Simon Johnson

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Name: Simon Johnson

Industry: Internet Marketing, Domaining

Website: DomainerIncome.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon: Yes, it is.

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

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

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

Simon: Quite a lot.

David: Multi thousands?

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

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

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

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

Simon: It is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David: It’s still a question.

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

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

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

David: Yes, people are trained to dotcom.

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

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

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

David: As it was an underscore or something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David: As hard as you tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon: That’s alright, thank you.

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

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Brian Johnson

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Name: Brian Johnson

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.strategicprofits.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Yes, please, dig into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Johnson: Thanks David.

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Rich Schefren

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Name: Rich Schefren

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.strategicprofits.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dori Friend

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Name: Dori Friend

Industry: SEO

Website: www.dorifriend.com

Product: SEONitro

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

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Like blog networks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dori Friend: So you know about Fiverr?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dori Friend: You mean building your own network?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: I can vouch for that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dori Friend: Thanks.

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Lynn Terry

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Name: Lynn Terry

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.clicknewz.com

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

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

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scalability is very important from the get go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynn Terry: Thank you Dave, I appreciate it.

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Erik Qualman

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Name: Erik Qualman

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.socialnomics.net

Product: Socialnomics

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

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

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you can develop those relationships that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Sounds like a plan. Thanks again.

Erik Qualman: Thanks.

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Yaro Starak

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Name: Yaro Starak

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Product: www.membershipsitemastermind.com

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

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

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

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

Yaro Starak: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: The two hour work day.

Yaro Starak: That’s the one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: What do you do now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: You get a bit of momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yaro Starak: I do have that as a potential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: This might be the last interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Jenyns: Pleasure. Alright.

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John Carlton

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Name: John Carlton

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.john-carlton.com

Product: Simple Writing System

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

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

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Carlton: Ok.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most people see the world as they wish it was or they think it should be. So they wander around being constantly upset at the way things are going because it doesn’t make sense to them. They’re constantly at odds with the way things turn out and a salesman just stops that. He isn’t trying to change people’s behaviour, he is trying to understand people’s behaviour and realizes the persuasive nature of being able to sell something.

Salesmanship has a bad name and rightly so. There are a lot of scams out there and a lot of people use their salesmanship chops in a psychopathic way to sell something that people don’t need. That doesn’t mean that the thing they do isn’t the right thing to do.

I tell people, Dave, when I speak at seminars, I always ask people to raise their hand if they’re selling an unethical product or scam. Of course everyone chuckles and no one raises their hand and I say, I’m deadly serious about this. If you’re selling an unethical product, then I hope you die and rot in hell, because you’re making it really rough for the rest of us, who have good things, really good, solid products. We really care about people and advertising or marketing is the way we get the word out.

There’s nothing mysterious about this. You don’t know, Dave, that I exist. You feel you need help creating sales messages. You’re looking around for help and you don’t know I exist and I’m sitting here with all this help that I can offer, this advice, these courses I have, all these things that are meant to shortcut it, all the experience that I brought to everything that I offer.

If you don’t know I’m out there, you may never find out and you may go the rest of your life without realizing what a great opportunity it would have been to meet me. If you just hear about me and I don’t do everything I can do to make sure you realize that I am the guy you should be dealing with, that what I have really can change your life, and this is an opportunity right now that you can jump on, if I don’t do everything I can to make you aware of that, then shame on me. I am not a good marketer if I don’t do that. I will not be a marketer for very long anyway because I won’t survive in this noisy, crowded marketplace of the global online market that’s out there.

It’s not necessarily the noisiest guy that’s going to win, it’s going to be the guy who understands salesmanship. It doesn’t mean you shout louder. It means you have a real conversation with people and you let them know what they need to know, again to understand you’re the guy they should be dealing with because you have the experience, you’re a nice guy, you’re fun, it’s a great world to be in and you’re hip and what you have really is what they need. You’re going to be there to watch their back, all these things that you know, your prospect doesn’t know and it’s your job to make him aware of that.

So when we get back to salesmanship, it’s all about being able to communicate the way that most people don’t know how to communicate. That word influence is huge. You mentioned the tipping point. I think you were referring to Gradwell’s book The Tipping Point where he talked about the 10,000 hours to become an expert. You don’t have to be an expert at this to make it work. If you can tell any bit of a story, if you’ve ever told the story about the last time you were on a cruise ship, and it tipped over or pirates tried to rob it and you held the attention of a room for three minutes, then you’ve got the beginnings of being able to weave a story about what you offer, to be able to get the attention and build the interest and desire of someone listening to you.

If you learn a few more tricks, you’re going to be able to weave that story in a way that leaves them gasping for breath and ready to punch the button and do whatever it is you want them to do or sign or opt in or click to buy or get the free report or whatever. You don’t have to be an expert.

However, you do have to understand something which is probably the primary directive for anyone who wants to be a successful marketer. You need to understand the basics of salesmanship. If you don’t, a lot of people out there just think, I’ll job out all the creation of my sales messages. I’ll outsource it, I’ll find some writer on Elance for $50 to write it or I’ll get my niece who is majoring in English in high school, she knows how to write. You think it is just something that goes out there. You’re going to be out of business really soon because that doesn’t work.

However, if you take the next step and hire a really expensive writer, to do all these things, to write your video scripts, to write your sales letters and all those things, you’re only going to be as good as what he creates for you. What is that old saying, you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

If you go out and buy expensive freelance copywriting services, you are essentially having someone hand you the fish. You don’t know if it is any good or not until it works. If it works, you don’t know why it works. If it doesn’t work, you don’t know why it didn’t work. You don’t know if what this expensive writer has turned in is any good or not. You’re just operating entirely on faith. That is just really a poor way to conduct yourself in business.

You should at least understand salesmanship and how to tell a story, how to have a conversation with somebody who is a little bit interested in what you have, to be able to let them know that what you have is what they want etc. Have that conversation. You don’t need to do the actual writing, but if you don’t know what a good ad looks like, if you don’t know what a good video script reads like, if you don’t know what the elements are that need to go into these things, then you’re just a babe in the woods.

You might have a great organization. You may have a big staff, you may own the building you’re operating out of. You may have the warehouse lined up. You may have the best product in the world. You can’t sell it, you’re still going to die a slow, agonizing death.

Most of the top marketers online, the brand names that you hear out there, they’re one man bands. They maybe have an assistant, maybe a staff, they outsource a lot of things. All they need is a pencil and paper really, although they can work on computer, or a recorder. They just need some way to translate their salesmanship into a mass produced vehicle, a website, a video, a mailed letter, an email, that is all they need. You can take away everything else and a lot of entrepreneurs do run into problems, not everything goes swimmingly for everybody all the time.

You talk to anybody who’s been around for a while, who’s been through multiple businesses who is a successful entrepreneur You can take everything away from him, all of his money, all of his staff, all of his equipment, his place to live, everything and leave him naked in a cornfield in Brisbane. What do they grow in Brisbane?

David Jenyns: Sugar cane.

John Carlton: You leave him naked at Wolf Creek. If he can just make it back to civilization, his ability to sell, his ability to actually create a message that lets people know he’s the guy they should be dealing with, what he has is what they need, that they should buy right now, that’s what you need. You can start rebuilding immediately. Everything else is nonsense. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Knowing how to sell and all the elements that go into that, and you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to understand the process.

That’s why I became a guru. I wanted to start sharing these things. I was a very successful freelancer, one of the highest paid freelancers out there. I walked away from all that to teach because, I know it sounds rubbish, but it’s true. I get more out of teaching than I do out of anything else. Every other writer that I’ve dealt with, I’ve talked into becoming a teacher too. They say the same thing, we really like it, we do it, we do it well, it’s a lot of fun.

I get to see the aha lights go off in people’s eyes as they figure this out and go off into the world to become totally independent, not sort of independent. They know how to get the websites up, they have membership sites, they have a product, now all they need to do is to sell it, so let’s go find somebody with the magic box who knows the voodoo of how to sell.

Forget that, learn how to sell first, everything else is easy. All of those things are easy, creating products, getting online, all the technology, all of those things are easy. Actually learning how to sell is easy, but most people don’t approach it, they think it is voodoo, they get all screwed up in their head about how it is.

It’s really the simplest thing there is and salesmen lead better lives. You are more aware, you are totally conscious, you understand how things work, you see the world as it is, not as you think it should be or some fantasy. You can actually get what you want. It’s the other side of the goal setting. You’re not just dreaming and setting goals, you’re actually implementing actions to go get the goals.

That was the big thing for me, Dave, by the way, when I turned thirty-three. The big realization I had was reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The lights went off in my head. Up to that point I didn’t think I could want or desire anything and then go and get it. It was just not in my brain, the thought was not even hovering around the edges of my thought patterns.
The idea that I could now actually want something, that I could desire something, make a plan to go get it and then implement that plan and then go get it, that is what real goal setting is all about. That blew my mind.

Within months I was off to the races. That was the big realization I had. So once you understand how these things work, part of implementing, part of making your goals come true, is to become a conscious, good salesman who understands how to weave a story that influences people because you’re going to help people. If they don’t know you exist, if they don’t know you have the best product or service out there, they’re not going to figure it out on their own. They’re going to go to your competitor or they’re going to go somewhere else, or they’re not even going to get involved in these things.

Shame on you if you think that you’re going to build a better mousetrap and the world will somehow magically beat a path to your door. It’s not going to happen, especially in this noisy, crowded online world.

David Jenyns: Wow, I’m dumbfounded. You just got on that roll right then. As you were telling that story just then, there were those hypnotic story elements that were all interwoven. That’s clearly someone who is a master of their craft. It takes years to develop and get to that skill. I’m imagining when you first start out, having those simple formulas and structures for writing the story might be a good way to start. I’m imagining over the years you start to develop different ways of telling the same story.

For someone who’s just starting to get their feet wet in copywriting, is the idea of trying to get one basic story structure down that you like and then apply that throughout what you do, or does that become stale? You talk about not becoming an expert. To get to where you are now, everything we talked about now, you embedded so much into all those different layers, you were just selling on multiple layers. It’s probably even at a subconscious level. But for someone to do that who is just coming in, you’re in a different league.

John Carlton: Actually, I’m not. I started out really clueless. I didn’t know how to sell, I didn’t understand a lot of things. I had a tiny little experience in an art department in a computer supply catalogue. I was actually living in Silicon Valley in the late seventies, but I wasn’t writing. I was creating the art for the catalogue that was being mailed out. I met a copywriter and I started getting interested in it. It wasn’t a head start, I had a little bit of an idea of what was going on. I thought, I can do that.

I’d never met a freelancer, I’d only met some copywriters who had been hired and worked within a company. I knew freelancers existed and I thought, I could do that. I could work out of my house and this was where I was at that point in my life. I didn’t have any resources or anything.

What I did, Dave, I started researching things as much as I could, hanging out with old school salesmen. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, I’d moved from Silicon Valley down to Los Angeles. There was a thriving freelance market down there, so I started meeting some freelancers. I’d just started risking things and I just started beating down doors and just made that happen.

You don’t have to do that. People doing that now don’t have to do that. What I did back then was, every time I had a success, I wrote it down. I kept thorough notes through my entire career. I still keep notes, that is what my blog is. It’s six years worth of notes. I wrote a newsletter for five years before that. This is all about sharing my notes. My life is my career.

What is interesting about this is, very early on, those early notes I took became a check list that I would go through much like AIDA. I used that for a while. Very quickly I started adding to it and massaging it around. I came up with this seventeen point check list that I started referring to. It helped me understand what I needed to say, who I was talking to, what was the position that I or my client or the ad was going to be in. It had all the elements that I had to do to make sure I had covered all the points that I knew, that were going to make this sales message as powerful as possible.

What’s interesting is, I mentioned I came from a storytelling family so I needed to do that. That doesn’t mean that it immediately translated. I was not an expert storyteller back then, especially trying to translate sales messages into stories. My career started before NLP was started, so while I have friends who were conversant in NLP, I’ve never studied NLP. I understand all about thrown anchors and all those things because I hang out with these guys.

I have never been thoroughly impressed with that and I never tried to do trickery or anything in this. One of the advantages you have as a marketer is, if you want to get into weaving stories that sell, which by the way is the only way you will become really successful, one of the big advantages you have is not some 10,000 hours you’ll be able to spend with master mentors who take you to a secret hill somewhere in Tibet and teach you how to do these magic things.

No, it’s having a simple checklist like I had, which is the essence of the Simple Writing System. Just a simple checklist to watch your back and then bring the passion that you have for what’s going on, for whatever your product is, whatever you’re into and realize whatever you’re doing, you really are changing lives.

If the person you’re talking to is a prospect for what you have, then his life is either on hold, he’s got some level of trauma, he is in need. His life is incomplete to some level, it might be a low level, it might be a high level, without what you have. He’s looking for something. He’s either going to get it from you or he’s going to get it from someone else or he’s going to wander off and do something else.

At the point that you are in front of him, either your website is in front of him, your video, your email, your letter, whatever is in front of him, at that point the advantage that you bring to the table if you know just a few things that you need to cover, is your passion. It is your ability to say, you know what, here’s what happened to me, or here’s my tale and blah, blah, blah.

People get confused. In that situation, the key point here is that you care about what you offer and it’s a legitimate, ethical, good product. The person you’re talking to is in your target market. You don’t care if he’s not. If you’re selling nails, for example, and he doesn’t need nails, then no matter how good your story is, it’s not going to have any effect on the guy. If the guy needs nails to finish a project, he may be looking at a number of different possibilities for getting those nails and you’re one of many. As you tell your story, his need and your offer coincide. Whether you close the deal or not doesn’t matter.

Let’s make it different. Let’s say I’m a business owner, a brick and mortar business owner in downtown Melbourne. I sell meat pies. I need to get online because my competitors are actually catering meat pies to places outside Melbourne and I’m losing out big time on this, so I need to get online. I haven’t got a clue how to get online. You can tell me how to get online, how to get my business going, how to do it right so I don’t have to spend a year to two years making all these mistakes and wandering down blind alleys and trying to figure this out on my own.

You can teach me in two days everything I need to know. Our passion intersects at that point. I have a need, you have the ability to fulfill that need and now it’s up to you to make me understand that the price is good, it’s a genuine value, I don’t risk anything if I come on board. You really are the guy to deal with. How do you do that?

Now think about the passion you can put into this. You’re not trying to convince me I need to go online. I know that. But that is about as much as I know. I don’t understand anything else. You can’t talk jargon with me, there are a lot of things you are going to lose me on and I’m going to be paying really close attention because I really want to leave. This is making me nervous and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be ‘sold’. But I’m interested, I need to find out about these things. So you can have that conversation.

Just pretend you’re in a bar and I’m next to you. You hear me say to the bartender, wow my life is miserable. I need to get online or my meat pie business is going south in a hurry. You turn to me and say, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. You need to get online? That is what I do. What do you say after that? Remember in the real world, I’m not your best buddy, you’re a stranger to me and I’m actually appalled that you would interrupt my conversation so I am not ready to sit down and listen to you.

What you have to say to me in those first few sentences needs to be able to capture my attention, start building my interest, and give me a reason to listen to what you say next and give me a reason to get interested in you and what you have to say. In the first hit are you going to sell me something, or are you going to come across like a used car salesman? I’m out of there. I can bolt at any time. I can say, wow, that was miserable I went in for a pint and instead this guy rips my ear off trying to tell me about some weird online thing he has.

If I’ve already identified myself as a guy who needs what you have to offer, helping people get online, think about how you could blow it, and then think about how you could make it work. How you make it work is all salesmanship, telling a story, making sure you’re paying attention to me, not to your story. It’s not about you, it’s about me and my needs.

Once you understand these few basic elements of weaving a good sales story as we call it, or a good sales message within a story, then you’re off to the races. But until you learn those things, or if you think, I’ve been in business twenty years, I know these things, well maybe you do and maybe you don’t. If you’re not doing well, if you have gaps, if you know you’re leaving $10 or $100 on the table for every dollar you bring in, if you know your competition is smoking you and about to leave you behind, then you better learn these things. It is very easy and it’s very quick.

If you deal with a guy like me, I’ve been around the block so many times I can’t even remember how many times I’ve been around. The knowledge and advice I give you is not theory. I’m still in the frontline trenches of marketing. I’m a major online marketer. In fact I’m a super affiliate. Even though I’m old school, I’m the guy the younger guys go to in order to learn the basics and then they go off to weave their magic.

It’s an opportunity. There are a lot of opportunities out there to learn how to do things, to be taught things. It can be really confusing, it can be time consuming. But please, my message to anybody, and I say this is in all sincerity and all urgency, get the basics down first. It’s not tough, it’s not voodoo. It’s not magic, it is easy but you’re probably not going to figure it out on your own.

Even if you dedicate yourself to figuring this out on your own, in other words going to talk to old school salesmen, trying to read all the books that are out there, trying to do trial and error, trying to go down the dark alleys and do all this, it’s going to take you a very long time to learn it all on your own. Over a very short period you can get the short cuts delivered to you from a guy who has already been there.

David Jenyns: One thing you mentioned, coming from that old school background, and I think old school especially with the direct mail, back in the day we’re talking fifteen, twenty A4 sales letters, I feel like it’s slowly starting to morph. I can only judge it by my own experience. Back in the day I’d read through those, because it’s the old line we’ve all heard before, copy can never be too long, just too boring. Right?

So if it hooks you and it drags you in, you’re going to read all the material. Even with that said, I feel like there is an evolution. I don’t know if it’s coming from my own self, or whether it’s happening across the board, we are seeing a lot of shortening of sales letters. When we’re told to write a good sales letter, we are told to have the appropriate sub heads because the chances are, the person is only going to read those sub heads anyway.

I’m wondering about your thoughts, especially coming from that old school, writing long sales letters, is there ever going to be a change in the shortening and the tightening of that copy where you almost embed the entire sales process into a video with short copy underneath it? I’m interested to get your thoughts on if I’m picking it up or if it’s not actually there.

John Carlton: Here’s the story, and I’ll try to keep it as short and precise as possible. Old school direct mail letters were not fifteen and twenty pages. They were four, eight or twelve pages long. The reason they were four, eight or twelve pages long, that’s how printing presses work. They work in things of four. A four page sales letter front and back would be two physical pages printed front and back. The number of pages you had mattered, because the heavier your letter was, the more you would pay in postage.

Old school copy and writers learned to write, eight, sometimes four, usually eight or twelve page letters, occasionally up to a sixteen page letter. There would be other things in there, like a return envelope and an order form and often some other elements. The price of the package mattered. So guys learned to write very concisely.

I should also tell you that a full page newspaper ad, where you see a lot of copy, you’ve probably seen them. What is the name of the local paper there?

David Jenyns: The Age or the Herald Sun.

John Carlton: Yes, the Herald Sun. A full page of copy seems like a lot, but it is not. A newspaper, full page of copy is about an eight page letter. A full page of copy in a magazine is under three pages. So you think about that, so even though it’s long copy, it’s very dense, it’s going on. It’s not what you think.

What happened online, Dave, was that there were not constrictions on the length. So I definitely remember when I saw my first thirty page scrolling website. It was thirty manuscript pages on a single scroll. What happened was there was no physical reason not to write until you were absolutely exhausted and you could stop writing. Online you were not penalized for length. So people got longer and longer.

The old school guys like me, we’ve never gone beyond the old thing. I type out in words, so it’s page by page, and I’m still writing eight and twelve page letters. Now sometimes I’ll go up to twenty because I can and I’m adding things. But that adds testimonials or other stories or things like that. I’m still as concise as possible.

The rule is not to be boring, but you start at your story. You start at the beginning of your story, you get attention, you start building interest and desire. You work through all the things you need to establish in your prospect’s mind that you have credibility, that what you have is something he can start picturing in his mind and you work up to and in to the actual sales process. Here’s what you need to do now, and you start working through that.

When you’re done, you stop, you sit back and you look at it and how long was it? That’s how long you need it. Now if you’re really good, you can go back and start chopping things out.

Here’s a tip for newbies out there writing. Drop all the adjectives. Just stop relying on adjectives. If you don’t know what an adjective is, look it up and then realize those are the colourful words that people get caught up in when they think they’re describing something. Really what they’re doing is just adding words to the message. Make your verbs do all the work, and that is just one tip. That’s something I can maybe talk about in another call, Dave.

If you show me what you’re talking about, I’ll bet if you add up everything, especially in a launch, that a launch could be a series of three minute videos and then a final video that is maybe twelve minutes long or something like that. A minute of video is about a page of copy if you wrote down what the person says. If you add everything up, all the emails, all the videos, all the written work, all the testimonials, everything, in a launch, even though each element is short, when you add it all together, you’ve still got a classic long form sales letter. You’re just spreading it out over time.

That’s the magic of a launch by the way. It’s just taking the sales process and spreading it out. Nothing’s changed, it’s just a different delivery system. It’s a different method of delivery.

What you bring up is worthy of an entire book or even a documentary. Old school thinking was, what’s the most cost efficient way to get to a person? When it was mail, it was, you’ve got to have your whole message in the mail. You’re not going to mail three different letters and hope they get one. They don’t open the one on Monday, then they open the next letter that comes around on Wednesday and they open the next one on Friday, like you can do with email. So it’s a different process. Time is on your side online.

Also the costs are on your side because email is essentially free. You can broadcast 70,000 emails for the same price as one, for essentially nothing. So when you add all the things up, you’re still dealing with what people say is long copy. It’s not long copy. I don’t like long copy because I like to write, I just do what works. If I woke up tomorrow and the universe had shifted and suddenly I could say a happy phrase and people would go out of their minds and start buying, if that worked, I’d start doing that.

So I’m all for short things. I was one of the first guys to jump into video. I did one of the first marketing podcasts on iTunes. I didn’t do anymore, but I did one of the first ones. It was up for a couple of years. I’m an early adopter of things. I had one of the first marketing blogs up. I love online, I loved it, I love all of these things. The only thing that rankles me a little, is when people forget all the things that used to sell things, that’s all over with and everything is new because you’re online. That’s fine. They’re just trying to sell something. All is fair in love and war and advertising and that is great.

The truth is, humans haven’t changed. We still crave stories, we’re hard wired to hear somebody tell us a story. Before we pull out our money or our credit card or hit the buy button, we need to have certain emotional, physical, intellectual, rational, irrational, logical, illogical, emotional things covered. Most buying decisions are emotional but to get to there, you have to go through an intellectual process. So most people make that, yes, I’m going to get it! That is an emotional thing, that’s where you shift parts of the brain that you’re going to.

But to get to that point, you have to have enough information where your brain is ready to say, yes, let’s do it, gosh, let’s do it. You have to be able to supply, if you want to make the sale stick, you still have to use stick strategies. You have to supply your now customer with enough sound bites so that he can go back and tell his skeptical wife why he bought, tell his nosy neighbour who would make fun of him if he made a bad buy why he bought, and especially his jerk brother-in-law who thinks that everything he does is wrong. He’s going to have to explain himself in the real world.

What, you bought something online? Why did you buy that? You’ve got to give him sound bites, you have to give him ammunition for why he bought. Even though the reason he bought may be not what he’s able to say. He’s not clearly able to say it because once you understand basic, not advanced, but basic salesmanship, the psychology that goes on, once you understand these things, it’s all aha experience. It’s oh, that’s why. Of course, now it makes sense but it doesn’t make sense until somebody has presented it to you.

Once it starts to make sense, then you realize how that buying thing happens. How someone goes from not even knowing who you are five minutes ago, to suddenly being rabid about what you have and wanting to deal with you, wanting to actually get involved. That’s going off down another rabbit hole. I could talk for hours about this, in fact I do in my products.

The basic things are so intellectually and emotionally satisfying to learn because they explain everything about human behaviour. It explains everything about why we do what we do, why the capitalist system really is the best one out there and how people act. Not how you wish people would act or even how they say they will act. You know a lot of people say oh, I’d never buy anything online and then you dig into their lives and they’ve been buying things online a lot.

They’re doing all their banking online, they’ve bought a lot of things online. They research everything online. Their first stop is no longer the Yellow Pages or even asking friends, their first stop is online and then when they have a conversation with their friends about what they’ve researched, then they’re more knowledgeable and their conversation changes. Depending on how good they are at search engines, they either come away with nonsense or they come away with solid info.

But they’re still looking for someone to get it for them. So you arrived as the hero. You’re the guy who says, hey, I’ve been there, I understand what you’re doing. I like these things myself. I just took the extra time or energy or I was able to go deeper than you’re able to go. Now you could probably get to where I am too, but it might take you a couple of years. So how about you get there by Monday, next Monday? I can help you do that. I’ll shortcut everything and we can share our passion.

Usually when you’re a marketer, you are a window to a world that me, the prospect doesn’t otherwise have access to. So you’re the guy who is going to let me hang out with other people who share the passion or I get to find out all these thing. This information really has changed a lot of the ways we behave and a lot of the ways we look for things and a lot of the ways we buy product. But we still buy product, in fact we’re buying more of it. Just a lot more of it is information based and so on.

I think I’m going down another rabbit hole there David. So I probably need to wrap up.

David Jenyns: One last thing you had said, and it opened up a little door in my mind if I may be so cheeky. I’ll just finish with this last question. Is that alright?

John Carlton: Ok. Sure, sure.

David Jenyns: I was keen to find out, you being on the cutting edge and things as they’re starting to evolve, it does feel with the way things are going online and the way Google is so entrenched in people’s mindset these days, you have to be extremely transparent. If you do one thing that is wrong, and that gets out there, it gets plastered all over the internet and what happens on YouTube stays onYoutube. Once it’s in there, it’s very hard to get it back out again.

So I think a big part of that sales process, again I can only talk from where I’m coming from, but you’re able to see a lot of the shifts with a lot of the different copywriters. I’m wondering what your thoughts are as far as the need for transparency and building that proof. For me now, when I write copy, it’s all about proof. Really I just have the initial hook story to draw them in and then after that it’s just, how can I prove what it is that I’m saying is true?

John Carlton: Yes, it’s what I was finishing up on that last rabbit hole we went down. My blog, I share this, it’s not some super secret, but I don’t make a big deal of it. The reason I started my mailed newsletter back in 2001 and why I picked up the blog, I think I started the blog in 2005, I can’t remember now. The thing in the back of my head was, I wanted to leave, not a legacy, but I wanted to leave the story of my life, of what I know, not for my nieces and nephews but my grand nieces and nephews who are very, very young and have no idea what is going on.

I keep thinking in my head, I write to them. I write in a way that I’m not saying or sharing anything I wouldn’t say directly to these people who I care very much about and I have a stake in making their lives better. So the transparency there becomes natural.

People like to think it is because of online and social media and things, but people are not easily transparent. It is a bit of an effort. Even people who are into texting and Facebook and all of these things, even though it seems like we’re sharing more, we’re really not. Life is mostly shallow. Most people live their lives in the shallow part of the pond.

When you have a passion, whether that passion is from trauma, you need something, something is broken and you need it fixed, or you just really, really want something, you haven’t been able to find it and you want somebody else, you’re looking for help in getting there. When you come as the guy who is willing to lay it all out there and tell your story and you’ve been somewhere I haven’t been and you’re offering me a chance to come into your worl, where you’re going to be the guy who is the perfect guide.

It’s like, yes, I’ve been there, I know what this is like. Let me tell you what happened to me. If you can use it great, if not, at least you know what my experience was and you start laying this out. This is what we call either the hero or the go to guy, as I called it. That is what I called it when I started teaching. You become the go to guy.

It’s like for a few clients that I was able to work for who didn’t inhibit me in what I was writing. The letter would arrive, or the email would arrive in the inbox or people would find out about it and they didn’t say, oh boy, I’ll bet they’re going to try to sell me something. Rather the response, and we know this because we ask people all the time, the response was, hey, what’s this nutcase got to say today? What story is he going to tell me today?

What that means is, even though you know I may have a pitch or I’m going to sell you on something, or I’m in marketing, so somewhere along the line I’m going to have something for sale or something, you don’t care. The content that I’m laying out is so good that if you never buy anything from me, your life has been enriched invaluably by just connecting with me, by being inside of my world. If you do buy, it’s even better.

