sit there and receive outside content while we finish the rest of the work and the site data to finish building the framework. So we call this seasoning the work and we find it works really well, because by the time we’re ready to do SEO on it, it’s no longer a new site in the search engine’s eyes.

I’ve never actually seen one of our sites get sandboxed and trust me, I’ve counted the links on a couple of these test sites pretty hard just to see what would happen.

David Jenyns: So that’s over a period of just three months for that aging?

Darren Warmuth: Yes, in general. So for example, on a site we registered in June of last year, we set it up to receive content while we built the software to make the site run. We ended up getting a bit behind times as programming seems to do. So we didn’t actually start doing SEO on it until October and opened the site to the public, I think it was the beginning of November. Here we are three months later, the site is a PR3.

David Jenyns: Just by receiving content or was that after you started your offsite?

Darren Warmuth: That was after we stated sending out content through the Unique Article Wizard. So this site only has article marketing done on it to test it. Like I said, it is a PR 3 site and we’re ranking on the first page for our key search term and the competitiveness of that is around sixty-nine million, so it’s not too shabby.

David Jenyns: No, that’s excellent. With the initial aging of the site that you’re talking about, let’s say we’re setting up and we’re using whatever platform that you want. You’re just receiving content at that point in time, I suppose the theory being you’re telling Google what the site is about. With that content that you’re receiving, I know with Unique Article Wizard there is a little bit of spinning, regardless of what service you’re using. What are your thoughts on getting this content that isn’t, I suppose, one hundred percent unique and building the site based on that? I’d be interested to get your thoughts on that.

Darren Warmuth: At the current time, basically what you’re doing is you’re actually adding unique content to the site, it’s just not visible to your visitors but it is visible to the search engines. As you know, you take a site and you start to build it and it takes a number of months generally to get a good site going unless you’re putting up a quick review site or something like that.

But if you’re building a full in depth site, it takes some time to get all the content ready and to get it programmed. So during that time we just actually accept content and that’s mainly to get the site indexed, to get the bots to spider it. Make sure you turn on your pinging and your RSS and everything like that, just to get the bots to come around and look at your site so that it’s picked up that that site was new three or four months ago. So now when you’re doing some SEO on it, it doesn’t react.

So the big thing is with a lot of questions from people who are just starting out ask me, they say how do I get my site indexed right away? They get this big long list of things they need to do, send it to Google and all of that. But if you actually work on your site, and start putting content before you’re even building it for the public, it gives the chance for the bots to find it long before you’re ready to start doing SEO.

David Jenyns: That’s definitely great advice. You talked about installing a blog and obviously it’s going to depend on the type of project and type of site you’re looking to launch. Are we talking about installing it in the root domain name, or do you do it domain name/blog? That way when you’re ready to go, you’ll just build the site in the main index page and then do you do some sort of redirect and then that way, where previously it was getting redirected to be the home page of the blog, it’s now getting redirected to the home page of whatever the new site is that you’re launching? How do you do that?

Darren Warmuth: No, actually nothing like that. To be honest with you, for the most part, we just stick everything under the main domain and all the stuff we’re building in the background just stays off the main domain. We just let it sit there. I know this is going to sound maybe not so professional in that we don’t redirect and hide anything, but the site is just there. There’s nobody coming to the site anyway yet at the moment. The actual blog is actually active.

David Jenyns: When you’re ready to go live then and you’ve got it and it’s installed there, if you’re now installing a new site, if you’re launching a blog then obviously you can keep that main existing thing. Let’s say you’re not launching a blog, how then do you integrate that site that you’ve been developing over the top? I can’t imagine you deleting out the old blog. You’ve got all of that content out there, and being indexed, that’s obviously something you want to keep.

Darren Warmuth: Yes, but it indexes under that main url. So you’re right, we do move the blog over to a slash. As far as the traffic goes, you were asking how we drive traffic to a new site. Obviously, a little bit of SEO is going to help you get noticed, but it’s not going to bring you up in the ranks right away. So we still use the traditional, where everybody starts with AdWords and banner advertising, because naturally we had an AdWords test campaign to make sure there’s a viable market for a chosen niche. It’s very easy to get that going again on the site when it is ready.

David Jenyns: I suppose to recap this first stage, the seasoning the site, the first part of what you’ll do is you’ll run some sort of little AdWords campaign or something like that. Or I suppose firstly, you register the domain name, do your basic keyword research, let it age by having it receive content. That way when you’re ready to go, launch the site, there is already a little bit of age there. Then when you’re starting the optimization of that, you like to know you’re going for keywords that have commercial value, and that’s when you were talking about the AdWords.

If we take it to the next stage, ok, you’ve let this domain name age and you’re now getting ready to launch the site. Let’s say you’ve put up the product or whatever, what stage do you go through or where do you go from there?

Darren Warmuth: As far as doing the SEO?
David Jenyns: Yes. Obviously you do basic on page optimization, but your off page optimization, how do you go about that?

Darren Warmuth: If we’re talking about the single biggest ranking factor, is that what you’re aiming for?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Darren Warmuth: As far as organic rank and SEO goes, I don’t think there is one single biggest factor. I believe it is a combination of things. Mainly it is the entrepreneur’s learning and understanding the core marketing methods and then applying them consistently to their campaigns. The methods I’m talking about are obviously articles and article marketing, but also videos and pod casts, press releases, book marking, social media. Unfortunately, most people take these apart and treat them separately, when in truth they’re an integrated marketing unit.

So if you’re asking how the system works that we use, naturally we start with articles, because I’m a writer, that’s where I’m comfortable. Some people like to start with videos. But we need to create content for our sites anyway for the start of SEO. So we generally write an article, we obviously post it to our site.

Then what we like to do is, take that and turn it into a video script. You’ve already written it, so you can use your article or the bullet points from your article to create a video script. You can create a video script from that article and it gives you another piece of media.

Then you can strip the audio out of that into a pod cast. If your article or your content is newsworthy, you can take that and put it into press releases. Then we actually take that and distribute it. We use systems like Unique Article Wizard and to be honest we use other people’s networks as well.

Just because we have the Wizard doesn’t mean we don’t use some of the other systems you mentioned, because they’re completely separate networks. It’s like radio advertising in your locale. You may not like country music, but that doesn’t mean your customers don’t. You want to talk to all your customers, not just the ones that listen to the same station you do. Does that make sense?

David Jenyns: Yes. I agree. It’s good getting good link diversity and again, it’s not providing any real sort of footprint because you’re spreading it out over multiple networks and making it even less connected. It’s just a whole variety of links from a whole variety of your sources.

So you start off, obviously the first stage being now you’re starting to build the content for the site. You’ve done your keyword research and you’ll write an article, post the article, and then the distribution. You talked about the video script and that sort of thing. Do you have, in your own business, a set procedure system almost? This just happens every time we launch a new site: first thing, they get at least one article written, at least one video is turned out of that, and then that is then taken and posted into blog networks and things like that?

Darren Warmuth: Absolutely. Actually it’s funny you should ask that. I’m just actually in the process of putting the final touches on a report on this exact topic. We’re not selling it, it’s just another added value and we’re going to give it to our clients. I’d be more than happy to give you the link to give it to your subscribers as well.

David Jenyns: Very cool. So after you do the Unique Article Wizard there is whole lot of other ways to generate links as well. I’m curious to know, do you focus in on anything other than, like you mentioned, press releases and things like that? I’m just wondering how sometimes press releases are going to apply and then other times they won’t. Are there other things that you do? Do you ever look at directory submissions, do you look at any of those other ways to generate links: blog commenting? I’m just interested to see the process you guys apply or if it’s just the blog networks is a big part of it?

Darren Warmuth: No, like I said we actually start off with an article because we need to create content anyway. We take the articles due on that avenue. We take the articles, put them through the directories. We do manual submissions to some sites. We use our services and we use other people’s services as well.

From there, like I said, we take the content of that, and if it’s applicable to the product, we create a video script from the article from the bullet points. We create a video from that. Most of the time you can strip the pod cast from the audio out of that video and use it as is. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense without the visuals, so we have to do a re-record for the audio.

But you’re right, it’s just getting diversity out there. All your customers out there are not coming from articles, they’re not coming from videos, they’ve coming from all different sources. Then from there, you want to take it and you want to do your book marking and you social media and Twitter. Let everyone know you’ve got new content to give.

The big thing with us, and that I try and teach people is when they ask is, the three big things are consistency, quality and diversity. Stay consistent with your marketing campaign. We’ve talked personally for quite some time and you know that I’m involved in a lot of offline businesses, especially car dealerships. It’s consistency in your advertising campaign that brings the customers back to you.

It’s no different to you online. You need to stay consistent. Unfortunately a lot of time we take too big a chunk of things and say, ok, video is hot right now, so I’m going to put out ten videos this week. Then when the end of the week comes and we’ve only got two done, we think we’ve failed and then we just quit. Do you know what I mean by that?

David Jenyns: I do.

Darren Warmuth: Yes, a lot of people do that. The thing I like to tell people is that they should do things consistently. Do one article a week. Make it quality. Turn that into a good quality video and send that out and diversify with it. Send out your pod casts. Then do your back links and you RSS and your commenting and everything based on that.

The big thing that I’m into is the sticky marketing. I like content that stays there for a long time. I like it when you go back and you look for your video that’s two or three years old and it is still there. It’s still drawing in viewers. You can go back and look for your articles that you did two or three years ago and they’re still there. They don’t disappear. Nice and sticky is what I call it.

David Jenyns: With those sorts of things, I know you talked about it’s all about consistency and I can see the process of some of the things you do. The actual work flow when it comes to implementation, is this something that you have so systematized that you’ve got outsourcers handling it? Or you’re launching one of these sites and then you’re saying, as part of launching these sites, I need to go through this process?

Darren Warmuth: We have outsourcers that do quite a bit. We outsource a lot of our writing for starters. Generally depending on the product, we’ll outsource the videos. For the Unique Article Wizard stuff where we want to be involved in it, we will naturally do the videos for that.

Outsourcing is good when it is applicable. You can’t outsource everything unfortunately, otherwise I’d be over in Australia with you.

David Jenyns: Which we’ll have to do one time. I know the mountains over here aren’t quite like you’ve got over in Canada. But some of our mountains are worth skiing.

You mentioned some of the outsourcing and then trying to manage that. I’m trying to have an understanding as to how it actually happens over at Unique Article Wizard or even in your own business.

If you’re outsourcing, is that something that you’re managing the assistants and you’ve got an assistant who works on each individual thing? So you have an assistant who is your article person, an assistant who is your video person, and when the time is right, you just say, I need five articles written on this particular thing, or where applicable, this article now is appropriate for video. How are you actually managing it from a day to day point of view?

Darren Warmuth: Very badly. I’ve got to be straight up. We’re so busy with so many different projects. We like to have everything on a systematized sheet literally where we can go down the check boxes. But getting them done sometimes is a bit of a challenge. Things pop up. We run a fairly large business and lots of meetings happen that are unexpected and such. When the call comes in from a big JV partner, you drop everything. I have to say this is like the parent who says do as I say, not as I do.

We have a great system that works, but the execution of it sometimes, as you know when your business gets bigger, the execution of it sometimes doesn’t happen. Noel and I are still very much hands on. We like to know what’s going on and where it’s happening. We’ve outsourced a lot of the tedium to it, but we like to make sure that things are being done our way. We’re a little bit of control freaks you might say.

David Jenyns: Yes, I definitely know the feeling. It’s something we’re working on at the moment to try and, once we’ve got those systems, have someone step in and be able to manage those systems so you can effectively hand a site to someone and take them through the process, be it the SEO method for me or whatever method the individual develops.

Like you said, it comes down to that consistency, quality and diversity. I think you ticked all the boxes there. You talked about having that check list as well and we were up to, after the blog networks and you’ve posted out some articles to things like Unique Article Wizard and whatnot. Then looking at things like book marking and social media, what things do end up book marking? Are you book marking, the only way I can say it, are you promoting the promoters?

Are you promoting those promoting pages or are you or are you just focusing on promoting your core site?

Darren Warmuth: Just the core site actually.

David Jenyns: And the results you guys are getting are good. I know because we’ve talked about, for example the PR3, first page listing for a sixty-nine million competing phrase. That’s excellent. Have you got multiple keywords you’re going after for that particular domain name?

Darren Warmuth: Yes we do on that one there. Because it’s relatively new, we’re only targeting about five to ten key phrases on that. We’re first page for, I believe, three of them and second page for four or five more. So it’s definitely very effective. It works.

We’re also testing another theory whereby you do lots of back linking and lots of work on your site. Then you let it rest a little bit. The thing is to keep it looking natural to the search engine, is what the theory is. A normal site that gets lots of traffic doesn’t get lots of traffic all the time. It’s not on an ever increasing upswing.

It’s like when you get mentioned on Oprah. Your site gets bombarded and then it goes down a little bit. Then you go on another talk show and your activity on your site goes up again. That’s like what the search engines look like and we’re finding that as well. We stopped actually promoting that PR3 site. We heavily promoted it November, December and then we stopped at the end of December and it actually pushed us up to the top of the second page, number eighteen. As we’ve stopped promoting, we’ve actually seen that site rise further in the engines, which is really cool. It moves up onto the first page.

David Jenyns: How heavy were you promoting that? What sort of things were you doing? You talked about different things you do. For those sort of rankings, what sort of things were you doing?

Darren Warmuth: That one we were actually just doing articles on. That was a test site to start with.

David Jenyns: Just on Unique Article Wizard, or were you also using things like Ezine Articles?

Darren Warmuth: Yes, we were submitting to Ezine Articles, Buzzle, GoArticles a few of the top ones. But generally that’s the only three that I submit to outside of the distribution systems. But in that particular case it was just UAW.

David Jenyns: For this one it was just UAW.

Darren Warmuth: Yes. And then the top three like Ezine and such.

David Jenyns: Yes, you mentioned you promoted it quite heavily in those couple of months leading up to Christmas. What sort of volume were you pushing out for that sort of thing?

Darren Warmuth: I would say we were probably running about five articles at a time. Normally an article going out would have a throttle at thirty or fifty a day. It normally takes a couple of weeks to go out. There would be five articles running at a time. So overall we would probably put out twenty or thirty articles in the system on that.

David Jenyns: Yes and the type of links that you are sending…in Unique Article Wizard obviously down in the resource part you can have more than one link. Are you sending through to the domain name plus a deep link or you’re sending through just to the home page with whatever that primary keyword is? Are you sending them anywhere else? Some people talk about having other links on there. I know you mentioned you didn’t do the promoting pages. Where were those links going in that resource box?

Darren Warmuth: Actually we generally send out links, we usually put two links on the resource box. We send out the links: generally both to the home page, but different keywords or key phrases, two different keywords that we’re targeting.

David Jenyns: How varied are those? We always talk about you’ll have your primary plus two secondary or a third, but really all they are, are variations on that primary. Or are you going for things quite different like, let’s say SEO technique versus SEO training?

Darren Warmuth: No, generally the information we use is the synonyms generated by Google’s Keyword tool or Market Samurai, something like that. We use synonyms. Yes, the theory is you get some juice from being powerful on the long tail keywords that adds to the top level keyword.

David Jenyns: That answers one of the questions I usually like to ask, which is where you see the best bang for your buck. Obviously using Unique Article Wizard is a core part of the marketing you do. You can see that on the last little test or case study that you did run. Have you been documenting that? That would be really cool to get out as a case study.

Darren Warmuth: Yes, we’re hanging onto it. We’re still playing with it. Unfortunately testing this stuff isn’t like a split test on a page. It’s five, six months, sometimes even longer to get really good empirical data that you can make a solid call on. That is especially with the new algorithms coming into the search engines. It’s interesting to see what’s happened here in the last few months as Google is rolling out its Caffeine engine and stuff.

David Jenyns: Have you seen much of a change?

Darren Warmuth: Yes, on all our tracking. I don’t want to make this sound like a pitch, but we heavily use Article Marketing of course and we use lots of the sticky organic I like to call it. We saw that most every site that we had went up in the rankings and also went up in page rank. This leads us to believe what we’ve been hearing all along is content is the king of the internet.

As far as getting good bang for the buck and back links, naturally it’s the Article Marketing, as it provides long lasting back links that are sticky like I mentioned. It can also grow organically. You can post on, let’s go back to EzineArticles. You can post on EzineArticles and end up with a whole bunch more people taking your content from there and posting on their site. So you’ve got that organic growth. But it is the same thing with video, and the other organic method we talked about earlier. If you put up a good video it can go viral. It can change your business dramatically in a matter of days.

I think that’s the best bang for the buck. Articles and media like videos are great because they virtually have that indefinite life span. They’re there two years down the road as long as they’re relevant. If they have a good quality relevant content, they’re just like news stories that never seem to disappear from the search engines.

The great thing about these methods for all the marketers is they’re free or virtually free for marketers starting out. If you’re just starting up an online business, it’s so different to an offline business. You don’t get the opportunity to test out your marketing for free now in the offline world. You call up your local radio or newspaper, and say, can I try out for free to see if your ads work, I don’t think you’ll get a response. That’s the great thing about the internet. There are free ways to test just about everything.

Eventually as the business grows, marketers will want to begin using automated and managed services to increase their marketing effectiveness. This will help them save time and offer them the opportunity to work more on their business and not so much in it.

David Jenyns: Yes. One thing I’m interested to get your thoughts on as well. You were talking about sticky marketing and you talked about, it’s almost like having the users follow the articles when they do find them. A lot of people view blog networks and things like that more as just a way to it’s all about the SEO and getting out the links out there so you can hopefully get the rankings and then drive the traffic that way. I’m interested to know your thoughts on the way that you approach this, even when you’re using blog networks. Are you only putting out your best quality content or do you see it more as just purely SEO?

Darren Warmuth: That’s a tough question. I like to think of it as both. Certainly I don’t think any marketers are doing themselves or their business any favors, just by hammering content out there that’s unreadable. We have a very large blog network. With our network, we have plug ins and such that inject content directly into these sites. The reason we have this is, this isn’t our network, this is other people, this is all independent sites that have come to us and want to accept our content.

The reason they allow us to submit and post other people’s content to their site unmitigated, without any controls for the most part, is that they trust that the content we’re going to send to them is decent. That’s why we have, I don’t even know how many reviewers; it’s in the teens anyway. We’ve got over a dozen article reviewers. They read every article that comes in, not to the extent that Ezine does. What we’re looking for is obvious errors and we’ve got error trapping and stuff like that.

Basically what we’re trying to do for our customers is make sure that they can send out the best content they can. So if they’ve missed a major spelling error, we’ll tell them. There are certain errors that make you look silly, we’ll tell the customer about that. If they’ve done their tags wrong and their back links don’t work, we’ll tell them about that. We don’t want their content going out and not being the best that it can be, even though it’s going to a blog network.

We think the quality is still good in the blog network. You’ll never go wrong with quality. It’s the old axiom, you can’t go wrong with good quality stuff. So keeping your quality levels up on everything you do will also help your back links remain sticky. I think with the search engines when they come around, they’re not stupid. If they see people are coming to that particular article or that video or that piece of content and they’re staying three and a half seconds, they’re not going to give much credibility to that site, that page or that link.

David Jenyns: It sounds like obviously, having worked with a lot of clients, you would have seen a lot of people make mistakes, putting out those junk articles that are just Frankenstein is no doubt a big one. What are some of the other mistakes you’re seeing people make when they first come online and even when using your services as well?

Darren Warmuth: I would have to say the biggest mistake doesn’t have anything to do with SEO actually. Honestly, the biggest mistake I see is marketers who don’t treat their online business with as much respect as they should. What I mean by that is, the barrier to entry is so low in regard to start up of an online business, it doesn’t cost a whole lot of money. Many folks don’t treat it as seriously as they should or as seriously as they would treat an offline business that costs tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to start up. Don’t you agree?

David Jenyns: Oh, yes.

Darren Warmuth: So the marketers need to treat what they do online with the same level of respect as their offline ventures. It’s that important. As we’ve seen time and time again, online ventures have the capacity to expand more quickly and with more velocity than we’ve ever seen in the past and certainly much more quickly than the majority of bricks and mortar companies.

David Jenyns: What sorts of things occur as a result of not approaching it like a business? Obviously consistency is a big part of it. What sorts of things do you think go wrong as a result of not treating it like a business?

Darren Warmuth: The biggest pain that I’ve seen firstly in my business and you’ve probably seen this with some folks as well, is that they never planned to be a big business. They’ve always planned that this is going to be something small that I do from my house. They’ve never made plans to run it as a real business. As we’ve seen, some of these ideas have just sky rocketed and they’re not ready or they’re not prepared for that when it happens. There’s nothing more painful than not being ready for that massive growth and leaving all the money on the table.

David Jenyns: The type of planning we’re talking about, are we talking about everything from having systems in place, to having the right team members? When you say they haven’t planned, what does that entail?

Darren Warmuth: They haven’t planned, let’s cut to the chase, to invest in their business. Because the barrier to entry is so low, and yes, you can start an online business with $100, it’s not your best option to create your business that frees up your time.

You need to look at it like an offline business, but online. You need to have a marketing budget, you need to have a marketing campaign that you’re going to do, that you’re going to actually create content and you’re going to market that in all the mediums that you can. There’s that time versus money argument all the time. You can either invest a lot of time to save money, or you can invest money to save time, but you can’t have both of them expect to grow.

The goal is to eventually build a business that runs itself. At the beginning, unfortunately we’re the ones that need to do the running. I just tell people to make their marketing plan and stick to the plan. If you’ve done your keyword research and you know that there is a market there, stick with what you’re doing. You made an educated decision.

In saying that though, a lot of people have run by their gut and they’re created a business based on a gut feeling. They’ve got a website, they’re doing article marketing and they’re doing all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately I’ve seen this over the years, people will come to me and say, I’m not getting any traffic. I‘ll go look at their site and I’ll say, there isn’t any. Nobody’s looking for what you’re selling. Where did you get the keywords from? Oh, I just thought.
When there are great tools out there like Market Samurai, like Google’s keyword tools that give you all the empirical data, make an informed business decision. Don’t do this emotionally. Make sure that you know, going forward, that this is a true business that you’re getting into.

David Jenyns: When you talk about making a plan, we’re talking like you said, you sit down every three months and say, here are the next few sites that we’re going to be launching. Your plan is, I’m going to do the appropriate research, choose the right keyword, register the domain name, have it receive content. Within three months I’ll come back, review it, I’ll start posting my articles, getting videos made and being really specific down to the point of saying, each month I’m going to be publishing at least five articles through my blog networks. I will be placing at least ten book marks and making x number of posts for social media. Is that what you mean by a plan?

Darren Warmuth: Kind of. Because we’re talking about SEO, I understand we keep coming back to that. But I also mean on the larger scale too, Dave. If you think about this, when we were planning for the first quarter of this year, we were looking at what we need to do. Part of the plan is we need to find another programmer. We need to find another certified programmer to hire to our team. The plans that we have going into this quarter involve more programming than our current team can handle. That’s part of the planning, we need to find that.

We also need to find more reviewers with the flow coming in. So as far as the business plan, I’m talking a much higher level, not just the marketing. Yes you need to make plans about how much content you’re going to create and do all of that. From a business perspective as well, you need to plan how much time, if you’re still working a full time job, you need to plan how much time you’re going to put into that business.

I’m pretty sure it was Ed Dale who said it, if we could actually sit down and put in thirty minutes a day uninterrupted without the emails and without the phone going off or something else, if we could just put in thirty minutes a day, what we could accomplish in the course of a year is phenomenal.

You need to plan everything with your business. You need to plan a budget, you need to plan if you need help. Even a start up business needs help. If you don’t know how to program or you don’t know how to even put your WordPress blog on the site, you need help. That all needs to be planned out before you get going helter skelter and then end up nowhere.

David Jenyns: I think finding that balance between the two is important. Ed Dale, I know he was talking about that. It was also to do with generating content. He figured out what the one or two key leverage points for him in his business were: realize that it was creating content and then decided to put a process in place to make sure that each day, one of the first things he did for the first half an hour was do some sort of content generation. I think the other one was exercise, I remember him saying. He made sure he tackled those first to get those out of the way.
People can caught up making plans and then never getting through to execution as well. I think there are two sides. There are people not actually making the plans and going gung ho but not even sure what track they’re on, so they can’t readjust when they find they’re off course. On the other side you’ve just got your planners, where that is all they do. They plan and consume every new course that comes out, update their plans but never get through to execution. How is it best to try and find that balance in your eyes?

Darren Warmuth: Yes, the term we always use is called paralysis by analysis. You’re analyzing everything, you’re downloading every course, you’re trying to suck up every bit of knowledge you can get on your new found career as it were. But unfortunately there is so much information floating around on the internet, some of it good, some of it bad. It doesn’t matter, if you just spend all the time absorbing information, and never moving forward, then you end up stuck.

One of the things I was actually just writing about was, a lot of people look at a business and say, I’ve got a great book, I’ve got a great business idea and I’m going to write a book on whatever their passion is. Then they sit down and they say, my book is going to be $500. It’s a bit more of a scholastic tome, so I’m going to do a seven hundred page book. They sit down and they get one or two pages into it and say, how am I ever going to get seven hundred pages? They’ve just taken too big of a chunk.

What I actually did in that report I was talking about was, I also talked about reverse engineering content. Instead of sitting down and trying to write a seven hundred page book, realize this is just a massive task. People go about things backwards, in that they’re trying to get too much information, they’re trying to put too much together before they actually get started. The traditional way to look at it, is, to say, I’m going to write this fantastic book and then I’m going to create a website and then I’m going to sell it because everybody’s going to want it.

I think a lot of people get overwhelmed by that task and they finally look at that seven hundred page book and it’s a year long task, and they say, I just can’t get there from here. What they need to do is break it down. They break a book down into chapters, they break it down into sections, and they break it down into points and pages. Applying that to internet marketing, if you take the system I was talking about, you can actually create a book and a system and content out of just that.

What is a book? A book is five hundred pages, an e book is one hundred and fifty, reports are ten to twenty pages, articles are one to two pages. If you look at it, a book is actually three e books. An e books is five or ten reports. A report is five or ten articles. so if you look at it that way and you start your online business with your website and you start creating content but you’re basing it all around this structure of using this content for a book down the line, it’s easy.

You can sit down and say, look I can write, like Ed says with his content first thing every day, I can sit down and I can write one or two pages, not a problem. That’s not a really big chunk to bite off, it’s a something realistic that someone can work with every day or every couple of days or maybe you want to write five pages a week. The thing is, what you’re doing is you’re creating content for your site, you’re creating content to send out there, you’re creating content for your buyers to find. You start building your list or your list of subscribers and you build this content. Then you start creating reports and you send out the reports. You start creating e books. Maybe you have a product there and you can sell that to the list you’ve already grown.

Then as your e books come along, you can create a full hard copy book and start doing some off line marketing. You can do interviews and TV shows and stuff like that and that will push more people to your site. I didn’t mean to ramble on like this.