I become the go to guy. You think, hey, I have a question about copyright. I wonder what Carlton has to say. Let’s check on his blog and let’s go there. By becoming the go to guy, you become that resource, that constantly desired, welcome resource in people’s lives, where you’re just the first thought that comes up whenever they think about these things. So, when I have something for sale, you don’t automatically buy, but you’re going to give it a look. You’re going to say, ok, let’s see what he has to say.

You’re certainly going to be entertained and you’re going to learn something during the process. It’s never a waste of time, and who knows, you may become a customer and the new BFF in my life.

David Jenyns: I love the way that even when you talk about those things, and I know you said you hadn’t done any study of NLP or even further back the Eriksonian hypnosis work, just the way you layered that last little bit, positioning yourself, whether it is conscious or subconscious, it shows you’ve embedded this in the core of who your are. You’ve just effectively told us that you’re the go to guy when it comes to copywriting. I truly believe that. If people want to find out more, they should head over to your blog which is the john-carlton.com or just Google John Carlton and it will be the number one position to find out more.

Also I wanted to mention, you mentioned your Simple Writing System as well, which is a fantastic course. It’ll break down that checklist that we did talk about. If you want to find out more about that, I’ve got a special link I’ve set up through davidjenyns.com/sws. Yes, that is my affiliate link, but hopefully, if I’ve introduced you to John Carlton, it’s only fair that we keep that relationship going. I go out there to get these interviews for you guys so that I can introduce them. So it is a little bit of a win-win.

John, I just wanted to finish up by thanking you for your time. You are the go to guy when it comes to copywriting and you share that information so freely, so thanks for your time.

John Carlton: Well thanks David. It’s always a joy to talk to someone like you who is interested in this, who knows a lot of things and you don’t ask the same old questions. That was a riveting interview, one of the best set of questions I’ve been asked and I appreciate the opportunity to share the answers with your people.

David Jenyns: Perfect, thank you.

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Yanik Silver

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Name: Yanik Silver

Industry: Internet Marketing

Websites: surefiremarketing.com, www.internetlifestyle.com

Products: Instant Sales Letters, Copywriting Seminar in A Box, 33 Days to Online Profits, Public Domain Riches

Yanik Silver’s Bio: Yanik Silver is one of the most successful, and also visible, Internet marketer today. He is considered a serial entrepreneur, launching exciting new products every now and then.

He is a self-made millionaire, having sold over $13,000,000.00 of online products to date. He did that with only the help of his wife, Missy.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’m extremely lucky and honoured today to have, almost I suppose like a household name when it comes to internet marketers. Yanik Silver has been one of the very early pioneers in the internet marketing community. I actually listened to an interview with him a while back, where he talked about feeling like when he first got into the internet marketing that he was a little bit late to the party. Corey Rudl and Mark Joiner and a few of the other big names had got on board but, looking back now, he really has been one of those pioneers there from the start.

I think all of you will probably come across a few of his different products. One of the early ones, Instant Sales Letters, I think that was one of the first big successes Yanik Silver had. Then there was Auto Responder Magic which I think has been included as a bonus for just about every internet marketing course under the sun. So you’ve got Yanik Silver to thank for that. There’s the 33 Days to Online Profits and he’s also written a book, Moonlighting on the Internet.

I suppose when I really got into Yanik Silver’s work was I purchased just about all his public domain Goldmine CDs and they ended up forming the basis for the five hundred odd domain network that we use for building up for the SEO purposes. Yanik Silver’s course there for that public domain work really was the whole back end driver for that. He did all the research for his team, and his partner for that one did all the research to make sure the niches were good and got the content together.

He also runs loads of different workshops. One of the more well known seminars in the internet marketing community is the Underground Seminar where he uncovers internet marketers who are on the rise and he uncovered loads of people. The first time I actually heard of Jeff Johnson next to listening to the Traffic Secrets, a course by John Riess, then hearing his first presentation, was at Yanik Silver’s. He creates these amazing themed events, so the Underground is fantastic and I think he just ran the last one which was number six.

The biggest thing that stands out for me for Yanik Silver, apart from if you look on his blog, the internetlifestyle.com, he really does live a full life and does a lot of things; he is a little bit of an adventure junkie. At the core of that, he is an internet marketer with a big heart. You always hear that from everybody. He has great integrity and he supports charities and all that type of thing. I’m very honoured to have you on the line Yanik. I know it was a pretty big intro but thanks for your time.

Yanik Silver: I appreciate it. It was a very glowing intro. I appreciate it and hopefully I’ll be able to live up to it when we do our interview here.

David Jenyns: I’m sure you will. I’ll dive straight into it. The biggest thing I’ve seen, you’ve really positioned yourself, you’re an info marketer, you have a lot of educational material for the internet marketing crowd. A lot of people I suppose, are trying to build up these info businesses and I think you’ve done it really successfully. I just want to get an idea of how you’d recommend if someone was looking to build their info empire, how do you go about it and maybe draw on some of your past experiences. It is a pretty big question, but if you want to take it wherever you feel you want to start.

Yanik Silver: Ok, sure. I definitely love information marketing, publishing. It is one of the best businesses out there. You mentioned one of my books Moonlighting on the Internet, it is like a $15 book on Amazon or wherever you buy books. In that, we have a really good road map for info marketing. The reason I love it so much is, you can get started for pretty cheap and you can take your passion or your hobby or whatever you’re really into and start selling information to other people around that.

What I’ve found, took it with the best, and we’ve had students, everything from potty training to guitar lessons. One guy was selling information on how to take an engine out of a particular car and put it into a different car because the engine blocks were the same or something like that and I didn’t quite get it, but the guy was doing $100,000 after I helped him out.

That’s what’s so exciting about the internet right now is that all these people will self identify. He was selling to Honda Civic owners to tell them how to take an engine out of an Accord and move it to a Civic. That’s pretty specific. Ten years back or fifteen years back, you’re not going to be able to do that, but today I can target people who are just interested in ferrets or just interested in particular guitars even and that’s what gets really exciting.

You mentioned public domain and that is one of the ways of tackling the information business. When I start talking to people about the info business, first of all I think most of us have something that we’re either an expert or an authority in, or enough of one that we can go out and sell a product on. We’ll hit on a couple of these after this question, but I really look at some of the big hooks and some of the big ideas that have to be there. With the ease of selling information online right now, there comes more competition, so that means you have to stand out and differentiate yourself, so we’ll talk about that in a second.

A lot of people have skills and talent that they just don’t realize other people would be interested in. So I always start off on a little brainstorming session where we just get them to think about the jobs that they’ve held, the passions that they have, the magazines that they read, any sort of problem that they’ve had to overcome, whether it’s personal or business, anything ‘how to’ related. Anything that their friends or family ask them about for advice and so forth and in there is typically a kernel for something that could become an information product for sale.

Then of course there’s the bigger question of, ok well how do I package it up and sell it and do I make it an e book or should I make it an audio program, should it be a full blown home study course and so forth. So it’s almost like there’s the cursory review of info marketing which is, hey we’ll put something out there, maybe we’ll put together an e book.

As a real world example, about nine years ago, I had an idea of a workout program for people. It started off as an idea I read on CNN, that traffic was 200% or 300% worse in the last couple of years. I thought, oh, people should have an exercise program while they’re in the car. I was talking to my personal trainer and he said, yes, that would be a bad idea. Then I said, ok, and we started talking and he said, what about people who are in the office all day and sitting at their computers or watching TV. I said, yes, sounds great.

So I literally went out and just wrote a quick little sales letter and then I told him. I said, figure out some exercises that would fit the bill for what we just wrote here. So he figured out the content part. That little e book is a simple way of getting out there and doing things and we sell it on ClickBank which is one of the marketplaces which handles all the logistics for you and will handle all the affiliate payments and the credit card costings and so forth. It’s a really good way to dip your toe in the water.

So that’s been selling for nine years straight now. It doesn’t make us a fortune but we don’t really market it anymore. But the last cheque I got was in the neighbourhood of $100 every two weeks or something like that. It’s not much but after nine years, it’s still pretty interesting. That’s one thing and so I’ve been helping him actually on a brand new program. He’s going to take his information for really advanced fitness people. His last name is Ball, so we’re going to call it The Big Ball’s Workout. It’s totally different.

It’s also a good segue into my other point about differentiating and having something out there in the marketplace that has a good hook or a good angle. There’s obviously a whole lot of fitness information out there, so you have to pick off your market and then also come at it from a slightly unique way so that people can immediately get it. So for him, like I said his last name was Ball, so we instituted the Big Ball’s Challenge which is this workout which is so hard that you can’t do it and it plays to these guys’ manhood. Throughout the sales presentation, he calls them Cupcake and Princess. So it is kind of funny and plays against their ego and there’s a Hall of Fame if they can prove they actually completed the final advanced version of the Big Ball’s Workout.

So it’s got a unique place, a slightly unique hook in the marketplace. I don’t know how it’s going to do, we’re going to release it in the next couple of weeks, so we’ll see. That’s something that I’ve always been a big proponent of, that there has to be a unique aspect to it. So for my very first ones, the Sales Letters that you mentioned, that really took off, the unique hook there I call it a fish product. There is the old saying if you hand a man a fish, you feed him for a day or if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That is kind of rubbish; people want the fish handed to them. That’s one way you can create that hook. So that’s what that product did. We’ve had a lot of success doing that.

Actually way back, my very first info business was actually selling to cosmetic surgeons, dermatologists and plastic surgeons, helping them grow their practice. The very first thing that really took off was, I gave them different toolkits for all sorts of procedures , so it had pre done ads and postcards and scripts and press releases for liposuction or breast augmentation or all sorts of other procedures. People loved that; if you can do that for them that makes a big difference. That’s one of the hooks and one of the ways that you can create a different information product.

Believe it or not, you probably have a lot of this material on your computer. So if you’ve been doing anything and you’ve had success at it, there are a lot of other people out there, you can go back into your same marketplace. For me, I actually sold medical equipment so I worked with doctors every single day so that was my in. I have other clients who are actual doctors and they went back and sold to their profession because they’ve done different distinct things in their business, from how they trained their staff or how they market their practice or whatever the case is. To go back in your hard drive and start looking at things you’ve got on there, that could be the basis for a kit or an information product, if that makes sense.

David Jenyns: When you break it down, like the steps there, it’s quite easy. You outlined how it is that you go about creating your first info product. You start off doing the brainstorming to find the niche and then making sure you find the hook and I think you’ve got that knack also, for you bring that little bit of fun to a lot of the promotions that you do. Then figuring out how you’re going to package it up and then getting it online is definitely a good place to go.

It’s funny you picked out all of these little niches, everything from cosmetic surgeons to Getting Fit While You Sit. I know you’ve built up a pretty big name just in the internet marketing space as well, so I’m just curious to know your thoughts on splintering, I mean going for all these little sub niches as opposed to focusing on that one niche and then going deep and if that’s helped create your business or what your thoughts are looking back on it now.

Yanik Silver: The way that it started was definitely not strategic. It was more about, ok, what are Yanik’s interests and what is exciting and interesting and let’s try a couple of different things, let’s prove to people that this actually works with the public domain material or whatever the case was. So I became my own case study.

For people who are trying to figure out the best way to go at it, I’m a big fan of having a mini empire, I guess, so that you’re in a general market. That’s where you play and it doesn’t mean that you have only one product but you can have a whole slew of things and it makes it a whole lot easier when you have. I think to myself the least risky way of building your business, is think of this as 2×2 matrix. You’ve got your product on one side and your marketplace on the other side. The most risky is to go, new product, new marketplace. So if you’re moving two steps, it is pretty tough and that’s where you’ve got the most risk.

I would either like to take my existing product to a new marketplace, or have my existing marketplace and bring them a new product. That’s been typically the way that we’ve grown what we do. You’ve got your built in base where at least you know if you’re taking your existing product somewhere else, at least you know your product is successful. It’s riskiest when you’re trying to do both of those at once: new product, new marketplace.

David Jenyns: The other thing as well, if you don’t mind me digging just a little bit deeper, the products that you have created, because they’re so varied, and like you were talking, small e books that sell from $20 all the way up to high end products to high end coaching, to seminars, those type of things, I know it’s important to have a good mix because you make sure that you have the funnel and making sure that you can monetize at each different stage. Is there any particular part of your business, you say that area is one of the more profitable parts of your business?

Yanik Silver: Absolutely, yes it is the high priced material for sure. We have a $20,000 Mastermind program which is for high end achievers. We’ve got our Underground seminar which, if you wait until the last minute, costs you $3500 to get a seat there.

David Jenyns: Do people buy tickets at that last minute?

Yanik Silver: Yes, some do, which really surprises me. We try to put as many incentives in place as we can to buy early because it helps us set the room right and do all the rest of the things. If you buy early, it is $2000 versus $3500, so there’s definitely a big difference there. We’ve done different coaching programs and all of those things. The higher price material definitely is more profitable. The lower end material is typically easier to set up as a front end, as a way to start building up your funnel and building up your customer data base and so forth.

Lately when I’ve been working with people and if they have something really unique and it has a significant ROI to it, I’ve been pushing them towards creating a higher priced something first, instead of going a traditional funnel route, where there’s a $20 e book and then a $200 course and then a $500 something and it keeps rising from there. There’s a significant psychological component to pricing. With high priced products, you typically expect to get the best and there’s definitely a correlation it seems with that.

So if you can jump in immediately, one of my rules is that we have to, in my planner, one of my values is I get rich by enriching others ten times to hundred times what they pay me in return. So even at the high priced material, that’s one of the questions I’m always asking myself and I get my students to ask is, well, how do I make sure this is creating a ten times to a hundred times value for the end user? If you’re thinking like that then, why couldn’t you charge more for it,as long as you’re delivering what you promised?

David Jenyns: I think at your Underground seminar, Jeff Johnson did that really well. When he burst onto the scene, he launched it at your seminar, that $25,000 coaching program and that was his entry level product.

Yanik Silver: Exactly, yes that’s a great example. Yes, Jeff was very unknown. He was a friend of mine, he still is a friend of mine. I knew him in passing at that point but we became a lot better friends and that is why I asked him to speak there at that very first Underground. That positioning that he got was very powerful. It’s like, ok, you can sit here and listen to me or you’ll get the recordings of this if you want but if you actually want to work with me one on one, it’s $25,000 and that sets up your positioning for a lot of things in the future. If afterwards you’re selling a $5000 program or a $2000, it seems cheap in comparison. There’s definitely a strategic element involved in deciding what you’re going to do.

We were talking about the guy who teaches people how to take the engine out of the Honda Civics, he couldn’t come out of the gates and say, ok, for $25,000 I’ll show you this. You have to have a correlation to the return on investment or the value for somebody. People don’t always buy info products just for an ROI, they buy it for a lot of reasons. They buy them to avoid embarrassment, to look good, to get the inside skinny on things.

It’s good to be a buyer of different things to see what models people are using. So I’ve previously been a purchaser of this one thing called the Andrew Harper Hideaway Report, which is this anonymous guy who goes and travels under an anonymous name to all these little hideaways around the world and then he shares them with you. His clientele are really high end, like CEOs and executives. It is a $300-$400 a year newsletter for a travel newsletter. You’d be surprised what people will spend money for. I’m into wines, so there is a Pinot Noir report for maybe $200 a year to find out about the best Pinot Noirs coming out. So you’ll be surprised.

David Jenyns: Once you’ve brainstormed it out, you’ve figured out what your niche is and you’ve figured out where the hook is going to be, you’ve got your pricing strategy right, you’re starting to package it all up, you’re getting ready to bring it to market, whether you have a look at your copywriting course or get Instant Sales Letters, once you’re at that point, then I suppose the next piece of the puzzle is making sure that you drive traffic. Now there are fifty million different ways to drive traffic. I’m just curious to get your ideas on, when you’re launching a product, what are the ways that you like to try and drive traffic to a site?

Yanik Silver: Yes, there’s definitely, would you say, fifty million ways, that sounds about right. I think for most people, that is part of what slows them down. They see all these different ways of driving traffic, there are all these different ways of doing online marketing and it stops them like a deer in headlights. For me, I’ve totally always been and I still am, non technical. I’d be looking at different traffic strategies and some of them will resonate with you and some of them won’t. For me, one of my key questions I always like asking is, who else can I piggy back on that’s already doing things in the marketplace, where I can jump into their stream of business.

Very early on, that’s exactly what I did for Instant Sales Letters. So back ten years, maybe ten and a half years now, at that time Alta Vista was the big search engine, so I went to Alta Vista and Yahoo! and typed in my keyword, which is sales letters. I just picked out, who is already on top here? I said, I don’t want to do the work to figure out how they did that, why don’t I just contact them and see if they’d be interested in getting a profit share for my product? I contacted people who were on the first page or checked out their sites to see. Some of them were colleges and it would be hard to do a deal with them and different people who didn’t fit.

The ones that fit, I contacted them via email personally and let them know about our product, let them know I’d be happy to give them a review password to check it out and see what they thought. We had one or two people respond and then after that, they would promote it and I’d use those results and go back to the rest of the people on my little hit list of fifteen to twenty prospects or ultimate prospects that I had, and tell them about these other people. After a few months, we had about 30%-40% of the people on there. So we had a good amount of impact just around that keyword.

One of the other things that I did a lot of, was articles. I always think about traffic in three general ways. You can buy it, you can borrow it, so I was borrowing it by going to these people who had existing rankings already, or you can create it. Articles are creating traffic, things like viral marketing and so forth. Typically you have either more time or more money. So I’m typically happier to spend some money to see, instead of waiting for rankings to come up.

You’re a pretty good SEO guy, but I know nothing about that. For me it would take a while to get the rankings but I would imagine you’ve got something that would do it a lot faster than I think. I would rather pay for traffic right now because I know that then it is something I could track and measure right away and see what’s up. I can see what’s my conversion rate, how’s this doing, can I test some pricing, can I test some different things and get it right before I want to market it on a bigger scale?

David Jenyns: I think a lot of people get caught up, it’s almost like you said, they get caught in that deer headlights. Even though you broke it down into the three, and that’s as simple as it needs to be, people have this habit of over complicating things. You identified that as a big mistake I suppose a lot of people are making on a regular basis. No doubt you see a few of these recurring themes. Are there any mistakes that you see people make?

Yanik Silver: Yes, there are definitely a lot. One of them is thinking that it takes a week to become an internet millionaire.

David Jenyns: Yes, that might be Frank Kern’s fault. He makes it look so easy I think.

Yanik Silver: Yes, you have to work at this. It has so many great advantages and benefits. For me, it’s something you don’t have to give up your day job for. You can spend some time building up your assets. It creates an asset for you that you can profit from for a long time but it’s not going to be an overnight thing. You’ve got to build up the relationships with partners, you’ve got to build up traffic sources and test different things.

What I tell people all the time is, you can do just one proactive thing a day, just commit to that, you’ll get there pretty fast. Just don’t get stuck in things that you think are proactive or you think is work but really it’s not. It’s pretty important, especially when you’re starting out and you have limited time. I’ve been refining this over the years because I have a little five year old boy who just walked in and a little three year old girl. When they were born, my time available just kept getting whittled down.

Every year I’m trying to figure out, what are the big 20% activities that make me 80% of our income, or the 20% products that make the 80% income and so forth and really honing in on that. You have to be ruthless about what you spend your time on. The internet is like a Pandora’s box or something and if you have a connection on, all of a sudden you might be working on something that is proactive, like you’re writing an auto responder message or you’re writing a sales letter. Then you might say, this looks like a really interesting angle for this, I wonder, what is the research on how many whatever, tons of con men are tailed by, and then all of a sudden you’re off on eighteen different websites and you just get off track so quickly.

So you’ve got to bring yourself back in and really hone in on what you’re doing and making sure that you’re building up your assets that keep paying you for a long time. Instant Sales Letters, it’s ten and a half years now and last year it just dipped below six figures, $95,000 we did. So it’s still going pretty well for a $40 downloadable product.

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s amazing.

Yanik Silver: I haven’t touched it in six years.

David Jenyns: You hit the nail on the head with the whole idea of the critical focus time. I know you live it because when I was chatting and lining up this interview with you and we were chatting with Chastity, she was talking about this idea of you’re trying to build in or you are building in, she’s helping building this one day when you have the focus time. She’s telling the other team members, if Yanik is calling you on this day, do not answer the phone, he’s supposed to be working.

Yanik Silver: Yes, sometimes it helps if you get someone around you who can help police some of that work too. There’s a good program that I’ve been going through called Strategic Coach by a guy called Dan Sullivan. In there, he’s got three different days that you should be thinking about in your week. One is a focus day where you are hammering things in and getting things done that make you money in your business. Then there are buffer days when you are doing all the rest of the things that you need to do, whatever the case is, it’s all other additional things. So for me it is team calls or different phone calls or interviews or other things like scanning in my credit card, that was a buffer day activity, because my assistant needed to get me a new credit card.

Then there are free days when you don’t do anything and don’t think about work and just rejuvenate and reinvigorate what you’re doing.

David Jenyns: You mentioned that you tried to identify that 20% or those 20% of activities that are giving you the 80% return. I suppose that’s trying to identify where those key leverage points are. I’m interested to just dig a little bit deeper to find out what things you’ve discovered. You’ve had a very varied entrepreneurial past and you’ve learnt a lot of things along the way, so what sort of things have you identified as those key ones?

Yanik Silver: Some of the key leverage points, I love that idea of leverage because that is part of what got me so excited about info marketing, is you do the work one time. We wrote the letters one time and we keep selling them year after year and a lot of the products were created one time and we keep selling them. So for me, leverage is a lot in work related tasks so what else can I use this information or content for?

So for instance, I’ll be taking interviews and we might take the entire interview and sell it to subscribers who are buying it. But then we might take pieces of it and add it to my blog, transcribe it, add it to the blog. We might make it a chapter inside a book I might want to release, so thinking about it in all sorts of ways. We might make it an article that we release out into the wild, so thinking about all sorts of ways you can leverage what you’re doing. That’s one thing.

Leveraging your team is another way. Up until about three years ago I guess, two and a half years ago, it was pretty much me, my wife and a couple of virtual assistants who were running a fairly good size operation. I’ve had some pretty big new lofty goals around what we want to accomplish in the entrepreneurial space. For that, we need to bring a team in. So now for me, the leverage is about finding the right people, the right culture, the people who fit what we’re doing, so they’re able to be working when I’m not working and pushing through to the common vision.

That’s probably another leverage point, is I spent a lot of time creating what one of my coaches calls a painted picture and this is where our business is going to be in the next three years. Now everybody has read it and they’re all on board with it and so they know, instead of me as the boss or the CEO always having to get a final say in everything, if it fits the painted picture, they’re free to work on it at will.

David Jenyns: So there are three real key ones: reusing the content as best as you can, making sure that you’ve got the team and getting the right people and then painting that picture. I suppose they’re real key leverage points.

Are there any other things you’ve learnt along the way? It’s amazing that you could build such a huge business with a very small team to get to the point at which you are now. I think one of the things a lot of people say, is, when I first started getting my e support answered, my customer support as it came through, that was a big stepping stone. Are there any big stepping stones like that which you can think of, if you looked back over your journey and say when I started to do that, that was a big shift for me?

Yanik Silver: Yes, that is a great point. One big leverage point that we didn’t cover and would totally make sense is copywriting, getting that skill. I learnt early on when I sold medical equipment, that I didn’t like just walking up and being toe to toe, belly to belly with someone making that sale. I could if needed but I didn’t look forward to the rejection.

So when I learnt about direct response copywriting, I said, wow, this is really exciting. So then I just learnt everything I could on psychology and writing sales letters and sales copy and so forth. That was a big leverage point because that actually took my Dad’s business from a regional player to where we wereable to compete nationally because I was writing ads for them to sell. Also, the medical equipment my Dad would look and say, nobody’s going to buy this. I said, let’s just try it and see what happens.

That was a big leverage point and learning that skill of copywriting or having that in your business, I think it’s a very learnable skill. That’s a huge leverage point because now, you get tens of thousands of people coming to your website and they all get the exact same sales message delivered perfectly.

You mentioned people having emails answered and so forth. Yes, when you start off you’re typically doing everything, and there are definitely parts of your business that you’re better at and you have more leverage at. I would much rather have somebody I paid, $8, $10,$12 an hour handle my customer support because that’s not really my unique ability or something that I’m incredibly good at. I limited my time to product creation, to copywriting and striking deals with other people because that is where I saw the biggest, highest leverage of my time.

David Jenyns: Very cool. I suppose there are some really key insights there. To shift gears a little bit and to finish up on a lighter note because I know you get into some crazy adventures with everything you do. I know you’ve got the Maverick program as well where you go up and you do all these different crazy things with other like minded entrepreneurs. You’ve done everything from halo skydiving to running with the bulls and going zero G and you’ve signed up to do the Virgin Galactic. Was there any one experience that if you were going to say to someone, hey, if you’re going to do something, you should do this because it had the biggest impact or memory?

Yanik Silver: There are so many. I think what I’d really tell people to do, is create a big life list. On the blog at internetlifestyle.com, we have a little giveaway book, if they just search for Life List.

David Jenyns: It’s on the home page at the moment but maybe I will link to it with the audio.

Yanik Silver: We have a book that outlines this. My whole philosophy is banish the ordinary and create a life really worth living and for me that means rich experiences and rich relationships. Just coming up with all the cool things that you want to do in your lifetime, whether it’s an experience, whether it’s someone you want to meet, whether it’s a skill that you want to have, whether it’s an organization that you want to help or how you want to be of service and impact others. I keep a lot of that on my blog. On the right hand side is a running tally of my ultimate big life list. I don’t know if there’s been one in particular that’s been more monumental than others.

David Jenyns: Scuba diving in the Barrier Reef? That would have to be pretty special. I’m a bit biased.

Yanik Silver: Yes, I haven’t done that one yet. I’ll have to give you a ring when I go over there to do that. Maybe one of my very early adventures was doing buggy racing in New Mexico. I went with someone you mentioned at the beginning of the call, who was Corey Rudl.

Corey and I were pretty good friends and I went with Corey. He had to convince me; my Mum was really sick with cancer and I wasn’t sure I should leave her and Mum said, oh, yes, you should go. So I went and I had a) an amazing adventure, but b) it was a terrific bonding experience with me and Corey and I just got to know him on a much deeper level. Unfortunately a couple of months after that, he got killed in a car racing accident. So I look back on that trip as a really special time that we were able to share together.

It was also a catalyst to start up Maverick Business Adventure because I met a couple of other high level CEOs on that trip and we bonded right away. When I got home, we emailed back and forth and those relationships were built outside of a seminar room, or the typical place where most entrepreneurs meet. I guess that probably is the one that really had a pretty good effect on me for multiple reasons.

David Jenyns: Yes, Corey has still got some great material out there and I know his company lives on. People should definitely Google his name. I think it is Internet Marketing Company.

Yanik Silver: Yes, Internet Marketing Centre.

David Jenyns: Your material is definitely worth following. I know you’ve got your own personal blog at internetlifestyle.com. But are there any other ways, if people want to keep an eye on what it is that you’re doing, that they could find you?

Yanik Silver: That’s probably the best spot is the blog to keep up with what we’re doing and all my crazy adventures and all the things we’ve got going on. Of course my site, yaniksilver.com and .org is a good place too.

David Jenyns: Alright Yanik, we might wrap it up there. I can’t thank you enough and you’re very generous with your time, I know you’re about to fly out. Where are you off to next?

Yanik Silver: I’m going to South Africa for the finals of the World Cup and cage diving with Great Whites. So that should be pretty interesting.

David Jenyns: Very cool, well I’ll look forward to the stories. Thanks again Yanik,

Yanik Silver: Alright, thanks David.

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Name: John Jonas

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.jonasblog.com

Product: www.replacemyself.com

John Jonas’ Bio: John Jonas is a major proponent of outsourcing most of your daily admin tasks so you can focus more in growing your business. He has found success in outsourcing to the Philippines and is actively sharing his experiences on his blog.