David Jenyns: No. It leads to another question I have which is, looking back now, obviously that’s a key insight that you’ve had that’s moved you forward. Getting into it, breaking it down into small pieces, planning it out and then how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, and slowly just working yourself through what needs to be done.

Looking back now over your development, and I know now you’ve been doing your online full time now for over five years. What are some of the leverage points, where if you look back over your career and having worked with Noel as well, what are some key things that you guys started to put in place and do that had a big impact on the growth of your business?

Darren Warmuth: I’ll refer back again. Unfortunately one of our own mistakes is that we made – my advice is to plan a big business from the start and hire people before they become an absolute necessity. What I mean by that is, even though you may be able to handle a full work load when everything is going well for your sites, people tend to hamstring their businesses by waiting too long before finding the necessary help- help that will free their time so that they can work on their business and not in it.

We saw this about a year back when we added a general manager to run our day to day operations and we added more people to our professional programming team. Things just get done now. Instead of trying to outsource our coding and having programmers disappear, I can sit down and talk face to face with these guys. That one thing alone has accelerated our growth and freed up so much time for us. It allows us to go do the networking and create joint ventures with other marketers. So that was a big leverage point.

Secondly, I would have to tell people to keep the company as virtual as you can. When I say this I mean completely virtual. The online community we have has created a marketplace whereby the companies that work in it don’t actually need a physical store front. We don’t need offices in which to greet customers. Currently we ship products all over the world. One of the best things we ever did was, we hired a fulfillment company to handle all our orders. So they do all the fulfillment, the picking, the packing the shipping of all the physical products that we sell.

That actually freed us from having to be in any one spot to do business. We can work from absolutely anywhere that has an internet connection now. I guess it was finding the things that freed up our time and I would recommend that to anyone else. Whether that is so they have more time to meet people or do the high level tasks on the company to make it grow, or if you just want to spend time with your family. After all isn’t that what the whole internet lifestyle is about?

David Jenyns: Yes, trying to have that four hour work week. So some of those key ones are, the hiring of the staff, to make sure that things are running. When you say keep things virtual, you just mean by not having everything in a centralized office, and using more things like fulfillment centres so that way you can run your business from wherever you are.

One thing you did mention, you mentioned the way you work with your programmers and being able to sit down with them. When you said sit down, was that like a metaphor for a chat with them over Skype? Or do you have someone in the office as well that you work with?

Darren Warmuth: No actually we use independent contracting companies. But they’re close by, so I can get them on the phone, I can go and visit with them and we have lunch. That’s usually how the programming meetings go, I end up paying for lunch! You can sit down with them. We do outsource a lot of things. We do use oDesk quite a bit. That’s a great service to use.

We outsource a lot of stuff overseas. But there are just some things that you need to have close by. Again it’s the time versus money thing. We’ve hired programmers from an outsourcing company a number of times. Unfortunately when they get frustrated they just don’t talk to you anymore. When they’re on the other side of the world, you can’t really do anything about it and the answer you might get from a lot of people is, well, it didn’t really cost you anything, they didn’t get paid. I have to say, yes, it cost us a lot because we’ve wasted three months now.

So that’s why I say having the programming team here that I can talk to, and these guys are my friends now. We’re all friends, we’re just friends working together and we move towards a common goal. To be able to sit down with them and talk to them on the phone is a big plus.

David Jenyns: Very good. I know you mentioned one of the things is freeing yourself up by getting this staff on to give you more time to be able to do more of the networking and connecting with JV partners because that is obviously a big leverage point as well. I know you get along to different seminars and that sort of thing. When it comes to the world of SEO and online marketing, who do you keep an eye on to keep on top of current trends?

Darren Warmuth: For the most part, I’ll probably sound like a lot of other people at this point. There are lots of great people with great ideas. Frank Kern is always innovative and always interesting to listen to. I like Mike Koenigs, he’s really down to earth and has great teachings. The one guy that I find fascinating to listen to is Jeff Johnson.

David Jenyns: Yes, I love his stuff.

Darren Warmuth: Just by watching him present, you know that he is confident, teaching what he knows and his information is really well thought out and it’s not presented with a bunch of hype. So I really respect him for that.

David Jenyns: Yes, I agree. I know you’re pretty underground, so if people wanted to keep an eye on what it is that you do, you don’t have a blog and you deliberately keep yourself out of the limelight. We’ve talked about this in the past, the idea of branding your product as opposed to branding yourself as an individual. Did you have any ways if people want to get in touch? Obviously, if they want to find out about Unique Article Wizard they can go to theSEOmethod.com/uaw, which stands for Unique Article Wizard. Are there any other ways people can keep an eye on you?

Darren Warmuth: To be honest there’s not much about me out there. I never really aspired to be in the spotlight and like you say, I’m an underground marketer. If people want to contact me, they can contact me through the UAW help desk. They just contact the general help desk and they’ll certainly forward the tickets to me. We answer back. Our help desk is great. They’ll answer within twenty-four hours. That’s about the best way to contact me is through there. You can get there through the Unique Article Wizard website. So if there are any questions you have, feel free to ask them and I’ll certainly get back to you as soon as I can.

David Jenyns: Well we’ll wrap it up there. Again, thank you very much for your time. You’re always very generous and much appreciated. Check out theSEOmethod.com/uniquearticlewizard, and I’d just like to say thanks Darren for your time.

Darren Warmuth: Thank you David, I appreciate it very much.

Download Darren Warmuth Interview | Darren Warmuth Videos | Darren Warmuth Podcast | Darren Warmuth Review | Darren Warmuth MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Ed Dale

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Ed Dale

Industry: Online Marketing

Website: Immediate Edge

Product: The Challenge

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

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (10 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: And no one is doing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Don’t undersell yourself, Ed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Good film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Better than a poke in the eye.

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

Trading systems are interesting too.

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

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

David Jenyns: The moment your money goes in though…

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Smart business.

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

David Jenyns: That’s exactly what you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Really.

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

David Jenyns: An Apple fan boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Ask and you shall receive.

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

David Jenyns: Please.

Ed Dale: My greatest influence is the Google Reader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Yes, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Dale: That is absolutely so true.

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

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

Download Ed Dale Interview | Ed Dale Videos | Ed Dale Podcast | Ed Dale Interview | Ed Dale MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Leslie Rohde

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Leslie Rohde

Industry: SEO

Website: www.leslierohde.com

Product: SEO BrainTrust

Leslie Rohde’s Bio: Leslie Rohde is the SEO gurus’ SEO guru. He started off as a software engineer in 1974, and worked on fringe technologies for the Defense.  He worked on developing and fixing up one of the first portable GPS unit. In 1998 he turned to internet marketing excelling as a consultant. He is a true pioneer of SEO strategies and was one of the first people to talk about link reputation. He also created the concept of dynamic linking that has now become a common weapon in the armoury of an SEO expert in the form of no follow and page rank sculpting.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, this is David Jenyns from davidjenyns.com and also the SEO method. Today I think I’ve lined up for you something that you probably haven’t heard very often. I would consider who I’ve got on the line today as SEO royalty. I’ll take you through a little bit of his back history to bring you up to speed with how he got to where he is now and also I suppose how I got in touch with his stuff.

I’m of course talking about Leslie Rohde and he started off as a software engineer back in 1974 and worked on fringe technologies working for things like the defense and helping develop and fix up the first portable GPS unit. Then he started to move into internet marketing around 1998. Then he started to create a really big presence. He was doing a lot of consulting and was one of the first people, if not the first person to talk about link reputation.

Everybody before that was talking about link popularity, all about the numbers of links. But then Leslie Rohde came along and started to talk about the quality of those back links. He had a few bits of software that I think were probably the first most analytical pieces of software out there. There was SEO OptiLink and SEO Spider. He’s had a few claims to fame in this whole development of the SEO industry. He created dynamic linking and using no follow structures to be able to do what is now known as page rank sculpting. He was pretty much the first guy who developed that.

I started following him when I started to keep an eye on Jeff Johnson many years ago now, over four or five years ago. For me, at the time, he knew his SEO stuff and I know he was paying for Leslie’s time to come and speak to coaching clients and things like that which showed me it’s almost like Leslie Rohde is the guru’s guru when it comes to SEO.

So Leslie I’d just like to welcome you to the call and thanks for your time.

Leslie Rohde Well thanks for having me David. It’s fabulous.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well, I’ll jump straight in. The reason I linked this call up, I know I’m really excited to meet you in person. You’re coming down to Melbourne. Is that for the first time?

Leslie Rohde Yes, that’s true. Once many, many years ago I traveled to New Zealand, but I didn’t have the opportunity to get over to Australia. So this will be the first time I’ve been on that continent.

David Jenyns: Excellent. And you’re coming over for Ed’s seminar, so at the tail end I want to ask you a little bit about what you’ll be talking about. It will be great to meet you in person.

Leslie Rohde Totally.

David Jenyns: To dive into the meat of this call, your strength is obviously SEO. I know it is a huge question to start with, but I’d like to get an idea of how you drive traffic when you first launch a new website. I don’t know if you’ve got an example. Maybe we could draw on the SEO Brain Trust which is something you recently launched, or you may have another example. Take us through the process of what you do to start driving traffic through SEO to a new site.

Leslie Rohde To a very new site, that limits the techniques a little bit. A lot of what I do is with existing sites, larger ones in particular. That is because a lot of my background is in e commerce rather than in the info product markets, although I’ve done both. One of the things I’m really known for, is how to make a site bigger and actually use that site size as a competitive weapon.

Assuming you get your pages indexed, and there are some tricks and traps there, building more content is probably the best single way to get more traffic, because you’re actually dipping into the mid and long tail. The other thing is paid rank sculpting of course. With more content you can even attack the short tail very effectively.

This works primarily with deep keyword pools which most markets actually do have, even info product markets. But the other dimension, you’re right, if it’s a brand new site, then you really have to do two things. One is you’re developing content. That’s important, develop more pages. The other thing is, you’re going to have to get discovered and you’re going to have to pass some sort of eclectic thresh holding that Google seems to do about new sites.

In the beginning, you really do have to focus a lot of your efforts on what we would consider classical link building.

David Jenyns: Yes.

Leslie Rohde At some point you become like part of the click, you become suddenly trusted. Where that crossover is, nobody knows outside of Google anyway. But as soon as you’re trusted, you can build a bigger site and you’re suddenly in charge of your own destiny. That’s a magic thing to have happen.

But we can certainly talk about what do we do for a new site? It is very different, new site versus aged site.

David Jenyns: Perhaps even a little bit aged, so let’s say they’ve got over that sandboxing period, they’ve put some content up and got the site initially indexed, so the real basics are done. Where would you take a site from there?

Leslie Rohde Again it would depend a little bit on life cycle. Even if they’re getting well indexed and trafficked, coming to some of their major terms, there are a couple of different things. There are some ongoing processes that I always recommend people do. One of these, and this is one of the things that Dan Thies and I go back and forth about keyword research. Dan is focused on doing the really deep keyword analysis upfront even before you buy a domain. What I do, I eschew that. I’m his other half in many respects and in that regard I just look at the operating website. It will throw off information which is more valuable than you can ever buy from any source.

What I look to do in building traffic is first, I want to see what traffic we’re actually getting and what’s happening to that traffic on the site. Ultimately it’s not about getting traffic, it’s about making money.

So I want to see what traffic do I really need and then what is going to happen as you get more and better ranked and you get more traffic, the long tail discovers you. This is one of those mindset things that I’ll talk about. That is, you don’t actually discover the long tail, because half of those are new searches anyway. Google doesn’t even know about them.

Really what happens is, you find keywords showing up in your Google Analytics. You say, oh, I hadn’t thought about that one. Is that worthy of a page or not and there are these trade offs you have to do in building out a site. It also identifies things you might want to do articles around that you put into syndication. That’s the piece where you’re working on site and trying to get the best profit from what we already have on our site and adjust our site appropriately. Simultaneously we’re going to go do this off site stuff.

There are a couple of different things going on within the site. We talk about optimization by addition, which is adding more content, optimization by subtraction, which is guiding the content to the right pages so it gets us the most money, and then off site. This is two different things, one is indexation, so you’re actually getting spidered and indexed and getting those trust factors in place, and that is also optimization by addition as well, because you’re getting link reputation and page rank flow into your site.

David Jenyns: Let’s say with the optimization by addition, and you’re looking through your keyword research, looking through your different logs through Google Analytics, to determine how much you actually throw up against the wall, is it just a matter of resources, or do you have a set structure, where you say, ok I’m first going to build out with fifty new terms. How does that work as far as how much additional content you’re adding?

Leslie Rohde Right. That’s where, and this occurs a little later in the presentation but, I’ve said this for some years now, so you may have actually heard me say it come to that, and that is I can actually teach you everything you need to know about SEO in twenty minutes. I’ve done that routinely, there are only about three things you have to actually do right. Those are the skills: how to run a title tag, how to write link text that work, that kind of thing.

That’s not the problem. People fail because of the other two aspects, which are mindset and process. Process is really huge, particularly now. One of the themes that Ed has in mind for the upcoming seminar is the new age we’re in. Most of the easy stuff is done and doesn’t work well anymore and you have to get serious. We’re building a real business, think long term. Most real businesses are about their processes. For instance Amazon, the amount of process they must have. Right?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Leslie Rohde So what I teach is, let’s look at keywords and which ones make the most sense. Do the trade offs about which ones we want to focus on, because ultimately we don’t have to throw stuff on the wall. We can be very precise in our selections of keywords and our construction of content for both on site and syndication, in order to get inbound links to our site. We can be very precise about that sort of thing by using Google Analytics correctly.

Google Analytics is one of the best things to happen to SEO outside of Google itself. That’s where I go with that. The keywords will discover you and then you have to decide what to do with them. That may mean, well, here’s this keyword landing on this page. Is that an appropriate page for it to land on? That’s the art of content, which is you build a page for a particular keyword. Typically you should only have one or two or three related phrases. Once you have that, you can’t keep from ranking for stuff. Dumb stuff typically, but some of it isn’t dumb, it’s actually good stuff.

Then the question is, well, is that a different page or is that the right page for it to land on? Well, engagement metrics will tell you. Now if you find, well, it’s not engaging quite right, but the visitor value is pretty good when it is, then maybe we need another page. There are ways to estimate how much traffic we’re leaving on the table at a particular rank and some other tricks like that I’ll show, where we can actually make those kinds of trade offs.

That’s the approach I take. On a live site it throws of so much data that I can use to actually drive the processes of SEO that that is really where I live. It doesn’t take much of a site mind you. So for a ‘brand new site’ whatever brand new means exactly, if you’ve got a ten page site, you have something, you have a kernel of something there. When you get to a hundred page site, you are well on the way to having a thousand page site. I don’t know anyone who can’t have a thousand page site when they think about content the right way.

David Jenyns: So it sounds like the aim of the game in search and I think I’ve heard you talk about this before, it’s really about having as many pages as you can. Obviously you should optimize and focus on the right things and John Reese talked about it as the more pages you have the more tickets you have in the search engine lottery.

It’s funny, especially when you start with Google Analytics and you can get just lost in all of the slew of these different metrics and different things to analyze. You talk about a process. As far as going through that process, you talked about some pretty high level things there, as far as what to do. To break it down, and say, you need to jump in and look at your analytics. You should start off by picking out five words. Where do you start?
Leslie Rohde Well, that’s a very good question. It depends. This is about how to focus your efforts. That gets into some of those processes. Let’s go there. I skipped over a couple of things there, like how to get links and that kind of thing. Let’s go ahead and be strategic for just a moment.

Here’s the challenge, and one of the questions you asked me in email, and that is the single biggest opportunity in ranking today. Here it is. It’s why top ten no longer matters. That’s obviously the teaser line. It’s intended to create an email that gets opened. That’s up there with the death of pay per click and the other things, right?

It’s the steepness of the graph that you get when you look at traffic versus rank. This is one of those things that people have been looking at ever since AOL accidentally leaked the data. When you look at the data, you find that it takes, given search terms with the same traffic, it takes five number three ranks to equal the traffic of a single number one rank.

Let that cook for a second. I could have lots of pages. If you have a number ten rank, it takes fourteen of those to equal a number one rank. It’s obviously for the same traffic terms. So what does that mean to us? That means that we need to not light the wall with a floodlight, we need to pull out a bunch of lasers. We need to be very focused. Basically what it is, if you’re going to go after a term, do not stop until it’s number one. Just going from number two to number one is three and a half times on average.

What does that say about our focus? One thing that people have said is that short tail matters, and I disagree. Wherever you are going to focus, whether it is short tail or long tail or within a particular segment of your industry, or something of that nature, what it means is, don’t stop until you have a number one and then work on the next one. So it almost means you serialize your keyword choices. Almost, it’s not quite true, but it is close to that.

I would say, and have said, pick five, no more than five, because that’s how many fingers I have. So I want to attack a very small number of terms, I want to absolutely command them, and then, while protecting those, I’ll go after the rest of them. So now that restates the question, which five?

The first thing I’d look for is what is the visitor value? I can look at my logs, I can look at my Google Analytics results and see that this particular search term gets me this much from the visitors I get. Now where is that ranked? For example, here are a couple of examples. Say I’m on page three, so I’m on position twenty-five say and I get half a dozen conversions. I get a hundred visits in a month and I get half a dozen conversions. The visitor value is really good.

If I’m getting a hundred clicks a month on page three of results, what does that tell me about the total traffic available if I’m at position five, or position two or position one?

David Jenyns: There’s a great deal more there.

Leslie Rohde Yes, there are thousands, that’s a factor of hundred bigger, so it’s more like ten thousand. Look deep for those, look for things that have really good conversions and really good value when they convert and try to figure out how much of that traffic is actually available. That’s one dimension.

The other dimension is look for things that are knocking on the door. If I’m at position five, I am in the steepest part of the curve because it really goes really fast. It’s pretty flat on page two or three.

You can move from position twenty-five to position fifteen and wonder if you actually did any work. You wouldn’t be able to tell from your traffic graph that you had actually done anything. It was probably a lot of work mind you, but you’re not going to see that in your traffic. When you move from position five to number three, you’ll really notice it, and from three to one, you’ll be a hero.

So those are a couple of different things and you have to balance what the opportunities are, and ultimately there is some arithmetic that you can use to do that. It’s about the mindset. The first part of the presentation that I have for a week and a day away is that people fail from mindset. The skills of SEO are too trivial to build a business around.

It’s the mindset and the trade off, the processes we have to use to construct a business based on free traffic, where people get completely bottled up, they get completely in analysis paralysis and they don’t do anything, or they do something wrong. That’s where the difference between a successful internet business and a non-successful one comes out.

David Jenyns: I think coming back to what you said earlier, the idea of process and being process driven, after you pick out those five keywords, you look at what’s converting and also where you are already, trying to identify, let’s say, which five to go after. You start off with all the basics we know, on page optimization, getting the keyword in the right place and having you internal linking structure correct. I suppose then you move to the off page or is there anything else you do there as far as working through this process?

Leslie Rohde Oh, yes, sure, and in fact this is the peeling of the onion, and so now we’ll do an abbreviated version of the twenty minute skills to do SEO. There content is king and linking is queen. Like your house, the queen runs things, at least in mine.

Within king, within content, there are only a couple of different things one has to know, or really three things. One is the title tag is most important for SEO, meta description comes shortly after that and then the content itself is just there to sell humans, it really is irrelevant from a search perspective. It attracts long tails, and yes, there in the last five percent of ranking algorithm sure, on page matters. But frankly on page matters when there is so little signal in everything else, that’s the only thing you have to go on,. It is like the default, the back up.

You can find whether your page is indexed by looking for some incredibly long string of words on the page and sure enough you will be the only result. The title and description most people think, oh, that is SEO. Yes, it is SEO but your ranking doesn’t matter. Your traffic doesn’t matter, it’s your conversion that matters. Let’s make sure you’re getting the right traffic. First and foremost, write your title and description to sell. Then back fit in the very small number of things you have to get right in order to do SEO. That’s the first thing and the second.

Then there is link text, which is link reputation, a term actually coined by Michael Campbell during a phone call in early 2002 when we were working on a sales letter. Just before the release of OptiLink in 2002, we came up with this term to differentiate from link popularity.

There’s the link text and you have to do that. Honestly, that is the largest factor, but whether it’s the most important one depends on your competition. Then there is page rank, which is really the structure of your linking. If you get those things figured out, and like I said, it really only takes thirty minutes, to get the essence of those things, you’re done. You know everything you need to know in terms of skills about SEO.

Then it is about applying it and applying it the right way. That’s when it takes a lot longer than thirty minutes.

David Jenyns: That’s the hard part. With the linking, and that’s really where the rubber meets the road and that’s where a lot of people get stuck. What are your thoughts on as far as getting the process, is it important to be consistently building links and where are some of the different sources as far as getting a variety of links is concerned?

Leslie Rohde Yes, and that is where I segued away from what your question was, so it goes outward from on page, onsite and then off site. It’s the off site thing where most people run into difficulty. Dan in the SEO Brain Trust has done this wonderful thing called Link Liberation which he ran over the summer too as a stand alone program. He has some particular techniques for doing that.

I have my own view of that, which is not inconsistent by any means. What I do is a thing I call Endless Content. People are always stuck with this. If they’re told build a one thousand page website, they nearly faint. They can’t figure out how they could ever write more than the four pages they already have. Trust me, there is a way. Ed Dale and I talked about this on an interview call some months ago. We’ve talked about it over the years.

He does the same thing. I think he talks about sausage making and how you can relate sausage making to everything else on the planet. That’s what I call topic bridging. It’s the game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Is that only a US thing?

David Jenyns: I’ve heard of it, but you’re going to have to elaborate.

Leslie Rohde Kevin Bacon has been in almost every movie back to Humphrey Bogart. The game is, you name an actor or name a film director or name your next door neighbor and try to find in six degrees of separation what the connection is to Kevin Bacon. It’s a silly trivia game for people who watch that kind of stuff. It doesn’t work for me because I have no clue. That’s the trick. How do you bridge sausage making to something else?

That’s some of the things you have to do in order to create lots of content on your site, but it also works to create articles. This is where we get to your actual question finally, which is how do you get off site links. You’ve heard article marketing is king.

David Jenyns: Yes, that is pretty stock standard.

Leslie Rohde It’s standard stuff except the way it is done, no that’s not it. The one link you got from EzineArticles, is that it? Really seriously?

David Jenyns: You want to rank for that term with that article?

Leslie Rohde Well, yes and you only got one link out of the deal. So how is that going to work? Besides, how is that better than actually putting the same article on my website? ‘Well off site links are different to on site links.’ Rubbish. And that’s not the real point. What you really want from article marketing what EzineArticles advertizes, is people pick it up and put on their own site. It’s the syndication aspects which make article marketing worthwhile.

So now, it’s not about writing an article, it’s about writing an article that somebody else wants and will pick up and put on their site. What I teach is, if you write an article, and in ten days it doesn’t get picked up half a dozen times, you made a mistake. It’s not a good article.

One of the popular things is to figure out how sausage making relates to celebrities, because everybody wants content about celebrities. Or, national events of one sort or another, like how does sausage making relate to the current referendum in Western Australia, if there is one, or the current political debate going on in Congress, which there always are.

Those kinds of things are actually going to go viral and that’s what the real goal of article marketing is. Now you have links from a whole bunch of different unrelated websites. That’s the thing that sets off the threshold filter that says, yes, this is a trusted site.

David Jenyns: That seems contrary to the way a lot of people talk. It’s all about getting themed back links. What are thoughts on when people talking about making sure you’re getting back links from websites that are relevant to the topic that you’re writing on?

Leslie Rohde I can’t tell you my first thought, because it is a PG call. If you take this stuff too seriously…What I really think is, and it is what I actually say after I think it is, you should spend more time looking at search results. When you do that, you’ll see that’s complete hogwash. The reality is that sites rank for the things in the title and the link text. That link text could appear from anywhere.

The example I’ve used literally since 2003 about theming, and it’s not really theming. I don’t want to get into this whole mess about whether or not I’m bashing someone who does theming, like BruceClay for example. No, that is not the case. That’s not the case at all.

What I’m actually talking about, more precisely stated, but so precise it is completely unclear, is cross page topic. If I have a page A that is about a certain topic and it links to page B that has a certain topic, is the topic of page A counted in the ranking of page B or is it just the link text, the blue underlined stuff on page A? I contend it is the latter. It is only the blue underlined stuff that gets moved from page A to page B to help it rank.

The proof of that you can actually readily see. The argument is also persuasive in that, and one I’ve used, that clearly sunglasses and skiing are related. Would you agree?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Leslie Rohde Yes, you don’t have to do that more than once and you’ll go buy a pair in the gift shop. So sunglasses and skiing are related. So a skiing site that links to a sunglasses site, you’ve got to believe that is a good link. Now what about porn and Beethoven? I’m just not getting it. But what data base does Google have to make those sorts of determinations?

We’ve heard lots of rubric recently about related searches and there’s spelling correction and all those other things as you can see on the search results page. Again, if you look deeply in those, you’ll find that’s not the case. That’s at the best co occurrence, people have suggested it may be about the actual click history and things like that. But again, there’s not like this big data base that relates topics for one reason and one reason only, it doesn’t make sense.

In the time I’ve been in software engineering, we’ve been trying to build machines that would actually do natural language processing, would extract meaning from natural language. Guess what? We still haven’t done it and that was thirty-five years ago I started this. The reason it doesn’t work is, there is so little meaning in natural language. It’s not that our software is bad, it’s that we’ve finally realized we don’t actually mean anything when we say stuff. We can’t actually extract topic.

I don’t see this whole theming thing being used in ranking anytime soon. The simple reason is that we don’t even know how to do it as humans.

David Jenyns: I think that whole latent semantic indexing which runs alongside of what we’re talking about now, I’ve just always found it is better if you focus on writing that good content that you were talking about. All of that stuff happens naturally if it even does exist, that’s all going to happen naturally just by nature of writing good articles on topic.

Leslie Rohde Right, and again this is something I did over a year ago. Over a year ago I did a video on LSI that was used in StomperNet. It caused a furor on the web, it was absurd and silly.

David Jenyns: You’re a troublemaker.

Leslie Rohde Of course. And then that was used in a launch, oh, he caused so much trouble he had to be sidelined. It was all fun of course. It was way too highbrow and advanced. We had very little engagement on that video. People just glazed over and hit pause and for good reasons too.

There’s a bunch of technical issues about LSI about why it doesn’t really work at scale for something like that, and not just computationally but about what the algorithm actually does. It’s worked great in things like medicine and in law and things of that nature.

You’re absolutely right about the so called write natural content. Now that’s not like some SEOs, without naming names, will say, oh write good content for humans and Google will rank you where you belong. Yes, right on page seven.

David Jenyns: Where the two people click.

Leslie Rohde Exactly. Right, and those are your neighbours or your family. The real deal is, it’s a long tail attracter, it’s about getting that traffic that you didn’t even know you needed to go get. By the way, your ranking doesn’t matter, it’s the money you make that we use to score this game, and so write stuff that is actually going to entice the human to engage and do whatever conversion step you want them to do on your site. So that is the reason to write that good content.

You’re right, if you just write it for humans, well, sure enough, who is searching? Humans, they’re probably searching with a similar language that you are. So that’s exactly right, just write for humans.

David Jenyns: And you mentioned that right at the start when you talked about the content being key. It seems funny coming from someone in SEO, which is that idea of writing to sell. It’s not the search engines that are going to pull out their dollars and buy your products, it is going to be the user. So you want to write to them. I think that is excellent advice.

When we were talking about building links and we were talking about writing the article, articles I think are one of the best long standing ways to build links. I’m curious to know, if there are other link methods you use and where you see the best bang for buck in building links?

Leslie Rohde Again I think content is so good. You write content, you can adjust the article and use it in a syndication approach as well. There are other kinds of syndication that work as well, like press releases and things of that nature. They don’t get syndicated as widely as articles that are submitted to the article directories, but those are good.

Then we start getting into the specifics of a business. This is where you can really put it in overdrive. Some of those will be SEO focused, and frankly some of them will not be. Again, the way we score this game is money. SEO is great but it is not the only pony. If you have a Twitter application, well, Twitter. If you have a Facebook, application, Facebook. Do you get where this is going? Go where those people are.

If you’re in a niche marketplace, a very small niche, not just what we call niche in the internet marketing space, but one that is narrow. For example, products for pilots, particularly something like airline pilots only hang out in a relatively small number of places, in airports. Go where they are.

Affiliate marketing, that is another one. A lot of us in SEO have a deep connection to affiliate marketing because ultimately what we do is business opportunity. We talk a lot about information products. Ed Dale is one for example. Think about that and this is the great irony. Selling SEO software you don’t do with SEO. You do with joint venture partners. I actually rank really poorly for most SEO stuff. It doesn’t matter because it is the Who’s Who of SEOs that are recommending this stuff and telling their clients about it and things like that, that’s the deal.

The same kind of thing can happen in different markets. In terms of traffic strategies alone, there is social media. Social media is good. Now the ranking benefits are really not there except a secondary and tertiary thing which we could talk about if we had time.

David Jenyns: Do you see that coming down the pipe?

Leslie Rohde No, the people who run things like Twitter and so on are pretty smart. They know that any social network out there that lasts any period of time becomes something of the order of 80% spam. Digg is a good example. I don’t remember the exact number, but book marking sites in general, they’ve found it’s upwards of three quarters are actually spam accounts.

Nobody wants to follow down that path if they can help it. No following the links is first and foremost in their mind. So there’s not a direct benefit. But here you go, unfortunately you can’t stop it in some sense, so this is what happens.

You put a naked link on twitter.com to davidjenyns.com. That’s great it’s no follow so you’re not getting any help from that. Wait, it turns out that the mobile version of Twitter is fed through the equivalent RSS feed that washes out the actual link and puts in place this semantic markup which gets turned back into a link later. So at m.twitter.com you end up with a naked link and m.twitter.com is spidered by Google.

So there is actually a secondary effect even from things like the social sites which end up does create links.

David Jenyns: Also, the whole idea, Google paying that $15,000,000 to get the live feed in from Twitter and starting to integrate that in search and getting social media really integrated into search with personalized search and all that sort of thing. Surely Google, they may not be passing that page rank, but Google without a doubt is following all of these links. That at some point has to feed back into the algorithm to start to affect results.

I’m curious to get your thoughts on that.

Leslie Rohde Yes, I think there are several things going on there. One is that Twitter thing. I haven’t seen it. It was live for a few days and there was a lot of hullaballoo about it. I haven’t actually seen it live lately. I’m wondering if they actually pulled the teeth back on that one because there were some really serious issues in terms of what I call search reputation control around those live things in Twitter.

So that’s one thing, whether they actually leave that kind of social media stuff. Here’s the problem. It’s impossible for the spam team to do anything about it. It is real time. You could actually see the thing scroll while looking at the search results page. It was Java script writing, there were scrolled results. There was no way they could control search quality, which is a problem for them.

The other things that are going on there are about what does social media mean to Google? I don’t think it means as much as people would like it to mean. Here’s the primary tie in. Google wants to be a news site. When you type in, what’s the weather in Melbourne, they want to produce that result, they don’t want to produce weather.com. We’ve all done this. We say, oh, there is a tornado in Atlanta. Because we’re trained to, we go type into Google, tornados in Atlanta. There is no search result yet. The tornado will be gone before Google gets around to even indexing the page.

They want to be your news site because there is a lot of traffic there. This whole thing about making caffeine really fast and the high speed indexing that they’re doing particularly on real new sites that’s about a traffic model which ultimately ties to the revenue model. It’s not about wanting to be the ‘social’ avenue. I think that we’re mixing up some things there. The social stuff they know is highly spammy. How much of that are they going to use as a signal in their algorithm? They’re dipping into the most polluted well they know of.

David Jenyns: Yes. I was reading an interesting book called Socialnomics and the author Eric Qualman was talking about the idea of the way he sees search going. Obviously when you search for, let’s say European vacation, it’s going to be more relevant to you to get information back from your friends and photos that they’ve taken and reviews and that sort of thing. It sounds like a great idea. When it comes to actual application and implementation, what are your thoughts on that?

Leslie Rohde Right, and that’s that other aspect you asked about, which is personalized search. There are a couple of things that are interesting there. One is, they’ve had the pattern of material from Taher Haveliwala since 2003, that’s the topic sensitive page rank. I don’t know if you followed that, but what happened is that Taher and two other guys got their PhDs from Stanford. They formed their own company and two months later were bought out for an undisclosed price from Google.

I have started a lot of businesses. In two months you can’t even get the phones installed. That was a nice exit play. If you read the documents, it turns out what they purchased was they purchased the guys and they also purchased exclusive rights to certain technology licensed to Stanford. So they’re doing IP play, intellectual property.

One of the things they no doubt purchased in that, because Taher has spent his entire academic career going to the same places and doing the same stuff that Mr Page did, including lots and lots of research on page rank. One of them is topic sensitive page rank which tends to split apart the whole notion of page rank in different versions of page rank based around this whole concept of topic.

In a lot of the papers that Page did early on, he talked about personalizing search the same way, by just taking what is a random factor and making a personalized vector. It sounds great until you actually start trying to do it. Then you run into problems, well, I’m not the same person today as I was yesterday, at least in terms of what I’m looking for on the web.

If it does come into use, we have a Google video out there which says that they’re now doing it by IP and you have to be logged in and I don’t see a lot of changes. If you start seeing lots of changes, I’m going to have to eat my words. But I think if they actually turn that effect up too high, very high at all, that what we’re going to run into is that search doesn’t make sense to anybody.

Yes, we search a lot, but we search over so many subjects. What is my topic bias really?

David Jenyns: I do know when you’re logged in to your Google account, they’re obviously tracking all that you’re doing and depending on what you click, I’m seeing that my results, more so with search terms that I’m regularly checking in on. Those are the terms where you’re starting to see those changes. That I think is based more on the clicks, not analyzing your social media or anything.

Leslie Rohde Totally and I do this a lot. Everybody has Google Analytics installed and their g mail and what not and so they’re always logged in. So I’m saying, oh, I see that position three and then they say, well I’m position fourteen, so are you logged in? Oh, yes I am. Sure enough you log out and hit refresh. So if you’re logged in and looking at Google results, realize you’re not looking at Google results, you’re looking at your results.

David Jenyns: To switch gears and talk about what we were saying before, about building these links. We talked about getting articles and getting good quality content out there. Do you use any other methods as far as buying links, using blog networks, directory submissions? Do you do some or all of it or do you just have a few that you focus on?

Leslie Rohde Most of the work I do myself is with really high end companies, multi million dollar companies, So it’s the teaching I do when I track what students actually say they do, which is usually what they do.

Directory submissions, yes, ok do them but I don’t really focus on that. It’s really about building out the content. If I have a ten page website, what is more important to me, ten more pages or three more links to those ten pages? One hundred percent of the time I’m going to tell you, more content is better. It’s going to allow you to discover more traffic and more different traffic. Content is the focus and it is just about how to get better at creating lots of content.

There is a variety of ways to do that yourself and using outsourcers. That is first and foremost. There is that external linking aspect that has to be done and we talked about that. Certainly there is article marketing. Paid links can work. The challenge there is, knowing how to price the link. Most people run into that. The other thing is it’s a recurring cost, it’s not a sum investment.

Typically, if you do the maths, you’ll find out that often writing content, having outsourcers write content for you, even if it is relatively low quality, is going to beat the paid link. It’s not always true, but certainly that’s something you should look at.

The other thing is that there are paid links and there are paid links. Instead of going to networks, you can go directly to blogs, to bloggers, particularly in your space, you’re getting well targeted traffic as well as a good no followed link. Those are the really good strategies to use. In thirty minutes you can write out exactly what you’re looking for and somebody else can get on the phone and start doing that. You don’t have to actually do that yourself.

As far as blog networks are concerned, the challenge is to the extent that those things are already exposed and known about. It is well known that Google has a very ivory tower view of linking. Despite how rich they are, they don’t score the game based on money apparently.

David Jenyns: Until they became listed.

Leslie Rohde Right, at least some part of the company is tracking that. The challenge with live networks is they really are obviously only to get ranked. That’s the whole point of them, that is the reason we do it. I’ve done it too. In order to pass the absurd, actually unreachable standard that Google has put in place, you would just simply have to hide. There is no other way around it. You can’t say, oh, well I really like the traffic from that blog network. Yes, right. It’s really because you’re doing it only for ranking, you just have to make sure Google doesn’t know you’re doing it.

Bear in mind, that even with the tens of thousands at last report of people in foreign countries that are doing spam detection stuff, if you look at what Mat Cutts shows that his spam team works on, you say, wow, I thought I was a spammer. No way. There’s amazing stuff that they have to find. We are not public enemy number one. Almost nothing that we would even consider doing is above threshold for Mat Cutt’s team.

That said, you can still trip a filter, you can get reviewed and then you’re in the bin. It’s very important to realize that you’re going to want to firewall some things. What I teach, and I haven’t actually taught this in a while, but in terms of a network strategy, the closer you get to the thing that pays the rent, the wider and wider you want to get. Your e commerce site should have no inbound links that you’ve built at least, that are even marginally reprehensible.

Build your own private inbound links and you can fake an affiliate program to do that or actually use a real affiliate program if you have one, and so build in house affiliates if you will. They’ll link into your site. Then get those indexed. Now you see you’ve got some firewall. You can say, hey, I have no idea who that guy is, I’ll shut him down right away and then you can go to town on getting those secondary sites indexed. You don’t want them ranked, you just want to pass all the page ranks through to your main site.

So if you can do that, you’ve got that distance between you and anything that could be open to real question, then you’re safe.

David Jenyns: The age old argument is, you can’t really get into trouble for inbound links to your own site, because if that was the case, you’d just go to your competitor, link with a whole lot of bad links and take them out of the index. How does that play into what you were talking about there?

Leslie Rohde Exactly and that’s the trick. You’re absolutely right. The challenge is when 100% of your links are bad. If you already have a thousand links and you can buy into a blog network and you can get two hundred more, go for it, because you’ve got enough mixed in there. The problem is if you buy two blog networks and get two hundred links and another two hundred links, it’s probably not what you want to do.

The easiest, best way to get a computer science master’s degree right now, at least in the United States, is to do some thesis on network analysis for search engines. It’s really cool stuff and it results in a whole lot of equations and cool diagrams that are mostly impenetrable to everybody except your committee. You’ll get your degree and you’ll probably get picked up by Google or Yahoo or someone else.

There is a whole bunch of guys and girls out there studying how to pick apart networks. That’s kind of bad for those of us who’ve made their living on networks. The kind of network approaches that are simple are also simple to find. That’s the challenge. If it’s simple to do, it’s also simple to find.

One of the things that does happen, by the way, is that as these networks get ranked, which they will, then what happens is the edges of the network goes all fuzzy because those sites get linked from outside of network. You want that, and to some extent that’s happening because of other spammers that are even less educated. Good for them.

David Jenyns: Doing some traffic equalizer stuff there.

Leslie Rohde Precisely. That is exactly one of the things that happens. You brought up Jeff Johnson. That was one of the seminars I did was talking about traffic equalizer, directory generator and something else we talked about at one point in his coaching program and how to not make those things quite as blatant as they are out of the box.

David Jenyns: Changing the template like nobody ever did.

Leslie Rohde For example. That would be a good idea, an earth shattering idea.

David Jenyns: It sounds like there are quite a few ways people go wrong and you’ve been in the industry so long. Not in relation to the Jeff Johnson stuff that we were just talking about, but where do you see people going wrong?

Leslie Rohde Traffic equalizer and directory generator were perfect examples of the era. This is now and they’re different. What I call it is fixation on the newest silver bullet. There is a silver bullet and it hasn’t changed in years and it is called hard work. You can’t sell that one, right? One of my catch phrases is that optimization will reduce the amount of work you have to do, but not to zero. You’re actually going to have to do some work. Optimization is about making more money or being more effective.

So chasing the latest shiny object does three things really bad for you. It takes time and generally money too. By changing strategies and tactics with each great new idea, which does nothing typically to build anything with longevity, it might actually undo work that you’ve already done. You have no consistent plan that you’re working on, so that you really don’t build anything longer term.

In trading stocks and futures and stuff like this, this is the algorithm of the week where people will buy the newest course and the newest charting technique and they’ll try it ten times and it fails six and they’ll realize that’s what supposed to happen and they switch. The other thing is even thinking about the new silver bullet creates doubt that undermines commitment. That’s the biggest one right there. If you’re not committed to doing it, how well are you going to do it?

David Jenyns: You hit the nail on the head with the trading analogy. That’s pretty much my niche, where I come from. We call it the search for the holy grail, people looking for that perfect entry signal, that’s going to get them in at exactly the right time. Every time a new Forex course or new stock course or whatever course is launched, or a new trading instrument, it’s designed to catch amateur investors to keep on chasing that shiny bullet.

Business for them is not about generating good products, it’s just about generating new products to have the initial sell and have people jumping to those. More people than I could count, that’s the way they operate their business. You see it the same in anything to do with creating money.

Leslie Rohde Yes. Business opportunity is that way. Over here, and you have the same requirement, because you sell in the United States, the new FTC rules. No longer can you say, you and I may differ, the results are not typical. Now what they’re saying is, what you have to do is actually survey your customers and figure out what the actual typical result is. We’re having a ball with this in the IM space. Lots of alcohol was consumed in Vegas because that’s what we do there. One of the running jokes was how we’re going to rewrite the FTC disclosure.

The truth of the matter is, if you survey your customers, in any business opportunity area, you’re going to find that 98.9%, maybe that’s too low, of the boxes do not even get opened. We actually had a very unfortunate situation at a company I used to work for. We sent out bad discs. We didn’t know we’d sent out bad discs. We only got out of a thousand we sent out, twenty-five complaints. So that must be the number of people who actually put the disc in the drive. Twenty-five out of a thousand, there’s a real number.

That’s the challenge, and the thing about it, the really tough thing to get your head around, and you must have this too as SEO, you don’t know. They’re going to identify themselves, they’re going to self identify if they actually open the box and take some action. You can’t know in advance who those people are. So you still have to sell to everybody and you just have to realize that most of them aren’t going to stick.

I spent fifteen years, I guess,doing taikwando. As I progressed through the ranks and ultimately became a third degree black belt, as you get higher and higher in the ranks you are required to teach and so on. The challenge is, you find the fall out rate is really high at white belt and yellow belt. By the third test, people are sticking but they fall out down the road. You just have to realize when you’re teaching this person, you may not see them again in six months.

That’s the way it is when you’re teaching SEO or anything else, and in the business opportunity areas, you don’t know whether that person is really going to take what you have to offer and do something with it. You can’t be hung up about it. It just has to be the way it is.

David Jenyns: I think part of that is getting the mindset right and that process. Obviously you need to have the skill there as well. It’s a big part of my understanding of what you’re going to be talking about at Ed’s event coming up. What sort of things have you got planned for that?

Leslie Rohde That should be interesting and this is something I’ve been cogitating on for quite some time. There’s an opportunity where several things have come together and forced me to finally do this presentation. It’s actually parts pulled together and then duct taped. So there are actually three parts to the talk. The first one we talk about is mindset, and the second one is process and then I’ll also fit in fifteen minutes of skill work that everybody wants to hear of course. What I’m going to create here and I think it looks pretty good, I’ve got slides already is an end to end blueprint for a running a business based on free traffic.

That’s the headline. That will get the email opened. We’ll see how it comes off. Mindset is the most important. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to do this little piece of paper you take notes on, so that when people walk out of that seminar, what they’ll have is something they can post next to their terminal which has my one liner of memory aids about how to keep your mind right.

What I’ll also do is, I’ll map out an outline, we can’t do a deep dive on all of it, but I’ll outline actual processes that you have to do on an ongoing basis to get ranked.

David Jenyns: Definitely seems like a talk I’ll be well keen to sit in on. I can’t wait for that one which is only a couple of weeks away now. I think there are still some spots Ed has opened up a little bit further now to expand because royalty, the king of SEO, you, among others are coming to Melbourne. It’s going to be a fantastic event.

Leslie, I’d just like to finish up, you’ve been very generous with your time, I do appreciate that. If people want to find out more about you, I know they can head over to your website, your blog, which is leslierohde.com. There is also theseoinnovator.com, another site of yours. If people want to keep on the pulse of what you’re doing, obviously they can come to Ed’s event, but are there any other ways they can keep in touch?

Leslie Rohde Oh yes, I’m very visible in fact, I’m so visible Google will even correct the spelling of the last name if you get it wrong, so that’s very important. The SEO Innovator is kind of the press kit if you will. There is leslierohde.com and more and more I’m trying to blog, instead of just having the site which for a long time I’d only blog once a month and I’m trying to actually fix that.

Seobraintrust.com is where Dan Thies and I run our teaching and coaching program. Right now it’s hard to figure out on the site how to buy into the program because we’re moving our marketing funnel around, so nothing is perfect.

David Jenyns: Sign up to the opt in and wait.

Leslie Rohde If you opt in, I think we actually pitch you to sell at some point. I think, I’m not sure, I’d have to check that. Those are ways you can try to contact me on Twitter, on LinkedIn, there are a whole bunch of ways to find me. But leslirohde.com will work. I try to read and answer all the comments on my post.

David Jenyns: And if people Google you, apart from the correction on the spelling, they’ll find a whole host of ways. Again Leslie, I’d just like to thank you very much for your time and I’m sure people will love it and hope you guys have enjoyed the interview.

Leslie Rohde Look forward to meeting you.

David Jenyns: Sounds good.

Download Leslie Rohde Interview | Leslie Rohde Videos | Leslie Rohde Podcast | Leslie Rohde Review | Leslie Rohde MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Dave Lakhani

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Dave Lakhani

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.boldapproach.typepad.com

Product: Bold Approach

Dave Lakhani’s Bio: Dave Lakhani has been described as a “Marketing Genius”, “Business Acceleration Strategist” and “Multipreneur” by his peers and the media. He has been responsible for developing dynamic strategies driving record breaking growth and increases in sales in more than 500 businesses in the past 10 years. Dave is an in demand speaker, author and trainer, whose ideas have been applied by some of the biggest companies in the United States including IBM, US Army, Rogers Media, Micron, GE, Wizard Academy and many more. His latest book Persuasion – The Art of Getting What You Want published by Wiley will be in bookstores fall 2005. Dave is frequently seen in magazines including Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management, Entrepreneur, Business Solutions, Retail Systems Reseller, Integrated Solutions, Home Office Computing, PC Magazine and other media including Business Radio Network, The Business Connection, The Today Show and dozens more. Dave has owned more than 10 successful businesses in the past 20 years and has deeply studied the marketing and sales leaders of our time including Jay Abraham, Brian Tracy, Harvey Mackay, Roy Williams, Dr. Nick Grant, Zig Ziglar and many more. Dave is a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from the SEO method. Today I’m very excited. We’ve got a master persuader on the line. We’ve got Dave Lakhani. He’s got a really interesting story and it started back when he was raised up in a cult and perhaps I’ll get Dave Lakhani to talk a little bit more about that and how he broke free from that. I think being so entrenched in that has given him a great understanding of the way persuasion works. He’s gone on to be a business strategist having worked with more than five hundred businesses over the past ten years. He’s a great speaker and is very much in demand on the circuit and his latest book is Subliminal Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want. Is that right, Dave?

Dave Lakhani: That’s actually my next to last book. The newest book is called How to Sell When Nobody’s Buying.

David Jenyns: There we go, that is the perfect introduction. Thanks for jumping on the line. Perhaps tell us a little about the new book that is coming out.

Dave Lakhani: Yes, the book came out in June. It’s interesting because it will tie into a lot of what we’re talking about. I was contacted by my publisher in February. They asked me to write the book as fast as I could. They wanted to have it out by June, so I wrote the book. They did an amazing job of getting it out quickly. We planned the launch for it and by we I mean me, because publishers do very little to really help you sell a book. I planned the launch. The book sold out in North America in eight hours online and off.

Interestingly enough, over fifty percent of my sales came from social media online traffic driven strategies. That’s what helped that book sell. You can get it at Dymocks or any place in Australia that sells books and of course Amazon and those kinds of places. It’s very interesting because the book really focuses on exactly what you have to do in what has been a very tough economy for many people, to get attention and to cause people to come to your website and interact with you.

David Jenyns: I suppose that leads into what these calls are all about and how to drive traffic to your website and how to get that attention you need and then hopefully convert that traffic. Perhaps if you can even take us through the process of what you did in the launch of that book to get that awesome result and have it sell out so quickly.

Dave Lakhani: One of the most important things I do right now is I maintain a very focused social media strategy. I’m constantly interacting with people on Twitter. I’m interacting with them on LinkedIn, I’m interacting with them on Facebook and interacting with them on multiple blogs. One of the blogs I’m using right now most effectively, or one of the blogging platforms which is most effective because it allows you to do virtually everything to your blog from a cell phone, a BlackBerry, and iPhone, anything that you might be using, I use posterous.com.

Posterous allows you to update your blog via email and so basically what happens is, if you attach a photo, a video to your email, you put the subject line that then becomes the headline of your blog post. Whatever you type in the body of your email becomes the body post.

As a result of that, when you press send, it automatically converts the video for you into a proper format, it aligns it properly on the blog. It is the same thing with photos or any other attachments that you have, audio, anything like that, properly puts in the headline, properly puts all the text in where it should go. So literally now there is virtually no reason that you can’t be responding to things as you think of them, as they’re happening and helping create that following.

So step number 1 was to begin interacting more deeply about the book with people who were following me online who were on the blogs and those kind of things and let them know what was going on, to build anticipation and excitement. So I did that from the minute I started writing the book. I talked about what it was like writing the book under a tight deadline, having a very short amount of time to write the book. I started talking to them about the interesting things that I found while I was researching the book, about the economy, about business, all of those kind of things.

I started a dialogue and I continued that dialogue and didn’t allow it to stop up to the point that the book was released. I was building anticipation about what was going to be covered, I was talking about why I wrote the book differently, why I started with the chapter zero. All those kinds of things lead people to become more and more engaged, more interactive, wanting to know more.

I also created videos which we ultimately released using a tool that allows you to actually click the video. You can click on the video and it will take you directly to a link in the site. All those kinds of things have allowed me to interact with my audience in ways that I wasn’t able to before. So that created the sort of anticipation, which created a lot of the interaction that happened.

What was very interesting about this wa,s as it was released, social media did exactly what we hoped it would do. It caused people to then share the message. While I was sharing the message with the 16,000 or 18,000 people who are on my Twitter following, the 5,000 people on Facebook, because I’ve reached the Facebook limit, the thousands of people who read my blog. What happened is, a percentage of those people, and frankly not even a large percentage of them, maybe ten percent of the people then either retweeted or recommended it on Facebook or linked to it on their blog. Of those thousands of people, a good percentage of those people’s friends, followers etc did the same thing, which created massive exposure that first day and resulted in the books selling out in under eight hours in North America.

David Jenyns: What are your thoughts on selling? Obviously persuasion is such a big part of what you do, selling, using social media. Everybody talks about the idea that social media isn’t the platform for selling, it’s that interaction and relating to your customers. How do you tread as far as selling through these different social media outlets?

Dave Lakhani: I find that sort of a funny argument really because social media is simply another messaging distribution outlet like radio or television or print or anything else. That isn’t the most interesting thing.

What is interesting is they make a distinction between having an interaction with your client and selling. The best sales people, the best marketers, the people who best interact with their clients who provide people with valuable information, who cause them to be polarized who cause them to be interested or intrigued and then talk about solutions to problems they’re having and all those things.

I think where they get mixed up is, if you use social media as a tool to shout at people, to try to interrupt them for their attention and get them to pay attention to a sale where you’re asking them to buy now, now, now, then they turn on you very quickly. That’s where people have made the mistake.

It’s not the fact that social media isn’t a tool for selling, it’s a great tool for selling, it’s a great tool for distributing your message that influences people highly. It’s not when you use old techniques of screaming at people, at trying to interrupt them, of spamming them, all those things. That’s what turns people on you very quickly.

David Jenyns: Yes. The process that you went through for this launch, is it quite a structured thing where you very much look at, I’m going to make sure I do x number of Twitter posts, I’m going to make sure I make a few posts on a blog and x number on Facebook? What sort of structure, systematized process do you follow or is it more as people interact, do you interact where the attention is at that time?

Dave Lakhani: It’s a combination of the two. I had a very specific strategy for how much I wanted to interact, what kind of videos I wanted to create. I put videos up on Veeple for example and I can send you a link to that if you like. That’s the clickable video and it has analytics on the back end so I could tell immediately what people were interested in. If they clicked through to something I talked about in the video, that let me know they were interested in this or they weren’t interested in it. I could create more of what they were interested in and do less of what they weren’t.

Those kinds of things allowed me to be very targeted and specific in what I was doing. So to answer your question, I had a very specific process for making sure I tweetered on a regular basis, I updated the blog on a regular basis, I Facebooked on a regular basis. All those things that really worked that I was doing. I did as many pre tele seminars as I could for the book. All of those kinds of things allowed me to be very methodical in my process and to make sure that I was reaching the sort of mind share that I wanted to.

Then as people interact, I made sure I interacted with them as well because the best way to get people to talk about what you’re doing is to have a conversation with them that’s interesting and compelling to them, so that they’ll then report it to other people. That helped increase my following base. Then the day that the book released, it helped increase the number of people who retweetered or talked about it in social media blogs about it or created their own videos or reviewed the book on Amazon, all of those things.