With top Internet marketing gurus finally revealing that outsourcing is one of their best kept secrets on how they are able to expand their businesses more efficiently, John Jonas is at the forefront of informing people on how to do it right and get the most out of your investments.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. Today I’ve lined up a call with John Jonas, really who is an expert in outsourcing, specifically outsourcing to the Philippines. I first got introduced to John Jonas’ work through a website of his called Replace Myself and it really teaches people how to outsource to the Philippines. It introduces them to different tools and gives you the systems to be able to pass to your outsourcers to get specific tasks done.

It was a great way for me to get my feet wet in outsourcing, specifically to the Philippines, and we’ve used some of his suggestions going through to Best Jobs Ph. That’s the way that we hire our staff now. He’s modified a little bit of the 4 Hour Work Week to be a 17 hour work week because he’s a big proponent of Tim Ferris’ work and getting things done. He’s really figured a lot of things out, so I’m excited to get him on the line and talk about how he outsources his business. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call John.

John Jonas: Nice to be here with you Dave, I appreciate it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well I’ll just dive straight in. Usually I just like to jump straight into the meat of it. So one of the first things I wanted to talk about is tying it a little bit into what we do, which is driving traffic to our businesses. When you’re first setting up a new project, and I know you have lots and lots of different websites, but maybe if you think of one of those websites, maybe take us through the process for how you launch a new website and how you drive traffic to it. It is a pretty big topic so just dive into it wherever you feel comfortable.

John Jonas: Ok, so one of the big things that I have found, is that I don’t wait until the website is perfectly done. This is something I’ve seen people do over and over again where they’re a little bit scared or hesitant to start driving traffic until it’s perfectly done. So that’s the first thing I do when I start driving traffic is I do it before the website is complete. I know that it is going to take some time to get traffic to it and so I can start the traffic generation process before it’s completely done and then I can work on finishing the website.

Second, I make sure I have a plan in the beginning. That plan is partly knowing the market and knowing where people hang out in the market and how they’re going to come to my website. Every market is a little bit different. Some markets will allow you to go into forums and participate in the forums and you can get a lot of traffic that way. Other markets, people aren’t necessarily hanging out in forums, they’re just searching. You can get them through pay per click or through SEO.

I’m not going to talk about the forum or the social method of driving traffic, I’ll talk about the SEO method that you talk about. My plan for any website that I’m going to launch includes starting off with article marketing. We’re going to do at least one or two articles right at the very beginning. The website is up, there is something there, there is enough there that the article directories will accept our work. We’re going to do some articles. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit our articles.

David Jenyns: Great service.

John Jonas: Immediately after that we are going to do directory submissions. We’re going to start doing social book marking and beyond that, we’re going to start building a mini net. I don’t know if you’ve talked about mini nets. We will build an extensive, extensive mini net. We will do video marketing so creating videos and submitting them to all the video sites and linking them back to us.

We’ll use a couple of different services that are out there to help automate link building, 3 Way Links and One-Way-Links and Linkvana and the Free Traffic System and Content Spooling. There are quite a few of them. We’ll include all of those in the plan for doing this. Those get used consecutively over a period of time; they get added to the sites, the site gets more and more links. Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes. To dig in a little deeper, you start off with the article marketing you mentioned. You probably write those articles, just are we talking standard posting to Ezine Articles? Is that where you first start, because you mentioned doing one or two articles before you shift into the Unique Article Wizard?

John Jonas: Ok, here is how we do it. We always use Unique Article Wizard for everything. Every article we write gets submitted to Ezine Articles first, and then it gets submitted to Unique Article Wizard and then it gets submitted to numerous other websites, although I don’t know which ones those are, because I don’t do the work. My guys, my outsource workers, are doing all that work for me.

In fact, just today I got an email from one of them, it was actually sent from one of them to another one and they cc’d me. One of my guys has taken over as manager and he was pointing her to four other websites that the articles should be submitted to, like GoArticles, or Article City or something like that. Every time we do an article we submit to Ezine Articles, submit to Unique Article Wizard and then I think they submit it to four or five other websites also.

David Jenyns: Cool. And then from there, the directory submissions, do you do that through Directory Maximizer or are you guys hand submitting those?

John Jonas: We are hand submitting, so that they get done over a period of time. I’ve given very specific instructions. We use a piece of software called Directory Submitter and I’ve instructed my guys to submit to ten to fifteen directories per day and not to more than that. I want the links being built over time. I don’t want to slam thousands of directories all at once so Google sees that we just got three thousand links this week. I want it to be done over time. It’s a pretty permanent thing that my guys are going to be doing in submitting to directories.

David Jenyns: Then it moves into the social book marking and is that something again hand done? I know the way that you’ve structured yourself with your team, a lot of what you do is hand done, which means you know it’s getting done, and getting done to a very good quality. But social book marking is one of those things where it is a lot more effective than it was. It’s got certain benefit to it now, so I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.

John Jonas: We use a couple of different things. I haven’t done this myself in a long time but I know my guys have used OnlyWire in the past, and I think we may be going back to it now. We’ve been using Ping.fm to do some work. I know that we just started using SocialBot and I don’t know the results from that. Another thing that we’ll do is use packet sites, high page rank sites to get high page rank links. That is a whole lesson in and of itself.

So my guys do some of those things by hand. I know they’re using tools to do them, like Ping, SocialBot and OnlyWire and I believe there is one other but I don’t know what it is.

David Jenyns: Then you mentioned moving into the mini net. I’m assuming that’s through a combination of Web 2.0 and building your own sites as well?

John Jonas: Yes. It is a combination, but most of it we do on other people’s sites, so this is something I have a huge training on how to do this. In fact everything I’ve talked about I have a big training I give to my guys on how to do this. For the most part it is built on other people’s sites. I’ve found it is almost the exact same effectiveness and there’s a lot less hassle and headache.

People talk about, you’ve got to spread this out on different IP addresses, you’ve got to have all these different hosting accounts, make sure you do them right. I don’t want to deal with that, so we just use Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and HubPages and Squidoo. There are tons of places out there that let you build a website and link them back to our site.

We’ll do article marketing for those sites. We’ll submit those to directories and we’ll book mark those sites. Now those sites are getting traffic and they’re more authoritative than they were before, so now they’re pointing to us, which makes my main site more authoritative. That’s the process that we’re using.

David Jenyns: Then shifting into video marketing, which is an excellent way to get some quick rankings at the moment, is this something you’re outsourcing, the content generation of the video, or do you create it and then your team helps to distribute it, uploading it? I know you mentioned Traffic Geyser and things like that in Replace Myself.

John Jonas: It depends on what the website is. If the website is me, for my blog or for Replace Myself, I will create the videos, but otherwise I have them create them. There are quite a few different ways that you can have videos created by people overseas. They are effective, they’re well done. My guys do a great job of it and again I have a whole training that I give to them on how to do this and how to do it correctly so it gets done well.

They create the videos and they submit them using Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul. We use both, because I just get the feeling that we get different results using both, so that’s even better. Anything that I can let them do, I do.

David Jenyns: Then I suppose the last one you mentioned was building links through alternative services, things like Linkvana, Free Traffic System, the 3 Way Links. That is just a gradual process where you just get them to drip out those links and go in there and post to those different services.

John Jonas: Some of those services are automated and some of them require constant work. Linkvana, for example, requires any link you get requires a piece of content. My team knows how to do that. They do it for me and I don’t ever touch it. One of the things I learned over the years, and this is one of the things that I realized really made a difference to me and my success, when I realized I don’t have to do all of this at once. I just know that I need to know all these things.

They need to be done over time. All these things get done in a new website that we do, but they don’t all get done upfront. We do one thing at a time. That’s important because if you’re trying to do too many of them, you don’t do anything and it doesn’t work. What I just described is a six month to a year’s process. If you start and systematically do them one by one, you’re going to get traffic to your website, there is no question. You’re going to get traffic and that’s how I approach it.

I know if I do all these things, it will work. I’ve done it enough times to know it will work. If the market is super competitive, I know I’ll just have to wait longer to get more traffic. But otherwise it’s all the things you’ve heard of, that people have heard of that they know they should be doing and they’re not doing because there is not time in the day to do them all. I 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.

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Jim Fleck

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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.

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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.

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Darren Warmuth

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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.

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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.

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Ed Dale

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Name: Ed Dale

Industry: Online Marketing

Website: Immediate Edge

Product: The Challenge

Ed Dale’s Bio: How does a self-described “odd Australian” build an empire from the ground up that consists of seminars, wildly successful online courses, a dedicated base of followers, and over $14 million in profits? He does it with a sense of humor and honest, hard work. In this Ed Dale interview you’ll discover the latest online marketing techniques that the ‘Tubby Nerd’ is using to make waves and millions of dollars. Listen to this Ed Dale podcast in the car or on your iPod.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, welcome to another call for theSEOmethod.com and davidjenyns.com. Today I think I’ve lined up one of the best interview I’ve got for you so far. We’ve got Ed Dale on the line. For those of you who listened to the audio where Ed Dale interviewed me, you’ll know how our history has been intertwined for a long time now. I’ve followed his original work with the UnderAchiever, I’ve attended the UnderAchiever seminar and went to the Beechworth seminar. Now I’ve even started taking the Thirty Day Challenge training and am using that to train my assistants to get them up to speed, shortcutting. I don’t think Ed Dale even knows that.

Obviously I’ve locked in for the Melbourne seminar coming up but I’m using Dominiche, which I got a long time ago to start selling my first site on Flipper. I’ve got a big network of sites and I know with some of the work I’ve been doing with offline business, you really do get a big cash flow injection when you do the sales. Suffice to say, I love Ed’s stuff, and I’m very excited about what we’re going to talk to Ed Dale about on the phone today. Ed, I’d just like to welcome you to the call.

Ed Dale: Well thanks, mate. I’m very excited. It’s nice to be on the other side of the mike so to speak. So I’m just going to sit here and take your grilling and see what we can talk about. So I’m very excited about it. Hey, that flipper.com really has changed the whole buying and selling websites thing, because it’s a really good, safe place to conduct the transaction.

But I think more than that, and this goes to the heart of everything you’re doing in terms of SEO, is that traffic is not as easy as it was three years ago. You really do need to educate yourself. You really do need to make sure you’re dealing with the right people and put in really serious effort.

This has had the by product of making it much safer to sell your websites now. In the old days I used to really harass people to say, don’t reveal your actual site. Talk about the actual thing, get a non-disclosure, get protection, get all this sort of stuff.

What was happening, people were opening the kimono as they say in the biz, and revealing everything about their site. Because traffic was so easy in 2006, people would throw up five cent Google campaigns or do some quick and dirty SEO and they would effectively mutilate the site. Rather than selling it, they would just rip it off. That’s just not possible these days, because you either have to spend so much more money to get the quick traffic, or you have to put in real effort on the SEO side.

For people who want to rip you off, effort is the last thing on their minds. So it’s very exciting. I think it’s a very exciting area now. It’s great. It really does sort the wheat from the chaff.

David Jenyns: I feel like this leads into, traffic being such an important part, and I know to stay on the cutting edge, you’re constantly testing and developing new techniques. You’re especially doing a lot of work with Dan Raine over in the labs for the Immediate Edge. Perhaps we should take a case study and dive into it. I know you talk about the Symphony of Four Parts and there is market research traffic conversion and also the product itself. Let’s really hone in on the traffic, and I know there is going to be some overlap obviously.

I know just recently you had a little product that you launched which went a little bit under the radar I think for the value of what it really could provide, which is your Valuing Websites course. This is obviously key for the buying and selling on Flipper like we talked about. What are the processes, I know people can follow along in the Thirty Day Challenge and see the processes that you set out. But I feel like that is about getting someone an excellent foothold, getting them to make their first dollar, taste a lot of different things. But when you’re launching a product, what are the processes you go through for driving that traffic?

Ed Dale: Well, the most interesting thing, Dave, is that the first week of the Thirty Day Challenge which is all about the market research side of things determining the keywords which will hopefully bring us traffic and using Market Samurai I suppose in particular, is absolutely no different if we’re doing a $10 product or a million dollar a year product. It really is exactly what we do. We don’t pull any punches.

The difference if you will, and a lot of people are interested in this, what is the difference? The difference is, once we find something that is going to work, then we apply a whole other bunch of traffic techniques. We teach effectively two or three traffic techniques, the most standard, the most important, the most basic ones inside the Thirty Day Challenge. As you well know, there are dozens and dozens of strategies that you can use depending on your skill level and the financial resources that are available to you.

If we take that Valuing Your Website product, you can’t talk about traffic without talking about market research and why you create the product in the first place. I think the biggest mistake people make is that they think about that product first which we often talk about as part 4 in the Magnificent Symphony. They come up with a product idea first without really seeing if there’s a) a market for it and b) if there’s any traffic in that market and c) will that market actually buy anything?

In this particular case, we knew that because of the rise of Flipper and the resurgence of buying and selling websites and the raw data in front of us, that people were selling their websites either way too cheaply, or people were buying the sites and getting incredible bargains. A lot of people were missing incredible bargains because they didn’t realize the true value of their website.

Let’s first talk about envisaging. This product was designed to be one that was consumed easily, is an evergreen product which will just sit there and stay and we put a lot of time and effort into the creation of it for it to be a permanent product. Because it is a permanent product ( I am coming back to traffic ) it’s so important to do your keyword research in that market research phase. If you’re going to create a product, if you’re going to put up a website, if you’re going to do a blog, if you’re going to create content about it, to me it’s a crime not to optimize all of that stuff for the keywords in that marketplace that are likely to attract traffic.

It works, no question,, but I’m all about leverage. Rob Somerville, who heads up the labs here in Melbourne, drums it into me all the time. If you’re going to go to all the effort of creating this content, it’s a crime not to do the research prior to it to figure out what the words are that people type when they are thinking about this. You’ve heard me say it Dave, nothing exists on the internet without a phrase. When you think about it, until somebody types something into Google or Wikipedia or whatever it is, it may as well not exist.

David Jenyns: And if you aim at nothing, you’re sure to hit, along those same lines.

Ed Dale: Exactly. You accidentally might rank well, but I don’t like accidents in business. I don’t want to be accidentally successful. I think you can accidentally screw your business up really easily, but accidentally successful I’m not a big believer in.

What we did in that specific case, ok, we’re not talking a mega market here David. As you quite rightly pointed out, this is a really niche product. A lot of our promotional strategies for product going forward are doing JVs with companies like Flipper and people who are involved in that very niche area, which is buying and selling websites.

Mark Copeman, who is our partner, a brilliant partner on that product, actually used Market Samurai and did exactly the same research that we teach in that first week of Thirty Day Challenge, to develop a series of keyword phrases related to valuing a website that we used for tagging purposes. We used them when we put the videos up, they’re keyword tagged with these phrases. The content is on the blogs and so on, and this is Grade 1 SEO, we don’t pick stuff deliberately, we don’t do any of that stuff. It’s cutting your nose to spite your face. Great content is the best SEO that exists.

Leslie Rhode, who is of course coming to Melbourne, who in my mind is one of the greatest SEO minds on the planet, a true legend in terms of SEO, points out that the number one best SEO trick, the number one SEO technique is developing great content. You can juice that content just by being smart about using the phrases that are going to attract traffic in that market in your headline, in that first paragraph.

These are the basics that we teach inside the Thirty Day Challenge absolutely for free. I think in some ways, it’s funny isn’t it, because you do this stuff for free, people have the idea that you’re not giving them the whole story because you want to sell them something. I learnt early on that is stupid. Again, it is cutting your nose to spite your face strategy.

If you only raise the hemline a little bit, if you only reveal a little bit of what you’re talking about, that is not going to make people want to buy from you more. They want to buy from somebody who is really enthusiastic, who really knows what they’re talking about.

My great mentor Gary Albert pointed out time and time again, I didn’t believe him at first but I have seen it time and time again, the more you give away, even if you lay out the entire strategy in a launch video, people will be more likely to sign up for the actual course and the implementation than they would if you only allude and you tease.

People don’t have time for teasing in this day and age. We’re so bombarded with content from every direction, that people don’t need teasing. They want good info that is either entertaining, it’s educational, somebody who’s enthusiastic or indeed people love a great fight. They love a great battle and they’re interested in seeing that. That’s what they want to see. They don’t want to see teases. Teases just come off as slimy.

What we did very specifically, to bring it back to specifics, we created a blog that used the categories, and those categories on that blog were the keyword phrases which were most likely to attract traffic in this particular market. Again, we’re not talking about attracting thousands of visitors a day, we’re talking maybe twenty visitors a day. But that is the size of this particular market.

It’s worth us putting in all the effort to create a really professional product and I encourage people to go, even if you’re not interested in the actual topic, have a look at the layout of the site because it is a good example. We created the categories so that Google looks at the site and says, oh, check that out. When I see value in websites, I expect to see these other phrases in a site about value in websites so we use those as the categories in that blog, we use a WordPress blog.

We’ve titled the videos and we’ve keyword tagged the videos that make sense. Google sees what it expects to see. It’s interesting, I can’t even tell you if it has any page rank at the moment, but it would not surprise me if it shoots up quickly to a PR2 or a PR 3 in the next update because of those on page factors, you’d call them, that help you in your SEO efforts.

You can get all these on page factors right from the get go and it doesn’t take you any more time or effort. This is what I see time and time again, Dave, that people are so enthusiastic to get their product up and running, that just that extra little time spent doing the keyword research with a view to targeting traffic would be good. Now of course what we’re doing with that site, is we’re sowing the seeds. We know now it doesn’t happen overnight as we started off saying. These things don’t happen overnight. But I bet you in three to six months, when somebody types in valuing websites, our site, if it’s not going to be number one, it’s going to be close to number one.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you mentioned a few things there. As far as the way I look at things, and I’m a lover of clichés, that whole idea of you measure twice and you cut once is valuable. You’ll do that market research, you’re setting up a WordPress blog, you’re making sure you’re feeding the data back using Market Samurai and that pulls from a variety of sources, Google being one of them. It’s effectively like Google says, here are the keywords related to this website, then feeding its own information back into it, which obviously it believes it should be seeing. Then you’re putting out champagne content.

One quick question I have if I may. When you’re installing the blog, are you talking about putting that all on the same domain name and having your product sales page at the front and the blog and a sub directory, or how do you work that?

Ed Dale: Yes, currently it’s all under a single line and then we use sub directories for the blog. So for example, it would be, bakingacake.com/blog. Now I know people who do it other ways. They may attack a different keyword phrase.

I don’t think that is as important as getting a core right of on page factors. Think about it. Google just wants to see what it expects to see when it is a normal thing. It doesn’t want to be gamed. Google doesn’t want to be gamed. It’s advantage. It has billions of websites which are being created by people who are not trying to game the system.

It looks at those websites and says, ok, if I see this word, I expect to see these other words or links from these sites. That’s what I expect to see. As soon as it sees stuff that it doesn’t expect to see, or it sees the phrase baking a cake seventy-three times on one A4 page of text, one legal pad worth of text, it says, hang on, what’s going on here? It flags it and it starts to realize, hang on, I’m being gamed here. That is just the on page factors.

It’s far more important to worry about your content and creating great content once you’ve got your fundamentals right. You do that initial research, you know what keywords you’re targeting, you know what your phrases have targeted. I think Rob Somerville puts them in a little text file. So every time he creates a video, or every time a new piece of content goes up, he’s got his tags ready to go. He copies and pastes them and in they go.

We don’t put thousands of tags in because, again, if Google comes to a site and they see thousands of tags, ask yourself, does the normal person put in thousands of tags? The answer is no. They maybe do half a dozen tags. You just want to do what normal people would do.

David Jenyns: I think Ken Giddens always talks about that, just replicate what happens in nature, because that is ultimately what Google wants. You talked about putting together this champagne content, putting videos out, posting them with the right tags. In this particular example, the Valuing Websites example, the content that you put on the blog, did you look at doing any articles, or was it more based on videos, or what sort of content were you putting on that site?

Ed Dale: Both articles and videos. We did the classic Ezine Articles with key phrases and we’ve seeded those out. Now in fact I’m pretty sure we haven’t done this, but the next obvious step would be to take our demo intro video, put that on YouTube and tag it up correctly. If we talk about things that are really working brilliantly now, and getting really big bang for your buck, it’s getting traffic from video. That’s really working well.
I know you do it. I know our number one source of traffic for Thirty Day Challenge is literally YouTube. For new visitors, YouTube is our number one source of traffic. People don’t realize, unless they’ve been hanging around the internet marketing industry, that YouTube is the second biggest search engine.

David Jenyns: And then you’re taking that content, repurposing it. We do a lot with TubeMogul. I’ve tested both TubeMogul versus Traffic Geyser. For the stick rate, because the way TubeMogul is set up, they’ve got relationships with those sites, so they’ve given API the back end access to the sites so it’ll load it straight in there and you’re getting stats back. It’s really quite easy to target those videos and then go after a keyword phrase. When you do your Google video search, you can have six, seven, eight positions within that Google search for that phrase.

Obviously some videos and some keyword phrases people aren’t going to be searching for videos based on those topics. Again this comes back to measure twice, cut once. Do your market research and make sure you’re using Market Samurai or some tool.

Ed Dale: It takes two seconds. You type in the main phrase that you’re targeting and add the word video. See what Market Samurai spits back at you. What are people typing? Are they looking for videos? Are there any words and phrases that have a relation? Is there any traffic to speak of? We use video submission services, either Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul and I must do some more testing on TubeMogul because we tend to use Traffic Geyser.

What makes me cry, if they had done that work in market research, is they’d know what to call the video. They’d know how to tag it properly for maximum effect. Videos are like any other piece of content, and yet people haven’t treated them like any other piece of content. Any links that go back to that video are back links.

Of course now we start to stretch into the off page factors of SEO which is what it gets to be all about. After you’ve launched your content, there’s nothing more you can do in terms of on page factors, that’s it, you’re done. Anything you change has to happen over a long period of time.

Then the focus switches to the off page factors and getting back links. Of course back links to those videos are so powerful.

David Jenyns: And no one is doing it.

Ed Dale: No. We’ve been experimenting with this for the last six months or so and it is literally shooting fish in a barrel at the moment. This is an arbitrage situation, there is no question about it. If you’re listening to this, it’s something you need to look at because the average YouTube video would have less than five back links.

If you want to test this out, it’s very simple. You just type any phrase into Google, you’ll see the videos come up in the universal search, usually they’ll be in position five or six, sometimes even higher.

Just grab the url of that, go to Yahoo and type link: and then the url and have a look at how many back links there are. Or alternatively, if you want to be a super ninja and use Market Samurai, Market Samurai makes it even easier for you. You can just go and analyze that site and you’ll see how many back links there are. You’ll see where they’re coming from, what PR they are and all those sorts of things. The videos are getting just great traffic. They really are.

David Jenyns: There are a couple of things with the videos that we’re finding. Firstly, it’s important, once you’ve done your keyword research, name the video your keyword. So it will be keyword.move; before you upload, you upload it to YouTube. We find that helps. Then using different services, as far as getting those back links, and yes, at the moment there is this arbitrage opportunity.

I think this opportunity will be here for a long time, even when you drill down into niches like knitting. It’s going to take so long before it filters through. It’s still an easy opportunity in internet marketing. So that obviously will happen. Porn usually catches up first, not that they’re putting porn on YouTube, but then internet marketing is a few steps behind. Once that hits, it will still take a long time before it filters down.

You can use things like AMA or Portal Feeder or any things like that where they allow you to post out using their blog network. A lot of them are now allowing you to embed the video. We’re finding that embedding the video is just as good as getting a link back to the video. That’s a sign that it is a popular video.

Ed Dale: Absolutely. Think about it from Google’s perspective. If someone’s deemed the video so good that they want it to be seen in their blog as opposed to just linking to it, again, physics, it’s much more likely to have more weight. If they think it is so cool that they’ve embedded it in their blog, that to me would carry slightly more weight than just a pure link.

Do I know that Google does that? No. Do I have any evidence of that? No. It’s amazing. Google pretty much, at the end, of the day has to work on common sense, because if they start not working on common sense, then somebody else will eat their lunch.

David Jenyns: Yes, and that will be when they’ll get gamed. So again, getting back to that Ken Giddens thing, replicate what happens in nature and just think through logically. You talked about some of the on page stuff, putting out excellent champagne content both in video and article format, and then you shifted into some of the off page factors. Because I know Valuing Websites is quite new, whether you’ve done it on this one, or perhaps drawing from another example, what then are the stages you go through for off page?

Ed Dale: Look, it’s back links. It’s all about back links. However, it’s all about the quality of those back links. Anybody can generate a thousand back links off social media sites or whatever. That used to work in the good old days. But Google realizes that’s not real and kills it and they make adjustments to their algorithm.

So at the end of the day, back links are what is vital and the quality of where you get those back links from. What’s interesting, and taking SEO advice from me, David, is pretty much like having Forrest Gump as you phone-a-friend in who Wants to be a Millionaire.

David Jenyns: Don’t undersell yourself, Ed.

Ed Dale: Again, I look at common sense. If CNN is linking to your little article, it’s got to be interesting. It’s got to be important. That’s what Google looks at and they say, ok. Whereas Ed Dale’s site that has one article on it and hasn’t been updated since 2004, does one link to a site, it’s not going to give much weight to that at all.

The analogy I try to give is in newspapers. If an article is published on the front page of The New York Times about you, a lot of people are going to see that and it’s probably more of national relevance. But if it’s published in the Ovens and Murray Advertiser, which is the 400 circulation paper at my old home town of Beechworth, it might have some relevance locally, and Google will show it locally I might add, but is it going to have any impact on a national level? No. Four hundred people are going to see it.

That’s the way Google works. It figures, wow, this big important site that we give authority to thinks that this content is worth linking to, we’re going to check this out. We’re going to rate this more highly than a site that has no authority, that has just been created or is an unused blog or whatever it happens to be. It’s as basic and advanced as that. It’s a bit like checkers. It’s two minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.

The thing that frustrates me enormously, and maybe people just don’t realize this. This is all back trackable, thanks to the magnificence of Market Samurai. You can now go into any keyword and pull up those front page sites. What people don’t realize then, is that you can go into each of those sites and analyze exactly what level of authority it has.

When we refer to authority, of course we mean page rank, PR people refer to it, it’s a logarithmic scale from 0 to 9. The thing that people really need to realize is that, and again, this is a fluffy number, not an exact number, but Google views a PR1 site to have ten times the authority of a PR0. A PR2 site has ten times the authority of a PR1 and so on. So if you have a link from a PR5 site, that’s worth hundreds of links of a PR0 site because of the way Google thinks about authority.

Given that this is the case, you can go into Market Samurai, and you can just research exactly where your competitors are getting their links from. You can find this exactly, not guess, but research it exactly. Then funnily enough if it happens to be a blog, or whatever it happens to be, why not send them an email and ask them to link to your blog? Or you could make a comment on their blog and link it back to you.

People tend to use a sledge hammer to do their back linking. There are some brilliant services out there in terms of back linking. AMA is one that immediately comes to mind that does a very good job. They will provide links over time that have some actual value, which is a brilliant service.

Otherwise people take the complete other end of the spectrum and they have a high tech sweat shop in the Philippines or India or Costa Rica or wherever it happens to be and they just pay people to just go and get links wherever they possible can. Most of that effort is wasted, of course, because they come up as spam comments and people who own the blogs knock them off or they just go on blogs that Google has already written off millions of years ago.

I think you can be a lot smarter than that. You can use Market Samurai to target sites that have authority already and that you can provide some specific content for and you can bring a bit of brains to it. If we’re talking about Viagra, you’re talking about the hardest, smartest, baddest, meanest, black hat and do anything to stay on top and I mean that, we’ll threaten anybody literally type of stuff.

The markets I love, as you well know, are where real stuff is being sold to real people, hobbyists and how tos and all sorts of things where there is nowhere near the competition. That’s where this stuff really works effectively and you don’t have to work as hard to do it.

David Jenyns: I think with reverse engineering what your competition is doing as well, you can begin to pick out, is this keyword worth going after? You can sit there and know what the value of my product is and then look at what the competition is doing to get that position and using some of the analysis tools find out how much traffic that particular keyword’s getting. Then you can say, is it worth me investing $1000 to hire this person to get enough links to take this position? You can then pick those battles.

I think that right there, the idea of reverse engineering your competition, is something that can just completely open the landscape up and it’s like you’re knowing where to punch and not wasting any energy.