David Jenyns: I’m imagining toget that initial swell, obviously you’ve already got a little bit of attention with some past work that you’ve done. So you’ve already got that initial following of people and you can start to seed that. If you’re working say with a new client who doesn’t have that, how do you go about starting to build up that presence? Is it just putting good content out there, and if you build it, they will come?

Dave Lakhani: That’s a great question because as social media proliferates, obviously there is more and more good information out there. So you start of with building a powerful persona. You have to develop a person worth hearing and worth watching. You’re right, I’m fairly fortunate with this book. I speak to about 100,000 people a year around the world so there are a fair amount of people who follow me.

But having said that, my first book, when I first started this business, I had no clients either and there are now a lot of people just now getting into this business and are building a following. The thing to remember when you are getting into this business, there are two camps in this. There’s my camp which is the right one and there’s the other camp. The other camp says numbers of following matters because social media is a numbers game. That’s a very old school mentality.

That’s the sort of antiquated television sales mentality of listen, we have a million viewers. Well a million viewers don’t mean anything. You’ve got Ashton Kutcher, these celebrities who have a million viewers, Oprah who has a million following her on Twitter and it really has no impact. People don’t pay attention, there is no mind share.

What really matters is not the number of followers, it’s the number of followers who interact with you and who do something as a result of their engagement with you. So they retweet you, they actually have an ongoing conversation with you, they recommend what you recommend, they see you as an aggregator for information out there.

So when I have a new client, we start out by building a persona for them. We start out by saying, ok, what makes you compelling and interesting? What can we do, how do you need to show up all of the time in order to be that consistent, personal brand that people have to see, in order to connect with you.

Social media is in many ways a one on one game. You’re building a personal brand because it has a voice. Even if you’re the voice of a large company, that voice has to be consistent, it has to be specific and it has to be planned. Specific, consistent and planned is a very big important point.

You start out by developing a persona, something that people would be interested in listening to and hearing from. It doesn’t matter what your audience is. I’m not saying you have to go out and be over the top and crazy and all those things, but what I am saying is, you have to be very consistent about it.

You have to be whoever your consumer expects to see in your position. They’re looking for the most knowledgeable, interesting expert they can find and that’s the person they’re going to follow. It’s being consistent, it’s creating this persona and then it’s putting out that killer information, the category killer information, the information that’s going to bowl people over, get them very interested in what you have to say and coming back for more. You have to do that too.

The interesting thing is, this does not happen overnight. When it does, it’s a fluke, it’s a mistake, it doesn’t happen overnight. People build trust over time, rarely do they build trust overnight. You have to provide them with enough information that’s compelling, that brings them back, that they have time to build trust with you, so that they then can engage in the conversation so they can then buy from you.

By doing that, start with that persona, create that information and be ruthlessly consistent about it. When I have a new client who’s doing this, this is what I tell them. For the next ninety days you have to write a blog post every day. For the next ninety days, you have to create at least two videos a week. For the next ninety days you have to create at least one audio a week. For the next ninety days you have to tweet at least ten times a day with something that is interesting and compelling. For the next ninety days you have to ask at least two powerful questions that people might have that would lead them to ask more questions about your product on LinkedIn.

When we start with that process, that seems very overwhelming to a lot of people. They say, oh, I can’t create content at that level. Well, if you can’t, you need to back up and regroup and decide what it’s going to take to do that, or maybe you’re in the wrong business. The reality of it is, what most people feel when they say, oh, that’s too much information, I don’t know if I can do it, is they’re not prepared for it.

So step number one, even preemptive to starting that strategy obviously is to sit down and say, ok, I need to create blogs over the next ninety days, I need to create twenty-four videos. So what are twenty-four topics, questions, concerns, interesting things people might have about my product or service that I can talk about, that I could create videos about?

When you break it down into those simple topics, I can talk about these twenty-four things, I can have an audio around these twelve things, I can write blog posts on these ninety things, you’ve suddenly got something that’s very interesting.

What I’ll let them do in the last twenty days of that is, they don’t have to write blog posts that they’ve necessarily created themselves, they can respond to other people’s blog posts. They can begin introducing other ideas into their blog. Initially we want them to do that and there’s a very specific reason and focus for that. What we’re trying to do is dominate the keywords in a category. All of the blog posts that we’re writing, we’ve done our keyword research ahead of time, so that we know these are the keywords, these are the key phrases people are searching for in order to find our product or service.

Those keywords or key phrases are going to end up in the headline of the blog post and they’re going to end up in the blog post body, so that we have more and more relevant, valuable links back from the search engines. That is one of the most overlooked things that people do, but that’s the real reason for having such an aggressive strategy.

Once that first ninety days is up, you’re going to let up a little, but for the next year or for the balance of nine months, you’re still going to post at least three times a week on your blog. You’re going to be doing video at least once a week, you’re going to be doing audio at least a couple of times a month, you’re going to be tweeting every day, Facebooking, all those things that are required in order for you to dominate the search and to dominate the top of mind awareness in the category you’re trying to create.

David Jenyns: What you’re talking about there seems like a very people centric brand building process. What are you thoughts on social media? Is it all about having it focused around that one person and building that personal brand? Can it also lend itself to businesses as well, like particular business promoting? How do you think that works?

Dave Lakhani: It lends itself perfectly to either one. If you’re an individual and you want to build a personal brand, it’s superb for that. If you’re a company, it’s superb for extending your brand or building your brand awareness of your company as well.

The key is, you have to have either someone who is in a position of authority, a CEO, a senior director of marketing if you’re a larger company whatever it is, giving the authentic voice to that message. If not that person, then you have to empower the person who’s going to write whatever it is they will and to give them the authority to be able to create your voice or take your voice and carry it out to the masses in a way you approve of and is coherent with you. Also, so the experience people have meets the expectation you’ve created when they come into your store or they buy your product or they call you on the phone.

It works perfectly for either one and it’s just a matter of creating that authentic voice, being very transparent, being very relevant and making sure that if it’s for a company or a product and it’s not senior people themselves writing and doing it, the person they put in charge that they have enough trust in that they will authorize them and give them the authority to do what they need to do.

David Jenyns: That’s some awesome feedback there and having the correct voice especially when it filters through these different action items that you did give. I’m wondering, you talked about social media also being the first step, that little action plan that you just gave us there, is that something that you, when you’re first working with a client, you say, here, this is what you need to follow. As far as breaking it down even further, writing a blog post, we’re talking just setting up a blog hosted on your own server?

Maybe I’ll drill down in to each one just to get a little bit more on each one of those topics. So for a blog, how would you go about setting up that blog and getting them ready for that?

Dave Lakhani: There are a couple of ways of setting up the blog. You can either use Posterous like I talked about before which, again, you’ll find at posterous.com, which is a free blog service. You can port a domain name over to it so it would be your domain and then your blog would show up when they type that in. You can do that or you can use a WordPress blog or a TypePad blog, any of them you want to.

The purpose of the blog though, is to develop links back to your main website so that when searches are done, people end up back to wherever it is that your products and services are, so they can learn more about your company.

To set up the blog it’s very simple, I’m not going to walk through the technical stuff of setting up WordPress. You set up a WordPress blog and that’s where all your posts are going to be at. Ideally if you use a WordPress blog it would be a sub domain of your main website. So you just have a link to it. In my case it would be howtosellwhennobodysbuying.com/blog or boldapproach.com/blog or whatever it is and then it would go there. Those are the kind of things you want to do.

Then from there what happens is, your domain is ranking higher and higher in the search engines because everything is your domain/blog/whatever the topic is with the keywords in it, that’s what’s going to get it ranked. So the purpose of the blog again, is to drive traffic back to your website and as well as showcase your knowledge. As people search for these terms, or they search for these keyword phrases, they’re coming back to you and seeing you as the most knowledgeable expert.

My goal when I help a client start this process, is to think of it like this. We’re casting a net and any place you step on the internet, we want you to step into our little net so that we can reel you in.

David Jenyns: Some of these other nets that you’re setting, things like the video, how do you go about distribution for that? Are we talking just YouTube or are you using other services like TubeMogul?

Dave Lakhani: Excellent question. YouTube is still the biggest traffic driver of them all. So we definitely focus on YouTube and it’s the same thing. The thing that people miss on YouTube though, is they don’t think through from a keyword standpoint what they title their videos.

So we focus very hard on what title are we going to give the video because, again, that’s what helps it show up in the search engine. They forget to put a hyper link url in the description back to their website so that when people do go there they can. They forget to edit the video to include something that tells people where their website is at on the video, so that while people are watching it they know where to go.

All of these things make a difference. So we focus on YouTube first and then we use TubeMogul to distribute to as many different places as we can, because again we’re trying to spread this out as far as possible and find people wherever they reside or wherever they find us.

David Jenyns: Cool. And audio was another thing that you mentioned. For distribution of that, is it more just through the blog or have you got audio services as well?

Dave Lakhani: Yes, it’s a combination of things really. We focus on iTunes quite heavily because it’s fairly simple if you’ve got a niched category to be the number one show on iTunes.

It’s just very simple. There’s podcastradio.com and there are a number of other services like that. Blogtalkradio.com allows you to set up a very quick radio show that you can then integrate into iTunes and start moving it up the charts. Many people do still search iTunes for free things to listen to that they’re interested in.

All this is about generating and building an audience and a following. So we’re trying to reach out to as many people as we can in as many different ways as we can so that wherever they look, they keep stumbling across us in your product or service or topic category.

David Jenyns: Yes and then you’re doing some of these other things, setting those nets. There was the tweeting, obviously that’s done through Twitter. Are you looking at integrating any of that. I know Posterous has that option where you can be posting on there and directly post on other web 2.0 properties and have it fed through. Do you link that together or do you see it a separate channels to be handled as such?

Dave Lakhani: I try and link it all together. For those people who are following me and who have contacted me, I want them to be able to get my best information first. So they may not be watching my Posterous post as often as they watch my Twitterfeed. They may subscribe to my Twitterfeed on their cell phone and my Facebook updates on their cell phone. So if they’ve got their cell phone in front of them, I want when I post a new Posterous post, I want it to show up on their cell phone right away. I want it to show up wherever they’re at.

I want to have the highest likelihood that these people are going to click and engage with me and then share that information with people. The best way to do that is provide them multiple different pieces of information wherever they might be, so that they can click on it immediately.

David Jenyns: The other one I think you mentioned was LinkedIn and using that as well and that obviously all links in together. You take them through that process, it’s a three month process, the ninety days.

Having a little bit of a look you can see you’re very much looking at your on page optimization, selecting your keywords, making sure they’re in the appropriate pages. Then you also effectively get some off page optimization because it’s all linking together, the YouTube linking back to your site and your blog and Twitter linking through. So it’s all linking through. Do you have any other off page optimization or is it all internal all of those different sites you’re working on?

Dave Lakhani: No I do other things as well. Like this interview for example. I encourage people to link back to my site for these interviews so that they can find out more about me so that I’m getting obviously the back links that count. I do guest posts on other blogs and those kind of things.

I also do offline marketing as well for things where I’ll send out postcards. I’ll use something like voiceshot.com and go to my existing customer list and make them aware for example that I’ve got a new blog post, when my book came out that my book was releasing. I let them know about it first and they got a personal message from me.

I do those kind of things as well as I still maintain an email list and encourage those people to interact with me because even if they unsubscribe from my email list, chances are high, by now they’ve subscribed to me in one of these other places, so I’m not really losing them. Although on the other hand, I don’t really care if people leave me, email or any place else. If they don’t find me compelling and interesting, they’re not going to buy from me, I don’t really .like wasting my energy with them, so if they leave, I’m ok with that.

David Jenyns: Yes, because it all does come back to you’re doing all this and you’ve set out what your focus is and the reason you’re doing it is obviously is to convert that person at the other end. This is all very good for driving the traffic to your offer. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about, I know this is a strong point with you as well, creating the offer. How do you persuade someone to buy?

Dave Lakhani: Right. Well here is the thing that people need to remember when you’re doing all of these things. Only polarized people buy things. Only polarized people buy things and you have to be seen to sell. You have to be seen to sell. So if you’re not taking a stand, the only that happens when you ride the fence, and you sit on the rail, and you try and balance that way all the time, and you never take a side, the only thing that happens is you get splinters. Nothing else happens, nothing good happens from that. You can’t please everyone all the time.

It’s better to please a hungry crowd of people who agree with you than it is to try and appease a crowd who couldn’t care less. That’s what polarization is all about.

Polarization is taking a stand and saying, this is who I am, this is what I’m about, this is what I believe. If you think about that, and it doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk, it doesn’t mean you have to be mean, it doesn’t mean you have to be any of those things, but it means you have to be transparent and relevant and say the things that people who could potentially buy your products or services can come down off that fence and agree with you on.

You’ve got to knock them off the fence to get them to buy. So when I’m looking at constructing an offer or even a persona, I’m looking at, how do I creating that polarization? The next thing is I’m looking for, what does it take to get these people to say yes to something? So we constantly look at the psychology of consumption for example. There was a recent research study done that said that if you get people just to try something briefly, they’re much more likely to consume it longer term than they are if they don’t try it at all.

Even things like bitter medicine and those kind of things, if they try it and they have an immediate result from it, then they’re much more likely to engage it much longer than they are if they don’t try it or if they don’t have an immediate result. So whatever we can do to give people an immediate result, listen to this, do this thing, see what’s going to happen as a result of doing it and I’m going to teach you thirty more strategies when you buy the product. This gives people that sort of immediacy and that causes them to say yes more often.

Things like giving to receive, the law of reciprocation still works. If you give people something in advance, they’re much more likely to engage with you. This is one of the values of social media. Why we create so much video on blog posts is because we’re

preemptively giving, giving, giving and as a result, what we’re getting is people who are saying, this person is giving me so much, I need to do something in return and so they do.

David Jenyns: Obviously you’ve got you book and you went through those processes and sold out your book. You’re not necessarily going to get rich from selling a book so that feels like that first step. Obviously you give out great content and then they take the next little step, which is yes, I’m happy with what Dave’s putting out. The next little step is buying the book and gradually you’re getting them to make bigger and bigger commitments. How do you see the process after they buy a book and where do you go from there?

Dave Lakhani: For me the book is the top of my funnel. Really social media is the top of my funnel. That’s the free line for me, so that everything that I give away on social media is free and then when I get them to engage and buy the book, I know that’s the first step to establishing a profitable following.

There are two different groups of people for me. There are the people who haven’t bought from me yet and there are the people who have bought from me.

The people who have bought from me have moved further down into the funnel. They buy the book, they’ve become more interested in what I do. They’ve given me an initial early yes, saying yes, I trust you, yes, I’m compelled by what you say, I want to read your book and I want to see if my experience with your book matches my expectation. When experience meets expectation then they move further down the funnel.

They may buy a set of DVDs like my Renegades of Persuasion for $200 or they may buy another product or a tele seminar I’m doing or something like that for $100 or $200. They may come to one of my live events for which they’re going to pay anything between $1000 and $2000.

Each time they make that purchase they become more valuable to me and they move further and further down the funnel, not just valuable in the sense that they’ve spent more money with me, but valuable in the sense that the deeper they get into my funnel, the more religious they are in their willingness to help me spread my message.

These are my true believers. These are the people who are going to go out and defend me at all costs whether I defend myself or not. These are the people who are going to go out and tell their friends and family to buy this product or service. These are the people who are going to get their colleagues to do it, these are the people who are going to come to my events and be my evangelists. Those people have tremendous value to me and they’re to be protected with great vigour.

David Jenyns: It’s funny how you can already start to see the parallels drawn between what you’re talking about there and what happens in a cult. You get those few key members who are the ones who are really strong believers and I think Cialdini talked about the idea of looking around to other people to get cues about how you should be responding.

I’m curious to know, as you’re starting to build this up, how do you help cultivate that and help that propagate or do you just let them go out and speak as they will?

Dave Lakhani: No, and here’s one of the biggest fallacies of word of mouth marketing. Everybody says word of mouth marketing is the best marketing I can get. But word of mouth marketing works both directions. If people don’t understand what they should say about you, they’ll say anything about you. My focus is to get as many people as possible who will take my message and repeat it verbatim as I can. I’m constantly telling people what are good things to say. I’m not going out and being that blatant about it, saying please say this about me.

What I’m saying is, here’s the message I repeat over and over again so that you understand it and then that’s the message you’ll repeat. People parrot what they remember. So we want them to remember these certain things about us.

When you’re looking at building up this group of true believers, you want to give them things they can talk about, so that they can go out and tell people the best and most relevant things that will get those people to jump into the top of your funnel and hopefully dive in deep and grab a book or grab a book and tape set early because they came in with a recommendation.

David Jenyns: Do you have any way, how do you integrate, when I think of testimonials and things like that, how does that integrate into the marketing?

Dave Lakhani: It’s interesting because testimonials are undergoing a great change in the United States right now. The Federal Trade Commission has come down really hard on testimonials, so everybody is backing away from testimonials here right now. If there is any sort of financial claim or any sorts of claims about anything pretty much, if you can’t demonstrate it, the fines are tremendous right now. So people are backing away from testimonials.

Having said that, if you have legitimate testimonials you can use, particularly in Australia where the rules might be slightly different, testimonials integrated every step of the way increase sales. Social proof, which is what a testimonial is, social proof is a psychological premise that basically is best described as monkey see, monkey do.

The seminal research around social proof was done when they had a person in New York City stand on a street and stare up at a spot on a building. Pretty soon three or four people were looking up at the spot and when those people stopped and looked, then a dozen people were, when a dozen people were, a hundred people were and shortly after that they had a giant crowd that was blocking up the street looking up to see what was up on the building. The original person had gone.

People do what they see other people doing. Very few people want to be a pioneer. They don’t want to be the first ones to break new territory. What they used to say in the United States, nobody wants to be a pioneer because you can always tell who they are because they have arrows in their back. That was back from when we were settling the West here, that was the Native Americans who shot the pioneers with their arrows.

That’s sort of the same thing in business. Nobody wants to be the first one to go out and break the ground and yet entrepreneurs do it all the time and they’re successful. From a consumer standpoint, no one wants to be that first person, to be the first one to try whatever the product or service is.

So what happens is, when they see a group of people trying it and those people are happy and excited, then they’re much more likely to try it. Their resistance goes down, their natural inclination to question goes away and they’re much more likely then to engage and do whatever it is you’re asking them to do. Social proof of testimonials is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s highly persuasive and I strongly recommend you use them as much as you can because they will encourage people to do it.

Here’s what’s interesting, with social media again you get people who are retweeting or talking about you on Facebook or creating response videos or all these kind of things and they’re doing it organically. They’re providing social proof to people who trust and follow them without you asking them to do it or without it seeming contrived as often testimonials do. Most people don’t know how to give a good testimonial and most people who are asking for testimonials don’t know how to direct a good testimonial.

What ends up happening is they end up sounding like one of those hucksters on the street or on television and you don’t come up with really good genuine heartfelt testimonials that move people. What happens with social media often is, whatever people say extemporaneously is often very heartfelt, truthful, transparent and full of emotion. Those are the ones that convert best.

David Jenyns: You talked about those pioneers and obviously entrepreneurs going out there and trying to pave a new trail. You’d probably see, having worked with a lot of businesses and that sort of thing, a lot of mistakes people are making when they’re first getting started online, even if they’ve been online a little while. What are some of those big mistakes that you see people making online and how might they avoid some of those?

Dave Lakhani: Well the biggest thing is chasing shiny objects. You know they get so focused on trying to learn too many new technologies or trying to see what everybody else is doing, or they get excited about one product and they hear about one that is even more interesting that someone is having more success with. They start chasing that money. Those are the worse things they can do. That’s a big mistake, so chasing shiny objects is a huge mistake.

Not paying attention to the numbers, not doing your research ahead of time before you launch a product or service. Make sure there is actually a market for it. Understand that people may or may not want what you have. I’m working with a client right now who I’ve told on numerous occasions her product is probably not the right product for the market. But they did no research ahead of time, literally said, well this was given to me by the universe, so it must need to sell.

Well the reality of it is, whether you want to be that far out and say it was given to you by the universe, or you just have this great idea that you fall in love with and you’re going to make it happen, you can push it as hard as you want, and I’m a big believer in if you believe in something and absolutely hustling to make it happen.

But at some point if it’s not working and you’ve done everything that you possibly can, you have to ask, does the market exist? Ideally you would ask does the market exist ahead of time, before you invest a lot of time and money in trying to sell something that people may or may not want. So not knowing there is a market ahead of time.

Not developing a powerful persona that people can connect with and believe in. Not being relevant and transparent, believing people won’t find out the truth online. It takes moments if not less to find out anything they want to know about you now.

People take too long to initiate and engage. They believe it is too hard, so they’ll start out with one thing, and they’ll say, I’m just going to blog. I’m only going to do that until I’m successful. You won’t just be successful using one media outlet. It’s like saying, I’m going to build my whole business around a radio ad in a particular town. It’s just not going to happen. You have to reach out and go further.

The final thing, the biggest mistake I see people make all the time is being under funded. While it appears that internet marketing is very inexpensive to get into and it is, it’s not free, regardless of what people will tell you.

One of the fastest ways to do research for example is to use Google AdWords to drive traffic to a site or to a product to see if people are really interested in it. And if they are, that gives you a sense of whether or not it will work and, by the way, as your business grows or even in the beginning.

Almost all the beginning businesses when I start them or when I have clients do it, we start driving traffic with Google AdWords because it is the fastest most cost effective way of getting traffic that is interested in what you’re talking about to your site. You’ve got to have enough money to be able to last the ups and the downs, do the testing and to go from there.

Another big mistake people make is they spend too much money on technology. This person I was just talking about earlier, whose product may not be a good fit for the market, spent $60,000 to create a website that could have been created using an outsourced tool to Romania or China or India. They probably could have had it created for a couple of thousand dollars. They invested $60,000 in it and that was all of the money. Now there is no money to promote it further or do other things that need to be done. It was sort of the idea of, if you build it, they will come idea.

I’m here to tell you there are way too many fields on the internet to be building it and hoping they will come. You’ve got to have a systematic process for doing it. That’s my final thing that I see people doing wrong is that they don’t have a plan for how they’re going to run their business. They don’t actually create a business plan, they don’t create a marketing plan. They don’t sit down and say, these are who my clients are and this is how I’m going to reach them tactically day by day, these are the things I’m going to do.

Without that sort of focus, that fearsome focus, you’re not going to have success. If you do have success, it’s going to be lucky and along the way you’re going to experience many problems in growth. Your business may fail anyway even if you have a viable plan because you haven’t adequately planned for how to reach people, how to communicate with people, how to persuade people and then how to serve them best.

David Jenyns: You talked a little bit about things like the outsourcing. That person could have very easily got their website made and also hinted at the idea with the planning and also having systems in place. That leads into the idea of outsourcing.

How does that fit in with a lot of what we talked about, those steps that you did go through? With quite a few of those, the person is going to need to create that content because it’s hard to disseminate that sort of information if it’s not coming in the right voice. How do you link in outsourcing and where does that play a part in what we’re talking about?

Dave Lakhani: I’m going to talk about outsourcing in two different ways. Number 1, I think people outsource the wrong things way too soon. One of the first outsourcing things is, I’m going to rush out and get a VA, a virtual assistant, somebody who is going to help me with all these things.

If you’re starting up a new business, you need to be in the fray for a while. You need to understand what your clients are saying. You need to understand what all the people you’re interacting with are saying and doing. You need to become an expert on your business before you ask anyone else to run it for you in any way.

You need to do that first. Hold out on outsourcing those kinds of things for a little while and make sure you know what you’re doing. Before you outsource your social media to someone else to do, you sure better make sure you know what your voice is and how they need to talk.

You can’t teach people to do what you haven’t done. If you’re going to actually bring someone in to do the writing, create the videos, all those kind of things, they’d better know what your voice is and you’d better know how to tell them what that voice is and how to get it and what to say and all of those things.

The other side of outsourcing is outsourcing the technology component. If you don’t understand how to install a WordPress blog, build a website, set up social media pages, build a Facebook fan page, all those things, if you don’t know how to do that, outsource that. You can get it outsourced for next to nothing. You go to scriptlance.com or elance.com. I’m sure there are some specific to Australia that I don’t know about that you can go to and you can get these people in India, in China, in Romania, in Russia to do these things for you for nearly nothing.

The last full website I had built was about seventeen pages. I provided the copy, that was it. They did the graphic design for me and I had it done for less than $300 and under two weeks.

David Jenyns: Some of those things you talked about were the big mistakes and using the outsourcing, depending on what it is you’re trying to do. Definitely they’re some big insights and you’re able to teach those because you’ve learned them yourself firsthand.

I’m just wondering now, looking back over your career, if you knew then what you knew now, can you identify, if you were to go back, where those really key leverage points were with your development and growth? For example, could you say, once I started to outsource my customer support, that opened things up for me? Are there any things like that where, looking back, you can see big leverage points?

Dave Lakhani: I want to talk about some of the things that helped me be successful first, and then I’ll answer your question specifically. My ability to hustle, my ability to go out and make things happen, my ability to work harder, work longer, work faster, be more creative, think more deeply, read more, all of those things have given me an incredible edge that most people don’t have, because I’m willing to work harder, I’m willing to do more. If it means me putting in twenty-four hour days to get what it is that I want, I will do that. I’m committed to the outcome, I’m not committed to what’s going on now.

The focus is to get through today so that we can get to tomorrow. Hustle is one of the missing ingredients in many entrepreneurs. They’re unwilling to do the hard work, particularly in internet marketing today, and particularly in a lot of internet based businesses.

People hear all these stories of people who make money in their underwear or they make money while they’re cruising around the world on their yacht or whatever. Most of those stories are either a) untrue or b) they don’t tell the true story of how many people spent days weeks, months, years toiling away to make that overnight success happen.

When my book sold out in eight hours, people said, oh my, you’re like an overnight success. I said, yes, it only took me twenty years to be an overnight success. It took me twenty years of doing the right things and focusing again and again.

That said, the things that for me have been the real turning points in my career personally, once I started making high level joint ventures with people, other people who had solid followings who could endorse me and who would endorse me.

They are people like Chris Howard, Harv Ecker, Mark Victor Hansen, Tony Robbins, all these kind of people who I’ve been able to work with. That whole process took my business to a new level. Now I was interacting with massive audiences and much more credible people who were endorsing me.

But I didn’t start with those people. They weren’t my first JVs. My first joint ventures were with people who were not necessarily the best known people. Some of the first people I joint ventured with only had two hundred people on their list but the two hundred people on their list were dedicated to them. They were their close friends, they were their close business associates, they were people who had great trust. They learned to make money as an affiliate and I got the benefit of connecting with an audience who came to me already with deep trust. Developing powerful joint ventures were very important to me.

Moving away from the idea that I had to do everything internally and allowing stuff to go outside of my business and the employees that I had in my business made a big difference. At one point I had nine employees working in my business who were doing all kinds of things. I did the math one day and I said I think I can outsource this for less money. So I kept a small staff, my assistant and my brother who does all my video editing and that kind of thing. That became my staff. I made them work harder frankly, but I paid them well for it.