Ed Dale: You’d know this. How many times do you ask someone you’re trying to help out on a site and you ask them what are the top ten phrases that are delivering traffic? They don’t know and they haven’t gone through and reverse engineered all this. It’s such a shame, because the only thing it’s costing you is time, particularly with something like Market Samurai, it’s so easy. In the old days, this used to take a huge amount of research, now, not even close. It’s just so much easier. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.

Of course there is another quantifier here, Dave, which is really interesting. You should also know how much that traffic, and Market Samurai tells you this too, how much it will cost you for the pay for click of that equivalent phrase. You will then know the average cost per click for that particular phrase in that particular market. You will start to see value for what that is worth to you.

Then, if you can do that and you know your conversions, and you know if you’re getting x visitors, you’re going to make y sales which is worth z dollars and you can factor that back and understand how much you can afford to pay for traffic and make a decent profit. It’s all the maths. It’s cool maths. It’s exciting maths. But people don’t do it and that’s a tragedy.

David Jenyns: I think once you do start to learn your numbers, and this comes down to understanding things like the lifetime value of a client, you can understand how much you can spend to acquire that client. Then the name of the game really becomes how many clients can I acquire that’s under the price that I’m going to get out of them in a lifetime. Then your marketing budget effectively becomes unlimited.

Where I see a lot of people go wrong, especially with the market research stuff, is once you start in on that, it’s very easy to just get caught up in the market research and then have trouble going through to implementation. By doing the market research, you’re sitting there and designing a trading system. You’re looking for that holy grail, that perfect system, or that perfect keyword. Sometimes you just need to do that research and then dive straight in.

I’m interested to get your thoughts on how to get over that.

Ed Dale: That’s a huge issue, massive, for two reasons. One, it can be like educational crack cocaine, people get so addicted to designing the trading system in your neck of the woods, or doing the research and learning about something, getting all high on learning how to do something that they actually don’t end up doing it, or they don’t put their trading system to the test. This is insane. The only reason we’re doing all of this, is because the information that you’re getting from Google itself is not gospel.

It’s just like in trading, past results are no indicator of future events. They can give you guides and you can get good at analyzing them based on your judgment and history, don’t get me wrong. At the end of the day, there is nothing like getting a blog up, targeting the phrase and seeing how it ranks, doing the work to get it ranked and then seeing the actual traffic coming through. That is the ultimate test.

Everything we do inside the Thirty Day Challenge is all about getting you to that point, which is, is this market worth going to all that time and effort into? It kills me that people have this emotional bank account of how much effort they can put into something before they decide, forget this. I’m going to go and watch Avatar for the third time.

David Jenyns: Good film.

Ed Dale: Great film. If you spend all this effort, you’ve got this bank account of effort and energy and if you spend all of that on knocking out the product, first of all just doing the research, you’re never going to get something launched.

Seth Godin in his latest book called Linchpin which is a ripper. Tribes was one and Linchpin is just superb. It talks about himself wanting to be an idea shipper, not an idea maker. I love that. What a great phrase. Be an idea shipper.

The distinction is this. Anybody can come up with an idea. We can brainstorm markets; you and I could go on for hours about different markets that we could get into and different things. This is what I admire about you. You ship your ideas. Most people don’t ship. What I mean by shipping is, you deliver a product.

Valuing Websites is an example of a shipped idea. It’s a shipped product. Will it be a super success, will it be a moderated success, or just coast along? Not sure. One thing I do know, it won’t be a dud because we’ve done the research. All this market research and all this traffic testing and so on will never tell us how successful something will be, but it can help us avoid a huge amount of time and spending all of our currency in our emotional bank account by going after something that is a dud and is never going to work despite your best intentions.

David Jenyns: I can see already there is a huge correlation between the trading niche and the idea of the way people design trading systems.

Ed Dale: The fundamentals are the same. If I’ve got any distinction, if I’ve been able to do anything with my time on the planet, it’s to realize that the fundamentals are absolutely incontrovertible, regardless of niche market or system. The fundamentals in finding a good trading system are identical to a good marketing system for a new website. They are identical for opening up a hairdressing salon.

The tactics are different. The tools that you might have to use are different, but at the end of the day, it’s research, you need to get traffic, you need to figure out conversion and eventually you have to have a product. With a trading system, the best systems are all about helping you say no.

David Jenyns: Exactly right. That’s what a trading system should be, it should be keeping you out of the market.

Ed Dale: Exactly. What is human nature? I want to get in, I want to participate. You could apply this to poker, you could apply this to buying businesses. You’re in the business of buying businesses, so let’s buy businesses. Let’s get in there and buy a site. The Bransons of the world, who are perceived as these great risk takers, read their biographies, they’re not risk takers at all. They’re actually very conservative. Ed Turner from CNN actually tries to mitigate all his risk in something.

Branson now has got it to such a level that all he does is lend his name for 50% of a product. That’s awesome. He has no risk whatsoever. I suppose if he attached his name to a whole bunch of things that didn’t work, his brand and his name worth would go down over time.

David Jenyns: Did you see his latest adventure? They brought out the prototype images of the submarine. How good is he?

Ed Dale: All these people have a fundamental in common, and that is they have systems for no. They have systems which they absolutely follow, and they don’t call them systems. They call them all sorts of things. Somebody might call them a process, some might call it a gut feel. I don’t care what they call them. They’re all the same thing. They’re about keeping you out of something so you don’t spend that precious energy on something that’s never going to give you any sort of result.

David Jenyns: I think you offered some really helpful advice there as far as some of the mistakes people make. You mentioned the idea of not researching, you mentioned also on the flip side, the yin and the yang, which is not taking action as well, the ability to say no.

Do you see any other ones, because I know you work with a lot of new people when they’re starting out, especially through the Thirty Day Challenge. What are one or two of the biggest mistakes that you just think, that is just what is holding you back?

Ed Dale: Ok, we mentioned a couple, analysis paralysis, as they say, where people get caught up in analyzing something and they get into this loop which is a negative loop. They never actually get something out and test it. In the Thirty Day Challenge we run up against this a lot.

We’ve just been talking about how all these systems are designed to keep you out of the market, so to speak. In the Thirty Day Challenge, what we do, we want you to get into the market but we want you to get into the market smart, with no risk. I think this is the other element. What you want to do is, you want to have systems, and I suppose the analogy in trading, Dave, is once you’ve created that system, to give it some real world tests. But you do it with limits in place.

Now I’m no trader, but you have all your systems in place so you know that if this all goes pear shaped, you know what your ultimate downside is. Anybody who goes into something knows things. The trouble is, tragically, most people when they go into something don’t know what their downside is, they haven’t put in these limits, they haven’t put in these stops.

To apply that in Thirty Day Challenge language, what do we do? We say, use a free account here at WordPress Direct and in fifteen minutes, and we’ll show you how to do it, it will take you a little bit of time the first time you do it because it’s all new and it’s tricky for you, but it won’t cost you a cent. Create a blog. Spend $8 and please only spend $8 on a domain name. Rather than guess a domain name, let’s use our Market Samurai research and it’s free trial, so you haven’t even had to pay for Market Samurai to do a test.

Let’s throw those up, let’s put them in, let’s use Traffic Bug and its free trial to get the thing indexed. Now let’s roll our sleeves up and do some effort and let’s create some content and some links and back links to get things cracking and let’s see what happens.

What have people risked? They’ve risked time and $8 for a domain name, but that’s it. We even mitigate against that because we say down the track, hey, if it didn’t work out, here’s how to sell the site on Flipper and Thirty Day Challenge created sites that are typically selling for $75 to $100. So they’re even making a little bit of money on the $8 for the domain name.

David Jenyns: Better than a poke in the eye.

Ed Dale: Better than a poke in the eye, that’s for sure. That’s what we talk about, we talk about that risk mitigation. I have a belief system, which is there is no excuse to go into any business with risk, with any risk except time. That is pretty controversial, because people consider businesses to be inherently risky. They’re only risky if you don’t do the research. Why am I doing online businesses and not like in the old days a suit business or a coffee shop or whatever it happens to be? The reason is, you can find out so much before you have to spend a single cent. That’s the key thing.

Trading systems are interesting too.

David Jenyns: You can back test a lot before you put money in.

Ed Dale: Here’s where the analogy comes into it again. Fundamentals are fundamentals. In trading systems, the true test at the end of the day though is when you test it with real money. To take another market, in sports betting, whenever there is a paper competition, like when it’s a paper trading system, and it’s paper betting like on the English football team or something like that, I dominate. Seriously. I am brilliant at it.

David Jenyns: The moment your money goes in though…

Ed Dale: Exactly. The moment I put actual money on something, I go to water.

David Jenyns: That’s why you make a plan.

Ed Dale: Exactly. I don’t have the constitution for it, ok but at least I recognize that. Here’s the thing. What I do realize for any system to be truly tested, you have to test it in the heat of the marketplace. That goes for any marketplace, any trading system, any website, gambling system, you have to test it in the fire of the marketplace.

A classic example is, a client of mine the other day, a really clever guy, did a really good deal with getting banner advertising on a site in his particular niche. By the way, just as an aside, we’re talking about hot traffic trends. It’s hilarious because it’s like going back to old school banner advertising, really targeted in niche markets on websites. It’s really doing well. But it’s a game you have to play with money. It’s not something where you can go in and get free traffic. You have to have a bank as both you and I say in our respective businesses.

So he said, here’s this deal, I’ll pay x thousands of dollars over the course of the year. They get this many impressions etc. It looked like a great deal. Plus it was a PR 7 site and he would get a link back to his site. It was a great deal all round. But I said to him, you know what? This, on paper, looks like a good deal why don’t we write to them and say, this looks like a great deal? We’re very keen to do it, but we always trial our advertising. So can we do a deal? We’ll sign up for twelve months, but we have a one month option, we do a one month’s trial. As long as we hit this x, y and z target, which you’re saying, by the way, we should get, then we’re in.

If not, you keep the money we’ve spent obviously this month, but we’ll part as friends, it just didn’t work out for our particular market.

David Jenyns: Smart business.

Ed Dale: Smart. It’s being smart about something and just having that little bit extra element of thinking about risk mitigation before, mitigation is a horrible $20 word, covering your bases, call it what you will, but just ask yourself the question, ok, what can go wrong here and how can I protect against that? Ultimately, isn’t that how you design a trading system?

David Jenyns: That’s exactly what you do.

Ed Dale: What can go wrong and how do I protect against that while retaining enough upside to make it worth my while?

David Jenyns: It’s funny, you were talking about these fundamentals applying across different areas. I would be interested to find out, those key insights, if you looked back, they would be the leverage points. They would be the points where once you got that, a lot of other things started to click together. I’m wondering whether you have any other leverage points which you can look back on. It might even be something like, when I started getting my customer support outsourced, I saw that as a leverage point because it freed my time up.

What are some of those key leverage points, looking back over your career,that you identify as crucial?

Ed Dale: The first two which I’ve talked about are massive. They are doing the due diligence, and if you want to break that down, what is due diligence? It’s asking the right questions and never making an assumption. The best interviewers, the people who are best at doing due diligence, doing the research, are the ones who ask all the questions.

I bet you’ve had this conversation in your head. I’ve had this conversation in my head all the time. There’s a little yellow flag, a little alarm bell going off about something. Maybe I’m buying a car. For whatever reason I’m thinking, oh, I’m not going to ask that. You don’t feel like you can ask it because you think you might come across as sounding stupid, or whatever, or you’re embarrassed. You don’t want to come across as not being knowledgeable.

David Jenyns: They’re the questions you have to ask.

Ed Dale: They’re the questions you must ask. I forget who it was, I wish I could credit the person, but if you ever watched Columbo the old TV series, he was like this doddering detective. People always underestimated him because he just seemed like this bumbling fool. But that’s brilliant. It’s brilliant to be the bumbling fool in your marketplace.

If you’re the one who’s asking all the key questions, that’s good. Due diligence is asking all of the questions, and getting an answer. Asking the questions and getting an answer, shutting up, not answering for the other person. Let them tell you the answer. If that means you being quiet for a while, be quiet for a while, ok. Human beings abhor silence, they really do. If you ask a question and they’re thinking about it for a minute, you’re so likely to jump in and try to help them.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, we tend to help them towards the answer that we want, as opposed to the reality of the answer. So ask great questions, and recognize the power of the question and the power of spending just a little bit of time to come up with some great questions before you go into that situation, huge. Market research, huge. Knowing that risk mitigation, again, think about it, how powerful are these questions, when you really cut it down, all of what I’ve just said is all about asking the right type of questions at the right time.

Then I suppose the net huge one for me, Dave, you will have seen me ranting about it all last year. I was looking online and at online niches, why some people are successful and why a lot aren’t. What are the core differences? I’ve got this privileged position, if you will, of literally seeing thousands of people with these businesses, thanks to the Thirty Day Challenge.

So I was asking, what is the core difference? One of these things is what I term market leadership. What I mean by market leadership is that the people who are really successful, either them or a pseudonym, it doesn’t have to be them, it can be a character, like Elton John, he’s Dwight something, but they have a leadership position. What I mean by that is that they take a position in their marketplace. They are in discussions. They are the ones who speak at conferences. They’re the ones who create blog posts.

Tragically, one of the downsides of social media, is that it has tricked a lot of people into thinking, if I retweet something in my marketplace that’s interesting, I’ve just done as much effort as if I’d created a piece of content and had others retweet. They think they’re doing something without actually doing something.

Retweeting is good, don’t get me wrong. It’s important to be the one who’s delivering information into your market. But when I started to look at this leadership, I said, ok, how are these people becoming market leaders and again, to mention Seth Godin again, at the time I was looking at this, he wrote the book Tribes. He calls them tribe leaders, a great analogy. How do people become this?

I realized, and this is where it hit me like a bolt from the blue. The only difference between someone who is active in their marketplace and one who is not, is their ability to put content into that marketplace. What I mean by content, it could be a blog post, it could be a pod cast, it could be a video, it could be a PDF, it could be an interview like we’re doing now, it could be anything. But they are a net contributor into their marketplace. They have positions, they have a viewpoint and they participate.

By doing this, and by doing that on a regular basis, now all of a sudden people in that marketplace, you’re the one being retweeted. By the way, what happens when you’re retweeted? You’re getting back links. This is the best SEO strategy in the world. Create original content that has a point of view in whatever media. I don’t care about the medium. You can use photography as your medium. You could use drawings as your medium, but you are a direct contributor into the marketplace.

For me, this insight has changed everything. It’s not, unfortunately, without its downsides. As soon as I use the term leader, a lot of people would have flashbacks, where we would say here in Australia, dakked or wedgied in the PE room by the cheer leaders or the captain of the football team. There is often a negative connotation with the term leadership for a lot of people.

That corresponds exactly demographically with people who are shy about wanting to be involved in a marketplace. This is a human tragedy. Whatever happened in their past, means that they’re shy. Because of their shyness, they’re hesitant to put out something in the marketplace that could be criticized. So creating that content was a huge realization.

That’s all you have to do. I’m actually doing some tests at the moment. You pick a marketplace and you do this, within ninety days, people are talking about you. You publish content five days a week, not great content, because when you start, it won’t be great.

Everybody thinks Charles Dickens started out with ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. He did fifteen different versions of that opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities. Stephen King busts out content, then he has to go back and edit and edit it. What we see in his magnificent writing, is the product of all these editors and himself reviewing and reviewing. A Gary Halbert sales letter is the product of fifteen to twenty drafts, where it is refining and refining and editing.

Unfortunately in school we’re taught to edit as we go, which is tragic. If you check out any decent writer, who is a good content creator, they divorce content creation from editing. They just get the stuff done. It’s going to be rubbish, and accept that it is rubbish. They get the stuff done.

Then, Dave, the other element to this, is, and this is a huge realization, if you want to do anything in a market, you have to be a market leader. Why? Do you have to be a market leader to be successful in a market? No, until someone who knows what you do and is also prepared to be a market leader comes into the marketplace. Then you’re messed up because they’ll take over from you.

Why? It’s a fundamental law. As a general rule, people buy from people they know.
If you’ve got a choice, same product, same service, same everything, and you know person A, you don’t know person B, who are you going to buy from? You buy from the person you know. It’s physics.

We have to get out there and we’ve finally got out there and we’ve got the guts and the determination to put out content on a regular basis. Here’s this next fundamental. This is a really hard one to accept. No person on this planet ever has been 100% liked. This has huge ramifications. As soon as you stick your neck up, amazingly, in my case, in your case I can understand Dave, but in my case, there are not only people who don’t like what I do, but they actually have the nerve to put those feelings in writing and criticize me.

The first time I read a criticism of what I had done, completely unfairly in my opinion, it hurt, badly. I don’t think I did any other work that day. I was just raging about how this idiot could have possibly written this about me. The first time this happens to you, and can you remember the first time this happened to you, Dave?

David Jenyns: That’s why I stopped doing my e support.

Ed Dale: There are some people who unbelievably do not like what you’re doing and your style will rub them the wrong way. This is important. Here’s why. Once I understood this, it enabled me to move on. Think about this for a second. It has to be a part of the human condition to ensure that someone is not ever 100% liked. Think of the horrific consequences if there was anybody in this world who was 100% revered. That person would have ultimate and horrific power.

If there was somebody who existed that had no criticism whatever, as a society we wouldn’t exist past a couple of years. Think about it, Mother Theresa had critics, Gandhi had lots of critics. Name any popular person on the planet and they have critics. It comes with the territory. No one can be 100% liked. It’s part of the human condition. I think once people fundamentally realize this, it certainly helped me, realizing every time I put something out, at best, someone will disagree with me.

You know what? This is the other thing that Halbert taught me. It’s great to be disagreed with. The worst thing you can do is put out stuff that everyone blandly accepts. You want people to either really agree with it or really hate it. That will generate action and energy. When everybody has antipathy for it, then you’re not going to motivate anybody to do anything. That’s why you have to take a view, take a position, you have to take a side.

If I could add a couple more fundamentals to this whole thing, that would be those.

David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head with that whole market leadership and I can see that as being the real key. We all know through any sort of sales training and that sort of thing, people are crying out to be told what to do. They’re looking for a strong leader to show them what it is they should be doing, because they’re not sure.

What are some of the qualities of a strong leader? A strong leader is someone who says what needs to be said when it needs to be said. He doesn’t care whether or not he’s loved or he’s hated, he says it because it needs to be said. That’s a real quality of a strong leader.

Similarly, that idea of adding value, not only just saying things to create a stir, to polarize people, but also adding value to that community so that you’re seen as that content creator. I think that right there is a fantastic insight.

You talked about something earlier as far as those little questions that pop up in your mind which you know you should ask and that’s when you should ask them. Coming to the tail end of the interview, I want to find out, because you have magnificent insight into what is coming down the pipe. The mobile revolution, and I’m not talking about mobile phones, because that is ubiquitous. What I’m talking about is us consuming information mobile, in new ways and having it come over the air. That is a huge trend. I know this one maybe is something you weren’t expecting but can you give us some insight, for 2010, what are some of the things on the horizon in the world of just online marketing?

I know it is a broad question, take it in any direction you like. What are some things coming down the pipe that are still on the horizon?

Ed Dale: Ok, well. I think first this concept of content as the best form of SEO, is still considered a relatively radical thing at the moment. I think as people put that into effect, they’ll see that. The other thing you talked about to inoculate against criticism, is if you’re putting out great content all the time, it does make it hard for people to unfairly attack you.

One of the side benefits, we certainly didn’t start the Thirty Day Challenge this way, but one of the side benefits has been, if I put something out in the marketplace that is very expensive for example, the more expensive your product is, the more anger it will generate. It’s mainly because people would like to do it, but they haven’t got the money, or whatever. This generates a blame thing and because of that, that generates criticism.

For me, because of the content of the Thirty Day challenge, it’s nice to say, here you go, here it is all for free, get cracking, you can do all of that. So content I think is going to be a huge trend coming up.

Two platforms which I think just have to be incorporated in any ongoing marketing mix going forward are Twitter and Facebook. I spend every January in the United States, and you look at all the businesses there and they’re all promoting their Facebook page and their Twitter. The stats on Facebook do not lie. People are fleeing from the ‘internet’ and finding a safe haven in Facebook, where the only people they have to deal with are their friends, and they can control their experience.

As marketers, we have to go where the crowds are. The crowds are unquestionably inside a Facebook. Now that means different things for different markets and you have to test it, but I don’t think anybody can ignore Twitter or Facebook as part of their marketing strategy in 2010. They’re platforms.

In terms of technology, I don’t know if you know this Dave, but I’m a little bit of a tiny fan of the iPhone.

David Jenyns: Really.

Ed Dale: I don’t know if you picked that up. It’s very subtle and obviously I don’t like to talk about it. Actually I’m being very sarcastic for those who haven’t heard me before.

David Jenyns: An Apple fan boy.

Ed Dale: It wouldn’t come even close to call me that. But I argue against that. If Apple produced something that was rubbish I would be happy to tell people about that.

David Jenyns: But they never have and they never will.

Ed Dale: They have. The Mighty Mouse, that was bad.

David Jenyns: The new one is supposed to be quite good.

Ed Dale: The new one is awesome. I had the privilege of being in San Francisco and seeing the iPad launch. We could spend another hour talking about the marketing lessons of a company that published exactly five words and generated seven times the press media of Barak Obama and his State of the Union address. There are so many lessons to be learnt there, but I won’t talk about them now or we’ll go on for another ten hours. What was said there was how people are accessing their information is changing. It’s changing far quicker than we could have ever imagined.

Three years ago, think about this Dave, three years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist. How did we live? We must have been like cave people. Actually, ironically, you might be listening to this on your iPhone on your iPod or in your car as a pod cast. People are changing the devices they’re using to consume their information. As marketers, we need to be attuned to that particularly as we’re going through 2010. In 2007 the iPhone didn’t exist. In 2010 seventy million of the things exist.

Let me put that into a slight piece of context for people. There has been nothing in the history of man, nothing that has sold seventy million units of anything. It’s unbelievable. No device has ever sold that amount in that period of time. It’s inconceivable. Whether you like Apple or don’t like Apple, the android phone, the smart phones, people are consuming more and more of their information in a mobile format. I think the iPad is just going to take that and better it.

This is where you start to say, is this just the fan boy coming out? Mark my words. The iPad is not, like it’s being portrayed in some of the geek press, it’s not just a big iPhone. Geeks are not the market for the iPad. It’s my father-in-law and my mother-in-law. It’s baby boomers. It’s people who don’t care what the device is made up of, what’s inside it, what’s the processer, they just want it to do stuff.

They just want to pick it up and easily look up a Foxtel or some sort of cable channel show and tap a button on the screen and it will magically record and sink in with their device. That’s all they want it to do. They’re not interested in the tech. They just want to see photos of their grandchildren and they just want to be able to do that by touch.

I think as marketers, we need to be aware of it. I’m certainly getting all our e books translated into ePub format which is the open format which the iPad will use to distribute books. It’s beautiful. Once these things are released, go into your local Apple store and try it. I dare you to walk out without buying one. I dare you. It is an experience like I cannot describe.

David Jenyns: I’ve got to say they have launched the right product at the right time. They’ve come out with an excellent price and with the way the apps are going to work, the smartest thing they ever did on the iPhone was having it open so developers can come in there and I can see such huge potential for the iPad. Once developers get stuck in there and make apps specific for it, I agree.

Ed Dale: I’ll ask you Dave, because you’re an iPhone man, how many of Apple’s actual applications do you use on the iPhone compared to third party ones?

David Jenyns: Probably just a handful. I use five or six times more third party applications.

Ed Dale: Exactly. And that’s it. I can’t wait. I’m sitting here talking to you, and I’ve got a yellow pad, the classic Gary Halbert yellow legal pad sitting on my knee here for notes. I can’t wait for that to be an iPad. Mind mapping just with you fingers, will be great. We’ve learnt more about our brain in the last two years than through history. There are some amazing books: Brain Rules, a huge number of great things.

They’ve proved there is something in our wiring, in our genetics, that when we’re actually physically writing the information, we are going to retain it more than if we type or do any other sort of memory saving recording skill. It’s an absolute scientific fact and they’ve tracked it and they’ve done it.

What’s exciting to me is that the iPad will give you the best of all worlds. You’ll get that digital saving ability to keep it and the ability to have those notes wherever you happen to be, but you get the unlimited yellow notepad, you don’t have to keep replacing it. If I leave this one at home, I can’t work because it’s got all my stuff on it for today and I’d be lost. I use a pen and paper, because as geeky as I am, I realize there are fundamental things that are very analogue and very fundamental.

David Jenyns: Drawing on your experience with Gary Halbert, Gary Halbert used to talk about the idea, and a lot of great copywriters talk about the idea, of taking excellent sales pieces and rewriting them out by hand. The idea is that it’s connecting your hand to your brain and it’s the closest you can get to the person who created that excellent sales copy piece. It’s effectively modeling.

Ed Dale: I wish Gary was alive today to see the amount of stuff that he used to talk about that was just gut feel to him that is now scientifically proven because of our ability to see what’s going on inside the brain without having to cut people open. I really wish he was, because he would be sitting back there and saying, I told you so. He would be.

I did that. I sat down and did that. It is an interesting thing, because so many people will read that. When you first start doing that, gosh, it is tedious. Any distraction from writing out a sales letter is welcome. Your hand starts to hurt a bit, and you say, is this really doing anything? If you actually do it, and you do it as an exercise, it helps. The next time you come to writing a piece, you are amazed how much easier it is. You are fuelling up your brain.

We know now how the brain is working. We know the brain requires fuel. We know, for example, scientifically, that writer’s block is really the brain equivalent of running out of fuel for your car. If you’ve got enough fuel, enough information, writer’s block is never a problem.

It becomes a problem when two things happen. One is a lack of information, and two is this internal resistance. You’re afraid to put something on paper because once you’ve committed something to paper, now you’re going to be judged. Now people will tell you if it is good or bad. If you don’t do it, nobody will judge you. Often your brain, thinking that it is protecting you, will say, I’ll tell you what, it is better not to do anything than be judged.

That’s important because, sadly, back however many millions of years ago, you’re sitting there and then you hear this crack and this guttural roar and you turn around and out of the corner of your eye, not twenty meters away is a saber tooth tiger. Now if you run, you are dead because it is that much further. Think about animals. What do they do when they’re caught out in the open? What do they often do, like a rabbit? It freezes and pretends it’s dead. It’s what you’re meant to do with grizzly bears. This is core. This is genetic material over millions of years.

Seth Godin talks about this quite a bit in Linchpin. This lizard part of our brain, that core, the oldest part of our brain is just about protecting you. It’s all it is, it’s so you can breed. It wants to keep you healthy enough so you can breed with somebody. When you’re no use for breeding with somebody, it wants to pop you off. That’s all it is and all it does.

The trouble is, in this modern world, that protection mechanism really causes some heartache when you’re in the business of creating content. It still equates you publishing that blog post with you staying still so you’re not eaten by a saber tooth tiger. Somebody writing some words on a computer somewhere, which has no physical impact whatever, your brain still sees the same way as being torn limb from limb by a saber tooth tiger. That is a problem. It’s a real problem.

Here’s the cool thing. By actually acknowledging that, and actually saying it to yourself and really believing it, that’s half the battle over. The other half of the battle is to sit in the chair and knock something out and acknowledge straight off the bat, this is going to be rubbish. This is going to total rubbish, but I don’t care. I am going to belt out for the next thirty minutes this article. I am not going to go back and edit.

Then I’m going to let it rest, then I’m going to come back and edit it with fresh eyes. I’m going to promise myself I’m not going to publish anything without editing it first. It’s even worse when you write something, and say, this is actually good. You want to get it straight up on your blog. No, sit on it. What do all the great copywriters do Dave? They finish off their first draft. What do they do?

David Jenyns: You’ve got to leave it time to simmer.

Ed Dale: Stick it in the drawer. And again, the science now backs all of this up. It’s how our brain works. The subconscious part of our brain is 70% of the processing power. It’s scientifically proven now, it works away in the background. When you sleep, it works on the stuff you’re working on. Your brain is there to help you. It really does, it wants to be your friend, it wants to look after you.

Sadly of course, it also wants to protect you. That is good, because you don’t want to walk up and slap a bear. You don’t want to forget what is dangerous. If you had no fear, your would continually do those things and we wouldn’t exist as a race for very long. I find this stuff so fascinating which you can probably pick.

David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head. I can see as we talk, some of the influences coming out. You’ve already mentioned a few people like Gary Halbert and Steve Jobs obviously, and Seth Godin. I know from our previous chats, another is Richard Bandler. I’m interested to find out in the world of online thought leaders, who do you keep an eye on and who you respect what it is that they’re doing in generating content and adding value?

Ed Dale: Look, in our little neck of the woods guys like, I hesitate to mention people in the sense that I’ll leave people out and it will be by my pathetic lack of memory as opposed to their lack of influence on me.

Frank Kern is one who immediately comes to mind who I’ve worked with extensively over the years. He is a dear friend and he has this ability with words which drives me crazy obviously. For example, I struggled with this talking about being a market leader. How does he describe it? He says, try to be the coolest person in your market. What a great distinction! Another phrase that he said just recently is, what have you done today to make your market a better place? What a great question!

Again, scientifically proven now, your brain will provide you with the best possible answer. Anthony Robbins has been talking about this for twenty years, but now it is science, hard, proven science. If you ask the right question to your brain, it will give you the right answer. Your brain will give you, with all the information you’ve ever collected over your entire existence on earth, it will weigh all of that up and give you the best possible answer.

David Jenyns: Ask and you shall receive.

Ed Dale: Exactly. It’s biblical. It’s fundamental. But, here’s the thing, for most of us, we don’t like the answer. Mine is, get out of the chair and walk for thirty minutes. Put down the Tim Tam. How can I be fitter, how can I not get these colds all the time? That’s what my brain’s telling me, it is absolutely correct. I just don’t like the answer. It happens to the best of us. Can I tell you who my greatest influence is?

David Jenyns: Please.

Ed Dale: My greatest influence is the Google Reader.

David Jenyns: Yes I know you’re a fan of Google Reader. You got me onto that one too.

Ed Dale: Now let me explain what that is, because a lot of people don’t know. My Google Reader is now my ultimate influence. Why do I say that? What Google Reader is, it’s a news gatherer. It gathers news from all the sites around the globe on the topics that I’m interested in and the people I’m interested in and the people I follow. It funnels it all into this one place. Rather than having to go to a hundred different websites like I did in the old days, this information is delivered to me.

Once you become a bit of a ninja of Google Reader, you can consume vast amounts of information in minutes. It is just amazing. You combine it with iPhone and an app that I use called NetNewsWire and it means any time you’ve got a spare thirty seconds, you can be getting fuelled up as I say. You can be getting inspired. You can be getting information from cool people about the topics and stuff that you’re interested in.

I use it for sports. I barrack for Arsenal in the English Premier league. I can maintain a brilliant conversation about what is going on with Arsenal even though I’ve watched two games this year. I follow all the blogs and the pod casts. In some ways, Google Reader is my greatest influence now.

Now, the thing about Google Reader is, it is not only your influence, it’s also like my own personal Encyclopedia Britannica. Every article, everything that comes into my Google Reader is recorded and for as long as Google does this, it means it is searchable and you can search it by criteria, it is sortable. This is so powerful.

We do some lessons in the Thirty Day Challenge Dave which are completely free on how to set up Google Reader and maybe you could send out some links for people. Let me ask you Dave. What’s Google Reader done for you?

David Jenyns: One, it is a fantastic time saving tool but two, it keeps you on the cutting edge. It means as things are breaking, you’re on that breaking edge because you’ve pretty much got your ear to the ground for all the things that are important to you in your niche. It is the most efficient way to consume information. In a world where we’re bombarded with so much information, that it would be impossible to consume it all, it’s just a godsend.

Ed Dale: Yes, I completely agree. If you talk about the single thing that has influenced my workflow, because I know nothing, I’m totally dumb. It’s only the work of others, yes, I’ve got so many influences. If I bring a skill, because I can barely walk and breathe at the same time, that is to say, ok, I just read an article about how penguins live in the Antarctic and then realize that there is a great lesson for photography in that because of these fundamentals.

If I’ve got any skill, it’s saying, wow, look at this cool thing this hairdresser did in the north of England, she got a whole bunch of clients in. For me not to put the blinkers and filters up, and to say this only applies to hairdressing, but to say what if we changed the word hairdressing and applied it to motor sports. Will it work?

You need to understand if you put the risk mitigation and everything in, that the worst thing you can do is a test that wastes some time, but it doesn’t waste because you’ve got a result. It’s just that particular result didn’t work. But then it might lead to something that does work. If I’ve got any skill, that is it.

David Jenyns: I think you’ve got a little more skill than that, and I know you’re definitely someone people should be watching.

Ed Dale: I’m really starting to get some chops in FarmVille.

David Jenyns: I’m holding off. I’m not too sure I want to be jumping into FarmVille.

You’d definitely be up there with all of those people you mentioned, even though you do play that down. Your skill is really quite strong in the way you can break it down and make it consumable for people at every level. If people want to find out more about you, they can follow you on Twitter, which is ed dale. What are some of the other ways people can keep in touch with you?

Ed Dale: My personal blog, heaven help you if you want to go and look at it, is tubbynerd.com, a name given to me by Frank Kern, thanks Frank. The other place we’ve mentioned a bit during the course of the interview was www.thirtydaychallenge.com. I love this and I’m finding out lots more people are doing this. People are using this to train assistants to understand how to use marketing for their traditional businesses or whatever it happens to be.

There’s just so much great information. We spent so much time laying it out and doing it properly and of course the best part of it is that it is completely, utterly free. There are no catches and you’re not pitched anything at the end.

People think there’s got to be a pitch. We don’t. The Thirty Day Challenge is a sacrosanct thing we do. It’s I suppose the equivalent of doing pro bono legal work. For eleven months of the year, we try and make as much money as humanly possible, for one month of the year we give back.

The important thing to realize is that it’s the best possible information. There are no punches pulled. It really is, as you well know, the latest cutting edge information for that year. The good thing is, of course, even though the Thirty Day Challenge is in August, we set it up now, so if you want to go there tomorrow and start, start. That’s it.

If I can leave you with a final fundamental, we were talking about fundamentals.

David Jenyns: Yes, please.

Ed Dale: There are heaps of them, but the other one is, that content creation and creativity and all these things is not a gift, it’s a habit. What I mean by that is something very practical. We talk about this in the Thirty Day Challenge, but let me tell you this. If you get into the habit of spending thirty minutes a day for thirty days taking action, actually applying the stuff we teach in the Thirty Day Challenge, by the end of that thirty days you will amaze yourself with how you’ve done. Don’t think about the outcome, just think about the process of turning up, sitting down and producing for that thirty minutes a day.

You will be amazed at what you get because again the fundamental there is that too many people get focused on the end goal. I want to make ten grand a month or whatever it happens to be. The best, and this applies to Olympians, to sports people, to anyone who does really well, anyone I know who does really well in any field knows the secret. The part that they enjoy the most is the process. It’s the act of turning up, sitting down and knocking out some work every day.

The other thing that would stun a lot of people is the actual productive length of time for most high achievers’ days. You’d be amazed. For most people it would be about an hour of hard core, this is what’s making them the big money. The rest of it is communication, and dealing with staff and just the general hubbub of life.

If you knock out a solid hour a day of creation of product or content or traffic building or something and you do that on a religious basis, you’re going to be so much ahead of someone who just tries to do it haphazardly in thirty days, I can’t tell you. Again, it is a fundamental. Walk for thirty minutes a day for thirty days. You’ll be a lot better off than you were when you started. Eat properly for thirty days. It’s getting the habit of creating.

If it’s writing you look at the first piece you did on day one and you compare it to day thirty, and you won’t recognize it. Unfortunately, we’re in a quick fix society. People want to take a pill, wake up in the morning and have every problem solved.

Another fundamental is that it just doesn’t work like that.

David Jenyns: I think that fundamental is key. I remember sitting on a mat in my gym as I was learning my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I was still new, six months in, sitting on the mat, asking my Sensei could he please show me chokes, arm bars and leg locks. He said, no, you need to practice the basics for pretty much the rest of your life. He said you focus on the basics and then everything else falls into place. You need to find out a few of those key repeatable things, you master those basics and everything else falls into place.

If you focus on the wrong things, you end up chasing your tail every time a new email pops into you email box about the latest whiz bang, magic bullet system. You’ll be buying that and you’ll be chasing that.

Ed Dale: That is absolutely so true.

David Jenyns: I’ve kept you well over our planned hour, and you’ve give so much there, Ed. You’re extremely generous with your time so I thank you for that. If people want to check you out they can check you out at the thirtydaychallenge.com. You can just Google it and it will come up. That is thirtydaychallenge.com. If they want to find more interviews they can head over to davidjenyns.com. Thanks again Ed.

Ed Dale: No worries, mate. It was awesome, I really enjoyed it.

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Leslie Rohde

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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.

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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.

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Dave Lakhani

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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Marty Rozmanith

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Name: Marty Rozmanith

Industry: Internet Marketing, Blog Publishing

Website: http://www.rozmanith.org/careers/about/

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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.

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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.

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Jonathan Mizel

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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.

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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.

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Dr. Ken Evoy

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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.

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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 his top affiliates, keep up the good work and all that sort of stuff. I really used to get a buzz when I’d get that cheque in the mail. In April 2006, I was lucky to chat with Ken. He gave me a call and we talked about a few different things: what I was doing as an affiliate because I’ve been in the top five percent of all SiteBuildIt affiliates since January 2005. I haven’t dropped out once since 2005.

I was one of the first affiliates to use the Don’t Buy SiteBuildIt. At the time I was advertising on Google and getting a 25% click through rate and it was huge. I was smashing it out of the park and I had Ken’s affiliate manager contact me and asked me whether or not I had something to share.

Sadly that technique did get a little bastardized for want of a better word. So many people started using it and it really did start to hurt the brand because you’d search for SiteBuild It, a company that I loved, and all you’d see is these ads, saying Don’t Buy SiteBuildIts. I think SiteBuildIt made a smart move a little while ago and said, look we’re going to have to stop this. It was something that worked in the early days but it really did move away.

When I chatted with Ken back in 2005, he asked me had I heard about a thing called web 2.0? This was back in 2005, well before Twitter, Facebook or MySpace were really in that vogue. I thought I was on the cutting edge and knew what was going on. I said, no, and you asked me, Ken, I don’t know if you even remember, but you said, have you heard about this web 2.0 thing which has since gone on to be massively huge, obviously. We all know where web 2.0 is these days.

At the moment he is the head of the ship over at SiteBuildIt. I know this is a huge intro, but they’ve got 40,000+ customers, 80,000+ affiliates. He’s built up a massive empire and I’m so honoured just to get a little bit of his time. So I’d like to welcome you to the call Ken.

Ken Evoy: Thanks very much David for that wonderful introduction. It has been an interesting and long and winding road from starting out with making SiteSell which was based on a hobby, and the penny mining stocks which was a mathematical model that I had developed to find basically good looking stocks.

It’s never given me pleasure just to make money just to make money so, when I got onto the internet to do a little research for these stocks, within a month I realized the internet was really an infinite number of niches. As opposed to being a consumer of information, which I was in my first month I was online, I decided it made an awful lot of sense to be a producer of information and to use that information to reach people with a similar interest that I had and to sell a product.

In those days, Amazon was getting started, and the big question was, could the net be actually used for commercial purposes? That’s when I set about basically teaching myself to write software, so I could take my little data base and turn it into a product. Even then it was very much like SiteBuildIt. It was a combination of an e book and a tool. How to build a website that would sell, writing good sales copy and finally how to get found by the search engines.

So over a period of a year, I learned how to do all that, and I launched a little product PennyGold and I think if you look up penny mining stocks, I think you’ll still see that old site, it’s goodbytes.com/pennygold, in the top ten. People still find it. They’ll send an email in asking for this. We sold a thousand copies at $1000. I thought it would take three years to do it. We sold out within a year and a half. We still get emails to this day from people who find that site, saying, I will pay anything for that, $5,000, $10,000. I have to have it. The answer from support is, what part of, it’s not for sale, do you not understand?

I still get emails from people who use that original software. A couple of months ago a very nice guy sent a golden penny and basically said, you changed my life. I bought your product, with my last $1000, borrowed a couple of thousand dollars from family, was in debt. Now I have a $600,000 house paid for, $700,000 in the bank, absolutely no debt. I do nothing but invest my own money and my friends’ money in return for a percentage and earn a very handsome living.

I was very happy for that chap, but I could not do that. It gives me no pleasure to make money just to make money. There’s nothing productive in that. It was kind of a hobby. It was an experiment in human psychology and developing a mathematical model to predict it. But once I knew it worked, and made quite a bit of money doing that, it became more interesting, once I found the internet to say, I wonder if I could turn this into a product and sell it? Based on all I learned from that, that’s where Make Your Site Sell came.

Make Your Site Sell was really the first book that was really at a reasonable price, hard core, based on experience, that worked, information on how to develop a site. Originally it was meant to sell but it grew into building traffic, the whole, everything you need to build a successful website. From there, through the branded books Make Your Knowledge Sell, Make You Words Sell and so on were written.

After a few years, we realized the vast majority of people loved these books, read these books but don’t use the books. It’s only a very small number of exceptional people who really can take information like that, use the information, figure it all out, turn it into a system and succeed. I’d say we’ve launched an awful lot of big careers, most of them internet marketing, not in the general business sphere, not in the small business sphere of raising turtles or whatever it is they happen to know and love. It’s a complicated thing to build a successful business.

Even back then it was very easy to put up a website, but not to build a successful business. So the bottom line was, we were going to go back to the PennyGold model. The PennyGold model was a combination of the book and tools  you needed in order to execute properly. If I’d just written a book about how to successfully invest in penny mining stocks, most people would not have done it properly. Give them the tools they need and suddenly everyday people are able to do extraordinary things.

I think that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learnt from SiteBuildIt, is remove the difficult part, the technical part, the part that requires you to really have been  95% average in high school and university in statistics, it’s all hard core left brain stuff. Take that away and it enables people to focus on what they know and love, their business, and they can really do extremely well.

That’s when we decided to leave books, and what started out as a very simple little site builder, grew into a series mostly aimed at affiliates. It grew into a complete ten day process, from brainstorming all the way through to monetizing at the other end. The basic concept of Make Your Site Sell which was making a site that sells.  Having the product  on the internet, a website is useless. It’s just a collection of words and pictures that sits on a hard disk someplace and if you don’t get traffic it might as well not exist at all, even if you spend $700,000 on it.

However if you build a site that delivers  content, that delivers the information that people are searching for, now you’re on the right track. Good content builds traffic when it’s properly formatted. Again, there is every tool in the SiteSell needed for what you should be creating a site about. You may be interested in snowboarding, but there’s a way you can turn snowboarding into something that is unprofitable and there’s a way you can sub niche it in a way that is going to be very profitable.

So proper brainstorming, keyword research is important. We invented the whole concept of a theme based content site. Back when search engine optimizers were laughing at that concept in the late 90s, we developed this in a series of articles that later became the Affiliate Masters course that became SiteBuildIt with the tools. The engines looked at more than the single pages. They look at entire sites, what they’re about, how well they’re respected in terms of inbound links and so forth.

Good content builds traffic but it also does more than build traffic, it pre sells. It builds your brand of one. I know a lot about cactus. I love to grow cactus. I did a site on cactus where we live. I can not only write well about it, knowledgably, I can speak to people who know the niche and understand that this guy really knows what he’s talking about. I’m building my brand of one, I’m building my credibility through just sheer great content. As that starts to happen, you start getting what’s called off page criteria.

The on page criteria, which is putting keywords in all the right spots on your page, basically was enough in the old days before Google, AltaVista and even other engines were measuring things like how many inbound links. When somebody clicks on a link in a search engine results page, how long do they stay away before they come back? They’re looking for other indications, not only was this relevant, but was this a good page and meets our searcher’s needs?

The next thing is, most of that you don’t need to really work on. If you develop great content, most of this happens. The exception is building a good inbound links program. You really as well as building good content, need to develop a good inbound links program from a variety of different resources, so that doesn’t mean just getting a list in Yahoo or a directory, but from a variety of resources get quality inbound links that tells search engines, hey, people like this site. They like it enough to link to it.

That starts raising your site the way the way a tide raises a boat in search engine results in general. So over time SiteBuildIt became this more and more comprehensive set of tools, that showed you how to build content, that showed you how to build content that would drive traffic, that would pre sell your traffic and finally now that you have hundreds and thousands of pre sold visitors per day, now you’re ready to start to monetize that.

Again monetization is something that we cover, not assuming that you want to be an affiliate or an AdSense advertiser but taking a view from where you are. In the early days we find out what you want to do and then enable you, show you, and give you the tools to build a site that’s going to enable you to turn that site into business.

That’s still one of the biggest concepts that is not understood on the internet when we’re fifteen years into it now, the difference between a site and a business. People still talked about putting up a site and about how easy it is to blog and none of that has anything to do with building a business, with developing pre sold traffic that you’re going to be able to monetize. It’s staggering how major web hosts, how the blogging craze, everybody blogs because everybody else blogs. But what is blogging really? Blogging is really just building a website that is in a certain timeline, in a time oriented, time sensitive format.
The reason blogging took off is because the technology called RSS came along and RSS enabled you to distribute your content rapidly. People can subscribe to your blog and immediately know what it is that you blog. Immediately knowing is important for the blogging world.

We took RSS and we were studying that in the early days. We track a lot of major trends from very early on. Some of them come and go and just make a little noise and don’t happen. That’s part of the value that we deliver to SBIers. A lot of what we deliver in terms of value is what we don’t cover. They just don’t need to know it, never needed to know it and it came and went. Web 2.0 was clearly going to be important and we said how do we take this and make it relevant to our small business person? The answer is in blogging.

The RSS was the key technology, not the blogging software. What RSS enabled us to do was take a typical SiteBuildIt site, which is an evergreen, theme based content site which has momentum. The day you stop blogging is the day your traffic starts deteriorating because we were looking at most blogs as being time sensitive.

Theme based sites are evergreen. You build your sites, you build your links. It takes months, even years before you really start to see significant deterioration. However, let’s incorporate RSS and enable us to distribute the information as people create new pages without them having to do a single thing more, without having to become a blogger, without having to learn any of this technology.

Immediately they are able to have a blog page of their most recent pages, have it distributed, have it pinged to the engines. A lot of people don’t understand how much there is underneath the hood of SiteBuildIt because we try to make it look simple. Like Tiger Woods, look at that swing, it’s so clean, it’s so tight, it’s so simple.

That’s what we do with SiteBuildIt. Underneath that we were the first people to develop the site map XML automatically from content. Yahoo came out with a different format, that was on within a few days. When Yahoo changed and went to Google’s format, we were back with that. When Bing, Microsoft at the time came out with their version of it, we modified for that.

If anybody reading this has no idea what sitemap in XML file is, they don’t need to, that’s the whole point. Everything is taken care of behind the scenes, so that the average SBIer, if he’s using tools, they’re business tools. You’re sending out an Ezine to your subscribers. You should do both. Because you have a good subscribership to your site, your blog, does not mean that you should also not have an Ezine.

So SBI encompasses everything to enable people to basically do what the very first product PennyGold did. It has the content, the theory and all the tools to enable people to build businesses, not websites. A website is just your place of business. People mistake the place of business with the business.

That’s about as long as your introduction, David. That’s where we came from and where we’ve gone to over the ten years that we have been doing this. What amazes me is still nobody in the world does this. It just makes so much sense to me. It’s like the MacIntosh of web hosting.

You have to make the obstacles disappear to enable the average person, the everyday person who knows something about something whether it’s Pilates, whether it’s crocheting, whether it’s propagating turtles or cacti.

Whatever it is that you know and love, you can create an e business about that, that is going to earn you income in a variety of ways. It may be selling a service, it may be selling a hard good, it may be through Google AdSense. There are fifteen major ways to monetize your traffic once you have the traffic. The key, of course, is getting that traffic and even more, converting the traffic.

David Jenyns: You talked about a few things. It was fantastic the way you went through that process, and you even answered one of the questions I wanted to talk about, which was that idea of how do you build a successful business online. You distilled it down.

I think that’s definitely one of your skills, is the ability to take the complex and make it simple. That idea of, all you have to do is get some good keyword research, build up some content, it will pre sell your visitors when they come there. Make sure your on page criteria is right with that content that you do put up on the website. Do some off page criteria as in link building. Try to get quality links in and then look to monetize it. Really they are the steps.

I think one of the biggest hurdles people have when they’re coming online, is building that trust and the loyalty with the visitor when it is they get there. You positioned yourself very early on by the thing you did with penny stocks .How do you build that trust? You basically sold that product and then kept to your word once it sold out, even though you had people saying I want to buy it, and I’ll buy it for $10,000, you said, no, I’m sticking to my word.

That leads into, how do you build, because that’s the biggest hurdle people have with doing online business with someone, is that trust and that loyalty?

Ken: I once gave a talk to a group and told them basically, even if you are the world’s biggest thief, the world’s worst psychopath, the old saying that honesty is the best policy is not just nice in the offline world, it’s a must in the online world. We’re talking about the ultimate communication medium.

So if you don’t know how to treat a customer properly, if you’re not dedicated to building a great product, you’re going to have a very miserable life. I suppose you could earn a few dollars by continually turning over very angry customers. But sooner or later they’re going to add up in forums and all the places that people can go now to complain, until finally you’re out of business.
I can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to lead life that way, but it certainly is a lot easier if you understand that basic concept of being transparent and being focused on creating a great product, what we call over delivering.

Your customers are very real people. We sell internet marketing information, if you want to boil it down to a phrase I hate to use about ourselves. It’s the same thing as we are a web host. At the end of the day, we need to host websites. But that’s not what we do. What we do is all the software that’s wrapped around that which enables people to succeed. You do need to acquire skills that enable you to position yourself properly, but not in a misleading fashion.

If you start to lie, if you exaggerate, you will be discovered. It’s just as much work to develop a great product and build a great business in an ethical manner as it is to be thief. One of my favourite examples is the old movie Heat with Robert de Niro and Val Kilmer. I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie.

David Jenyns: Yes, I know it well.

Ken Evoy: They’re brilliant thieves. They rehearsed for months. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on capital expenses, practising armoured car heists. I remember looking at my wife and saying, the amount of time and money and energy they’re spending on this, why don’t they just start a business? The worst case scenario with a business is you end up bankrupt, but if your thievery goes bust, you end up in jail.

Why not build an ethical business, why not deliver great product, and yet what do we see all around us David? We see so many get rich quick, so many blatant exaggerations. One of the things we always talked about on SiteBuildIt was proof, the proof of success.

We document that proof in so many ways, so many verifiable ways that people can read, follow, check. The case studies that we did seven or eight years ago are the same case studies that just grow and grow over the six or seven years. How powerfully does that speak about SiteBuildIt?

Nobody else does. People all come out with these crazy claims of how much money they’ve made in their first month but there’s no documented proof of success. You know there’s no such thing as get rich quick. If I had a get rich quick product, I would not sell it. Would you sell yours?

David Jenyns: No, obviously you would be out there trying to get rich quick off you own scheme.

Ken Evoy: Who in the world, in their right mind buys this? They buy it because the people are brilliant copy writers, who manage to convince them that this time it is different. Even against your better judgment you know it can’t be different, it’s just not possible. If everybody could get rich quick the world would be a different place.

It’s a really interesting and complicated question. The way to build trust is just simply to stand out by being honest, by really focusing on your customer. It is so boring, it’s so trite what I’m saying, and yet so few people do it.

I have a weekly meeting with the head of support and we go over so many metrics, from a special address where people can reach me if they’re really totally unhappy with the level of support they received. That’s a metric. How many people complain in the forums is a metric. Everything is measured so we can improve it and bring it as close to zero as possible. Ten percent of the outbound emails are monitored by a human reader and she gives it a score as to how good it is, including things like grammar. So every single element is constantly focused on improving customer support.

Once you’ve got that mindset, it really becomes very simple. How good are we? How do I know? I need to measure. Once I measure, I can start doing things to make it better from your customer to your product.

We have a wish list, David, in terms of what people want. That’s interesting in itself because to some degree as a product developer, you have to lead, you have to take the product into areas that aren’t being asked for because it’s not their job to see the next major trend. That’s probably my single most important job. What is the next major trend, whether it’s RSS and how do I use that for SiteBuildIt or web 2.0 and how do I use that for SiteBuildIt. The most important job is taking the product into those important new directions.

As well, an important job is listening to customers. ‘I wish SiteBuildIt could do this. This part of SiteBuildIt bugs me. Yes, I can do it by doing this, but it would be much quicker if I could do it this way.’ When enough people get on board and support a wish, then it gets onto our production schedule. Some of them are ridiculously simple and just oversights.

We can’t have, and we don’t pretend to have complete understanding of all of our customers. If you just admit that to your customers, and say, I can’t know everything you want, but I sure would like to know what you want, it’s good. People respect you for that. Instead of the typical big company, or famously politicians, I did not have sex with that girl, you’re open, hey, I made a mistake. We’re going to fix it.

We don’t know everything that you could possibly want. Tell us. We’re going to give you that. People respect that. You stand out by letting people know that you do care about them, not just saying it in words, but acting, delivering on what it is that you’re saying. So building trust at that level is the big part of your question.

The smaller part of your question in terms of a website is much simpler. It gets back to again CTPM (Content, Traffic, PreSell, Monetise).Nowadays CTPM has become so well known, so used, that it is now in the land of overuse and abuse. People start now developing software that will slice and dice content.

You want to do a website, but a bad website on Anguilla. You’ll do a search on the Caribbean island Anguilla. You’ll take the first four or five sites, you’ll seed it in the software, it slices and dices content, turns out ridiculous pages, builds some fake links in from free hosting places like blogger.com or HubPages. There are a bunch of them that have become blogger heaven. Hopefully if you do hundreds of these little mini sites, a few of them may go in the top ten and then make you a few dollars.

I can’t imagine anything more soul destroying, more depressing. It’s not a business because, sooner or later, Google has already discovered parts of it and will ultimately crush it completely. For all that work, because it is work, it’s like going back to Heat. Why spend all that time and energy on something that ultimately is going to get destroyed and gets you put into Google jail, when you could be doing it properly, building a real business that has real equities that ultimately people like my daughter with her website about Anguilla.

She could sell that to companies here in Anguilla or Caribbean tourism companies for at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars, because of the traffic. Not because of the income she generates, because they could develop much more income because of their larger reach, but she has a unique property. She has thousands of visitors a day who love her website and who monetize it. Now she puts on her own advertising, she has Google AdSense, she sells some hard goods.

She could if she wanted, live here in Anguilla and build a tour company and make a great deal of money hiring people, training them and doing tours for tourists because she’s probably the most well known person on this little island of Anguilla amongst tourists.
She’s done that, she’s built that trust and recognition by delivering great content, by knowing her area.

People focus on a lot of different areas. Just to let you know, this logo, the Better Business Bureau online and this and that, nothing speaks better than somebody who writes content that other people with an interest in it recognize as being great. The funny thing is the average person can do that.

What they can’t do is figure out search engines, worry about CSS, is master all the various complicated stuff which is tedious, the brainstorming keyword and all that paper research that has to be done upfront. If you don’t show people how to really think about this properly, they will end up with the weirdest site concept if they’re even thinking about CTPM. Give them the correct process with tools and all of a sudden, these people are able to operate at an extremely high level. Once you free them up to write about what they know, it’s amazing.

The majority of people can’t write very well. One of the most common complaints was, I can’t write. Even if I could do this, I can’t write. You say, how ridiculous is that? Of course people can write. They can talk. They can go in to their boss and ask for a raise. They’re perceived as having a certain kind of personality by the way they communicate with friends. They’re constantly negotiating with spouses and children on a variety of family type issues, but it boils down to negotiating and communicating.

Suddenly you’re in front of a keyboard and you can’t write? That’s nonsense. So we put out a book and you can get for free at mycps.sitesell.com. You can download that book and it’s very simple. It just simply destroys this myth that you can’t write. Yes, you can’t write to be Hemingway, but it’s not about being Hemingway.