They had to do a few more things sure, but the result was, I was able to outsource many of the things that these other people had been doing. Now I was paying an unweighted, and by unweighted I mean I wasn’t paying employment taxes, I’m not paying medical insurance, I’m not paying all these things for people. I was able to then recover all that money and put it right back to the bottom line and my profitability went up directly and frankly my stress level went way down because I didn’t have all these people to attend to on a daily basis.

Writing a book was another turning point for me. If you’re going to be the foremost expert in your market, at some point you need to write a book. I don’t care what your business is. People say, I’m in the fertilizer business. Great. You write a book about what fertilizer’s about, what are the new innovations, how are people using it, case studies, all those kind of things. I don’t care what you tell me, I’m going to tell you to write a book anyway because that puts you in front of a whole new audience.

Even if it does nothing more than expose you to trade shows and places like that where you can come and talk about your book, it gives you such a deep level of credibility that people still instantly and subconsciously respect that.

Those were big things that were turning points for me. The big things now that are turning points for me today are obviously embracing social media. I’m sure I was one of the first people to sign up on Twitter. I was on Twitter in very early 2007 or late 2006. I embrace technologies early now and I figure out how they’re going to work. So for me embracing social media early and learning what about it really worked was something that was very powerful for me and took my business to the next level. Anybody who’s thinking about growing their business or starting their business, they can look at that and say, ok, I better be embracing this.

What they should also be doing is reading my blog, for example, and seeing what I’m embracing next because I talk about all that stuff very openly about my successes and failures and how it works. The more I do that, the more transparent I show people, the more my sales grow, the more my following grows and the more people want to interact with me.

David Jenyns: There were quite a few key points that you mentioned there: allowing outsourcing to happen, the writing of the book, the social media, and with the joint ventures as well. You mentioned some names with Chris Howard and Harv Ecker and Robbins and so on. I’m just wondering, when you’re looking to the marketing world and online, are there any other people you see as being on the forefront, people you look to and keep an eye on?

Dave Lakhani: Yes, absolutely. Dr Rachna Jain at mindsharecorp.com. She’s a social psychologist, a PhD, very tied in and tuned in to media, a powerhouse of a person. Eben Pagan, is someone I pay very close attention to. Seth Godin is another person who I watch very closely. There are probably a dozen more who I find very compelling, very interesting who have very useful stuff.

Tim Ferriss is another person to watch closely. Tim Ferriss of the 4-Hour Work Week. He’s got a lot of great information, not necessarily about the 4-Hour Work Week but how he runs his business and why he runs it the way that he does. Those things I think are invaluable in studying. This is somebody who is incredibly successful. Chris Brogan for social media is also very good.

If you want to find out what’s going wrong in internet marketing, I encourage everybody to read the blog called saltydroid.info. This is a guy who is an attorney who systematically takes apart internet marketers and he is talking about why he is going after them so hard. It’s irreverent and sometimes he uses a lot of bad language but it’s a good look at what not to do and why not to do it.

David Jenyns: Great. I think you’re definitely someone people should keep an eye on. You’re specific, consistent and well planned. If people want to make sure they keep in contact with what you’re doing, what is the best way people can find you?

Dave Lakhani: The best way for people to find me is they can go to my main website which is boldapproach.com or follow me on Twitter. I’m at twitter.com/davelakhani. That’s the fastest way to do it and that’s the way that I’ll connect with you and we’ll begin a dialogue and a conversation.

Of course the next time I’m in Australia, do whatever you can, sell your children, whatever you have to do to get to the events that I’m at. I’d love to meet you in person. It would be wonderful. I was supposed to come to Australia in December and that didn’t work out. A couple of the events changed and I wasn’t able to make it. Next time I come, it will be my forty-second or forty-third trip to Australia. I’m beginning to figure it out there that maybe I have a second home someplace.

David Jenyns: I can’t thank you enough Dave. You’re very open, very straight down the line, very generous with your time. So thanks again and I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person.

Dave Lakhani: I’m looking forward to it as well and I look forward to engaging with everybody who is on your list. I think people are brilliant for spending time with you because you give out such great information and you do a wonderful job of interviewing people. You definitely get to the crux of the matter and you give them usable information. My kudos to you.

David Jenyns: Cool. Thanks.

Download Dave Lakhani Interview | Dave Lakhani Videos | Dave Lakhani Podcast | Dave Lakhani Review | Dave Lakhani MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Name: Endre Dobozy

Endre Dobozy

Industry: Trading, Off shore Investing

Website: Landau Securities

Endre Dobozy’s Bio: Endre Dobozy, an expert on finance, demographics and booms and busts. Endre will teach you that being caught up with consequences associated with the coming depression can be avoided if you learn about booms and busts and how they affect different investment opportunities around the world.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming soon…

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from meta-formula.com. I’m really excited today. I’ve lined up an interview for you with Endre Dobozy. If you’ve been following along on my blog, you’ve heard me mention him before. He’s the guy that I keep an eye on to get an idea what’s happening in the underlying conditions of the market, what’s really driving the economy because hopefully that will flow on through to the stock market and trading and influence the way that we invest.

Endre has owned his own investment and brokerage firm for over nine years now. He’s written a book, he’s done keynote presentations all around the world, he runs his own global investing workshops. He’s part of the Harry S. Dent advisory network. Suffice to say, Endre knows his material. I thought what better time, while I’m here in Vanuatu to take the opportunity to have a chat with him. We’re on the verge of 2010 and having a look back on what’s happened and trying to see where we’re heading in 2010 and hopefully to help us make smarter, more advised investment decisions. So Endre thanks for your time, it’s much appreciated.

Endre Dobozy: It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Jenyns: I suppose to kick straight off, I want to get a little bit of a feel for what’s coming down the pipe in 2010. I know we’ve just seen the markets rally hugely off their lows, the Dow’s up 60%. I know reading your newsletter, you see this as just a little bit of a bounce back from the stimulus and you’re not one hundred percent convinced that we’ve been saved from recession or worse, depression. What are your thought on that?

Endre Dobozy: I basically think that all we’ve been able to do so far, is to delay the inevitable. You cannot dig yourself out of a hole. If I go to my gardener and say now here’s a shovel, go into my yard and dig and keep digging until you dig yourself out of a hole, he can’t do it. You can’t dig yourself out of a hole any more than you can borrow yourself out of debt. You can’t throw more debt at debt and expect bit to fix the problem. So the underlying disease is still there. All we’ve done is addressed the symptoms to make people feel better temporarily.

David Jenyns: Those underlying conditions, obviously it was all triggered by the sub prime and people being over extended. What are the main conditions that are causing the economy to be very sick?

Endre Dobozy: Ok, basically there is too much credit being extended. That’s the first thing. If you look at the US, something like $17 trillion, which is way more than their GDP is just financial debt. It’s just massive. They basically gave loans to everybody and anybody. Your qualification was, if you had a pulse, they’d give you a loan. And that was for homes and everything else. So now people have to pay that back and they can’t.

David Jenyns: We’re seeing a lot of people and again I’ve read some of the figures in your newsletter, of mortgages that are defaulting, especially in the States and it feels like the brunt of what’s happened because that’s where it all started. Do you see that trend continuing?

Endre Dobozy: Deutsche Bank released a really interesting report, where they figured that about 42 to 48% of homes would be underwater by 2012. That means that basically half of the mortgages in the US would owe more than the value of the properties are worth. When that happens, people don’t necessarily want to pay it back. We’re already seeing what’s called strategic defaults, where people who can pay the money back are saying, I’ve got a mortgage for $400,000 but it’s only worth $200,000 now, so why should I pay the mortgage? Instead they’re opting to get out and go somewhere else.

I saw a figure yesterday where they say one in ten mortgages aren’t being paid at the moment.

David Jenyns: That’s huge. That’s in the States?

Endre Dobozy: In the States. On top of that, if you keep with the States, something like seven million homes are in default at the moment and they expect that to increase by about 300,000 a month. Now it’s all default stock. You can’t stabilize the housing sector and if you can’t stabilize housing, it makes it really hard to have a sustained balance in your economy. A lot of small businesses tend to borrow against their assets to keep themselves afloat. When nobody knows what the value of your assets are or what they’re going to be, it makes it very difficult.

David Jenyns: None of this has really changed. From once the stimulus package has come in, all of these fundamentals have remained the same and yet the market has rallied heaps. There’s very much a huge disconnect on what the underlying is and what the market’s doing. What’s really causing that?

Endre Dobozy: You’ve got these massive amounts of stimulus which had to flow into the economies and that had to make a difference. On top of that, you’ve had businesses cost cutting, getting rid of staff, downsizing or even cutting costs, cutting wages and then selling assets they didn’t need, also cutting their inventories. All of those things have impacted on the bottom line, making things look better. But none of that means anything. When you think over this decade, or the last decade, there has actually been a net job loss of something like 300,000, which means there were 300,000 more jobs lost over the last decade than were created.

What happens to those people? If they don’t have money, they can’t consume. In somewhere like the US where 70% of GDP is consumer spending, that impacts negatively on consumer spending.

David Jenyns: How is that relative to how it’s been? Is that just a very small percentage? We talk about a lot of people losing jobs but how is that relative to how many people usually lose jobs? It just doesn’t feel like it’s flowed on, especially back in Australia.

Endre Dobozy: I know, Australia has missed it totally.

David Jenyns: I’ve chatted to numerous people and I think I can count one or two people who have said that they’ve experienced any change in their lifestyle or job loss or anything. Perhaps we can talk about that in more detail in a bit, but I’m just wondering, are those effects being felt in the States and how much worse do you think it’s likely to get?

Endre Dobozy: Case-Shiller who do the Case- Shiller Index for housing said that if housing went down another 15% in the US, it would put them right back to where they were in 2007 as far as the problems. Fifteen percent seems like a lot, but the more houses that go into foreclosure, the lower prices get. Let’s face it, if I want to sell my house and the guy next door is in foreclosure, I’ve got to drop my price to that or below if I want to have a hope of selling.

David Jenyns: Yes, because he’s a motivated seller.

Endre Dobozy: Exactly.

David Jenyns: And it drives things down. So the flow on effect, these still underlying conditions have remained and what’s to stop the US and other economies just continuing to stimulate, stimulate, stimulate? I know you said you can’t dig yourself out of a hole, but we’re in a situation now where we’ve rallied back so much. Who would have thought that we’d make it this far?

Endre Dobozy: I actually did anticipate that we’d be around 11,000. I think that was last year’s newsletter for Christmas when I gave a wrap up, I figured we’d be around there. So that hasn’t changed because we knew there had to be a balance. When you put all this money into the system, or I think Harry Dent said when you actually put the Viagra in, you expect some sort of result. This is what’s happened. Could you imagine if it hadn’t happened, how bad it would be right now? So we’re in a very unique position right now.

David Jenyns: People were stepping around the word depression, and how likely that is to happen. What are your thoughts on that? What is a depression, what actually signifies a depression and is that something that you still see as a possibility?

Endre Dobozy: Oh, yes, it’s definitely a possibility and I hate to say that because people think if you say depression you’re one of those loonies who should be walking around the street with a sandwich board, saying the world is coming to an end, hide your children and bury your gold. But a depression is just a natural cycle. We have to get rid of the excess debt that has been built up in the system. Either we pay back, and those that can pay back debt pay it back, those who can’t, don’t. Then what happens to that?

I saw an interesting article yesterday, it was on Bloomberg, where they were talking about modifying mortgages in the US where people owe more than the mortgage is worth and modifying it back to the principal, basically modifying it back to the value now. They either defer the difference or forget it.
David Jenyns: Who takes that hit?

Endre Dobozy: Isn’t it great we’ve got taxpayers?

David Jenyns: So it just gets passed on down. So your thoughts are then…

Endre Dobozy: Basically I see that this year is going to be an interesting one. I look at demographics, I look at cycles and I look at a lot of other things as well. From a cyclical perspective, 2010 has the deccenial cycle, a really reliable ten year cycle pointing down, the four year cycle points down, the twenty-nine to thirty year commodity cycle starts to peak and then starts to point down. I think the real estate cycle still starts to point down and the generational cycle and 8.6 year Princeton economic cycle. All of these things point down in 2010.

So you’ve got to expect in an economy as weak as this one, despite what the markets may portray, things are going to get a bit messy. I don’t expect the US to be able to start making more jobs. If you can’t create more jobs, what do you do? I think the unemployment rate in the US is 10%, revised down from 10.2. I still expect it could get as high as 15-17%. Then if you look at discouraged workers, those people who are no longer looking for a job, they’re not classed as unemployed. So if you’re not looking for a job, you’re not unemployed.

If you’ve got a part time job, even though you were earning $100,000 before and you’re getting $10,000 now, you’re not unemployed, so we can’t count you. There’s a guy called John Williams at Shadowstats and he shows that what the unemployment rate should actually be if you backed all that material out, and he’s showing 22-23%.

David Jenyns: That’s significant.

Endre Dobozy: That’s a huge difference from the 10% that the US government is showing. I’m not saying either one is right or wrong. It’s just saying that those people who haven’t got jobs, can’t pay their bills.

David Jenyns: The flow on effect? Obviously this is all very much talking about the US.

Endre Dobozy: Well, they’re the world’s largest consumer. What do you do if you lose your best customer, it takes a while to get a transition across to compensate for that. Then we say, but China is the economic saviour. It’s not. I think in the US $40,000 is the per capita income, about $40-$46,000, whereas in China it is about $6,000.

You drill that down even further and you end up with something like out of 1.3 billion people in China I think 600 million of them earn less than $US1000 a year. Then I think it goes up from there. I think it’s about 400 million that earn between $US1000-$US2000 a year. There are only something like 60 million who earn around $US20,000 or better a year which is the middle class. For a population of 1.3 billion in china, you’ve only got something like three times the population of Australia as a middle class.

David Jenyns: They are obviously still very much export driven. But surely they can see the writing on the wall as well. Is it something that they’re changing as far as you know with your research?

Endre Dobozy: Last year thirty-three percent of GDP was based on exports for China. They still exported a fair bit to the US and other places like that. It is changing, but it changes very slowly because when all your factories are geared up to make material for Americans and other people who no longer have the money to buy those goods. Now I’m being rather extreme here. It’s not that bad but people are watching what they spend.

David Jenyns: Yes, yes. I think it will be interesting to see once, I’ve haven’t had a look, all of the figures when they come out for Christmas.

Endre Dobozy: Yes, I think they’ll come out later this week or early next week.

David Jenyns: Yes, it will be interesting to see how that pans out. As far as other areas, and we touched on it briefly, Australia. I don’t know if the Kevin Rudd government is being seen as some sort of saviour or something. It feels like we’ve completely missed any recession in the slightest. I think spending still seems like it’s up, people seem confident. I haven’t really heard of foreclosures or anything. In fact property in Australia is going through the roof.

Endre Dobozy: I know, I think the average price in Australia is $460,000 compared to I think $US 160,000, $US170,000 in the US. When I looked at the bubbles forming in property, that was interesting. I looked at Japan first and said, hang on, Japan’s bubble is interesting. I think commercial property dropped about 83% of value and residential by about 60% of value. Even the Nikkei, whose anniversary was I think was the 28th or the 29th December, their twenty year anniversary, they’re still down something like 66-70% from where they were twenty years ago. When you talk bubbles, you think, wow that’s huge, but then I looked at the US housing bubble and they were bigger in magnitude than the Japanese.

Then I looked and I found that the Aussie property bubble, if you want to call it that or whatever, but the increase in property value was even higher by magnitude in Australia than it was anywhere else.

David Jenyns: I always find it interesting, because people talk, especially the property side of things, they’re saying in Australia we’ve got a lot of immigration and that’s what’s helping push property prices up, a lot of people coming in, obviously increasing demand. I’ve heard you comment as well that idea that over in Japan clearly there has got to be a large demand because you’ve got such a huge population. Not a large demand, but the argument that it is dependent on the number of people to how much property is available. What are your thoughts on that?

Endre Dobozy: It all comes down to demographics first. As they say, demographics is destiny. As people age, they spend less. They get rid of their bigger homes. When you’ve got kids, kids cost a fortune to raise. I love my daughter but she’s not cheap. Kids cost a fortune, they produce nothing. You’ve just got to keep giving this money out and getting nothing in return from a financial aspect. You get the love and everything obviously.

As people age, it starts to change. As my daughter grows up, she leaves home. Then lights start getting turned off and the power bill goes down and the food consumption goes down and everything else goes down. As I age more, I start putting away money for retirement and getting rid of unnecessary debt. This is what happened in Japan basically. They aged and the demographic trends turned down. That’s what’s happened in the US, Europe and Canada at the moment.

After Word War 2 people came home and they were happy to see each other and they made babies. So you’ve got the baby boom generation which is bigger than any other generation that lived in history. They’re moving through that now, the kids have left home, some have come back because of problems, but the majority of them have left home. They’re past their peak spending years as far as spending on discretionary goods and they’re starting to put money aside for their retirement.

As they do that, they start to sell down their bigger homes which is a really bad thing to be doing right now, well, right now it is a really bad, bad area because properties are going down. There is less demand for those bigger homes because the next generation coming through is smaller. This is what happened in Japan. Even though there is demand for property, the demand is less, so it’s not enough to raise the value of property up.

David Jenyns: So your feeling is, it all comes back to the idea of those underlying demographics. Obviously the baby boom was so large and they’re coming to the tail end. Looking at the demographics then, how far out are we before we start to see things pick up? Demographics is one of those things, it’s slow.

Endre Dobozy: Yes it is. You’ve got two fundamental trends at the moment. You’ve got demographic slowing, which is a slow, lumbering sort of process but you’ve also got the deleveraging, where people are going hey, we’ve got too much debt, we’ve got to get rid of it. So both things are happening at the moment.

At the moment demographics is taking a back seat to deleveraging. I’ll get back to demographics in a second. This is what’s happening now is a trillion dollars worth of credit card debt paid back last year alone, just in places like the US. Eleven trillion dollars worth of cash in banks where people don’t want to borrow because one, I don’t know if I’ll have a job tomorrow, or two, I don’t need the money and three, the ones that can qualify for it don’t want to take the money right now.

David Jenyns: Is that what’s pushing up the US dollar because that’s another thing I look at, especially the Aussie dollar to US dollar, the rally has been unbelievable. Is that strength driven by that? Where do you see the strength driven in the US dollar at the moment?

Endre Dobozy: It’s quite funny when you look at the headlines a couple of months ago: Retire the US Dollar, Find a New Reserve Currency, The US is Dead. Then you see this bounce which we said would happen because as deleveraging happens, especially in places like the US and anywhere else where the debt is nominated in US dollars, you have to have US dollars to pay off debt. How do you get US dollars? You have to sell goods to get dollars to pay back. Every time you pay back debt, you actually retire or destroy the debt and that makes fewer dollars floating around. The fewer dollars are floating around, the more valuable the remaining dollars become.

David Jenyns: So how about the idea of happening over the next year, more houses defaulting, people getting worse, they’re going to be wanting to recall more of the assets til they’ve got money. What’s going to be the effect on the US dollar?

Endre Dobozy: It going to push the US dollar up. We’ve expecting the US dollar to rally for at least the next couple of years. It’s actually starting an upward cycle, it could potentially go over the next fifteen years. At least the next two years, maybe I’d say five, you’d have a good strengthening US dollar. Maybe the euro has potentially seen its high and it won’t get as high again for the next ten, fifteen years, if not more. I think commodity dollars like the Aussie, the New Zealand and the Canadian dollar are going to get hurt as the cycles turn down, as the commodity cycle turns down and things like that.

David Jenyns: I suppose especially as well if that consumer demand does dry up then obviously there’s not going to be as much call on resources and the flow on effect.

Endre Dobozy: Obviously the depression or the slow down is a natural progression. Last time I think I saw it described as winter. If you’re looking at it from a seasonal perspective, this is like winter. Things slow down, things freeze up and things get bad for winter but afterwards, you end up with spring. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it, it’s not the crumbling of the economic markets, it’s not the end of the US or capitalism or anything. It’s just something we have to go through to get to the next stage where things have to deleverage, assets have to come down in value to make it more affordable for the next generation coming along.

David Jenyns: One other thing as well that comes to mind, we were talking about currency and things like that with the instability of the economy, a lot of people do resort to gold and gold and other things have been rallying. At the moment, all boats float on a rising tide and I think anything at the moment has been going up but gold has been doing particularly well.

Endre Dobozy: Especially when you can get US dollars, borrow them for next to nothing. If I can get money for next to nothing, I’ve got to put it somewhere. So you actually have this disliquidity moving through the system and they’re saying, where can we put it? Everywhere they’re putting it, is pushing up the price. Also when people were worried about the US dollar potentially crumbling and being the end of the US, which was rather silly when you come to think about it, but then people thinking about that, obviously is the choice, it’s a hedge.

Gold is great, survivalists can bury it in their backyard, it’s fine, you can hide it in your toilet because people like to hide it in their cisterns and other places like that. Gold is gold, you can’t manipulate its price as far as you can’t leverage it. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Whereas with the banking system and the fiat system, I can give the bank $100 and they can lend that out to $1000, ten times.

David Jenyns: What’s going to be the effect then with all of this deleveraging as well? Obviously if there are fewer dollars floating around…

Endre Dobozy: You come back to that original $100 instead of that $1000. That’s why people have to find money to pay back that debt which takes more money out of the system.

David Jenyns: Which should be good for the system.

Endre Dobozy: It is, ultimately it’s good for the system. In the short tem there is some pain. All the politicians have managed to do so far with the stimulus packages and everything else is delay that. The US said, for every dollar of stimulus we spend, it will be $1.4 or $1.8 in the economy. It actually turned out now we’ve got the figures, it ended up 80c to the $1 by the time it passes through all these politicians’ hands and does everything else. Governments are the most inefficient users of capital ever. You give it to the private sector, we go out and we make things with it. They don’t. I’m not anti government, it’s just the way it works.

David Jenyns: I know some of the things we’ve talked about, I know you don’t like to call yourself a bear. As far as your stance on where we’re moving, it sounds pretty bearish.

Endre Dobozy: Ok, I am a market agnostic, I’m neither bear nor bull, but I will go where the money is and if right now the money is on the short side and I think that the markets are going to come down substantially over the next six months, year or two, then I’m going to be on that side. That doesn’t make me a bear, that just makes me a capitalist because I want the money.

Afterwards, when people have gone through this, then basically I will turn bullish again and I’ll say, ok, now it’s time to bet the farm on the emerging markets and everything else. Right now, for me, I think we’re due for a correction. This market has gone way up and yet it could go to 11.2, 11.3. I don’t think see it going past 11.8 because that is a really strong resistance level on the Dow. But for the time being I am bearish.

This is weird. If I say to someone I can make you 70% a year, oh, wow, you can walk on water. But if I say to you, hey, if you do this you’ll save 70%, because I think the market is going to drop and I’m just using this as an arbitrary figure, then people think I’m crazy. You guys don’t want to hear bad news. Even if you can make a great deal of money in it, you don’t want to hear it.

David Jenyns: Where are the opportunities then? Are we talking about, when you say save money, I don’t think, and I’m sure you agree, taking your money and then hiding it in your cistern or under your bed is also not a solution.

Endre Dobozy: No.

David Jenyns: So in 2010, where do you see the opportunities?

Endre Dobozy: Ok. Well firstly, I’m on the deflation side of things, not inflation. I don’t think all this government money is going to create inflation. If you create inflation by creating heaps of money, Japan would be in inflation right now, but they’ve had two lost decades and they’re in deflation.

The problem is you can be right about this and say the markets are going to hell in a hand basket, but I think the result of that is going to be inflation. Even though you’ve got the market direction right, you’ll be wrong because you’ll lose money because you’ve been in the wrong asset classes. In an inflationary environment, commodities do well, stocks do well, everything else does well, cash is a poor investment and bonds are generally a poor investment because the rates are so low but in a deflationary environment every assert class goes down.

Commodities lose value, houses lose value, stocks lose value. The only thing that retains its value is cash and that’s because the cash can buy more of the deflated investments. So the guys going into gold right now who are thinking it’s going to go to $5000 an ounce are probably going to be pretty severely disappointed. If you did convert everything from US dollars six months ago into gold, well, it had a rally and it’s done quite nicely, but I believe gold is going to start heading down. Our target’s probably $650, $680 for gold which I know isn’t impossible.

You know when I get my grandfather ringing me up and telling me he wants to invest in gold and when I see Harrods of London selling gold over the counter and when I see central banks buying gold, central banks are really bad investors at the best of times. When I see them doing that I think, hang on a second guys, gold’s got to go down.

David Jenyns: Yes, sometimes going for the completely contrarian type of investing works well.

Endre Dobozy: If 95% of people are broke by the time they reach retirement, shouldn’t I do what the other 5% do?

David Jenyns: Yes, the opposite. So as far as opportunities, you just went back to the idea of cash is something that retains its value. I see that, with my background, as effectively doing nothing, like sitting on the sidelines.

Endre Dobozy: That’s because you’ve grown up in an inflationary environment where inflation arose to the value of cash. But we’re going to a deflationary environment, potentially. We’re going into a deflationary environment where cash is going to be worth more. First there’s nothing wrong with whatever you’re in, as long as you’ve got an escape plan. As long as you’ve got stops in place, it doesn’t matter. The market can keep rallying so you can be long for a bit longer potentially.

For me I want things that generate a cash stream, a revenue. Businesses will do me good if they’re good businesses. It’s all about having a revenue stream, generating revenue. For an investor, I like the short side. I love the ETFs, because I’m lazy, I don’t want to work out which options contract I need or what series I should look at or futures and that is just me personally. I like the ETF because I can do the one to ones or I can do the leverage double, the one to two or the triple leverage and things like that. I like them because I can go the short side and be on the short side and then make money as the market falls.

That’s not saying I’d rush out now and do it because I think in my last newsletter I showed that back to about the 1800s, 97% of all market movements can be attributed to the trend. So I’m not going to jump in front of a bus right now and, say, hang on, I’m going to go against the trend, that would be so stupid.

But what I do see, and this is what I say in my newsletter and what I start to do now is put in signposts and say, if the Dow closes below x, then this could happen. It’s ok, the trend is up now, but if it closes below this amount then maybe you need to look at things differently. So we’re looking at warning signs and then confirmation at this level and then we go short.

I showed in my last newsletter, I was crystal balling saying ok, $10,000 invested in this triple leverage ETF when the market turns down, could be worth this. Then after that point we can get another turning point and then we go along again and the potential over a five to seven year thing being extreme could be turning $10,000 into $200,000.

David Jenyns: I think that is one thing I do like about your methodology as far as especially understanding there’s a disconnect between what the economy is doing and what the market is doing. The idea of, well here are the facts, let’s look at the facts, try and get an idea as to the general feel of the economy. That will ultimately flow through but then more of a reactionary.