This is about communicating something that you know already, communicating at a very simple, easy to read, grade seven, grade eight level, and getting your personality into that writing so people understand and see who you are. Anybody can write at that level, and yet curiously people somehow think that they can’t communicate. It’s been an interesting exercise of just constantly knocking down the roadblocks.

Mycps is a great low tech example. Content 2.0 that we just launched is a high tech example. Web 2.0 you alluded to earlier. That’s obviously now a major and important future of the web. For those who don’t know it, it can be summarized basically as, your visitors create content for you in a way that spreads virally. In a nutshell that is what web 2.0 is.

Amazon was probably the first company to do that with their reviews. It wasn’t true web 2.0, in that it wasn’t viral. But in terms of users creating content for you, that was the beginning of that concept. Then you look at some of the other examples like Twitter. Twitter doesn’t create content, users create 100% of that content. Facebook, YouTube, you could go on and on, whether it’s video. With Facebook the first thing you’re uploading is yourself. This is who I am. After that, the platform is there for social interaction.

A great next use for the internet after searching for information is social interaction. How much value that has for the average small business person when you only have x number of hours is a completely different thing.

Our job is sorting this out, turning it into a module, giving you some ideas how to use Twitter and niche Twitter in a time and cost effective matter. Don’t go overboard. The focus of a small business is still websites. But now, it’s web 2.0, get your visitors involved. Get them to tell you what they miss about Anguilla, or how I propagated this particular cactus. You can create versions of Yahoo Answers. There are an infinite number of things you can do with this and when we launched this two years ago internally, SBI is selling it as a separate add on module. It became so successful SBI has literally tripled and quadrupled already very good traffic.

We simply bit the bullet and said this needs to be. Up until now SBI has been all in one. This module surpassed our expectations and became part of what we call SBI’s 2.0. It is the first true web 2.0 platform for your small business person.

Up until now web 2.0 has been well financed by venture capital driven companies that had an idea like Twitter. Before Facebook there was MySpace. Before MySpace there was Friend Search. Facebook finally got the recipe correct. It took hundreds of millions of dollars to build a platform to enable visitors to come on and create better content for them which is what builds their traffic. Some have yet to prove a model as to how they’re going to make money with this.

But with a theme based content site, you are now getting your visitors to build more and more content for you. You get more long tail keywords which are those rare keywords that, for a site like Anguilla, you might know ten keywords. In fact there are over 40,000-50,000 keywords for which you could find Anguilla. That builds up more traffic, stable traffic.

If suddenly the most important keyword isn’t in the top ten, maybe your ego cares, but your pocketbook doesn’t because by now the vast majority of the traffic is coming from very stable long tail tier two or tier three traffic and you have such a presence, so many inbound links to go with that traffic, to go with that content that you really did build a site that is becoming invulnerable to incursions by larger companies.

People say blogging is web 2.0. That’s only in the weakest sense. With blogging, you still have to create the content and basically you’re limiting your visitors to comment on what you’ve written. That’s very restrictive and it’s also not the best way to build a business.

It’s like creating a pile of magazine clippings and over time those magazine clippings become less and less relevant. If I wanted to find out about Anguilla, I might find fifty little clippings here and there instead of a couple of good pages, or if you want even a mini site within a bigger site, that is all about Anguilla in one spot.

So for your average person who is searching for information, a theme based content site anyway is much better than blogging. As web 2.0, you’re hitting out of the park now. There’s nothing like getting visitors to create true, honest to goodness web pages on a variety of content that you probably would never even think about writing about.

On top of that, other visitors comment on what they’ve created, it all starts spiraling around through emails to each other. It all gets fed into your RSS feeds so other people see your sites being updated. Google sees your sites being updated. Its spiders come more often. We’ve talked about at SBI how it all snowballs, and how momentum builds pre 2.0. Well post 2.0, the snowball snowballs. It’s like we’re talking about exponential growth now.

A lot of people think this has been like a blueprint from day one. It hasn’t been. SiteSell was supposed to be all there was. It kind of grew from there until finally I got frustrated when I realized most people can read information, they just can’t actually put it together and use it. That’s where it all came from.

David Jenyns: I think you mentioned some key things there. Obviously the web 2.0 is where everything is going online at the moment. There is the idea that the information that the user feeds back into the website helps it grow. It’s like the user is giving back what it is that they’re looking for. That’s obviously going to speak right to the other users out there who are reading that. They’re effectively getting the same information that they’re looking for. I can see that snowball building.

I think the few key nuggets that came out for me from there, were things like the way that you evolved as far as asking customers what it is exactly that they want and building it. Like you said, the Make Your Site Sell when it first came out, that was kind of your end game plan. By evolving and giving back to the customers what it is that they’re asking for, it is very similar to web 2.0. It’s like you’re giving back the information that it is that they’re looking for.

Then taking it down a level, you were managing to effectively measure everything. I think that is one thing that has come out for me, the way that you’re so granular. I knew before that you kept an eye on those numbers, but you really can’t improve what it is that you don’t measure.

I think it’s fantastic to hear how much you pay attention, even down to the level of customer support. We all know businesses, and that’s what you’re about, building real businesses, are centered around the customer. So obviously at the core of that, you need to be supporting that customer, providing that customer service. That interaction is important.

That is one of the things I know as your business has grown, it’s probably got harder and harder to do this, but in the early days, you just signing those cheques to the affiliates and hand writing those notes, you were connecting with those affiliates and making that bond with them to want to help grow you. I think it started to build on itself.

The question that came out for me after all that you were talking about was, you talk about finding those passions, be it cacti or whatever it is that you’re most passionate about. There’s that age old argument about should I be going for, a passion or should I look where the money is and look for something with commercial intent? Or do you just build it around the passion and the money will come?

Ken Evoy: Well that’s my personality and I think it’s most people’s personality. Most people hate the job they work at, even if they’re making $100,000 a year. They’d rather not be working Monday to Friday 9 to 9. There are those lucky souls who have a job that they absolutely love. Why would you then go and want to build a business that is going to doom you to resenting, oh,   I have to sit down and create another web page.

I’m very much passion based. If I’m not interested in something, I can’t do it. However, my best friend who was one of the top bankers, the smartest businessman I’ve ever known anywhere, any place, retired a little while ago. He looked around for various business deals, or he didn’t even look, they came to him. After two years, do know what business he decided to get into? Pizza Hut.

He now owns hundreds of Pizza Hut franchises. He travels around the world with top executives. None of this is a passion of course. This is logistics. This is about buying a group of Pizza Huts in a given city, knowing that he can turn them around, run them better. They may be money losers and he turns them into money makers. For him, business is the passion. For me, it’s the particular business that has to be the passion.

If you’re the type of person who can make a website reviewing lawnmowers or whatever, that’s good. The closer the keyword is to a product in general, the more it’s worth, the more somebody searches for a trademark. If you’re searching lawnmowers – John Dere, John Dere is probably somebody who’s closer to making a purchase.

Writing reviews of products on content sites can be very lucrative. It can also be very boring. It can be also a dangerous because it’s getting a little overdone. But there’s no doubt about it, right off the bat, you can probably make more money with a product content site than a general theme based content site.

With SiteBuildIt, we explore those issues anyway. Day 1 is a general introduction, day 2 is the beginning of brainstorming, where you measure three site concepts one against the other, and that’s the direction we take our brain stormer into basically becoming a smart brain stormer. How to pick the best niches for you, how much time do you have, what are you interested in? It helps you narrow it down or widen it, depending on some of your answers.

Developing a set of keywords and how in demand they are and how much supply there is, even though we do it in a unique way and a more reliable way, now the more important functionality is making that brain stormer smart. We help you develop a niche that,  maybe you’re more passion driven, maybe you’re more money driven, but at the end of the day, by the time we’ve taken you through day 4, you understand what your motivations are, you understand what the monetization models are going to be for this site for which you have yet to pick a domain name. You understand what the monetization potential is, not just the different ways, but this should be a highly monetizable site.

Only on day 5 do you actually pick the domain name. You asked a really interesting question and it’s one we address in SiteBuildIt because it’s an important one. There are people who are quite comfortable developing an expertise. You can do a lot of research, become an expert in lawnmowers and write a website. It may not shine with the same quality as a gardener. My Dad was a lawn freak. He knew everything there was about lawns, fertilizers, lawnmowers way back then. There are people out there, I’m sure, today.

That person given the same set of tools is going to outperform somebody who is simply doing it for Google AdSense and affiliate income. In the long run, when Google decides, you know what, there are a few too many products, sites out there writing reviews, probably the one  who is passion driven is going to make it because Google tracks much more than just the words on  a page, much more than just inbound links.

It’s on record that there are over two hundred off page factors from the obvious ones where somebody puts down a link in my search results that I give a surfer, how long did they stay away before they came back. On the top ten, which one are they clicking on? There are obvious ones like that. There are ones that you and I cannot begin to imagine. Picture hundreds of computer science PhDs, whose only job it is to figure out what’s the best site to give for any given query. They’re going to get pretty sophisticated and way beyond anything you’re going to read in any SEO book or forum.

We don’t pretend to know the depth of SEO to that degree. We don’t need to. If you create great content, get your keywords correct on the page, not to the degree that you used to have to. In the old days there were specific numbers. Now it’s really, get it more or less right. Don’t make any glaring errors like not putting your keyword in the title. Build some inbound links and then all of those other off page criteria. You get this great content out there, and the content 2.0 becomes even faster and RSS bloggers back a few years ago before that, again accelerated it.

Google starts taking up more and more of these signals that people like this material. It is not only relevant to a search on lawnmowers, it is now a measure of quality. That’s what Google is going for more and more. Ultimately in ten or fifteen years, and again, Google is on record as saying this, ultimately they want to have artificial intelligence. That is where their search engine reads the page and just says, that was a really good page on lawnmowers or Anguilla or propagating turtles.

The challenge I always put to SEO, is your site ready for that test? Of course I don’t think there is an SEO in the world except for the whitest of white hats, like the joke who would say, yes, I am ready. SEO sites certainly are ready because they’re created from a passion, a knowledge, two points first and get the search engine right second in order of importance. You do have to get them both correct. It’s a long winded answer to this short question but it depends on the person. For me, I couldn’t do a site that didn’t excite me. There are people who can do sites on keywords that are profitable.

The next level of course is spamming. People who simply take other people’s content, slice and dice it and. create more site content for inbound links and that has just crossed the line. It has crossed Google’s line as well. The shame is that they’re teaching people how to do this and hopefully those people will get flushed when Google takes a serious stance on that type of abuse.

David Jenyns: I think they will. Obviously Google wants to give the best user experience that they can. So I think what you’re talking about, some of those little flash in the pans are not about building a business and building a real business that provides real value, not trying to take advantage of these little arbitrary opportunities.

I think that’s why it’s absolutely key and why I recommend that people start with SiteBuildIt. There is so much noise out there, sometimes you can just get caught up in all of the noise and not get any work done. If you have that step by step approach that you can follow through, it just makes it so much easier. All that hard work goes in behind the scenes. It’s like, I’m a little bit of a Mac fan boy. So much goes in behind the scenes you don’t have to worry, it just works. It’s the same sort of thing where SiteBuildIt just works if you follow that process.

I think you probably see, and you touched on a few things that people do, obviously chasing those little get rich quick schemes. You’d see a lot of new people coming online. Where do you see people making the biggest mistakes early on? Are there either one or two key mistakes, where you say, if you avoid this, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache.

Ken Evoy: Well, from the point of view of starting a theme based content site, and if you’re a small business person you don’t have to create a theme based content site, you can blog. Some people perceive this as being anti blogging. What I would say is, if you want  to create a news oriented site, if you want to be a site that has the latest breaking developments in Anguilla, then blogging is the correct software to use. SiteBuildIt isn’t the correct software to use.

If you’re a very clever person like Seth Godin for example, a pundit, a commentator, who has a lot of beaux mots, a lot of clever little sayings to come up with a day, then you’re building your brand for your next bestseller. Blogging again is a great software because it creates a type of site where really, and Google has shown this in interesting Google studies, people basically read blogs, they find them, they subscribe to the RSS, they come to read your latest posts and they leave. That’s the way you use a blog.

If you want to do a research on how to propagate a tortoise, you’re not going to find that in a blog. I don’t know why you’d do a blog on propagating tortoises, but if you were to do a little blurb on something you discovered while propagating this particular species, it isn’t beginning to answer your overall article that you’re looking for on the propagation of tortoises. Of course, since these are time sensitive, just like Twitter, if you become inactive Twitter, you’re going start to see Google recording, putting tweets into the search engine results, become inactive in Twitter, and you’re going to fall off the map very quickly.

If your blog starts going down in terms of frequency of posts, you start becoming less and less relevant. Develop a theme based content site which is the correct format for most small business people, that is your single most important decision. What’s the biggest mistake? Blogging.

Everybody blogs because everybody else blogs. The bottom line is it is the wrong format. Think of blogging as simply a format, another way to build a website that comes out differently. It doesn’t come out nicely organized in three tiers. Yes, you can have categories based on keywords, but those categories when you click on them, are a bunch more posts related to that; there’s no coherent nice organization.

Think of a very good reference book written by you with your particular expertise in an area, your particular way of writing, and with your particular way of getting messages across as opposed to a bunch of magazine clippings. Which one are you going to use when you’re searching the internet for information?

We subscribe to over two hundred blogs. I love blogs. But we subscribe to them to keep up to date on what is the latest stuff that’s coming out. You know that noise that you were talking about? The vast proportion of that noise amounts to zero. We have to follow that because every now and then, something comes out that is the beginning of something big or is just a really clever little idea that we can twist and use it this way for theme based content sites. But for the most part it is a lot of noise.

A lot of people spend a lot of time coming up with their latest thoughts. Or if Google does a press release, immediately you’ll see twenty blogs report that Google is doing this. It’s tiring, what’s the point? We don’t really aim at internet marketers. Most internet marketers could really use SiteBuildIt.

You’re really great at what you do, David, but you are one in a thousand. The average person in the internet marketing game does not do well. They’d be better off focusing on something in the real world that they enjoy doing and they know about. Use SiteBuildIt and unlearn a lot of the bad lessons they learned and build a real site that turns into a real business that builds long term income.

The first biggest mistake is doing what everybody else does and blogging. The second biggest mistake, once you’re building a theme based content site, choosing the wrong niche. That’s why we focus more and more on the brain stormer. People don’t understand that if you only have two hours a week, don’t make travel your niche. It’s just not going to happen. There are little companies called Travelocity that are in your way.

Pick something that’s going to be at the other end of the section. Don’t pick Italy, don’t even necessarily pick Sicily. Maybe pick a little unknown region of Italy. That’s what your site’s going to be about because you have decided this is as much time as I have. Therefore I’m going to build a site about a niche that is winnable, so I can in fact build traffic about this narrow niche that will turn into income. Maybe in my next one I’m going to do a broader one.

Making people think about what they know, what they can do, what they love, but at the right level. Sometimes you’ve got to slice that down. Don’t do a site about the Caribbean, do a site about Caribbean cruises. There are all kinds of ways and sometimes they go too narrow, but that usually isn’t the case. There are all kinds of ways to broaden a niche you’re thinking about, narrow a niche that you’re thinking about. Show people how to think, how to use the tools properly because if you choose the wrong niche upfront, you’re in for a year of pain. Finally you realize, you make a post at a forum and somebody says, why would you make a niche like travel?

People fail at SBI. Ten percent of people refund SiteBuildIt and it’s always for the same reasons. It’s too much work. I didn’t realize that I had to do this much to build a web business. The internet does not suspend the law of gravity. Apples still fall to the ground. It does not suspend the law of business. It takes work to build a business.

The good news is, let’s say you put ten hours into your business. Without SBI, 9.9 of those hours are going to go into mastering some new technology, technique, something that’s changed, something you shouldn’t have to worry about, you should be focusing on your business.

With SBI all ten of your hours go into building your business, creating the content, using tools that otherwise would make something very complicated, using a tool without which would take you longer. Blogging is probably the most common mistake. Two hundred million blogs. You know the old Bruce Springsteen song? ‘Fifty seven channels and nothing’s on?’ There’s two hundred million blogs and there’s not an awful lot on the internet.

There’s a small number of extremely talented people who do a very good blog. Specifically in the internet marketing area, I find there are people who write good stuff for us to keep up to date with. But out there in the real world where there are people who are interested in ’57 Chevys, blogging is just the wrong choice. It’s not the way to build a business.

That’s the way we look at SiteBuildIt. It’s funny because ten years ago we named SiteBuildIt, when everybody was thinking sites. Now, after ten years, we’re looking to rebrand, call it SBI, the same way Home Box Office is HBO because it’s not always just about movies at home, it’s about their own innovative programming. SiteBuildIt is not about site building. It’s about business building, how to develop long term, profitable businesses.

In the next year or two you’ll see us, re branding, slowly changing over SiteBuildIt to SBI and now making those SBI information points in your mind start to become about business building. We can’t have the word site building, yes you build a site but that’s just a part of what is necessary to the real thing, which is building your business.

David Jenyns: You talked about some of those tripping points that people are getting stuck on, following what everybody else is doing, choosing the wrong niche which I think is a really big one. Part of that had to do with the amount of time the individual has. I know it’s the same with everybody, we’re getting less and less time, more and more noise is popping up, so it is much easier to get distracted.

Mindful of that, if you were to pick a few really key leverage points, areas that someone should focus on to try and get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to time, where would you say people should try and spend their time, mindful there’s not enough hours in the day?

Ken Evoy: I’m not saying this because I’m trying to sell SiteBuildIt, but SiteBuildIt leverages your time enormously. Having all the tools in one place, all coordinated so they work together, all within one system that is laid out where all the information that we track and digest both in our forum and in hundreds of outside locations. Using SiteBuildIt is a tremendous leverager of your time.

Aside from that, it really depends on where you are. People take SiteBuildIt, and non SBI sites grow to a point where it is too big for them to manage. At that point you have to decide, is this as big as I want to get? I’m making $50,000,$100,000,$150,000 a year by myself, no overheads, very nice, I’m happy. I don’t have to argue with anybody, a partner, an employee.

The next big leverage step, and there is a whole section on this in SBI, is about contracting out to developing nations, for tedious stuff. There are technologically savvy people out there who have graduated from IT schools who can do research for you. They can do stuff for you that you would like to do but would take too much of your time, but if you give them exact instructions, you can get information back that is of value to you in terms of what you want to do next.

Leveraging your business at a certain point, whether you’re hiring employees and you really want to grow your business, like happened with SiteSell. SiteSell has now almost seventy people. It wasn’t the plan. It grew at a certain point where, from one programmer and one web master, a UI guy and I was doing support, maybe three or four people. Immediately when SiteBuildIt took off, I needed a support person, otherwise, you would never get much further because I’d be doing support twenty-four hours a day.

As your business grows, hiring people is important.  A lot of the people in forums have written, I’ve been there, done that, I don’t want to hire people. I’m very happy with my site, making $80,000 a year. I spend twenty hours a week at it, I love what I’m doing, I don’t want to hire people. That’s perfectly reasonable.

Knowing what it is you want to do with your business, at the far end of the spectrum I would say, knowing when and who to hire and add to your team so that you can really grow that business to greater and greater levels is a key leverager, a skill you need to acquire.

At the far end, as you’re starting, taking your time and doing the proper research. I know, and we’ve talked about this ad infinitum, we know SiteBuildIt is not only the best product of its kind, it is the only product of its kind out there. The average person doesn’t know that. The average person sees nothing but scam after scam online, people who promise great riches, business success and so on.

Just like with PennyGold- when we sold PennyGold, there was nothing scammier in the whole investment world than penny mining stocks. The fact is though, that they’re so predictably scammy that you can develop a mathematical model to predict the next time that these stocks, certain stocks would be manipulated.

But try and sell that online. That was a challenge, David, because the arena was full of scam artists. Internet marketing is also an arena for scam artists. There are some good people out there. Ralph Wilson, one of my first early heroes. Alan Godine, these are people who supported SBI early, but I wouldn’t ask them to be affiliates, because I respected what they were doing. Ten years later, they’re still delivering good content. It’s a good question, and it’s really the most important decisions that you make that leverage everything you do afterwards are the first ones you make.

So do your research until you’re sure what you want to do. If you want to be blogger, then SBI is not right for you. If you want to build a small business online, and you don’t have $100,000 or a million in venture cap to create a Twitter, the next big thing, most small business people are going to create theme based content sites. The cost is low, the energy is yours, it’s your time, it’s your energy. It’s up to you, you can control the process.

There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t build a successful business, unless you make wrong decisions upfront. If you decide to buy blogging software to build a theme based content site, you’re making a mistake. If you buy SiteBuildIt and then decide to build a site based on travel, and you only have two hours a week, you’ve made a fatal mistake.

If you choose a niche that is too narrow, some off island off Anguilla, there’s just not enough demand for that. No matter how much content you create, no matter how well it is written, there are just not enough people who are going to search for that particular tiny site keyword.

I’d say those initial decisions that you make early on, how am I going to monetize? If you want to sell an e book, but you’re not somebody who likes to put up with customers, I’d say put up with customers. When somebody in a forum says that, put up with customers? I’ll tell them right off the bat, I know that you’re not meant to sell product.

If you’re attitude is putting up with a customer, don’t go there, you’re not going to be a happy puppy because customers complain. If you’re not focused on improving things, so that customers are happy, and your attitude is putting up with customers, you’ve now made an important decision that you’re going to have to live with for years until you can hire people to take care of that part of the business, or you give up. The odds are you give up, because you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy.

So the major leverages, David on the front end when you’re starting out are the first few key decisions that you’ve just got to get right, and on the back end it is when you decide, this is as much as I can possibly do. It’s really deciding, do I want to start bringing other people on board and then putting them in the right spot.

David Jenyns: One of the key leverage points I can see as well is what you manage to do so well is to keep your finder on the pulse, to see what’s coming down the pipe, what’s on the horizon. I think I got my first insight when, sure I got it back reading Make Your Site Sell but  also when we had a chat a long time ago and you mentioned web 2.0, this thing that was so new. So I’m interested to know, where do you see things heading online. Are there any shifts you can see happening or further developments? You might like to throw yourself out there and put yourself out on a limb and give some insight as to what you see as coming.

Ken Evoy: Right now we’re in what I call a period of digestion. Years and years ago I wrote about how video, music, anything that could be digitized was going to be distributed to the web. I believe in the next ten or fifteen years, we’ll start to see video websites. Not video in websites, but video websites. You’ll click, almost navigate within a video to get to other parts of a video based website. As the band width becomes faster and faster, websites are going to change. Of course before that happens, Google has to figure out, or the next great search engine has to figure out voice recognition, and understand what’s in those websites.

But video was something we talked about years ago and we’ve seen that happen. RSS and blogging, we talked about that. Web 2.0 is obviously a major part of our push for the foreseeable future, continuing to improve content, too, so that people can get more and more out of it.

When I say digestion, social interaction is an offspring, a cousin if you will, of web 2.0. People are creating content. They are creating content as they interact socially. That’s a major shift.

If you asked me five years ago I would tell you, how do people use the web? They use the web to search for information. How do people use the web today? They use the web to search for information and those are still the people who interest us in the business world. They also use it now to interact socially. Is there some crossover in business applications? Of course, just as there is in the real world. There is doing business and there is socializing. You don’t socialize only to do business, which some people seem to mix up online, but you do socialize sometimes because it has a business purpose.

That’s the way you can think of the whole social interaction explosion that has been happening on the web today. When I say digestion, what I mean by that is, more of the same: the development, the ongoing refinement, the pushing of the major trends that started a few years ago over the next two or three years.

Right now, what else is important on our horizon, there’s nothing major. Are there neat little modules and things that we have coming out? Yes, but that’s not really what you’re looking for. What you’re talking about are the really major things like video. We were  talking about how the web is  really going to fundamentally change as the majority of the world is on 24/7 high speed.
You know when you see that movie Apollo and you see somebody pulls out a slide rule. Everybody then says, the slide rule remember the slide rule? Remember dial up?

Now with fibre optics, the speed of the web is getting earth shaking and that has implications for, we talked about how the web is going to split, and you see it happening. The network simply did not use the web. Not so much it didn’t get the web ten years ago, it did not use the web. Now look at how ABC, NBC, CBS are starting to merge more and more the programming you see on TV with the programming that they carry online. Why? Because the band width is there.

We talked about, this is years ago, how two tiers were going to evolve. There would be very big corporate sites that could use this cutting edge technology, the very high band width and develop and deliver completely different websites to what you and I would even consider to be a website per se.

Then there is going to be the lower band width, almost the interesting part of the internet. This is where all kinds of people are living and sharing ideas, writing terrific websites that are turning into businesses, talking to their grandmother by video Skype across the country, where all the rest of us live and play. Again there is overlap, there are no strict black and white boundaries.

To make a long story short, I see no brilliant new things that are looming on our horizon. I’m sure there is still the great unforeseeable thing that is in some venture capitalist’s hands right now. It’s going to be a twist on social media, on web 2.0 or whatever.

Where is the next great thing coming from? It usually comes from, and because of, changes in technology. Ajax. A lot of the changes in technology are what enables today’s sites to exist. They’re more or less the expression of technological advancement and we couldn’t do this ten years ago. It wasn’t possible because of band width, it wasn’t possible because Ajax didn’t exist, it wasn’t possible because all these things have to fall into place before the next great trend that consumers of the web see.

Those aren’t on the horizon as far as I can see. Maybe a smarter guy like O’Reilly could give you a better answer than that. But as far as we can see as SBIers, as a typical business online, it’s going to be more of the same, interesting, pushing in new directions and you’ve got to be there to catch those new directions, but no major new technology that we can see that will make a major difference.

David Jenyns: I know you keep up to date with so much information it’s amazing how you can keep your finger on so many different things. Who are reading at the moment? Are there any people that you’re reading, or what you’re reading at the moment?

Ken Evoy: You mean in terms of blog wise?

David Jenyns: Yes, blogs or even any books where you see, yes, this is where I’m getting a lot of this information. You’re distilling so much and a lot is obviously going to be your own insights, but I always like to know where the influences for great thinkers come from.

Ken Evoy: Obviously there are the books that have come out lately like Super Freakonomics. At the end of the day, it boils down to, influences are important, but it is the way they tell the story. A great one was What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. There are books like that which just spark your thinking and your imagination.

The whole thing about global warming, Nathan Myhrvold was the CEO of Microsoft and Bill Gates calls him the smartest person in the world that he knows anyway. He has basically put together a think tank. They have got more patents than any corporation in the last decade. The way he looks at global warming is just fascinating.

He starts off, if global warming turns out to be due to human behaviour, that’s an interesting observation coming from the smartest guy in the world, and they’ve come up with a solution that would cost less than Al Gore’s marketing budget. It’s stuff like that which has absolutely no relevance to our particular business that sparks your brain and gets you thinking, how these guys think out of the box. The Freakonomic guys, I like them.

Online, people like Kevin Kelly. There are people I think are must read, like Danny Sullivan; I like the way he writes about search engines. Although we track a lot of SEO writers, I think he writes with a certain clarity of thought, doesn’t get hung up on all sorts of ridiculous little things. Matt Cutts, it’s important to read him, whether you think he is a PR guy for Google or whether he writes his own stuff, regardless, it’s still interesting.

When Google came out with their webmaster guidelines, a lot of SBIers jokingly accused Google of plagiarism because basically it’s what we’ve been saying from day one. Matt Cutts and Danny, and some other analysts, we’ll take a lot of their stuff and just keep pushing it and pushing it, but at the end of the day, it still all fits into the CTPM model, but coming at it from different angles which can stimulate our way of thinking.

We have interesting people in our own forum who come up with some good ideas. Tomaz, who has a tennis site, does very well, now makes over $1000 a day and still contributes to the forum. The forum is about give and get, help and be helped. It is the friendliest place, there are no flames, everybody is focused on moving forward together, but Tomaz will push relentlessly on the importance of link building. He does everybody a service because, although of course it’s well covered in SiteBuildIt, there are five major resource areas just about link building, he stresses link building.