There is no point in trying to pick the top or the bottom. Wait for that turn, make sure you’ve got your appropriate stocks, you’re trading with the trend. The way that you see it, your underlying feeling is in 2010, the trend in a lot of asset classes is going to be down but there are always going to be opportunities.

Endre Dobozy: That’s just it. I’m not saying hide your cash or bury it in the backyard. I’m not saying anything like that. There are going to be a heap of opportunities. The thing is that at the moment, we’re in a bear market rally. It’s still a bear market as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to keep thinking that until I see something that changes my mind and I haven’t seen that at the moment. So I’m going to keep looking for opportunities and there are going to be a lot of opportunities.

If it is a bear market now and we have these huge corrections, they happen much faster. So we can make money a lot quicker than we can in a bull market, sitting on our hands waiting for something to happen. I think the ratio is markets fall seven times faster than they rise. That’s great; not so good if you’re long.

David Jenyns: If you’re on the right side of the market.

Endre Dobozy: Yes.

David Jenyns: That’s one area, people definitely go wrong with their investing, they’re only betting on the long side. You talked about some other mistakes people make, the idea of not having appropriate stops in place and that sort of thing. Having worked with hundreds of clients, what are some of the big mistakes you’re seeing people make when they’re investing?

Endre Dobozy: One, they get too attached to a position. They say, oh, I love Russia. I like Russia too. We’ve done very well out of Russia over the last few years, last year excluded and the year before that. Up until then we did very well. Seriously I had some clients who went into an extremely speculative Russia fund. They went in with $100,000 and over a five year period they were able to turn that to $1.5 million. They did very, very well.

Right now they come to me and say they want to go into Russia and I say no. That’s just me at the moment. Commodities are turning down, other things. Falling in love with a position is a very bad thing. It’s all about the money, it’s no emotion and it’s hard to be that way.

Other people say you should never put your stops in the market because then other people know. That’s good if you’ve got willpower, but for me if I don’t have my stop in and I’ve just got a mental stop saying I’ve got in at $100, when it gets to $84 I’m going to sell. If I didn’t have my stop in and it didn’t happen automatically, I’d find a reason why I shouldn’t sell. That’s me and I’ve been doing this for years. So I personally like to see people with stops in the market. That’s another thing, they don’t always raise them up afterwards.

Buy and hold, which I refer to as buy and hope, is basically dead for the next twenty, maybe thirty years. Again I come back to demographics for the reason for that, looking back at the Dow over the last decade was the worst since the 1820s. It’s only the worst since the 1820s because that’s when accurate record keeping began. Records were kept before then but they may not have been as accurate.

I’ve got Jeremy Siegel’s book Stocks for the Long Run and that’s the bible of the buy and hold strategy. I’ve got it here and I refer to it on occasion. But the market we’re in at the moment, you can’t just put it in and hope for the best. Anybody who enters the Dow or any indices or the markets right now expecting it to do a repeat of last year is going to be severely disappointed.

David Jenyns: You touched on some really good points on where people go wrong. Having quite an extensive history and having done a lot of reading to get to where you are now, looking back over your career, were there any key points, leverage points where you can look back and say, once I started to do this, that’s when I really started to see an increase or an improvement in the way that your personal investing is going?

Endre Dobozy: The first thing was the demographics. I’m grateful to learning about Harry S. Dent. He doesn’t always get it right but who does? If you want to be always right then don’t say anything, otherwise, you’re going to be wrong on occasion. His demographics, showing you can predict long term market movements and what the economy is going to do way into the future by understanding demographics.

That’s why you can say, ok, China, people think is great but I say, hang on, China is going to be more like Japan. They’ve got a one child policy, they’ve basically got rid of most of their girls because they boys were going to support them in their old age. So now they have an imbalance of 32 million more men than women in the marrying age coming in the next five to ten years. Sixty Minutes actually put it at about 40 million more men than women. So you’ve got this imbalance. That means that there’s going to be civil unrest. On top of that, they’re aging, so China is maybe not the place to be long term. China is not going to be the economic super power to take over the mantle from the US.

David Jenyns: Which everybody is hoping.

Endre Dobozy: No, if I was going to look at anyone, I’d look at India for that because India has 70% of their population under age thirty-five. The difference also, and I make this point quite often is, the Chinese imitate, the Indians innovate. It’s not a racial thing, it’s just a fact. The Chinese can take something that exists, make it better and make it cheaper. The Indians can look at it, make it better and take another step or two above that.

David Jenyns: Yes, already we’re seeing, I’ve read some of the statistics again in one of your very early newsletters and you were talking about the way that telecommunications are exploding and all the different industries and everything that are going to come out of India. That being one of the emerging economies, is that something you’re still looking to invest into? Are you bearish or on the global front do you see it not as rosy?

Endre Dobozy: The last time round when the markets tanked and the US went down, Australia went down and everyone went down, the emerging markets lost more because there is panic, there is a flight to safety. You saw the US dollar rally and things like that. If I’m right about seeing a fairly substantial correction, I don’t really want to call it a crash, but it’s not going to be pretty for people who aren’t expecting it. I think it’s better to be out of those markets or have very tight stops and then once we’re through this, then we can go back in there.

One of the Russian funds we deal with did 107% last year. I actually in my newsletter the November before said, look, this is my case for Russia, I like Russia for these reasons, so I gave the guys the head up on that. China did well this year, India did well. You see what happened. We’ve had a dress rehearsal. So when the markets tank, what’s going to come roaring back?

David Jenyns: Yes, the emerging economies.

Endre Dobozy: But they’re just going to be hurt more on the downside before they come back. The other interesting thing was to note the strong correlation between the falls in the Aussie markets and the US, it’s almost to the percent.

David Jenyns: Yes, I’m interested to see what happens in Australia, for obvious reasons being there. It feels like we’ve avoided it thus far.

You mentioned Harry S. Dent as someone you keep an eye on. You’ve read a lot of research. What are some other areas that you’re drawing on to help form your conclusions?

Endre Dobozy: First of all I basically spend about six hours a day on research. I read one new book a week at least, plus obviously the Harry S. Dent’s for their work. I like Bob Prechter’s Elliott Wave material. Not as much as saying, this is what’s going to happen but it’s just an interesting point of view. He’s very good to look at for the deflation camp. I like Gary Shilling, I think he’s a good economist to follow. Steve Keen in Australia. I think he’s great as well because he understands deflation. Lots and lots of different places, there’s a heap of people.

For a trading perspective I still like Livermore. I like Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. I like that. I love W.D. Gann material. Even now I refer back to the old Gann books of 1929, 1930. Basically they’re saying, to quote Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes. So to understand what’s happening, what happened before will happen again, in a slightly different way, but the underlying factor is people are still people and we still react the same way.

David Jenyns: I think you’re definitely someone people should keep an eye. If they want to find out more about you, I’ll make sure I post a link at the bottom of the video, davidjenyns.com/global, because Endre is all about global investing. If you want to find out more, you can click through the link and find out how to get a free month newsletter of his Underground Investment Secrets which is something I’m a subscriber to and recommend that you do the same.

Endre, I’d just like to thank you for your time, it’s much appreciated.

Endre Dobozy: My pleasure.

David Jenyns: We’ll see what happens in 2010.

Endre Dobozy: It will be a fun year.

Download Endre Dobozy Interview | Endre Dobozy Videos | Endre Dobozy Podcast | Endre Dobozy Review | Endre Dobozy MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Marty Rozmanith

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Marty Rozmanith

Industry: Internet Marketing, Blog Publishing

Website:

Product: WordPress Direct

Marty Rozmanith‘s Bio: He’s worked with some of the hottest names in Internet marketing including Frank Kern and Ed Dale. His WordPress Direct service played an integral role in the thirty day challenge in 2008, with 57% of people using WordPressDirect getting ranked on the first page of Google’s search listings for their chosen terms. He’s also a CPA expert launching CPA Ninja to stunning success.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from the SEO method and we’re really excited today because we’ve got Marty Rozmanith on the line. For those of you who don’t know, he’s the guy behind WordPress Direct, which we know is an important part in the SEO method. For me, it felt like Marty was an overnight success. He came out of the gate and propelled himself forward with the WordPress Direct and aligned himself with Ed Dale and the 30-Day Challenge. He has worked with a number of other big name internet marketers. He presented on stage at the Mass Control 2.0 event. He came out with products afterwards, including most notably the CPA Ninja.

He really knows his stuff with marketing online, CPA stuff, driving traffic and I suppose that is all that the SEO method is about, driving traffic. I’d just like to welcome you to the line Marty Rozmanith.

Marty Rozmanith: Thanks Dave, and I will see if I can live up to all that.

David Jenyns: I’m sure you will. I’ll dive straight into it. Usually, one of the first questions I want to find out about is, when you’re setting up a new site, be it a WordPress Direct site or any site for that matter, I’m very keen to find out the process you go through, because I know SEO is a part of your traffic strategy, what steps you go through to try and drive traffic to a new website.

Marty Rozmanith: I guess the question is, what am I using the site for? If I’m using a site, for instance, to test a market, then my traffic source is likely going to be something purchased, whether that is pay per click or banner traffic or some other source. My goal then is to get that paid traffic as cheap as possible. In that case, my method for driving traffic is a WordPress Direct blog so that I get good quality, and I don’t over pay for the traffic, especially if it’s coming from Google where that is a big factor.

If on the other hand what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to build a ring of traffic blogs for, say organic SEO over time, then it’s quite a different process, and one I understand you have quite a lot of structure and experience with yourself.

David Jenyns: Yes. With the actual process you go through for, say, the pay per click stuff, I suppose it all starts with the keyword research. What process are you going through to try and identify what keywords you want to try and start targeting?

Marty Rozmanith: It’s almost the whole base topic, keyword research. The main thing first is trying to figure out what umbrella phrase you’re going after and whether your strategy is a long tail one or whether you’re just going to dive straight in with a budget and try and outbid people. In general, it’s always best to think laterally and go after traffic that might not be obvious to people bidding in the market.

I’ll use various tools, whether it be Market Samurai or WordTracker, to try and figure out lateral angles to come up with phrases that might not be obvious. The classic example that is always used is selling dating services on sites for computer programmers. The keywords don’t have anything to do with the offer, but psychologically you can see the relationship between the two. Luckily I don’t do that, but that is the obvious example of lateral thinking.

That is generally what I will try and do. I will try and think laterally and come up with a set of umbrella phrases that aren’t necessarily in the market I’m targeting, but are adjacent to the markets that I can then come up with some good long tail phrases to either buy or put blogs up on.

David Jenyns: Is the reason for trying to target those keywords, because you mentioned one of the first steps was getting traffic as cheaply as possible. Is the reason you’re going for those lateral keywords to try and get the traffic cheaply or break someone’s pattern because they’re not used to seeing that type of ad displayed on, if it is a programming website?

Marty Rozmanith: Right, I think it is a couple of things. If you’re constantly being displayed along with ads in a market that all say the same thing, you’re blending in. If you’re different than the ads that are being displayed, you’re going to pop out. That’s one reason for going lateral.

I think the other reason is, if what you’re doing is putting up a site that is going to act as a landing page that you’re driving paid traffic to, and the site is going to be out there and you’re going to be providing it some care and feeding over time in addition to driving paid traffic. Eventually if you have any long tail material on that site, it’s going to start naturally rank for those terms.

Part of trying to think laterally is to find as many good longer tail phrases. Effectively what you’re doing when you’re putting up blogs for organic ranking is, you’re putting out a fishing net so that you’re going to catch people who are searching on terms. The bigger the fishing net, the more people you’re going to catch. The longer the fishing net’s out there, the more people it will catch over time because as you build up more content and more keywords in your fishing net, the more pages you’re going to rank in Google and the more chances are you’re going to be coming up in searches.

It’s just a function of combining the two strategies of buying traffic but also making the sites that you’re pushing that paid traffic to quality enough that they’ll rank organically for certainly the long tail phrases and over time, some of the more competitive phrases.

David Jenyns: Because you said you start off on, obviously it depends on your outcome and what it is you’re trying to achieve, but sometimes you start with that pay per click and that banner traffic to try and get that initial traffic through, does that help you identify what you’re going to do for your SEO campaign as well?:

Marty Rozmanith: Well, yes, absolutely. If you’re tracking offers, and you are seeing in your stats what keywords are converting, that gives you a good idea, especially if you’ve got a lot of lateral keywords in there, what angles to go after and flush out with more targeted keywords. So that will definitely influence. You can definitely use paid traffic to figure out what keywords convert best to figure how to then SEO optimize whatever blogs you have targeted across lateral phrases. That’s a really valid strategy.

David Jenyns: When you’re personally doing it, let’s say, I almost feel if we grab an example and run with it, because it really does depend on what it is you’re trying to do and the outcome, be it CPA offer or a product. We can use CPA Ninja as an example.

You’re coming out with CPA Ninja and you’ve got a new physical course that you want to launch. Putting aside any JVs and that sort of thing, how would you go through the process of promoting that physical product that you want to sell online, including whether it’s pay per click or search, or just step me through the process.

Marty Rozmanith: That’s a tough example because CPA Ninja was almost entirely a Joint Venture driven launch. If I was going to bring a product to market, and I was going to use an advertising traffic driven strategy, I don’t get into a lot of this because I don’t put products out on CPA networks. I mostly promote products coming from CPA networks.

There are plenty of people who, for instance Matt, the person who did that CPA Ninja course, who does publish on CPA networks and in that case you have a completely different strategy; then it’s all about understanding your conversion metrics so that you can get approved by a network and have advertisers drive lots and lots of traffic to your offer.

The funny thing is, all of the same steps that you do for trying to promote somebody else’s offer apply, because what you have to do is, you have to come up with your own offer, test it, figure out what all the metrics are so that you can eventually tell the network what the EPC is going to be and then, of course, by publishing out on the network, you’re going to allow for lots of traffic, by just buying leads through a CPA network.

If I was going to pay for a launch, that would be what I would do.

David Jenyns: I know the CPA networks are one of these things, especially with all the new terminology and things like that, some people think, that’s probably not where they want to start. I know especially the way you pitch the WordPress Direct and through the Thirty Day Challenge, it’s really taking a product, be it your own or an affiliate product, and then building a blog around that, building some traffic to it and trying to sell the offer from those blogs. Perhaps that might even be a good example.

Do you follow the Thirty Day Challenge process for promoting a blog? How do you go through promoting a feeder site or a WordPress Direct type site to help push some other offers that you’ve got.

Marty Rozmanith: Yes, I absolutely follow that process. The main difference between the Thirty Day Challenge process and what I might do in everyday business promoting an offer is, the Thirty Day Challenge is very specific around testing a low competition market so that you’re not paying for the traffic. So it is an excellent teaching model. It is definitely one you use in low competition spaces, so that’s why I stress lateral thinking. I’m trying to find phrases where, given a reasonable amount of time and back links and other things that I can do promoting organically, that I’ll get some good traffic out of it.

Obviously in that situation, keyword research is the key. But as you said, the paid strategy for finding things that convert the offer also help you build out what keywords you should put sites around.

I start with the Thirty Day Challenge strategy in that I like to build something that is human readable starting with an article that is unique and let it bake for a couple of weeks so that it gets indexed, and then turn on content posting to the site on the keywords for the site so that it continues to accumulate content over time.

The first recipe is to get the site built, get the unique content out there. I’ll typically take WordPress Direct and I’ll use the Post Now feature of, say, something like the YouTube to WordPress poster and Answers poster, and I’ll just put a couple of pieces of content on each keyword out on the site. I will do a minimal amount of promotion so that there is a link going to it so it will get indexed.

Generally if I use a WordPress Direct blog, just with the ping list inside WordPress Direct’s sites, it will get indexed very quickly. So there is not a whole lot of promotion you have to do once you’ve initially build the blog just to get it indexed. Once it’s been indexed and it’s sat on the shelf for a week or two, then I would come back and I would start posting content periodically to it, using the software inside WordPress Direct. That is so that we build up more pages in the site, the site has more related keywords on it and I’m building up more pages that are indexed over time because there are all those pages on the blog linked together.

After that, mainly the strategy is how am I going to get back links? Is it going to be article marketing, is it going to be a service, am I going to promote to directories? There are all sorts of back linking strategies that you can employ. The two that I like are article marketing and then, in certain cases, internal tools we have for getting links from our own set of blogs that we have in house.

David Jenyns: A lot of those, are they WordPress Direct type blogs? Do you have a set all based around the same theme or how are you doing that sort of linking?

Marty Rozmanith: Yes, absolutely. You want to basically build up a number of blogs that are all on related keywords within a certain market. Then of course, those are going to be your least cost way of getting back links to whatever page you’re trying to get to rank.

David Jenyns: I think that process that you went through there, that was really quite clear as far as finding out what your keywords were through pay per click, making a couple of posts so it gets indexed, doing a really small amount of promotion and then building up regular posts. Obviously the internal linking structure is going to help with that, and then doing your off page article marketing and then also leveraging off your own network.

When we talk about leveraging off your own network, and setting up these blogs, does take a little bit of work to get a blog set up. I know because you have fifty million things going on, is this something that you put down into a systemized process and you’ve got outsourcers? What is the process? How do you actually take this from, ok, we’ve got a plan to actual implementation?

Marty Rozmanith: It’s tough. Our business has evolved to the point where we were using these tools ourselves for our own sites to the point where now we’re supporting lots of other people using those tools. It’s almost like we do it when we can get to it.

We do employ outsourcers and it is mainly a question of we try and do a certain amount of care and feeding every quarter, so that the idea is, we build up an asset over time and we want to make sure we don’t mess that asset up and have sites get de listed or lose page rank because we weren’t paying attention.

We just try and keep up with it because our current business, WordPress Direct is a software service and is a huge part of our business. Other things that we do are a huge part of our business. The affiliate marketing side has become the step child right now. One of my focuses for this coming year is not to have it as the step child anymore and focus a lot more on it. What we’re really looking at doing is adding more outsourcers and going after different sources of traffic that aren’t the typical pay per click or just organic SEO.

We’re trying to get into a lot more banner traffic, a lot more content network traffic, a lot of other sources that we haven’t used in the past, mainly because we just haven’t had the attention span to devote to it. So that’s part of what I’m looking to do in the first half of the coming year.

David Jenyns: I think once you know what it is you’ve got to offer and you know those metrics and you talked about the importance of that especially when you were talking about the CPA stuff. That’s really the perfect time for stepping in and buying significant amount of traffic. Google isn’t the be all and end all and the search engines definitely aren’t, when you want to take it to that next level.

People who are just still going through the process and trying to get that free traffic and going through that process that you talked about there, once they’re done a few of those stages for getting those off site linkings back to the site, you mentioned article marketing and the internal network. If you had to pick one, and I know it’s important obviously to get a diverse range of inbound links, but if you had to pick just one method, what would it be? I always like to see what people think is the best bang for their buck on getting links? Which would you say?

Marty Rozmanith: I think the best bang for your buck right now is still article marketing. It’s just simply a matter of keeping at it. It’s one of these things where you just have to keep on it. There are lots of great services out there that will spin an article, get it out there and get you nine, ten back links a day, publishing and syndicating an article out to either directories, or say a private network of sites. So that’s certainly the best value for money.

Once you have a mature site, by mature, maybe a month old, that’s a good strategy. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is they’ll put up a site, they’ll put a gob of keywords on it and they will turn on automatic content posting from day one. That is the biggest mistake. You want to let Google discover the site, see it, register the fact that it’s there and not see way too much activity right away, once it indexes a site. If it sees all kinds of crazy activity, it’s going to realize that’s not natural. There’s something weird going on and you’re going to get put in the sandbox.

That first thirty days of establishing a site is absolutely critical for making sure that that site is going to remain indexed and be valuable as an asset to you. Once you get past that first thirty days, then you can start using all sorts of strategies, whether it be the content posting or article marketing or other back link getting strategies to really start building the traffic worthiness and authority getting of that site. Did that make sense?

David Jenyns: Yes, one hundred percent. I know you’ve got tons of WordPress Direct members. A lot of them obviously came over from the Thirty Day Challenge. I can’t remember exactly, but something like 30,000 people participated in the Thirty Day Challenge, some huge number like that. You can obviously see which sites and which people are really making it work.

Are there any other things that the people who are really doing well and getting these rankings, are there any other characteristics you see? Obviously the automatic posting, and making sure that only happens after a certain amount of time, you let the page age a little bit, so that the search engines know you’re not some fly-by-night spammer out there trying to game the search engines. Are there any other common elements you see?

Marty Rozmanith: It’s a tricky question. I actually don’t look into the accounts of the users. The ones that I know are successful are because they contact me and generally I also know they’re successful because they have gold or platinum accounts and so they’re running a hundred sites.

In general, I would say that the people who are most successful are the ones who are the most organized. They approach a market specifically by trying to figure out what their keyword strategy is going to be, what their laterals are, testing it both by getting some organic and paying for traffic and then just figuring out over time where they’re going to invest their energies, so that over time they just keep increasing the value of the site network that they’ve built up in a market. Those are the most successful people.

The other way to do it as I described, is to rather than try and get organic traffic like that, is to, for instance, put an offer out on a CPA network and get others promoting it to get you the traffic. What I’ll say for that strategy is that that is an art form in and of itself. Personally I’m not taking the energy to try and get good at that because I know people who are good at that. In general what I’m doing this year, for that strategy, is to try and partner with those people to get products launched using that method where I don’t have to go and invest the work.

If you have a product developed and you can go and approach somebody like that, that’s possibly another good alternative strategy to building up your own traffic network. What I would do if I was just starting out and I wanted to go down that avenue at some point, there are a lot of guys out there who are well known names in the CPA world. I would just follow one of them for a while. Many often will start looking for partnerships that they can promote because that is their strength and you can end up becoming their partner and combine forces with some of those folks. You almost have to grow into that strategy.

If you’re just starting out, the best thing to do is what you’re describing. Start with just attacking a market, being organized, figuring out your keyword strategy, getting some content written, hiring some outsourcers so you don’t have to do it all yourself. Of course these outsourcers don’t have to be expensive. You can find these things, we’re talking in the hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands of dollars. You can off load a bunch of this rather repetitive work so that you don’t have to do all of it because, really, you don’t want to do all of it.

Once you’ve got a base of traffic generation and you understand how to do that, the next thing to do is to move into the most typical advertising venues so that you understand those, the banner ads, the AdWords, the pay per click stuff and then that is when you would move from that into the CPA, getting published on a network and really ramping up traffic. Once you’re at that level, you’re talking a thousand leads a day kind of traffic.

David Jenyns: It’s a different ballpark for some people.

Marty Rozmanith: It’s a different world. It’s also a risky game. It takes money to be in that world. You want to get your feet under you and be good at driving your own traffic and be good at paying for advertised traffic before you move into the CPA world and try to ramp your traffic up to that level. You have to be fairly confidant in your offer and your product before you take it down that road.

David Jenyns: You talked about one of the mistakes people make, especially when they’re starting out with at least WordPress related blogs. The idea of pumping out this automatic posting and then trying to use almost scraped content and not making it unique. I know WordPress has tried to steer away from that as well and talk about customizing the individual posts and making them a little bit unique and use it more as a way to pull the data in and then add your own elements to make it unique.

That is, I suppose, very WordPress Direct specific. If we think in terms of, you see a lot of new people starting online, where do you see people going wrong as far as getting online, and where it is that people are getting stuck?

Marty Rozmanith: That’s a tough one. There are as many ways to get stuck as there are things that you could learn on the internet. I think in general, it is a lack of focus. You get caught up in getting emails from lots of people and getting a lot of offers made to you. Really, it is a matter of sitting down and focusing on what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Certainly one of the reasons I love the Thirty Day Challenge and was happy to be associated with it, is it focuses you on testing a market so that you can figure out what the market wants, as opposed to just making some random idea of what you want as a product.

I think the number one mistake would be not starting by testing a market. Many people start by buying a product that promises to make them money without understanding that there is work involved. I would say the biggest mistake is not understanding you have to let the market tell you what it is it wants, and then figuring out how to provide it.

David Jenyns: You see so many people getting caught up with that. I think when you draw it back to SEO, we always try and say with SEO you have to first know what it is. You even said it right from the outset, it depends what your objective is. You need to have that objective very clearly defined and then it is much easier to design that strategy.

You’ve had a lot of experience in various areas of online marketing and had quite a few years online as well. If you looked back over your career and tried to identify, that classic question, if you knew what you know now, where would you identify the really big leverage points, the points where you made some massive steps forward? That is so that people can target those and try to get those things in place.

Marty Rozmanith: First up, before I ever got into internet marketing, I spent about ten years in corporate marketing, so I knew the basics of marketing to start with. That is quite a bit different to you coming in to marketing online and you don’t know anything about marketing to start with. I would say, first thing, know something about marketing. There are just basic concepts. You have to understand just how important elements of the offer are. You have to understand just how important price is to making something successful.

You really need to understand something about basic marketing, basic salesmanship, before you really are going to be comfortable doing stuff on the internet. The internet is almost like corporate marketing taken to the wild west. It changes very fast. For somebody new who knows nothing about marketing, it can seem to be completely chaotic. Getting an underlying grounding in marketing first is a pretty good thing to do. I would say that is one big leverage point at least for me.

The second piece was just trying to figure out how to take that stuff and adapt it to be online. So a lot of stuff I was doing in 2004, 2005 was just trying to figure out, right are these blogs worth anything? People weren’t using blogs back in 2004, 2005. To me, the leverage point is again, focus, trying to figure out what to pay attention to versus what not to pay attention to. The way that I find that easiest to do that online is, find somebody who is a well known name who you identify with and trust.

If you can identify with an Ed, follow an Ed. If you can identify with a John Reese, then follow a John Reese. Don’t try and follow too many people. Try and figure out who you identify with, in that you can understand their point of view, and allow them to steer you to the things that appear to be important at this time in the market. As I said, it can be really chaotic if you lack focus.

The other thing is just getting up out of my chair and doing it. At one point I just made the decision that I was going to pick a product and promote it as much as I could until it sold. I did. The first thing I tried didn’t work, the second thing I tried didn’t work, the third thing I tried worked a little bit, the fourth thing I tried worked better, and by the fifth thing I tried, it sold. So it’s simply a matter of put in your head, I’m going to do this, no matter what obstacle I hit. That’s the biggest leverage point, is just persistence.

The three things I would say are, get a little bit of grounding in basic marketing, focus by picking one or two names that you trust and following them and letting them advise you, whether it be through Twitter or their emails or whatever, and then the third is, just decide one day that you’re going to pick something and market it until it makes money.

The whole goal of the Thirty Day Challenge is for you to make your first dollar. It wasn’t for you to retire. That’s the whole point. You have to understand the process here so that you can make that first dollar. Once you understand the process, then you can scale it.

On the internet it’s just as easy for to sell a hundred of something as it is to sell one of something. You have to get past all of those hurdle points of just figuring out how to get that first thing sold by marketing it. Once you do that, it’ll click in your head. All of a sudden, it will be clear and then you will have a lot greater understanding of what will be my next step after this.

David Jenyns: One thing is, you mentioned a few steps along the way, like with the CPA Ninja and even WordPress Direct, aligning with EdDale. Looking at your career as well, there seems to be you aligning yourself with the right people and then doing the JVs. I’m just interested to find out how you approach that and how you see that as a leverage point.

Marty Rozmanith: Well, the relationship with Ed was interesting. WordPress Direct was an interesting endeavour, because I actually met Ed through StomperNet years ago. Ed was on the faculty of StomperNet, I was a StomperNet member. It was back in 2006, the very end of 2006, whenever they first launched. I got to meet Ed a couple of times at those meetings and had a chance to talk to him. I can’t stress this enough. In the online world, everybody’s sitting by themselves at their computer. It is so important to go to an event and meet people. There’s nothing like it for actually talking to somebody face to face and forming a connection with them.

You can follow up with them on Twitter for the next six months, but it’s such a difference when you actually meet them and you can exchange some real communication with people. So I have always made a habit of going to a couple of events a year, just so I can run into people in the market, other marketers and connect with them and talk to them. It’s changed now, where lots of people come up to me at these events because they’ve seen my videos and they want to talk to me.

But it wasn’t always like that. I would get to walk up to people and introduce myself and talk to them. That is the other thing about just persistence. If you want to start getting yourself to the point where you’re going to be able to propose a Joint Venture to somebody, the first step is you have to meet them. Going to events, meeting people, getting your name out there is the first step.

Honestly, WordPress Direct started as internal project that I was doing because I knew software development and I had programmers to build my own internal blog network. It wasn’t actually expected to be sold as a service. It was just through my discussions with Ed, where he realized that one of the things as the Thirty Day Challenge evolved, was a tool that they needed that would build sites that was really easy to use and fast, that would get people ranked.

There were a couple of different methods that they explored doing that, whether it be through social sites or whether it be through blogs. They decided on doing it through blogs and because Ed was speaking to me about the things that I was doing internally with this tool, one thing led to another to the point where the tool got put into the Thirty Day Challenge. These things never happen just because a bolt of lightening hits you and all of a sudden somebody calls you up and says let’s do a deal. Deals evolve over time.

The first step to doing a deal is, you have to at least be present. Showing up is half the battle. Go to an event and meet people. Once you’ve met people at a few events, then you’ll start corresponding with them and over time, you get to a point where you can actually provide something of value. The only reason WordPress Direct ever got put into the Thirty Day Challenge was it solved a problem for the Thirty Day Challenge. Ed was looking to do something, he needed a tool that did a certain thing and we ended up we were developing that tool.

Happy accidents happen to those who are prepared. They say there’s no such thing as luck, it is just planning. Well it is a bit of both.

David Jenyns: You mentioned a few things going along to these seminars, picking on or two of those ‘gurus’ so to speak that you follow and learn from. In the world of SEO and online marketing, I’m interested to find out who you keep an eye on and listen to.

Marty Rozmanith: It’s weird calling people gurus. There are people who are pretty well known in the market and they’re what Ed would call the market leaders. You want to pick one or two market leaders to follow, because they talk to a lot of people, they generally know everything that’s happening in that market and so it’s just a lot easier for you to follow a market by following one of them than it is trying to figure out what’s going on all on your own.

For me, I follow different ‘gurus’ depending on what it is I’m trying to find. If you’re going after SEO, one of the gurus is Guru Bob Somerville, I’m always on the phone to him. Early on, Jeff Johnson actually was somebody I followed for SEO strategies as well. I’ve been following Jeff Johnson since 2005.

I’m not telling you to do anything I wouldn’t have done. This is exactly what I did. I decided to pick someone who knew SEO and then follow them for a while. That led to a certain place. If you’re looking to follow somebody who’s doing off line marketing, you would pick a different guru who knew something about off line marketing. You can pick whoever that is. For me, for SEO, it’s obviously guru bob and then Jeff Johnson was another one and of course I’ve grown accustomed to have at SEO Dan Rayness.

David Jenyns: Yes, he knows his stuff. How about just in internet marketing stuff, not SEO specific?

Marty Rozmanith: Internet marketing is really all about salesmanship. At the end of the day it all comes down to the offer. Ed will always talk about Gary Halbert, who isn’t with us anymore, but he was a big force in Ed becoming versed in internet marketing. For me, the number one guy for salesmanship is Frank Kern. Frank can teach you all there is to know about salesmanship and conversion. As far as I’m concerned he is the best out there.

David Jenyns: Yes, and does so in his own unique style.

Marty Rozmanith: Yes, his own inimitable style.

David Jenyns: If people want to find out more about you and what you do over at WordPress Direct. If they want to find out about WordPress Direct they can go through theseomethod,com/wordpressdirect. But if they want to find out more about you, do have like a blog or something where they can get in touch with you?

Marty Rozmanith: I generally treat the WordPress Direct site as my blog. I’ll be putting out videos on the WordPress Direct site that I’ll then send people on the WordPress Direct list. The best way people can find me typically, is through the Thirty Day Challenge, just by going to the WordPress Direct home page and just signing up for a free account. That’s typically the best way to start following me. If you do that, you’ll end up eventually getting to a thank you page that says follow me on Twitter. So if you follow me on Twitter, that’s probably another good way.

Getting in contact with me, I have lots of people who actually @reply my Twitter account and, every once in a while, I’ll just see that pop up and I’ll answer people. Twitter’s a very democratic way of just asking someone a question even though they might not know who you are. So I’m not one of those people who is constantly burying my nose in Twitter every day. Every few days I’ll go look at it and see if somebody has asked me a question. If you do pop in there and ask me something, be patient, but I generally do get back to everybody.

The other obvious way too, if you’re a WordPress Direct member, you can just file a support ticket and sometimes, if you ask directly to get to me, then they’ll send it to me as well.

David Jenyns: I know, depending on when people are listening to this, you’ve got your own seminar coming up, the WordPress Direct University. If people want to find out more about that they can go to theseomethod.com/wdu (that is, WordPress Direct University). Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about what you’ve got planned for that.

Marty Rozmanith: WordPress Direct University is something that we’re planning for March. It’s going to be in San Diego, California. It was basically my attempt to put a face to all the people that are users in WordPress Direct. So get a lot of our users together, allow them to meet each other, again, make that connection and then bring experienced marketers to present on topics that are of special interest to anybody who’s gone through the Thirty Day Challenge or just using WordPress Direct to do marketing of anything.

Generally we’re covering a whole range of topics that are important to WordPress Direct users, including market research. It’s a two day event and we’re going to be doing about eight hours of sessions both days, which in my book is a lot more effective than just buying a product and trying to sit down with a shelf full of DVDs.

I actually find when I go to an event, I not only make the personal connections by meeting people, but I am basically locked in a room and I’m going through the material. I’m able to digest so much more of it, being taught by somebody in front of me and being able to ask questions, than I am by just sitting down with a bunch of DVDs.

I find if I have to learn a course through DVDs, it’s for me, more difficult. Everybody has their own learning style. It’s not to say other people can’t do it that way. I just find that for me, it’s easier if I’m actually at an event and I’m being actually taught the material.

As far as the two day WordPress Direct University, what we’re covering in the first day, is going to be market research. I actually sat through the Market Samurai guys’ presentation at the Over the Edge conference, because I was speaking at that back in 2008. I found it really helpful actually to go from start to finish with those guys in front of me, as opposed to trying to do it through ten minute videos on the Thirty Day Challenge site. So you might be covering some of the same topics, but you end up understanding it so much better because of the format.

Market research is going to be a big one on the first day. Basic salesmanship and writing copy. A lot of basic salesmanship on the internet is the ability to tell stories, and there are some tricks to that. Of course Frank is the master at that, but there are some basic tricks that pretty much everybody ought to know. Web design, creating a funnel for testing your traffic, and understanding how to get it to convert are going to be big on the first day. Video marketing and of course SEO are also going to be big on the first day. So we’re looking at the first day as a foundational day, where we just make sure everybody has a common level of knowledge.

Then we’re going to go into more advanced stuff on the second day. We’re going to be talking about internet business models. I did some of this in my Mass Control presentation where I talked about all the different business models that you could apply to a product or service, depending on how you structure them, whether they’ll make money or not. It’s so amazing to me that people don’t, before they launch a product or service, think about whether their business model’s actually going to work.

So I’m going to do a session on that, and take people through that exact, entire process to understand that, so you don’t waste your time on a business that’s not going to make any money. It’s just not a wise thing to do. Part of that involves the ability to make offers, tracking how those offers perform and figuring out your return on investment, how to generate traffic in higher quantities than you would through just a low competition organic traffic strategy. So we’re going to talk about traffic generation and a new hot topic called traffic brokering. We’ll get into off line marketing and how that complements online marketing.

I’m going to do a session on project management which is something I find almost never covered at these seminars. I’ve been doing project management for a long time and we have our own internally coded project management system. I almost have a religion about project management; it will either make or break you as far as whether you can efficiently execute something that you’re trying to do.

I’m actually going to take everyone at the seminar through the way we do project management, the way we manage our staff and our outsourcers and show that to everybody at the seminar. There are other ways other than affiliate marketing to make money online. We have people who are combining affiliate marketing with web consulting and actually doing web development work, building sites for people as a web consultant, and getting paid on a fee basis as opposed to just making affiliate commissions. So we’ll teach people about that as well.

So the foundational day, the advanced topics day, I think a great amount of material to take people well past where they are probably in their journey in online marketing or affiliate marketing.

David Jenyns: It sounds like there is going to be some good material covered there, so they can check out theseomethod.com/wdu (that’s for the WordPress Direct University, or theseomethod.com/wordpressdirect if you want to find out about that. So I just want to wrap up Marty. I really do appreciate your time. I know you’re very busy and you’re very generous with your time, so thanks again.

Marty Rozmanith: My pleasure.

Download Marty Rozmanith Interview | Marty Rozmanith Videos | Marty Rozmanith Podcast | Marty Rozmanith Review | Marty Rozmanith MP3

Jonathan Mizel

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Jonathan Mizel

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: Traffic Evolution

Product: The Online Marketing Letter

Jonathan Mizel’s Bio: Originally an insurance salesman and direct response copywriter, Jonathan Mizel quickly became an internet marketing legend since going online in 1993. He had one of the first marketing coaching clubs ever and he’s consulting for several Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, Disney and Intel. That’s only for starters.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Welcome to another call from theseomethod.com. David Jenyns here and I’m extremely lucky, honoured and privileged to be chatting with, I suppose you’d say, one of the legends of internet marketing, Jonathan Mizel. Now for those of you who don’t know, Jonathan Mizel first got started in insurance sales way back then and did a lot with the Direct Response agency. That’s where he learned a lot of his copywriting skills. He was online back when Bbs were around. He started really marketing online in 1993. He had his own marketing coaching club, he would have been one of the first where there were the likes of John Reese and Marlon Sanders.

He was pretty much one of the founders of internet marketing. He’s built many million dollar businesses, consulted with quite a number of Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, American Express, Intel and Disney. He’s been doing paid media for about five years. At the moment it’s starting to bubble up, but Jonathan Mizel’s been doing it for ages.

He’s been underground though. I haven’t heard a peep out of him for the last few years and he’s just popping his head up now. I heard about his new course, Traffic Evolution from Keith Baxter who mentioned that Jonathan was one of his mentors. So that speaks volumes. He’s over in Maui in Hawaii now and I’d just like to welcome you to the call. Are you there, Jonathan?

Jonathan Mizel: I sure am, thanks a lot.

David Jenyns: I’m excited to have you on the line. I’ll just dive straight into it. A lot of my guys work with search engine optimization. It’s definitely a great place to start when you’re getting online, getting that initial traffic, just learning the basics of the way keywords work and just online marketing. But I know you’ve got a really strong skill set at the moment, especially with the media buying. Can we talk a little bit about comparing SEO versus paid traffic?

Jonathan Mizel: Yes, absolutely. First of all I want to say I am a huge fan of search engine optimization and I am also a fan of free traffic. I think that a lot of the methods that are out there regarding optimizing your pages and getting your sites in Google and other search engines, are really fantastic. That’s especially for people just getting started. This is a way to get traffic that is relatively high quality, for free.

The big difference between SEO and paid traffic, and when we talk about paid traffic, I’m just going to exclude from the conversation Google AdWords, that’s it’s own separate animal. The big difference is that there are huge amounts of advertising inventory out there, whereas when you’re trying to do search engine optimization you’re really limited to the keyword volume that your niche actually has. So for example, if you’re going into weight loss or something, or belly fat, let’s just say that is the word you’re going to try to optimize for, is lose belly fat.

I’m sure there is a lot of search volume on belly fat but there’s not an unlimited amount of search volume for that phrase. In order to get ranked for that phrase, it’s really determined by how many people are looking for that particular phrase, that particular topic. Where paid media starts to shine, once you have an offer you know works, once you have an affiliate offer, or you have an offer that you’ve developed yourself, your own product, and you have some idea what visitors are worth and what kind of conversion rate you’re going to get and you understand your metrics and your numbers and you’ve done some testing and some tracking, once you get to that level, you get really frustrated with SEO.

You just can’t get more than the traffic that you’ve been getting, based on the number of people who are searching for that particular phrase. Then divided by all the other competitors that you have and all the other paid listings and all the other stuff. Really, where paid traffic comes in is, it allows you to evolve your traffic generation from just whatever comes in, based on search engines being a bit more proactive. You’re going out there and you’re saying, through keyword ads, through general ads, through banner ads, through pop ups, contextual ads, though opt in email ads, through all the other places and all the other types of media you can run, you can actually take something like a belly fat offer that really, on a search engine optimization basis, is going to be limited.

You can enter this whole new world and start to get significant amounts of traffic. Let me give you a story, because I know a lot of people say, well what’s the difference here? The difference is that really good SEO guys I know, really top guys can generate maybe a couple of thousand visitors a day, if they’re really good, if they’re really lucky and if they’ve created the process to continually generate new content. With that two thousand visitors, they’re going to make however much they make.

But there comes a point where people want to make more. They want to grow their businesses and they want to make more money for their families and they want to take vacations and buy all the stuff that we want to buy, houses and cars and toys or just retirement or college fund or a savings account. We don’t have to get all ambitious with Ferraris. People want to grow their business so they can get themselves security. A lot of people find it very difficult to do that with just the traffic that they get from SEO.

What paid media really allows you to do, is to go outside the people who are looking for your product and start really proactively approaching people through banner ads and so on. Probably the most common ones are banner ads, the little text ads you see that look like Google ads but they’re not Google ads, and maybe pop ups, that when you visit a site you actually get a pop up. All that stuff means that you now are not limited to a few hundred or at the most a few thousand visitors a day. You can get a few thousand visitors an hour.

One of the guys we work with is this guy Mike Hill. We’re talking about the maximum amount of visitors he’s ever seen a single web page get, based on paid media. I said, how much traffic did it get? He said, well, a lot. I said, how much is a lot? He said, I don’t even know. I said, more than a million visitors a day? He laughed and said, oh, yes indeed. He said, I think it was closer to a million visitors an hour.

David Jenyns: Now that’s serious traffic.

Jonathan Mizel: Now when you’ve got a huge ad campaign and you’re out there and you’re just getting huge amounts of traffic, that’s so much traffic, that people can’t even fathom it. Let’s just back up and let’s just look at realistically, most people to generate a decent amount of money, they need more traffic and they need to be generating 5, 10, 15,000 visitors, sometimes a day, sometimes a week and they need to be able to do it reliably.

They don’t want to have to worry that Google is going to de rank them or that it’s not going to like their site. Or these SEO phrases, they don’t have enough link juice or back links or any of this other stuff. All the stuff that is very mystical and magical and mysterious, well the paid media stuff is the exact opposite.

You go to the site, you develop a banner, you put it on there and you buy your traffic. You know how much you’re going to pay and if you aren’t making money you turn it off and if you are making money you turn it up. How cool is that?

David Jenyns: You mention one of the first things being obviously, you need to know your metrics to make all of this happen. To take one step back in the traffic evolution so to speak, what is the core strategy here as far as when you’re working online? What is it? How do you see the core strategy of putting together one of these offers?

Jonathan Mizel: It’s a great question and I just answered it actually for some clients and so I happen to have been thinking about it. There’s an easy answer and there’s a slightly more complicated answer. The easy answer is, make the most money that you can, based on the traffic that you’re getting. I’m going to bring it up a little bit higher. That sounds so simple, people say, well obviously I would do that. But most people don’t.

When I say you need to make the most amount of money, what I really mean is, you just need to make more money than your competitors. There’s this really great joke about these two guys who are in the forest. It’s bear country and they’re a little nervous. One of them sees a bear and he gets up and he starts running. His friend said, don’t be an idiot, you can’t outrun a bear. He turns around and says, I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.

What that means is that you really only need to be fractionally better than your best competitor. The reason your best competitor is ahead of you in the paid media is because they can bid more. The reason they can bid more per click, per impression, per pop up, the reason they can bid more is because they make more. The reason they make more is because they optimize their website not just for search engines but for sales. They have a fast loading page with a great headline and lots of benefits and all the other things that are important to making an offer actually work.

If it’s an affiliate offer, then you want to be promoting an offer that has all the good elements of a great offer. Really, if someone is ahead of you in Google, or in any search engine or any bidded situation, where you’re bidding for banners or you’re bidding for clicks or you’re bidding for impressions or so on, all you need to do is look at their site. People get angry at their competitors and I say, go to you competitor and find out what they’re doing.

I’ve heard stuff where people have said, oh well, they’re losing $20 for every sale. I say, ok, they’ve been doing it for five years, so how are they able to do that? They say, I don’t know. I say, buy their product and find out. It turns out, when you buy their product, they’re not selling a $20 product at all. They’ve got a $1000 home study course or a $5,000 coaching back end or they’ve got something that you’re not aware of and they’re willing and able to bid more and pay more for the advertising because their offer generates more cash.

Let me phrase it from the standpoint of an affiliate. If you are a merchant and you have a sales process and a page and sell a product, I don’t care what it is, all you have to do is help your affiliates make just a tiny little bit more than they get when they promote other people and they’ll promote you. In fact affiliates out there are so busy, and working so hard to generate traffic, there are so many affiliates out there who know so much about traffic, you just leave it to the affiliates, and just pay more.

We’ve started to see in the CPA business people paying 150% commission, 200% commission. A well known one was Eben Pagan with his Double Your Dating book. I don’t know if he’s still doing it now, but for a while he has paying a $45 commission for a $20 sale. The reason he does that is his offer converts like crazy and he’s got all sorts of ways to make money on the back end. So I think people really need to look at their sales process no matter what they’re doing and make sure that their metrics are acceptable.

When people say, hey, what’s acceptable, I say, look at your competitors, see what they’re paying, see where they’re running, buy their product, go through their process and see what they do. There’s a lot of misconception out there and the misconception is that people are losing money and they’re doing it every day and they’ve been doing it for five years. The truth is you just don’t know how they’re making it. Just watch the offers and look and see what people are doing.

David Jenyns: It sounds as if you break it down and find out how much that client is worth to you and then do a little bit of optimization to try and get more value out of that client and make sure that they’re all converting, so you ultimately pay more to acquire that customer. When you’re in the optimizing phase, a big part of it obviously has to do with the landing page, and you talked about a few things with headlines and benefits.

Once you say, I’ve figured out what my offer is and you’ve got a good product that you’re happy to promote, be proud of and adds value to someone’s life, that’s all a given. Now that we’ve got that, to actually build the landing page, perhaps you could talk a little bit about that.
Jonathan Mizel: That is another great question. There are so many different variables that there is not really one that really clinches the deal so to speak. Stephen Mahaney and I have a little saying. He’s the guy that runs Planet Ocean, the search engine newsletter, and he said, there are ten things, and if you mess up one of them, you don’t make any sales. So if the headline’s great and the opening’s great and the bullets are great and the guarantee is great but the price is wrong, you don’t sell anything and vice versa.

Really what I like to do, I like to look at other people who are in my niche. I like to go to ClickBank or just the top advertisers in Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN. I like to look at what their offers are and how they’re actually putting stuff together. Generally on the Marketing Letter website, I have a Marketing Letter website, I don’t have the exact address of this article, but I’m sure if you Google it, Marlon Sanders has done a How to Write Ad Copy. It’s a ten to fifteen page report and I still, to this day use that report to create my offers.

It’s got the headline, the opening sentence, the opening phrase. What I would really encourage people to do is to check that out. Even though I’ve been writing copy for a long time, I’ve just created this new offer, this Traffic Evolution. I used Marlon’s formula to write that letter. I know the formula by heart, it’s a twelve to fourteen year old letter, it’s an older strategy, it’s really timeless. I still use it and it still works. There are also other great copy writing resources I would encourage people to look at.

In terms of landing pages, I wanted to talk a little bit about the testing strategy. One of the things that is really critical, is that no matter what you’re doing, you have what we call a sales process. The sales process basically looks at who the customer is and where they’re coming from. It creates what we like to call this contextually relevant, cohesive message. Rather than saying, write a good headline or test a bunch of landing pages, what I’ll tell you that has been so helpful for us, is looking at what you’re doing to generate traffic.

If you’re going to be generating traffic through SEO, make sure the page, Google does a good job of this anyway, make sure the page has on it stuff about the thing that they searched for. If you’re going to be using paid media, a lot of these people didn’t come in through an affiliate, they didn’t come in through a recommended link. A lot of these people are new customers, and what they are, are strangers. With paid media, whether it be Google, whether it be banner ads, whether it be any other things, is you really have to warm them up.

The way that you warm them up is, you just talk to them in the fashion that they would want to be talked to. You give them the benefit that they want. Eben Pagan calls this moving the free line. What he’s done, he’s taken the free line, where something becomes from a paid product to a free product. He’s taken that paid product and he’s actually taken a mini version of it and he’s encapsulated the benefits and he gives that away for free. Right away when someone comes into his sales process, they get all warm and fuzzy and comfortable.

That’s why video has done so well. A lot of the things that are working now are video squeeze pages. You bring someone from a banner ad, or a contextual ad, a little text ad on the side of the page, but not a Google one, you bring them in and you can actually tell them a story. You don’t have to go for the hype nearly as much as you have to go for the stories and the benefits. People say, are you saying not to use hype, I’m not to use exclamation points? Of course you can use exclamation points, but only if what you’re saying requires them.

David Jenyns: It’s funny with those landing pages, now I design them, and I remember when you first get into internet marketing, especially in the early days, maybe it’s just evolved now but the sales letters used to be all about highlighting, bold, italics, double underline and different fonts. Now I love all the Eben Pagan style. He talks about design: one or two colours, one or two fonts, one or two sizes. When you want something to have attention drawn to it, you just bold it. You don’t have to bold it, highlight it, underline it and all that stuff.

Jonathan Mizel: Yes, that’s exactly right. I mean I like to play things down in my own copy style. In the business opportunity market, you probably do need to be a bit more dramatic. You probably do need to use more underlines and highlights and bold and crazy fonts and stuff like that. You definitely should test it.

When you’re bringing people in through paid media, I generally don’t bring them straight into the sales letter. I generally have a landing page that I call a pre page that goes between the banner and the sales letter. That’s part of the process. What I really like to do is, I like to create just a short page. There are a lot of different formats and a lot of different templates and a lot of different theories. I only use two different kinds. I use the link and I use the squeeze.

When people come in, I’m either going to take them to a page that has a bigger version of the banner with more copy and more information and more benefits that they can click on. That’s then going to take them to the sales letter, so I can do this intermediate tracking. Or I take them to the squeeze page where I ask them if they qualify, I ask them if they want the free report. I tell them they have to opt in to get the video. We’ve done a bunch of that stuff. That stuff tends to work pretty well.

For paid media, a lot of the stuff that does not involve a squeeze right off the front part of the process does a little bit better. You wouldn’t walk up to a woman in a bar, or a guy in a bar if you were a woman, and just say, hey I want your number. You might, but you’d say, hey, how are you? I’m fine. Well, who are you? Oh, I’m Jill or I’m Bob. Nice hat, or I like your shirt. Then you’d start talking and you’d develop a little bit of rapport. This pre page, this landing pre page is a way for you to really set up the sale and really see whether or not you’re on the right track.

Another thing that we’ve done that is so powerful is, when we have a sales letter we know works, but we want to test different headlines, we quite often make different banners. We might test five or six different banners. It will be the same banner but just with a different headline. Then we’ll rotate those. I can tell like that what people are really interested in. That’s the coolest thing because you’re not wasting your traffic on a split test that may or may not work.

When you have five sales letters and you’re bringing traffic in, you’re bringing 20c 30c 50c, maybe $1 to bring people into your sales process. To be testing four or five of these different headlines, is going to get really expensive.

But to do a banner test where you’re rotating these banners and seeing where these hot points are, and then maybe heat mapping the pre page and seeing where people are clicking or what people are doing, use a tool like ClickTale. What it does is it makes a movie of people using your site. It secretly makes a movie of users as they travel through your site and your process. It is slick. It’ll tell you all sorts of stuff that you really need to know to get that sales process down.

The best thing with landing pages is, when it’s an affiliate who’s mailing for you, you can send them straight to into a sales letter. But when you’re sending traffic into a process where you’re dealing with total strangers, you’ve got to warm them up a bit.

David Jenyns: If we take an example, I don’t know if you can think of a product that has been successful that you’ve promoted. Take us through that process of, you set up that landing page, that pre page, how do you decide if you’re going for a name squeeze or if you’re going to be sending them straight to the sales letter and it’s a little bit of a pre page.

Jonathan Mizel: I don’t have any campaigns I can show you because I don’t have anything running right now, but I’ll tell you about some of the ones that I did. I did one for a weight loss supplement a while back. What we did was test three different landing pages. This was an affiliate product that a friend of mine had put together. It was a consumable. The commission was pretty high. It was my friend’s product, so I was a direct affiliate and I got high commissions. There was no fraud or any of that stuff, it was a really solid gig.

I wanted to find the highest possible conversion, so we took the traffic and sent it straight in to the sales page. We also took the traffic and we sent it into an enormous banner. I think it was 550 x 750. It was a big banner with headlines on it and it had copy on it and all that other stuff. Then we also sent it into a squeeze page. We rotated the traffic so we could see which one not had just the highest conversion but where people were engaged most.

The very first day it was really clear that the banner was not working. We were getting a couple of sales from the actual sales page but nothing from the squeeze. Over time as the squeeze started to collect more and more names, over the course of a week, the squeeze actually beat it.

A lot of what we do is, we use the rotation scripts. This is the best thing I can say. Use your rotation script. Get a HyperTracker account or get a split testing software script or use your 1ShoppingCart tracker or you can split test a couple of different landing pages. See what is actually going on. See whether people are interested in your product. Drive the traffic into four or five different competing sites, competing processes.