He has to build links to get that snowball going. There is a point at which things do start to build momentum and you can slow down and eventually it takes over on its own. Elad, one of our case studies, he started out in day 1, he was a typical guy, worked in a cubicle and started a website. Here’s a man who did research until he found a good niche on birthday cakes. I don’t know whether it is still a good niche, because six or seven years later he’s had a lot of copycats since then.

But Elad goes over some months, two million visitors, and it’s consistently above 1.5 million visitors. Elad earns a very healthy living, travels around the world, and basically, every now and then visits the forum and writes interesting stuff, but Elad does not build a single link because he is beyond that point. Tomaz will make the great example of, guess what, guys, you’re not Elad.

It’s important to build links, and he’ll come up with his best five ways based on his experience of building links. So there are really some excellent people in the forum. I would do a disservice by just naming one, because I could probably name fifteen or twenty. I’d forget one and he would be mad. Even in the forums there are great people.

People like John Battelle. I like reading the Pro Blogger and the Copy Blogger. Derryn Rowse. It’s just good writing about writing, good writing about blogging. It’s not particularly because I believe in blogging but I like the way they write, I like the way they think. People who regurgitate, people who basically spit out the same thing, there the ones that get thrown out.

Seth Godin of course is on my list. I enjoy reading Seth Godin. Tim Ferriss with the 4-Hour Work Week, although he has a flawed model, the concept is interesting, parts of it are very much CPPM, but his monetization models are flawed. It’s not a way that people are going to be able actually earn income. But he is an interesting thinker. It’s important not to read just very narrowly in your particular niche of online business building but read the people who touch the periphery. There is no end of good bloggers out there.

Although I tell you that blogging is not the right medium for most small business people, for who we track, it is basically all bloggers. We’re not interested in a general site about blogging, about search engine optimizing, about whatever, it’s the latest and greatest. Tech, crunch, flash. There is no cohesion to them, there is no individual entity, they will just find, pick good stuff, most of it is irrelevant to the average small businessman, but some of it challenges us, some of it you just file away, and say, ok, let’s see if other people keep mentioning this. We don’t have to be on the cutting edge, you tend to bleed on the cutting edge.

When we’re talking about web 2.0, that was like cutting bleeding edge stuff. As you start to understand it better, and finally as you see how it fits in with SiteBuildIt, that’s when you jump in with both feet and start writing a tool that’s going to make sense for SBI owners. I could probably go on and on, but those are some of the people that we read. I’m sure there are a couple of other researchers that have their favourites. Then of course there are all the Google blogs that you have to keep up with, just so you aren’t missing anything.

David Jenyns: If people want to keep up with you, do you have a blog? I know you have you Twitter and also post different things in the forums. What’s the best way, obviously people can check out SiteBuilIt, or sitesell.com. What is the best way to keep on the pulse of what you’re doing?

Ken: We have a blog and the blog is used as much to transmit our Ezine and communicate to SBI owners as it is to blog per se. In my case it’s trying to raise intelligent things every now and again. Probably it would be subscribe to my forum feed, and to do that you have to join the affiliate program because the forums are closed.

It’s a funny thing. I Twitter because I tried to figure out how to use Twitter for small business clients, for SBI owners. At a certain point, our company gets to a certain size that we could hire staff to Twitter and we may very well start to do that and to start blogging and so forth. But we have 100,000 affiliates now who get the word out pretty well. They use social media.

When we first did PennyGold, I had a product to sell, an e good. I built traffic and I monetized that traffic. I was an SBI owner for all intents and purposes. When we came out with Make Your Site Sell, we realized now this covers an infinite number of niches. Every small business person needed to read Make Your Site Sell. Most small business people really should be using SiteSell. If they’ve yet to build a successful e business online, they should be trying SiteBuildIt, and if they don’t like it, ask for their money back. There’s so much to gain, and just ask for your money back if it’s not for them.

That’s about it. It’s just about getting the steps straight, thinking clearly and straightforwardly to make very clean and simple decisions. People so overcomplicate matters. There’s not much more to say, David.

David: Even all of those names that you mentioned, your name fits for me well within the group of people you keep your eye on. If people do want to find out more about you, definitely check out the SiteBuildIt blog or just go to sitesell.com to find out more. That links through to most of what you guys do. Perhaps we’ll wrap up there. I can’t thank you enough Ken. I know how busy you are, and the call took a bit of orchestrating but it was well worth it and I know people are going to love it so thank you very much.

Ken Evoy: It was my pleasure, David. You are one in a thousand, like I said, who just goes out there, reads the materials, gets the job done, and you do a great job. So my thanks to you.

David Jenyns: Thanks.

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Decla Dunn

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Name: Declan Dunn

Industry: Online Marketing

Website: www.declandunn.com

Product: www.dunndirectmedia.com

Declan Dunn’s Bio: Declan Dunn, it seems, has been online since the beginning of time. He’s been on the cutting edge since 1995 when he was one of the pioneers of multimedia CD roms. He’s heavy on blogging, podcasting and social media. He’s handled major media campaigns with the likes of American Express, Preiceline, PBS, ABC and Intel. And this is all just for starters.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, welcome to theseomethod.com. This is another call for all my guys out there who I’m introducing to some experts who have had a really big impact on my marketing career and the things I’ve done. I’m very excited about this call as I’m interviewing Declan Dunn. He’s been around the internet forever just about. He got started back in the 1995 era. He was doing multi media CD roms when they were in their early days and doing a lot of coding. He’s really been on the forefront as technologies evolved and got heavily into the blogging and pod casting. With things that are happening now, he is very much on the forefront of social networks and new media.

Not only that, he’s very good at monetizing that as well. He is able to bring in affiliate marketing, and then to find out how to make money from it. It’s well and good to get heaps of traffic, but unless you convert that traffic to putting money in the bank, what’s the point? He’s worked with some really big clients as well. He’s not just inside the internet marketing world and he doesn’t just deal in that realm. He also works with big corporates and takes the strategies he knows to those. He has worked with American Express, Priceline, PBS, Intel, mypoint.com just to name a few.

He’s done some major media campaigns and I think that will shine through. I’m very excited to have Declan Dunn on the line. I’d like to invite you on.

Declan Dunn: Yes, and I’m very excited to join you and explore the new things that are coming up the way the market is shifting. There’s lots of opportunity again.

David Jenyns: We’ll jump straight into it. You really are on the cutting edge as far as the social media and the social networks that are happening right now are concerned. You do a lot of consulting with clients as well. Perhaps we can talk about when you’re first starting a campaign and working with a particular client. What are some of the processes you go through for driving traffic, even just masterminding a strategy for them?

Declan Dunn: The first thing I really ask them, and it sounds really obvious, but what are the results you really want to create? Don’t just begin with the end in mind, but where are you dreaming about? For example, I had a woman call me up and say, I want to sell 100,000 books and I want you to guarantee it. I said, yes, me too. Five percent of authors sell more than 20,000 books. That’s if you’re in the real world in the US, I mean real world like a store. So that’s a silly number.

I don’t mind dreams, but what people keep talking about are old perceptions of hundreds of millions of visitors. I’ve done 60,000,000 visitors a month. I wouldn’t do that today. It isn’t going to happen. What’s happening now, is, it’s not how much traffic, I want to know the quality of your traffic. So I ask them, what are you going out to do to get in front of the people who actually want to buy? You can go out now and I can get you tons of people looking at your stuff that they would never ever buy. They simply don’t care. Because it’s social media it’s simply a bunch of people who are sitting around chatting in a room.
The first thing I ask them is, what are the results you want to create? Don’t tell me the tactics. What I mean by tactics is Twitter is a tactic, Facebook is a tactic, MySpace is a tactic, search is a tactic. There is nothing wrong with any of these. Where do you wrap these things around as a strategy so that you know which ones you can leverage as a strategy?

Quite frankly you’ll find some things are much better in search, other things have nothing to do with search, believe it or not. So don’t say search just because it’s a tactic. Is it a tactic that a) people are searching for and b) they’re actually buying from? Is there a buying behaviour in there, because, if not, what are we going to do? c) How can we put this altogether so that you can leverage what other people are doing so you don’t have to recreate the wheel?

I actually get most people to stop fifty percent of what they’re doing, which is fake productivity, working like slaves on what some guru or anybody else taught them. I’ve got nothing against the guru. You’ve just got to pick the things that work for you, not just because someone said it. That’s a tactic. A tactic without a strategy is like running around in circles with your head cut off.

David Jenyns: I think you mentioned something important, which is identifying what it is you want to do. You’re not an SEO guy, even though you do know a bit about SEO. We talked about the fact you don’t build a website for the sake of building a website. You need to first identify what it is you need to do. You help the client distill that. Are we talking down to the point of, we want to drive x number of targeted traffic? Is that the clarity you try to get with defining that objective?

Declan Dunn: Yes, and realistically how big is that universe of people? If I have a search thing, I can figure out how many people are searching, figure out how many people are going to click and figure out how many people are going to convert. We have a number. I leverage. I work with a lot of search engine people. I consider them sharp shooters, experts. I really don’t want to replicate what they do. They can’t do what I do, which is build partnerships and affiliate things and strategies. It’s a big world.

I want to figure out what that traffic is and how much of it is realistic. For example, you’ll be blown away. I’ve got one guy who is running a blog. By the way, here’s the difference between an SEO blog and a blog written by somebody who wants relationships and a big fan club. The SEO blog, don’t get me wrong, you can write it well, but you can get away with not writing it very well. You can hire people. It’s keywords, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re there to solve a problem, they’re not there to say how great you are or really become a fan of you.

If you’re going to do that, you’ve pretty much got to write your own blog or hire somebody really talented, not the cheap stuff, to write it. The quality of your writing matters. I’m not trying to say with SEO the quality doesn’t matter. But it really isn’t the same thing if I’m writing my blog and I want you to listen to what I’m saying. I need to write that.

One guy set up his blog, built his email list to eight hundred people, and I can hear everyone saying, oh, snore, that’s not enough people. These people by the way all knew him. They really trusted him and read his stuff all the time. We’re talking about a guy who would get forty or fifty comments on a blog post. Nobody’s ever heard of him, except in his circle. He went out and did a membership program. It was something like $US90 – $US100 a month, a really great program. He converted something like well over two hundred people of that eight hundred to buy immediately.

That’s because he’s writing well, they really love him, they know him. If I was doing SEO, I wouldn’t spend that kind of time on writing the blog. That’s why you need to try to identify. If you’re really going to solve your different strategies, your different things you have to implement in your business, think about it. Writing’s an important thing.

If you want people to really listen to you, you better either be a good writer or hire a good one. If you’re doing search, then you really want to think about getting many, many different keyworded posts, not written like garbage, but not really the level where you’ve got to string people’s emotions and get them going.

David Jenyns: I think you hit the nail on the head as far as, what’s Google trying to do? Google is trying to give the best user experience. That’s why I talk in terms of SEO. A lot of times SEO will just happen naturally if you do the right stuff, if you’re putting good content out there. That’s what I like about you. You’re all about putting the good content out there in the right places. Even though you might not focus on SEO, it happens naturally by virtue of putting out good content. What do people do to good content? They link to it. It’s like that flow on effect. It’s just by putting the good content out there.

One of the first things you do, you identify what is it that we’re trying to achieve. Then from there, because you’ve got a really big tool box of different things that you can draw on to achieve that, how do you go from there?

Declan Dunn: The next step to go from what really are the results is first, reality check. People are running down these paths telling themselves or having a friend or again someone who’s just told them this works just to do it and they’re not really backing off and saying wait a minute, is there enough traffic, is it out there? The other thing is, if you’re doing anything in today’s media and you want to get on search, I mean believe me, everything I do is to get links and tag it well and use the right keyword. So I never ignore search.

But even that’s going to take a little time. But there’s no quick drive through Burger King window, like we used to do many years ago. There are a lot of people competing, so do you have the patience to grow it? If they don’t have any of these things in line, I start looking at it and say, what are the key assets that you have?

I don’t think people understand this. I ask you how much time and money you have. Time is money. If I was to ask them, the very first thing I do next, is what in the next three months would be an achievable goal for you? What would make you happy in terms of what I call grocery money? It’s money that pays your bills but you’re still not doing much except eating your groceries. Where are the big number? How many people do we need to get there?

Normally after that, honestly I start looking for the people who are already in front of the audience, and I find a way to nurture, to engage them, not just to pitch them. If you really want somebody who’s got trust and who’s good and successful, they’re not waiting for you to call, ok? They’re very busy, so you want to understand that and say, ok here’s the big player, as I jokingly call it, the eight hundred pound gorilla.

Then there are the people who are the interim players who are good, but they’re not too big that you can’t contact them pretty quickly and they can take action for you, either posting an ad, doing a blog interview with you or what have you. Do you have people who can take action and how can we start getting some numbers going? If you’re just starting out with a new domain and no links, good luck on Google. At least buy an old domain, do something. You’ve got a big uphill battle.

The other end is, you can still not use that as a negative. In the interim that’s what I love to use affiliate partnerships with, doing joint ventures. Let me give you an example. Way back in the day, we were all struggling for traffic by the way. It wasn’t as easy as a lot of the gurus say. We ran into four guys who were doing about a million visitors a month. It was more common back then. They weren’t making any money and we do make money, ok? This is nice. The people who do know how to make money are pretty rare in this business, I’m sorry.

So we stepped in and really said, you guys are awesome. We created a group of five people who worked together. We did the monetization and the other four guys brought the traffic. We managed to send traffic to each other. Each one of us managed to increase our traffic by about 20%. We brought the monetization. As the partner that’s what we brought to the table and received about a million visitors a month in exchange. We monetized everybody. They locked in with us because once you’re making money, life gets very simple. We all were able to do it.

I was able to go out and start a website and get an ungodly amount of traffic to it. We were in a relationship, so these guys weren’t doing it with anyone, we were making money together. I was able to turn out $20,000 or $30,000 a month because they could send traffic to me by just snapping their fingers. But what they couldn’t do was monetize the traffic. Once we not just taught them but put in the systems, that gave us the lock in to make money on their traffic which made them much more than they were making. We did not have the traffic. But we had the smarts, copy, conversion and squeeze pages, 101 marketing. You think a lot of people know how to do it. They don’t.

A lot of the guys with the traffic today, I see as a great opportunity. I know guys in the blog world, let’s face it, the social media blog guys, there are not a lot of seven figure people in that business. They’re awesome people, but they’re like the early web masters. Some of them are like what we used to call cyber communists. ‘I want make money.’ Then they’re going to wake up and realize, I’m blogging like a slave and I’m not making money. Is there a way I can balance honouring my audience and making money? So that’s what I ask. Who’s out there?

I really start out, number one as a customer of yours. That’s really the single thing I’ve done throughout my career. Forget about you, your product, forget about you. I’m the customer and who do I care about? Me. Life gets really easy. Who do they know, like and trust? Where’s the traffic? Go do a little bit of research. Go to Compete and spend $500 for a month and you’ll get more research than you’ll need for a year. If you know how to use it, who’s sending traffic to who? It’s not like you have to analyze. It’s like little groups of people working really profitably together.

If you’re beginning, ideally you want to become part of a little group of five or ten people that work and share traffic and, by the way, not just share, but make money together.

David Jenyns: I suppose one of the first things being, identifying what assets you’re got to leverage off and where are those players in the market and start contacting them. Initially is it just connecting with them to see what value you can add to them? You’re really a master of building those networks. That’s another one of your skills. Are you initially trying to see what value you can offer them? Or are you just going straight to them and saying, I want to buy space on your blog, or it might be a question of how long is a piece of string? It really just depends.

Declan Dunn: It’s a great point. What are your assets and what are your weaknesses? If you don’t have money, that’s not a deal breaker. But face it, you’re not going to be able to go out and pay people. I’ve actually gone out and made bigger businesses by people with no money than people with money. People with money tend to get really silly. It sounds
weird, but they tend to think they can buy it. You can’t buy love.

What you first need to know is what are you bringing to the table honestly that you could talk about to somebody in about two minutes that they would get and they would totally understand and by the way that you would feel comfortable with. I’m not against hard pitch guys. In the end, people have really got their guard up against people fly by night saying all these things that might happen and burning them. You want to make sure whatever you promise, you can deliver on.

If you have money, money is an awesome tool. If you have an ability to understand basic marketing, you can create ad copy and landing pages and emails; that’s a huge asset you can plug in anywhere in this business. The guys with traffic are often spending so much time, I’m talking in the blog world strictly here, not the guys doing smart SEO who’ve got a financial objective.

A lot of times these are just guys or women who are just writing because they love it and they’ve never thought about making money. We used to call it, have fun, make money, do good. Are you having fun? They’d say yes. Are you making money? No. I would say, then you’ve got a hobby. Would you like me to be able to turn your hobby round, by the way without screwing over all those people, without ruining what you’ve built because I don’t have to? They’re really nervous about that because they don’t understand the money end. Then doing good for yourself and other people.

Businesses on the net tend to gravitate to a very few key cooperative partnerships. It doesn’t mean you don’t work with other people. Ultimately you’re looking to find those people you can work really closely with. What is it that they have that you don’t? What is it that they lack that you have? Nobody’s perfect. I’ll look at a market, and say, how does this market make money? Is it from email? Some markets work still to this day sending out email. Others work tremendously via search, primarily.

Where’s the place the money is and how can I fit myself into that? That’s one of the best ways that we leverage. One man’s garbage is another man’s gold is so true on the net.

David Jenyns: With some of the different methods that you do, we talked top down strategy point of view. At this point, you’re leveraging what you can see is out there. Obviously you’re trying to connect with those people and brainstorm different ideas. From a tactical point of view, and I don’t want to get too bogged down in tactics, because it’s very easy just to list tactic after tactic, do you have a few core ones where you like to get started? Are there some where you say, this is a no brainer and this can be very easily systematized, therefore there is great leverage there?

Declan Dunn: I’m a big fan of email and affiliate partnerships because they can move quickly. Personally what I like to do, I can put email copy together and conversion pages and test it in weeks. Not completely getting everything out but I can feel comfortable with it versus other things that take more time.

Let me give you an example of somebody we work with, MyDentalChannel. This guy is a dentist in the US. He has nothing. He has no traffic. He has a domain name. He has got very little time to be able to do it. He has some money where he can pay some people on a monthly basis to keep the site updated and things like that. He’s really stuck in a place where he can’t just work it every day. He’s got a very successful job.

We came to him, and here’s how we assessed it. He’s in the dental industry, which, if you look at it, is totally not driven by search. It’s driven by email. These are small business guys, and just look at the search terms. We’re talking maybe a thousand searches. It’s really just not happening. These guys have jobs and barely sit in front of a computer. That’s really not a great way to reach them, even though that’s what most of them are doing. I love markets. It doesn’t make any sense. Just look up how many search terms for specific dental terms.

If you’re selling dental services to customers, search is great. People looking for dentists, totally. Dentists San Francisco, California, buy it, get it, that’s what you want to do. But if you’re a dentist trying to sell training services to other dentists, there’s no way. So we started looking at, here’s a bunch of people that are overwhelmed, have great rate relationships with their customers, but are so lost on the internet. I love markets like this, by the way. I love people like this because they’re coming to the net, they’re great people. They just have no idea how this stuff works.

So I went and looked at the industry. This is what I do before I even start pitching. Find a couple of people who are experts and say hello, in an email or a phone call, not even a pitch. Listen to them. Find out what do you guys like, what don’t you like, what’s worked for you, what hasn’t. Ask basic questions. What turns out, dentists, all of them, would send newsletters in the old school, out through the physical mail and some guy would create a newsletter service and put his header on it. Basically, he would write the content and send it out with their name and address to their clients.

We said, well that’s pretty easy to do through email, isn’t it? So we set up a newsletter service where we offer to our partners who have lists of dentists, by the way this is a business to business, b to b niche market. I love niches by the way. Niches are so ripe right now. Everyone keeps competing for the heavy duty stuff, where ‘Those guys are really good. You better be really good if you’re going to compete up there.’ You’re skills aren’t likely there, but if you’ve got it, go for it, because that’s where the money is. But in the niches people ignore them.

Here are these guys with dentists. So we created a private label dentist newsletter. In return, we have an affiliate commission if they buy our subscription based service, we give them a commission. We ended up getting 20% of the total dentists in the US. Of the total dentists who have email addresses, we now have 20% of them, within four months, at no cost. I checked this out.

You’ll love this with the blog. This is the other thing that drives me nuts. People think bloggers have to wake up everyday and type and do this stuff. I love it. If you can do that, go for it.

My guy’s got one day a week. So we did this really secret thing. We actually write ahead of time. We script. Now we’re three months scheduled ahead of time. I can already tell you what’s coming out in January 2010 and what marketing campaign it’s hooked into. It took us one focused period of one week of writing and recording to get three months of content. We spend the rest of the time on the phone calling people. When our blog updates, it sends out automatically hello to our newsletter.

So my guy pulls one blog, schedules it for three months, it goes out to the newsletter and there is this thing called FriendFeed and TweetDeck and every other tweet that syndicates it to Facebook and Twitter. So we’re covered.

It’s not perfect but now we’re out in all the media. It’s driving traffic. We post to one place and we script. We write short interviews, send them out. That becomes our newsletter, our partners give us emails, and by the way it’s a joint venture. So it’s sent by them with their brand and ours, but we control everything. Why? These guys don’t know how to make money. So basically what I’ve done is create an email newsletter which goes out with their graphic on top. I’ve got 20% of the US audience simply because these guys kept trying to do it themselves, but they didn’t have the time.

David Jenyns: You make it sound really easy there and I want to drill down slightly into what’s going on, the mechanics behind that. We talked about the newsletter, and you said, we’re posting it on the blog and we’ve got that to drip feed out and you’ve got the newsletter and people are getting told when that’s being posted. Now as far as driving the traffic is concerned, you’re leveraging off some of those existing networks. You’re also pushing the content out there. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re pushing that content out there?

You mentioned a few different things, that are going to push it through to Facebook and MySpace or whatever markets you’re publishing on. How do you structure something like that?

Declan Dunn: First thing we do, I use FriendFeed. I like FriendFeed. FriendFeed allows me to put these different urls in, so my blog posts then can send them out to various places like Facebook, Twitter accounts. Let’s say I have about five accounts total, we don’t need to name them all. You know them all. They’re all the usual suspects. I get logins and passwords for those. I enter those into FriendFeed so that handles all the communication. FriendFeed says, oh, blog’s updated, tell Twitter, tell Facebook. I don’t know how it works other than logins and passwords and everything goes like crazy.

What’s important, and a good point you’re making is, when we generate traffic, we do interviews. Then we let our people know when the interview’s coming up so they can blog about it, they can send it out to their email list. In fact we encourage them to make this a bit of a celebration, because these people don’t do anything else to promote themselves. It’s like a focused interview. When you’re interviewed on MyDentalChannel, it’s a big deal, it looks really good.

Each guest expert will be encouraged to send out the email and then a week after it’s posted on MyDental Channel, we actually share a little excerpt, about two to three minutes of let’s say a thirty minute interview for free. We let them post it on their blog. Then usually about four to six weeks later, we’ll post a second part of their interview on our blog and let them know. We say, before , during or after, or all three if you’re great, can you let people know and then a week later we put it on their blog and they can let their people know, and put it on their site by the way, which honours them. It says, I want to drive traffic to my site.

Meanwhile our emails go out to our partners. Instead of you just sending it to your email list or mine, I’ve got five different partners, who by the way love this and we have rules about not pitchfesting and not beating our audience up, but giving them real content. I drive them to squeeze pages. If they give me a url I link to them and we’re all interlinking, so we’re playing the search engine game. We’ve got really high page rank relatively. It’s not exactly a real high page rank industry, but we’ve got decent page rank that our link matters.

We’ve got people, for example, one part of a general electric company. There are some big players who could care less. They’re just getting interviewed, they’re not actually an email partner. But if I put that content out, it adds to what people are doing. Then what we’re doing, to add to your point, you’ve got to tell people what to do as partners. Everybody says, you’re cool, I’m cool. I like to say, I’ll scratch my back, you scratch yours, and we both end up with itchy backs. Nobody scratches. You’ve got to tell people in a good way, I’m expecting you to do this.

My admins check in a day or so ahead. Here’s my other secret. Let your admins create the illusion that you’re organized. Tell them, a day or so before, contact the people, follow them up if they don’t do it, be nice, pick up the phone and give them the guilty call. They will do it for you, but they need to be nudged. Don’t expect anyone to do anything. So with one virtual admin and a schedule, my virtual admin already knows what’s coming out next month.

She knows who to call, has the phone number and email, the interview’s done and then it comes out about two to three months later and it gets segmented out. We try to get as many opportunities to post this and share traffic as possible.

David Jenyns: When it comes to actual implementation of this, I suppose you brought it up when you talked about the admins. A lot of this I imagine the core infrastructure of this is your time. You’re going to mastermind out what needs to be done. When it gets to a point of implementation, because you have lots of different projects that you’re working on at any one time, how do you pull that together and not go crazy trying to spin sixty plates at any one time?

Declan Dunn: I ran an agency for a long time so I learnt this in the trenches. I like to run two to three person teams being, one is the expert or the leader of whatever that company is and the other is the admin person who actually gets things done. If the leader can actually get things done, I’ve got an awesome team. I would encourage all those people here to not play this attitude game where, oh, I’m so lazy and I just sit around driving my Ferrari, I love you too. Here’s what you could do. Try working five hours more every week. You could increase your revenue exponentially.

When you care about your business, your people care. I don’t just talk to my admin and then throw them a brain dump and go out and stare at my belly button. I give them specific steps to do. I’m such a big fan of systems because, if you just spend the time in the beginning to say what are the various steps it takes.

Let’s say to my virtual admin, this is MyDentalChannel. We record content, it’s transcribed and edited down. What that person is given is about a two paragraph word document, maybe even html and a little two to three minute audio snippet. We hire a transcriptionist to do that. We record the audio and we do hire somebody for two to three days every three months to work eight to sixteen hours; that bills out at about $US30-$US40 an hour. It’s a little bit of a cost, but if you look at that quarterly, we’re probably spending $2000 a year on audio.

Audio’s our most expensive thing because it takes time to edit. The transcription stuff is nothing. I can give you tons of amazing transcription services that are incredibly cheap. So we bring it out. So my admin knows that I go to the blog, and instead of them going to the blog every day which by the way would cause errors. She knows that she sits down with that stuff and just schedules it out over, probably takes her two to three days. She makes sure everything is scheduled out in our blog.

WordPress does this, everyone does this, schedules ahead. Most people don’t think this way in the US. Everybody’s trying to do everything at the last minute, which is why stuff screws up because you’ll make more errors running through it than thinking ahead. By giving my admin that, after they do that one week of intensive work, by the way I can go back and check their work now. It’s not coming out tomorrow, so we’re not all having heart attacks. I can go check their work and say, ok, everything’s good.

Now what my admin’s doing is reflecting on comments, going to Facebook. Probably I would say I expect them to do about an hour a day. It’s just like checking email. Check Facebook, check Twitter. You don’t need to go to fifty sites unless you’re an SEO guy, then you do. There’s a real point to going to fifty sites because it will hugely increase your value. But if you’re like us, and you’re really trying to, what I call, fish in the right lakes, there are only a few lakes where the fish are biting. Facebook is one of them for us.

So we want her there to comment, we want her there to reflect back, to answer the questions but she spends literally about five hours a week, so that’s about twenty hours a month. We probably get that up to thirty when everything is said and done. We have her once a quarter, spend a focused week of twenty to forty hours extra chugging out all that extra work.

To answer your question, we compartmentalize our time into focused one week production times followed by just making sure the rest is running. That way we’re not doing production every week and it saves us a great deal of time and money. It’s just scripting ahead.

David Jenyns: That initial production time, would that be working with the client as well as getting the content ready for distribution? At that point, you’re working on a project for a week and you’re getting all the systems in place, skilling up your assistant who is then going to be able to take and manage that project through to whenever the person’s contracted to have that project go through. Does that sound right?