What a lot of the guys I know are doing now is, they’ll run these supplement ads like the muscle booster stuff. They’ll get a bunch of traffic sources and then they’ll get a bunch of different offers and they’ll just rotate them. They’ll see whichever offer comes up number one in terms of conversion, they’ll take that one. Then they’ll take that and they’ll test the direct offer versus the banner on the landing page versus the squeeze landing page. Then they’ll actually start split testing that stuff.

It’s really just a matter of seeing what’s working and seeing actually for yourself what is going to convert. I could show you a banner. I did one for a product where the guy was selling a dog cancer book. He’s a vet and he’s written a book and he’s a good friend of mine. He really knows the dog cancer situation and he knows the dog cancer market and it looked like a really good product.

So we decided to help him out and promote it. What we were doing was we were promoting two different pages. We actually had a page that popped up on dog sites, since about half of all dogs apparently die of cancer. It’s a huge problem. We were popping that up. We were also popping it up on dog cancer sites.

What we found when we did this was that, first of all we tested two banners. One had a picture of him and one had a picture of a dog. Which one do you think won?

David Jenyns: Maybe him. Hard to know.

Jonathan Mizel: The dog! People didn’t know him but they all wanted to see the fluffy, cute dog. We learned that the dog picture worked better than his picture. I said, ok, now we have intelligence for your sales letter. Put this picture of this cute dog up at the top of the page and take your picture off. I don’t know what he did, but I don’t think they liked that. Anyway what we found was with the dog cancer stuff, the dog cancer traffic, it was a lot more targeted. There was a lot less of it, but it was a lot more profitable.

Once we found the banner that worked better, we decided to target the different targeting mechanisms with the campaign. We were able to determine that even though we got a lot more traffic on just the dog stuff, the general dog stuff, and we got a lot less traffic, almost no traffic on the other. We were getting something in the neighbourhood, just to give you an idea. For the dog traffic, we were getting something in the neighbourhood of 10,000 visitors a day. For the dog cancer traffic, the more targeted traffic, we were getting about 200 visitors a day.

We were making more money off the two hundred than off the ten thousand.

David Jenyns: It really sounds as if you can target. That’s down to a very granular level.

Jonathan Mizel: It’s amazing how granular you can get with some of this targeting. There’s another process we’re using now which people should look into. It’s called remarketing or retargeting. This is something we’re doing on the Traffic Evolution site. When people go to our website and they don’t buy, they’re cookied. When they visit a site in the Yahoo network or AOL or Time Warner or Fox News or any of these large tier one sites, our banners follow them around and actually stalk them.

David Jenyns: It’s a little bit scary.

Jonathan Mizel: It’s a really interesting way that you can do targeting right now. Google doesn’t have a lot of those targeting things. In search engine optimization, you’ll never be able to do that. You could never retarget to people because you’re not using any technology that you own. You’re using somebody else’s process.

That’s something else I want to say that’s really important. Either you’re in control of your business or somebody else is. If you’re relying on search engine optimization, then Google, Yahoo and Bing are in control of your business. At any given time they could stop sending you traffic. It is their right to stop sending you traffic if they want to, because it’s their traffic. When people really start to understand that it is not a sustainable business model, they really start to look at going outside.

We talked a little about Google AdWords. I want to say something about that if I can. I love Google AdWords. I think it is a great place for people to go to cut their teeth. But Google has got this system, and if you’ve used it you know, and if you haven’t used it you’re going to find out, where it’s like they know the ads that are performing best for you and they start raising your bids as soon as they start performing.

People have spent huge amounts of money getting less traffic than they should because Google decided there was something about their page they either didn’t like or for whatever reason they’re going to charge you more money.

Nowadays when Google slaps you, they actually don’t show any ads no matter how much you bid, and if they ban you, they ban you for life. So people who are bound and determined to use Google should make sure they stay in Google’s very good graces. Spending money is not a panacea here. Perry Marshall just reported that one of his clients spends a million dollars a year with Google. This is $85,000 a month, and they just got banned.

They don’t sell a blog or some Google thing, they sell coffee. So if it can happen to them and it can happen to the people that we’re hearing from- you don’t have to take my word for it. Go over to one of the discussion boards, Warriors or something like that, they’re abuzz about all these Google accounts being banned and them really cracking down. Use Google, use SEO but I think people need to look outside that single traffic source for their business.

David Jenyns: Some of these traffic sources that we’re talking about, I think this is really critical for people to learn that they need to look outside for other traffic sources. I’ve had plenty of clients and even myself have had more than one AdSense account banned. When you’re building a business around one particular method and model, Jay Abrahams always talks about having those pillars and making sure you’ve got something that is supporting your business so that if that one pillar gets wiped away, you’re not up the creek without a paddle.

Some of these different traffic sources we’re talking about, where are the places people can go for this? It sounds like you’re going to have to be dealing with individual networks to try and get that traffic. It does sound like quite a lot of work to be managing.

Jonathan Mizel: Well the management is actually the hardest part. If you have an offer that’s converting and you have a page that works and you have some creative stuff and some copy, getting out there and finding people to run your ads is the hardest part. It’s really not that difficult.

Let’s talk a little bit about ad networks. There’s been a huge consolidation in the ad networks. There are now what we call ad exchanges and there are also ad aggregators. I’ll give one resource right now. It’s called AdBuyer. What AdBuyer is, is a service that allows you to access what they call remnant media, remnant space on the internet. One thing that’s happened that’s led to this giant explosion of paid media is that over the last five, maybe seven years, the internet has exploded. By exploded I don’t just mean there are a lot more sites on there, I mean there are a lot more pages on there.

Just between Facebook and MySpace there are something like a billion web pages. Those pages need to make money every single day. Every day, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and whoever runs MySpace, Rupert Murdoch, they need those pages to make money.

They realize the only way to do that is to run ads on them. With this massive amount of supply that has hit the market, and we’re not even talking about all the blogs and all the personal pages and all the other web 2.0 properties, we’re not talking about all the e commerce sites and all the other sites and all the news sites and all the other aggregators and all that stuff.

Just those two sites alone, those two domains alone need to sell advertising. When you take all that inventory, you get what we call over supply. When you get over supply, you get under pricing. What’s happened now is, there are some big aggregators out there like AdBuyer which will help you access some of these exchanges where the ads are actually available on a bidded basis.

Your ad could run on Time magazine or Fox news or Yahoo or anywhere based on its ability to get clicks and conversions and how much you bid for it. So I would say, if you really want to start somewhere, if you want to get your teeth cut in this business, check out a site like AdBrite which is a really great network. It is a small network, it’s lower quality traffic but it’s cheap traffic, it’s easy and you get your feet wet. We give a demo in the course. It’s not a difficult process to go through. It’s a little more complicated than setting up an email account but you’ve got to have your assets and ads and stuff ready.
The fact is I would start there.

I would take a look at someone like Quigo is another network. This is done by AOL. What they do is, they don’t have a system where they syndicate your ads out there. They will sell you a spot on a particular page. If you want to be on the very top of Fox news, or Fox Business and the quote page you can go there, and you can just say, I will pay x for this placement. It’s really phenomenal.

As you start to get more experience, then you can start looking at someone like an AdBuyer. One of the things we did was interview their CEO for our course which we’ve got in there which basically gives a lot of tips and a lot of little tricks to using that. Really it’s more of a function of budget. You can get started with AdBrite for I think $20. Someone like AdBrite or AdBuyer or one of the larger networks that has greater reach, you might have to spend $200-$300 to get started and you might actually have to spend $500 or $1000 to see some results because you’re in this different realm.

I’m going to talk a little bit about targeting. That’s what’s really nerve wracking to a lot of people but I want to tell you there is light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of people have gone and they’ve set up campaigns with say the Right Media Exchange directly which you can get to through AdBuyer or one of the Google networks or whatever. They’ve set up these ad campaigns and they’ve decided to use the automatic targeting feature. They let the ads run for maybe $300-$500 and they see a couple of clicks and no conversions so they can the account.

What’s happened is, there is so much data in these networks, you put your ads out there, they decide where they go and then over the course of a couple of weeks certainly, but maybe even a week, they start to return intelligence to the system that says, people on this site like the banner and people on that site don’t. People on this site actually convert, people on this site opt in.

All these networks, or practically all of them have a little tracking code that they’ll allow you to add to your website which will allow them to see how many conversions you’re making. Why that is important is, the real holy grail here, what we’re really looking for, is being able to get these networks to not sell you advertising, but to be your affiliate.

When they’re your affiliate, you don’t have to sign an insertion order or give them a credit card number or write a hundred ads or anything like that. You just make them your affiliate and they figure out where the sales are and you only pay them on a per sale basis. That is the kind of deal you’re only going to get if you’ve got the highest conversion rate, earnings per click, earnings per cost per thousand. When you really start to get your metrics down, that’s when you’re putting yourself in a position to actually make these guys your affiliate.

When you can get these guys to be your affiliate, I want you to realize something. A lot of people think the holy grail is CPA, but it’s not. The CPA networks are cesspools of fraud, of lousy offers, of illegal stuff. I think we’re going to see a lot of those people go to jail, get shut down, get sued into oblivion. The practices they’re using dictate that and that’s what should probably happen to a lot of them.

When you go into that realm, you’re dealing with affiliates who have, and I don’t want to paint the whole industry like that, but even the top players have a lot of fraud. By a lot I mean, sometimes 15-20% of the traffic and the orders and the sales are fake. The affiliate gets the money and you’re stuck with the mess to clean up afterwards.

When you’re running on AOL or Yahoo or a big network, they don’t have fraud in their network on a CPA basis. They don’t hire fifty people in India to buy your product twenty times so they can get a wire with a commission and then share the money with the Russian hackers who gave them the credit card numbers or whatever they do. They’re just somebody in New York who sells advertising. When you can get the networks to be your affiliates, the quality of the traffic is so much higher than when you’re dealing with a CPA network just because of the nature of the people.

It’s harder to get in, it’s harder to get the offers approved, but wow, that’s cool. Let me tell you a story. I had an offer a while back, and do you have a Juno NetZero down there?

David Jenyns: No, I’m not familiar with it.

Jonathan Mizel: We have a big ISP internet access provider in America called Juno. They have a mail service. It’s free email and I think they charge $10 a month or something. They had a big home page. Now if you’re Ford or General Motors or IBM and you call them, they’re going to charge you for a little banner spot between $10,000-$20,000 to be on their home page. There were not a lot of advertisers during this period when I started doing this. I told these guys that I wasn’t going to pay that, but I wanted the spot. I’d rather just pay them a commission.

For months and months I had two or three of my offers on the Juno NetZero home page. It would be like being on the AOL home page. There are huge amounts of traffic coming in and I only paid $40-$50 whenever a sale was made. So I know this stuff is possible. I was doing this stuff years ago and now the deals are way more common place.

In the old days, people would not do that. The networks would not do that. Nowadays if they like you, if they like your offer, if they know you can pay, if they know you’re not a cheat, if they know your products are good and you’re doing a good job, you have a good shot at getting them to be your affiliate. That is like the holy grail.

David Jenyns: I’ve never actually heard of that right there. I can see that makes absolute sense, having them, who already have access to the eyeballs and getting in front of those eyeballs. They’re going to know and have a vested interest in wanting to put you in front of the right traffic.

That’s one thing that a lot of people don’t fully understand about this sort of media space, about the advertising and how well you can target that advertising. A lot of people think they need to be general offers. They need to be win an iPod or something that’s got that mass appeal. It was interesting to hear you could really target it down, even down to the dog cancer market where you’re getting those two hundred people a day but they’re extremely targeted and converting really well.

Jonathan Mizel: I think what happens when people realize the paid media is out there and available, I think they realize they made their niche too tight. They thought because there were only 8,000 searches and there were only four competitors, they were going to have a good chance to get their page ranked. But with SEO, there are about five parts to the process. There’s getting into Google, there’s getting on the first page, there’s getting people to click through, there’s getting people to opt in and then there’s getting people to buy.

The paid media really has an opportunity to do some niche marketing, especially with some of these smaller networks. Then there’s something else too. If you went to Google five years ago, six years ago and you entered in the word colon cleansing, or teeth whitening you would find that these were relatively niche products. They’re generally interest appeal but in terms of what people were searching for, they really weren’t searching for a lot of teeth whitening stuff.

People didn’t start searching for teeth whitening stuff until they started seeing teeth whitening ads and they realized there might be a way to whiten their teeth. One actually led to the other. Paid media allowed some of these smaller niche products to become blockbusters. Granted a lot of the advertising was not particularly honest. I’m not thrilled with some of the ads people have put out although I have seen some really good stuff as well. I’m just saying the market for a niche product, if it can be spun into a general interest offer, can actually get put into the general interest media and rolled out on a huge basis.

David Jenyns: As you have been around the industry for so long, you would have seen people make a big mistake when they’re thinking about paid media especially. If we were to chunk up a level and think about working online and businesses online, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making as far as their online endeavours?

Jonathan Mizel: The biggest mistake is that they’re not building an asset. An asset is defined in an online business in a couple of different ways. The first thing would be a list of people who they can mail so they can get traffic on demand so they don’t even have to buy any advertising. The list would probably be the most critical thing. People have the idea that they don’t need one, or their niche is too small or I couldn’t tell you what they’re thinking.

When I do even a niche product, I always have an auto responder and I write, 10, 20, 30 sometimes 50 auto response messages, even for a $15-$20 product. Why not? You’re going to see huge conversion rates on something like that, and you’re going to actually build your second asset, which is your list of customers. So you’ve got your list of prospects and then you’ve got your list of customers.

Then the third thing is, they don’t understand some of the more nuanced aspects of business building, like owning their own domains or getting keyword domains or really getting assets that are going to pay off.

To chunk up one level even above that, is they consistently refuse to create their own products. I think affiliate marketing is great. I’m an affiliate, I make six figures a year just as an affiliate, even not working, just based on the list and the assets I build. But I have to tell you, it’s not until I’d developed my own products that I really saw payoffs. I’ve made more money in the past couple of weeks with our own product than I have in the past year.

That’s just a matter of I’m the guy everyone wants to send the traffic to. They want to send it to me because they know they’re going to make more money with me than somebody else. So I’m their solution. That is one of the other big assets and big parts of creating your own product. You either get to be the guy generating the traffic, sending it to someone else or you get to be the guy who gets the traffic generated for him. That’s really the key.

If you’re an affiliate, and you find a great offer, start modeling it. If it’s an offer like we did for our friend with the diet supplement, we couldn’t get an exclusive, but we got an exclusive landing page. We got some exclusive domains and we got a special payout and we also got fast payment. It was almost like our own product. We were building lists and all that other stuff at the same time.

If you haven’t created your own product, if you’re still selling e books on niche topics, write some products, create some PLR, make some videos, put together something. If you’re selling for somebody else and making them money, and you’re making a profit, take it to the next level. Make all the profit, get all the traffic and be the person who is actually in charge of this domain that gets all these visitors to it. That’s really it. It’s asset building.

David Jenyns: I think that leads into what you were saying as far as the holy grail with traffic. That is getting these people who own these massive networks and then having them become your affiliates. Effectively you are then that guy who owns the asset and then the people who have the traffic and they’re sending you as much traffic as you can handle. It links in really well.

Again going over your entire internet marketing history, and everything you’ve learned to get to where you are now, it’s that age old question, if you were stripped of everything and had to start from scratch, where would you start? I always like to try and identify where you see the key leverage points, or the points where you look back now, and say, once I started to get my email customer service outsourced, that was a big step forward for me. What are some steps forward, some actions that you took that really, looking back now, were some of the big ones?

Jonathan Mizel: I’ve got three or four actually. I think your biggest leverage that you have, that anybody has, the biggest advantage, the biggest competitive advantage that anyone of us has is this amazing amount of technology that allows us to see what people really like.

When I look back at the point that really started to change for me, we’ve always been fanatical testers and trackers. In fact we came out with a course called Test and Track a while back. I pulled it off the market because I need to redo it and rewrite it. We’ve just been fanatical at testing and tracking and understanding the visitor values and understanding what we have to pay for people, the different prices we pay and the different values they generate.

The first thing is the amazing technology that’s out there that allows us to split test. When we started to get a handle on our metrics, and we got over the ego, it was good. All of us marketers, I hate to say it, but we’re all very egotistical. We all think our products are the best and our prices are the best and our headlines are the best and whatever. It was when I decided to just give up that mindset and just say, I leave it to the masses, it got better.

I go and I test five pages or three pages or two headlines or four banners or ten prices or whatever, when I throw it up there and I let the customers decide, that was the biggest thing. Then I could say, oh, I thought this was the best headline, but then I realized, no it’s my favourite headline, not the best one at all, it’s the one that’s costing me $5000 a month, not making me $5000 a month. Huge, huge epiphany.

I think the next one for me was learning how to set up my business as a corporation and learning how to take the entity structure that’s available to all of us. In almost every country, there are ways to set up corporations and to create yourself a separate entity besides who you are, an incorporated entity that goes on without you. Even if it’s just you, just having that makes such a difference.

Just to give you an idea, the first thing I did when we incorporated, and I think we incorporated CyberWave in 2002. We had been going on for years and we had other entities and stuff but we really became a corporation in 2002. The first thing we did was sign an insertion order for $25,000. Now I would never have done that but when I started to treat my business as a business, I realized I didn’t do that. CyberWave did. So CyberWave signed the thing. CyberWave is on the hook for the $25,000, not me. Even though I would have to pay back the $25,000 if it didn’t work out, I was ok with that.
It allowed me to take bigger risks, because I was treating it as a business.

I would say the other thing is really the networking. I started going to seminars about a year ago again. I’d probably had done about two hundred seminars, which I really stopped doing in 2001, 2002. I’d go to a couple but I was just out of it. Then I ended up going back to seminars after a few years’ hiatus and I can’t tell you the networks and the people who are out there.

Just as an example, I guy who I met at a seminar two years ago, or a year and a half ago, just contacted me. He’s got a list of 50,000 people and he wants to be my affiliate and promote for me. I don’t even remember him. I do now because we’ve talked but when I first heard form him I said, oh, where did I meet you? Oh, yes, I remember. These networking things are just huge. Really how are you going to get someone to be your affiliate? How are you going to get a network to be your affiliate?

The first thing is, they’ve got to like you. You’ve got to be honest, you’ve got to be straight, you’ve got to be good and creative. You’ve got to have the greatest amount of conversion and all that other stuff. All the numbers have to work. But they have to like you.

People like doing things for people who they like. People generally like people who are in this business who network. Get out, share. These were huge things for me, and I just can’t stress how getting off the desk and getting out into the seminar worked for me. There are some good seminars out there.

Even a bad internet marketing seminar, some of the ones that are $500 or $1000 or whatever, even these cheap ones, even if it’s a product dump, where you’re just going to go and get pitched, look at what they’re pitching. Look at what people are doing. Watch what people are selling. Look at their offer. Look at how they’re collecting the cash and what they’re giving away and what they’re charging. Those are huge.

There’s one last thing. This struck me as we were talking. Learn to love your spam, learn to love your pop ups. Learn to love your email. Learn to love all the stuff that people normally say, I hate. People say, I hate spam. I say I love spam. Why? Because I can see what people are selling. I can see what’s in my in box. I like pop ups, I like banners, I like contextual ads. I can see what’s going on out in the marketplace. This is competitive intelligence.

I think the breakthroughs and the leverage points are more about shifting your mindset than they are about actually doing anything. Just about taking you business seriously, learning to look at the competition and really getting out there and starting to talk to other people.

There are a lot of people in my network, and I can just take a sales letter and send it to five or six people who are friends of mine, because we have bought drinks and whatnot, and I’ll get some pretty good feedback from them. These are people who, when you want your product promoted, they’ll promote it.

One guy I knew, I met him a while back at a seminar, he introduced me to an ad rep I’d been looking for who wasn’t returning my call. I’d been trying to reach this particular guy for a while now, and he said, oh, let’s get him on the phone right now. He got him on the phone and he took my call and he said, I’ll answer you’re calls and I’ll call you back. I didn’t know who you were. That’s huge stuff. It’s really about shifting the mindset.

David Jenyns: Each of those key insights, I can see the point, looking back now, some of those had a huge impact on my business. Especially things like the spam, which almost seems counter intuitive but it’s that age old thing, if spam is continued to be sent, someone’s clicking it, someone’s buying it, so there is some money there.

You talked about the networking as well and how key that was. Even though you haven’t been on the speaking circuit for many years, but you’re still connecting with those sort of people when you were back in that scene. I’m just wondering who do you look to and watch to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the online world?

Jonathan Mizel: If I started naming gurus I’d annoy all the ones I forget about when I mention them. I follow pretty much everybody. I’ll tell you a couple of people whose sales processes I really like and who I think do a really great job. I don’t think these are necessarily able to be duplicated by people, by everybody, but they are able to be duplicated by some people. Probably the guy who I connect with, who I’ve known for fourteen or fifteen years now, is John Reese, a very smart guy. I always read his reports.

I think Frank Kern is brilliant. He’s a handsome, charismatic, smart, funny, interesting man. He surfs, he’s got a great story and all of that stuff. I don’t think a lot of people could fall into that character. But I do think people can look at what Frank’s done with his character, which is really who he is as a person. I’ve known him for a long time. They can develop their own character. Part of it is being a character and being somebody who people like and who they’re interested in and who they’re looking at.

There’s a real personality based thing that I like to look at. From a strictly technical level, Frank is also brilliant. The way he sends his emails, the way he puts his processes together. I think Michael Sanders has got some great stuff going on. He’s really discovered that there’s life after the internet marketing niche, which is phenomenal. He’s turning his business into a technology company. I look at a lot of the big guys. I look at Yanik, I look at everybody and if you’re a big guru and I didn’t mention it, sorry.

I look at Perry Belcher and Ryan Dice have been doing some super brilliant work, coming in with $100 and $200 products when everybody else is at $2000 and really capturing the customer base and then through upsells and coaching and other things, really getting higher lifetime customer value.

On the other hand, there are a lot of guys I haven’t even heard of who probably make more money than all those guys put together. The joke nowadays is, there’s a fourteen year old kid who’s got a billion visitors a day in Indonesia, and no one cares how he got them, they just want some of that traffic. When you go now to Affiliate Summit or ad:tech or one of these big internet marketing conventions, the exhibitions, not like an info seminar but where all the advertising people are, you see all these kids who are nineteen and twenty years old.

It’s just unbelievable to me. I think what’s really great is, it just shows that there is so much money in this market for people with no experience. I don’t even know how old you are David. How old are you?

David Jenyns: I’m coming up to twenty-eight now.

Jonathan Mizel: Ok so you’re an old fellow, right? You’re practically a grey beard.

David Jenyns: Feels that way. Almost over the hill.

Jonathan Mizel: It’s really interesting how much opportunity there is for young people coming into the business today so I want to encourage everybody to get involved. People say, is it over? Someone said it’s the beginning of the end, and I said, no, it’s actually the end of the beginning. The beginning part of the internet is over. Now we’re entering the teenage years, the awkward teenage years. But the opportunities are still huge.

David Jenyns: I feel like we haven’t even scratched the scratch of the surface yet. You’re definitely one of the people who has the personality and the character that people should be keeping an eye on what they do. If they want to grab your latest course, they can check out theseomethod.com/te, which stands for Traffic Evolution. But Jonathan, if they want to find out about you, do you have a blog or a Twitter or something, the way they can connect with you closer?

Jonathan Mizel: I do have. I let everybody be my Facebook friend. My wife doesn’t know why I do it, but I do it. Listen, Facebook’s been huge in terms of getting through to people and finding friends. You can definitely Facebook friend me. I don’t tweet that often, but when I do, I try to have fun with it.

I think you can go to TwitterJonathan. Marketing Letter I turn that on and off, based on where I need traffic because I’ve had that site for so long. I’m fairly certain if you Google Marketing Letter, or if you just go to marketingletter.com, there’ll probably be access to the site. It’s a totally free site. You don’t even have to give your email address to get in and I know people think I’m crazy to do that but I’ve basically been writing this newsletter for about ten years. When I was taking a break a few years ago, I just took the best stuff and I put it up there and I made it free. It’s been really helpful for a lot of people.

A lot of stuff up there is stuff we talked about today and was really incubated in the online Marketing Letter. I think that’s a really great site for people. I don’t have a personal blog or anything like that. I’d probably have to hire someone to do it but certainly the Facebook and the Marketing Letter are two great resources.

David Jenyns: Very cool. Jonathan, I’d like to thank you very much for jumping on the call. You’re very generous with your time and I think some of the things that really resonate with me is you have an excellent attention to detail and you see that in all of the things that you do. You just really speak from the heart and you’re very upfront and honest. So thank you very much and I appreciate your time.

Jonathan Mizel: Thank you so much. I’m honoured to do the interview and really love talking to you so thanks a lot.

Download Jonathan Mizel Interview | Jonathan Mizel Videos | Jonathan Mizel Podcast | Jonathan Mizel Review | Jonathan Mizel MP3

Did You Enjoy This Interview?

Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!

Dr. Ken Evoy

Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…

Name: Dr. Ken Evoy

Industry: Internet Marketing, Business Building

Website: www.sitesell.com

Products: Site Build It

Ken Evoy’s Bio: What more can be said about Ken Evoy? He started out with probably one of the most influential manuals in internet marketing history with “Make Your Site Sell” and has then gone on to have built the Site Build It marketing empire. Site Build It has attracted more than 40,000 customers and 80,000 affiliates that believe in spreading enlightened ideas to individuals who build successful businesses that they previously couldn’t imagine.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (10 videos):

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Welcome to an exciting call today for www.davidjenyns.com. I’m extremely excited today. I’m going to be chatting with the person who’s perhaps had the biggest impact on my internet career. I don’t even know if he knows it. I got first introduced to Make Your Site Sell way back in 2002, early 2002. That was a manual on pretty much how to sell online. When it came out, it was so far advanced from what ever else was out there. Even today, you can pick up that manual and it is a solid report that you could follow for building an online successful business.

I kept an eye on his website for what he did for Make Your Site Sell. Before Make Your Site Sell, and SiteSell, he did a lot with penny stocks and I followed along with that as well. I was especially very interested in the stock market and I took a lot of the principles that he taught and that he wasn’t even necessarily teaching. I was copying what he does because I know he is an avid tester. I applied it to a little thing I did with the MCG, selling pieces of the MCG. I also applied it to my Metastock website.

I joined as an affiliate in early June 2003. When I signed up, shortly after the next year in 2004, I moved into my SiteBuildIt website being in the top one percent of all the websites online at the time; I dominated my niche within Metastock. It was the number one within its category on SiteBuildIt in the financial sector and has been for a very long time. At the moment it is bouncing around.

Then in 2005 I ended up becoming an affiliate for Ken’s SiteBuildIt and promoting it.
I would always find it awesome that Ken would hand sign his cheques and even write notes to