Declan Dunn: Yes. When you’re hearing it, it sounds like a lot at first, but once you’ve done it, it’s not. This is what I do. Now I can go out to any author or speaker and I’ve got a system that I can then train them in how to interview. We’ve got a whole book and training series. By the way, I don’t just throw them a book. I talk to them. It takes about two hours to train anybody. I listen to them, if they have the personality to do an interview. That’s how I qualify them. It’s not rocket science – some can do it, some can’t.

The interview and then the recording, then the posting and then the checking, that’s a system. It sounds like a lot at first. But here’s what people don’t realize. You’re probably going to work more and, to your point, a lot more at first doing it because you’ve never done it before. But the second, third, fourth time you start going through, this stuff gets so easy. It only gets easy by repetition. You’ve got to put in the time. But what that does is what anybody good in business knows, is that creating systems makes, three to six months from now, you’ll be blowing away your competition.

Most internet folks like to make things up on the fly. Those businesses just tend to crash and burn, because that is not a system. That is based on one person’s genius. Genius is not replicable. I want things that are replicable and that I can train good, average people to do. If it is something that takes a really high skill level, I’m going to look at that and say, I’m not sure about that because when you’re talking really high skill levels, there is a limited number of people who can do those kind of things.

David Jenyns: It almost feels like we’ve drawn up two business models. If we talk in terms of dentists, because it does depend very much on the client you’re working with and what it is you can already leverage off them. You find out where they’re strong, also identify where their weaknesses are and identify what partners you can work with. Similarly we were talking about, I don’t know if it is a separate system or whether it merges together depending on the individual.

After you’ve identified that, you also look at what content can we create with this particular client, be it through interviews which can convert into transcripts, to articles for basically distribution and getting that content out there. Just so I understand how you’re doing this process. The idea of getting the content out there is then hopefully to market to either the affiliate partners that you’ve lined up or through any sort of email communication that you’ve built up. You’re continuing to market to the people who are already in your funnel.

Then slightly out of that, you’re creating this content, putting it out there and you’re putting good content, hopefully putting it in front of the right people. You’re throwing the good stuff out there, and like I was saying, good SEO happens from putting good content out there. Does that sound right?

Declan Dunn: Yes, right. And one of the things we do is, we do a half hour interview. We give away three to six minutes. I’m not being religious about it, but it’s like a free chapter in a book. That way, if you’re on my email list, you’ll get a taste. But if you want to pay, you’ll get the whole interview plus savings by buying that person’s product or service. So anybody we interview has an incentive. For example, we don’t let them pitch, which would drive all internet marketers crazy. That’s ok. That market would kill us. We wouldn’t be able to send to those lists.

To your point, you want to make sure that what you’re sending out, that the list is willing to hear it. Internet marketers are willing to hear pitches. That’s fine. I’m not against that, but if I try to take that attitude over here, we’d lose all our people.

So we go out, and we know that they don’t want to hear pitches, but the end is, the person that I’m interviewing will sell services to a dentist that range anywhere from $US1,000-$US10,000. So they’re more than willing. Their goal is to be in front of real dentists who would hire them. They’ve got to put on their best. To this point, it’s one of my measures. Do I have people who give me good content, and won’t make my life difficult by doing it?

All these are rules. I look at it and say, because if that is not going to happen, and each market has its own way it works, then I would adapt to that market. This market told me no pitches. But the other end of it is, if this guy or girl is smart, then that dentist listening is going to hire them. That’s awesome, because they have money to spend.

If this makes sense, David, I positioned this as, are you a lead product or are you a back end product? We’re lead product for an entire industry. That is so competitive that enables us to make a deal. As part of what I do when I look at a business is, where do you best fit in to this world so you can start making some sales? Are you a lead product?

It doesn’t have to be that black and white but there are so many more openings for being lead products right now because of the way the economy is. People aren’t spending as much, and it doesn’t mean they won’t. It just means they’re spending smaller chunks of money. So we became a lead product and that tended to work in that market.

For example, we’ve got an association of dentists who we email to and they love us. They’re going to endorse us to other state associations which could get us further and further emails because in that market, earning trust and being long term is very important. So we have to be a bit more careful than I might be in an internet marketing circle. By the way, I love internet marketing. I’m not dissing it here. It’s just you can be a lot more aggressive in speaking to them, because people are there hard core to make money.

That’s not the truth in any audience. You want to make sure whatever the audience is, that your voice, your tone, your copy reflects what they want to hear. You don’t want to just take some guru’s pitch which might work selling a get rich quick book on ClickBank and try and apply it to another market where you sound nuts. It’s just copy, it’s copy and words, that’s all it is.

David Jenyns: You’ve developed this system that you implement, and you’ve got a bit of a tool box so it can vary according to the clients that you’re working with. That’s where the core of your business is, identifying those clients.

I like the idea that you identified dentists and then you said the client is worth $10,000 to them, so there’s a lot of money in that industry. If they’re excited by the fact of email newsletters because they’ve never seen it before and you come into that space and a client is worth so much for them, once you start to generate that cash, obviously you’re going to get a piece of that pie. Is that the space that you operate in?

Declan Dunn: Yes, that’s a very good way to put it. I consider myself a new media publisher, which means I set up the strategy, pick up the systems, the right systems that people can run depending on their skill bases. I work with a wide variety of markets. I work with guys in the internet marketing space, I work with get rich quick, I work with really corporate guys. To me it doesn’t matter, the system is the system. What matters is what tactic works in that market and what tools work.

What’s funny, one of the things I learnt, the thing is as a publisher I usually get a set up fee, plus I get a license. Basically I’m licensing the system at a really deep level if I work. I do coaching and consulting as well. When I license a system I get a piece of the action like I’m doing with the dentists. It gives me the incentive to be a bigger partner, and it gives them the incentive. Let me give you a quick hint.

This is something we learnt in the new media game. When we started out we had these awesome interviews. This guy is really good. He’s entertaining, intelligent, it is fun stuff. No one’s listening to him, so we’re struggling at the beginning, saying what are we doing wrong here? We’re sitting here in the old school mentality, old school being two years ago. I’m only talking US here. You guys over in Australia are so far ahead of us with mobile phones. If one thing Americans are dumb at, it’s mobile phones. We are clueless, leading the blind, I like to say. I’m confessing being blind and being clueless earlier this year. I’m not throwing stones.

I’m sitting there saying, I’m designing the email, it’s perfect. Everything’s right, I know email. I’ve had lists of eight million. I really know email. I know how to design it. I’ve got a whole give away. I’ve given away a sixteen page document because it really drives me nuts that people don’t do the basics. But they still weren’t looking. So I said, never complain. That’s another thing. Don’t get into whining. Every obstacle is there just to teach you how to do it right.

So I talked to my dentist. I said, John, let’s just break this down, simple. I’m sending you an email. Where do you see it? He said, well, you know I don’t really check our email because I use a palm phone. John’s hanging out with dentists. I have to get education all the time. Another reason I do this is, they buy education all the time as part of their business, they have to. I said, when you go to these conferences, how many of these guys are on mobile phones? He said, everyone. I even asked my internet marketing friends, and they said, yes, everyone. I said, do you reflect that in your email?

Here’s the deal. You know why they weren’t listening? We had it like they were sitting in front of their computer, click to go to the website. That is beautiful on a big screen. Try that on an iPhone. It’s difficult, there is no screen. So here’s the magic word: download. We tested it, download the mp3. We sent them pdfs. Download the pdf. If we’re writing anything of length, they’ll import that to their computer. They can listen to the mp3 on any phone. I’m talking about the US only. But mp3s are pretty universal.

Our listening rate went through the roof, up like 500% and people started doing the viral thing and passing it on. It was such an easy thing once we figured it out. But we were totally lost in the old world, thinking that everyone’s sitting in front of the computer. I have to tell you, none of these guys are and every internet marketing conference I’ve been to since, they tell me none of their people are, yet they’re still driving them to web pages.

The last thing I’ll say is, we actually drive them to a phone. We actually don’t have a call centre or anything like that, we don’t have enough money. So we have an 1800 number where they can call and get an automated sales message and go to do an order. But we have to drive them to a phone and not a click on the link to do an order because they’re simply not in front of a computer.

David Jenyns: I think that’s one of the big insights you gave there. It’s really getting in the mind of who it is you’re trying to get in front of and almost put yourself in their shoes and look through their eyes. Where do other people, not even necessarily newbies, people who’ve been in internet marketing, where are some other areas where you see people going wrong when they start to market online?

Declan Dunn: I upset an audience about a week ago, it’s what I do in a fun way. I like to shake things up, but only from speaking from experience. I don’t believe I know the truth or anything like that. Forget your ego. If somebody couldn’t do what you’re doing, you’re probably in the wrong business on the internet. We’re not rocket scientists but what we do have are followings. To your point, what I was telling people was, that what was good if I was starting out now as a newbie, there is no way I would do what most of the gurus, including myself previously have taught. It’s not a good way.

What they’re doing by the way, is working for them, and it’s crazy. They look at me and say, what are you saying, stop this? I say, no you don’t but if I was starting out with nothing, I would flop doing what you are doing. That was a different time period. Everyone’s blogging, everyone’s in social media, and they’re running around, which I call the ADD of new media, they’re running round. You’ve got to have some video or audio to stop them, to get them to read.

They will read, but I’ve got people going up with text only and doing squeeze pages. There’s nothing wrong, test everything. The old methodology, driving lots of traffic and millions of visitors, it’s insane. Most people I know making seven figure businesses have 10,000-15,000 visitors a month. They’re not spending their time driving traffic, but again I’m not in the search business, that is a different matter. Even search has only so many searches. There’s not a lot of mass market.

If you want to go to the US and do diets for your search, you better have a big bag of cash, or you better be really smart and work eighteen hours a day. It’s a very competitive market. If you know how a bell curve goes, it starts low, heads up a slope and then evens out on the top. That’s where we are. We’re at the top of the bell curve. We’re mature. We’re a real business now guys. It’s really hard now. So coming out like you can drive lots of traffic, you’re going to go out today. What I would suggest the gurus are doing, I’m not putting all of them down, there are some awesome guys out there, I love them all, but the thing that they’re doing works for them wouldn’t work for somebody who’s starting.

If you’re going out, you’ve got to get some trust and reputation. Still the best way to do it is to leverage and engage people and meet them, even meet them physically if you can. If you want to make a really big deal, you’ve got to get out of the internet friend, to face to face.

I’ll give you a quick example. One guy is very successful, has money but not a lot of time. His teams are ok but not great. He’s managing this stuff and he’s got a product going on. He came to me and he said, I want to sell this product. Here’s what I tell newbies. Don’t just say I want to sell this product, see if that product would sell.

I see a lot of people are saying, I want to sell this and this thing won’t sell. Maybe you’ll make some cute money but you’re saying, no, I want to change reality. I would rather look at existing human buying behaviour and fit into something and make it work. So he came out and he had this book which was brilliant. The book was so brilliant it was a hard thing to sell. So we turned the book into a 90 day challenge. We sold it for half the price of the book, took the content, put it out in auto responders and contacted major affiliates and paid them the lion’s share of the $97, all digitally delivered by the way.

It was a challenge, it wasn’t just an ebook. People had to trickle the content out over ninety days. They participated, and the content was awesome. We turned his book into an event. Then all the affiliates marketed. He sold something like 19,000 units of a $97 product. He blew me away. It took him six to nine months to get those affiliates. He nurtured them, he looked at them, he found them and he had to shake their hand, but once he earned their trust and had enough of a commission, he was able to move forward.

So I’m not trying to say there are not get rich quick things because this is the internet. You could invent something wildly successful, and I encourage any crazy people to continue to be that. A great author Hunter S Thompson said when the going gets tough, the weird go pro. Most of the best businesses I’ve ever seen on the net, none of them started with lots of money. Look at Google, it started with a dream. Isn’t it funny, do no evil. How ironic is that? I can say that about Google because I’m not SEO based.

When you get big, evil’s relative. If I was a newbie, I would be blogging like crazy if I had writing skills. If I didn’t have writing skills and I was really smart and organized I’d be doing something search related in a niche that wasn’t too heavily populated. I’m a big fan of this. I’m not against competition.

I just think being all macho and jumping in to kick the biggest guy in the world, I would rather learn in a niche and move to the other niche when I was ready and had all my ducks in a row and I had links and I had built up that tracking. You’re going to have to build this stuff up. You’re going to want to make some money. You’re either going to go out there and blog yourself, or you’re going to blog and you’re not really a writer. I would always urge anyone to write well, but frankly if you’re scaling up a lot of search blogs, it gets tough.

People use something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, other sites where they hire cheap writers just to do posts. You can do that. But if you’re just starting out as a newbie, the best way to build your list is to build a blog. So if you’re building an email list, get a blog.

Start connecting and contacting people and don’t sit there and pitch your product. Look at what everyone does at the product launch now. Do you start with the pitch, or do you start with the candy, give it away free, get them interested in a month, then let them know what you’re doing for a month, then hit it a month late?

That’s a really brilliant thing that Jeff Walker’s created and other people have systematized, that little process. But think about what it is. Introduce yourself, but don’t jump and think, if I get one more newbie saying, hi, I’ve got a book, do you want to sell it for me and get rich? I say, no, I don’t even know who you are. I appreciate you love your book, but back off a little bit and realize you’re just getting into the room. You need to introduce yourself, you need to get known.

By the way, people will help you if you don’t come on like a freight train at the beginning. You can earn their trust and you get this other side to them. There are a lot of top gurus who will promote because they are looking. It’s ironic. We need the newbies to bring new ideas in. We’re all so settled in our ways that newbies are usually the ones that look at Mark Zuckerberger’s Facebook. You think anyone who came from the web 1.0 world would think like him? No! Think about sharing and communication. No! We all thought about killing the customer. I’m serious, it was just marketing. People thought he was nuts.

I’m not trying to espouse this, that’s a big level example. Newbies don’t realize the thing they’re going to bring in is a different point of view that people that get good in this business have lost. Because they’re good and they’re good at what they’re doing, that’s why they’re growing their businesses focusing and stop paying attention to some things.

That’s what’s happening now. There are some shifts in terms of copy, language, style, the way people are marketing. I’m seeing people who three years ago people would have laughed off, doing better than people who three years ago would have been really successful.

David Jenyns: I think you hit something key there. Building that trust and reputation is the biggest thing online, especially when you’re going to buy something. The biggest hurdle people have to get over is that trust factor. So it’s important to build up that trust both with your key partners who could help you out from an affiliate point of view further down the track, and also your clients. Building that trust, I think you hit the nail on the head as far as Jeff Walker’s material is concerned. That really does connect with the individual and applies a lot of the Robert Cialdini principles through influence. It’s building a relationship rather than just coming out of the gate and going straight for the jugular.

I think that right there is really key as far as where some people are going wrong. Looking back on everything you’ve done up to this point, because I know you’ve had a huge amount of experience starting way back. If you could identify, if you could have known what you know now and redo it all, how would you do things differently? More specifically if you can identify some key points or leverage things that happened in your career, when you look back and say, when I did these one or two things, it really exploded my business.

Obviously connecting with the right people and building that relationship was one of those. Are there any other things that had a huge impact?

Declan Dunn: Mentors. Jonathan Mizel and Martin Sanders is the way back machine for some people but still two of my best friends. I was so clueless about marketing. People don’t have any idea about how bad I really was. I had an attitude against it. They taught me. People say, oh, you’re so good! My headlines, you would cry they were so bad. I had no clue on how to write it. So having a mentor relationship with some folks was great. I don’t know how anybody can go without that. Most of my mentors I’m seeking now are under thirty. I’m going back to the old hippy saying, don’t trust anyone over thirty. I’m way over thirty!

They know how to use the internet like I don’t and I know how to do marketing. I really learn from them. What is funny, they don’t just have to be twenty something, don’t get me wrong. But if you’ve grown up with it, there’s a different mentality from my generation who didn’t grow up with it. They know the tools. To this day, I continue to look for mentors who are not like me, who don’t have my viewpoint but are doing things that I think are amazing.

That’s how I ran into Eben Pagan years ago. It was so funny, we finally met in 2004. He is an amazing guy. I was so busy in 2001. In 2004, Eben is so like this, he’s always looking for knowledge, he’s always looking to learn. That’s why he’s so successful. Never stop wanting to learn. If I could go back and correct what I did…I have this ability with this marketing. If it wasn’t for the internet, I would be as poor as could be. This real world stuff does not make sense to me. When the internet came along, I’m really good at knowing what’s going to happen two to three years down the road. I made a lot of money through that.

When I went into doing info products, my biggest problem has been, my products have been two to three years early. The product I’ve been releasing I’ve put in the closet because it was too early. I’ve sat there and said, I’m going to stop trying to create it. I don’t mean let the market catch up. There are patterns, there are trends. That’s what I mean. There is no visionary stuff. You can see the way people are using stuff. When you see people start spending money, pay attention.

In 2001 people started spending money at Google. It wasn’t a lot of money but everyone else was making nothing. You’re seeing that with Facebook right now. They’re doing $500,000,000 while Twitter’s trying to figure out its business model. That’s a pattern. Somebody’s learnt to make money even though, don’t get me wrong, it’s a macro thing, but $500,000,000 with a crazy thing like Facebook is relatively not that much but it’s money. Whether they’re rather clueless about some of their marketing, which they are, they can figure that out.

Twitter is trying to say, we don’t need any business model, but unfortunately they don’t have the genius. Compare Twitter to Google. Google is run by engineers, Twitter is a cool little tool that anyone can replicate. There’s no money.

I would say, and this is my own weakness is being at the head of the market and knowing when to leverage that at the right time. Sometimes in an info business, timing is everything. I’m not saying most of you have an idea that’s not in there, I’m just saying, my particular thing is, it’s a gift that I’ve been able to get this and I make lots of money with bigger people doing this. I’m already doing this, paving the roads, but it doesn’t happen for a year or two.

So I had to balance that with stuff that’s not just here and now but that I didn’t put out a product and then come back and see two or three years later somebody with a product that is similar to mine, and mine’s now two or three years old. I pulled mine off the shelf. So I actually learned this time. We’ll see. I don’t know whether it will be a hit or not. I’ve been off the road for quite a bit. But we shall see.

David Jenyns: If we can get a little bit of insight, and I know you don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet. We have got your new book that’s coming out, New Media Game. Can you give some insight, about what you can see what’s coming two or three years down the road? What are some places that people can position themselves to be in front of this wave?

Declan Dunn: Let me give you a context. This is the third in my series. The first one I wrote was called Winning the Affiliate Game in 1998. I became a bible of the industry and I turned that in to my own agency which just went crazy. It was the high seven figures for the whole seven years I was there. It was an awesome experience. I created Winning the Internet Game in 2001. That was when Google was coming up, so it was search, email, a lot of the old school internet stuff. I haven’t really written one since 2004, so this one is called Winning the New Media Game. It’s different than a book. It’s really about audio and visual material to answer your question.

What’s really happening now is, you’ve got to have some audio visual presence. You want to hear something really crazy about video that people don’t get? People don’t understand. Video has been around for ever. The biggest thing that people look for in your video is not all the whiz bang tricks. There is a study out from UCLA, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the percentages right but general rules apply. About 45% of the reason somebody likes your video is the audio quality. People don’t understand.

I used to do video back in the day, my audio was bad, people used to crucify me. You can have bad video with good audio, you cannot have good video with bad audio. Bad audio is not allowed. That’s the number one thing. It is so counter intuitive. Number two, it is the sense of your presentation, whether they like you or not. It’s not anything to do with what you’re presenting, but the way you present it. It’s just simply one’s audio, the second half is your presentation style, whether they like it.

That’s why you get all these crazy people on YouTube who have this crazy thing, but they’re just genius just who they are. People love it. You know what 10% is? The content. Literally, content is meaningless to them. People don’t get this. They spend their entire time on content. People could care less about content. It’s the audio, the presentation style and the content is a 10% consideration.

So with my book and what I’ve turned it into is audio-visual training and practical training. It’s called The New Media Game because I’m about coaching people to get into the game and actually get off the sidelines, put it into action and create an area where I can coach and mentor some people at a lower level, other people way up the totem pole. I’m able to reach more people. Something I really love is I learn from these guys. This community is going to develop by everybody’s efforts. We’re going to have a lot of rules about not screwing each other over, which I will have to knock on wood.

If you screw people around and steal ideas, you’re going to be gone. I’m going to be like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld. ‘No soup for you! Bye!’ Seriously, I don’t have time. You can go plenty of places and do that by the way. You can go replicate it. But I want people to come up with their ideas and be able to put them into practice. I going to take audio and video and take social media mobile. This social media mobile is not a trend. It’s the customers in control of everything. Wake up!

I’m only talking from a US perspective, but advertising’s dead. It’s so dead, it’s dead like I never thought it would die. It’s been gutted to death. You’re either doing something on performance, because people don’t make money selling ads, they make money when ads perform. Google is the biggest, greatest example of that at a text ad level, but everybody’s doing it on their space. So social media is really a two step direct marketing.

You don’t sell them in social media. You take them from social media, and you actually drive them. Instead of a squeeze page, here’s a little trick, drive them into your own social network where they’ll opt in for everything because it doesn’t look like a squeeze page. Create a community around that with the right market.

For example, I saw a guy do that, called Shelfari; they were bought by Amazon. He drove people into a community to talk about books. They bought books from Amazon. He basically built that site and became an affiliate for Amazon by driving people who loved to talk about books. Gary Vaynerchuck, is the wine guy who everyone knows. Gary drives them into his wine network where they talk about wine and they like to buy wine. You have to have a buying behaviour.

But he wouldn’t do that on Facebook. There he puts out his videos, free entertainment. He gets them off there to a network where it’s ok to talk about commerce and it’s ok to buy stuff. You’re not going to do that in certain audiences. So you’ve got the old internet, which is the search, email and affiliates. The new internet is social media mobile. Where can we get them off there and into the old internet to make sales? Mobile’s just been invented and I can’t go into a lot of this, it would freak people out.

When I saw the iPhone, and being such a dumb American, when I was over in Australia in 2004, I was talking to guys from Orange. We’re barely talking about 3G now. We’re so bad. Being able to deliver content to people when they want it, subscription based and also the sense of micro payments, under $20 products is what’s great. People don’t get that. You don’t sell $100 books on a mobile phone.

I meet a guy in China who was actually buying up mobile phones, dumping on some poor nation for free, but he was getting $2 a subscriber for content. So scalability wise, he’s going to make a lot for certain markets. If you read an interview by the CEO of Nokia in Fast Company recently, he’s doing that in India. What we don’t get as Americans is, we always sell high end expensive entertainment and stuff. He’s going out to a farmer in India with a cheap phone, who needs to get weather information and charging $2, and targeting about 10,000,000 farmers.

David Jenyns: Over there, the scope of that market is unbelievable.

Declan Dunn: We know it’s cool. He said there are three things in mobile that blew my mind. It’s news, obviously, entertainment, we all like to watch each other, life is reality TV and then survival. That’s where I think most people miss it. The farmer getting the information is survival.

There are a lot of things people need on their mobile phones that they’re not going to get in front of a computer. The computer and the TV are going to become this giant plasma amazing experience but the mobile phone is where they’re doing email, it’s where they’re connecting and communicating and it’s where you’ve got a lot of viral marketing going to come in very big.

In the US, I don’t know about outside, but everything is, especially in the under thirties, under thirty-fives, it’s all about friend to friend marketing. The old days of advertising and marketing are gone. My nephew’s sixteen in New Jersey. There’s no way he’s going to trust your ad, but if a friend tells him something, and we can get the friends to tell friends, and by the way we’ve got to be cool and hip and earn that, which is pathetic for old people to say, but we do, they’ll pass it around.

That friend to friend marketing is what’s going to dominate, which is why it’s really important that you don’t just screw people over, because friends won’t talk about it. You won’t get scale unless you’ve got some form where friends will pass it on. I’ve seen this in all generations.

David Jenyns: You’ve touched on so many key insights there. I think the friend to friend is absolutely key. You need to make sure you’re doing the right thing because stuff spreads on the internet like wildfire. You’ve seen companies that are just getting destroyed by bits of information circling the internet. There were those krypotonite locks that were shown to be picked by a pen. That got out onto the internet and spread like wildfire.
If you’re doing something in a space that is not kosher,
it will spread. That friend to friend is key. The idea as well of talking about survival, a lot of people are missing that.

There was a really interesting podcast just last week on The Economist podcast through iTunes talking about what are the effects of mobile phones going into third world countries. One of the first things is that it increases the country’s productivity based on the fact that you have some dude now who can call up and find out what the price of fish in one area is, find out what it is in another area, and it makes the prices even across the whole country. They can call ahead. If they need to go pick up a delivery of fish or something like that, they can call ahead two days.

Instead of going out to pick this fish up and then find it’s not ready for them, they can call ahead and make sure it’s ready for them at the time they get there. It makes them a lot more efficient. I feel like you’re right. We’re only scratching the surface of where we’re going to see mobile phones are going and the technology. It is, it’s a child still, it’s in its infancy.

Declan Dunn: When I saw PC back in the eighties, I actually dropped out of school and published my own magazine, which back then was amazing. I didn’t even have a hard drive. That will date me. It was really funny, you could see this thing, and it was the same thing I felt when Mark Andriessen introduced Netscape in 1994. The net had been cute but he made it consumer. It made sense.

When I saw the mobile phones, the BlackBerries, the Palms, the iPhones are standard in the US, but still there are a lot of different versions that are doing it in their own way. This is radical, because all my friends, everyone I know, you can reach them on their cell phone. I even read an article where people doing debt collection in the US, which has been a big deal, they know that the only way to reach people guaranteed is on their mobile phone.

They’ll give up their home, they’ll give up their house, they’ll give up their car, they’ll give up about everything, except their mobile phone. When you start seeing trends like that, you start seeing that human behaviour is not too hard to figure out. What we used to have in a computer five years ago, you’ve got carrying around in the palm of your hand. What you’re basically doing, you’re communicating. Even though I really like the videos and so on, the fact is most people are not using it to watch video on the little screen. It’s there, but if you want to really see a great video, you’re going to go home to your computer or your plasma.

The screen’s cute. So it’s really a communication device. It’s going to be where continuity programs go. I’ve got people sending out information, doing stuff to mobile phones where people can get updates and be updated. They’re basically checking their email on a mobile phone and it’s all short text messaging. So why don’t we use it? Use it if you’re in real estate, if you’re in stock investment, if you’ve got some ticket service.

I had a buddy years ago who created a crazy service called Tickets Now. He was selling second hand tickets. The next thing I saw he was doing $200,000,000 a year. Go figure out! These are the kind of guys you won’t see coming, it won’t sound like the same old thing. They’re going to go and do something on the mobile phones now that’s just going to blow people away.

I was just doing a study on mobile. It needs to tie into something about their lifestyle, which could be spiritual. I do a lot of work with ‘spirituality’ companies, from new age to religious kinds of things. If it’s something of a real lifestyle thing being an important part of it, astrology is a big one in that sector, but investment, stock tips, travel.

People love to hear about travel, they love to see videos of travel. These are really key core things that people will get. You need to understand the mobile phone will be a way to keep connected, and we will be selling products in the US that are less than $20 and quite honestly less than $5-$10.You don’t sell expensive stuff. Once they do that, the whole goal is to move them from mobile into the richer environment of the internet and to get them to spend the time with you to sell your richer products.

So I think you’ll you see a lot of $1-$5 opt in pitches where people will get the audio visual but then they want to go read. The real goal is when they buy, they read.

David Jenyns: I think there are a few little key things you point out there. You mentioned you watch different people and you take on these mentors to try and get your finger on the pulse and you mentioned Eben Pagan. Are there any other people you keep an eye on who you think are at the forefront of their particular niche and who help you further develop your thought processes?

Declan Dunn: Actually one of my pieces of advice is only pick a few of them. I’m talking about being on steady communication. I don’t handle that much information well and I don’t think most people are productive, but whatever your choice is. My biggest advice to my folks is, cut out most of the gurus and pick three to five. By the way, you’ll hear what everyone else is doing through those three to five, it’s a very small world. But that’s just one man’s advice.

The thing I like about Eben, and you’ll hear it about me, is he’s really got a lot of heart and a lot of integrity. I’ve got a lot of respect for him. Plus I’ve had the joy of being able to hang out with him many times and just learn so much. It’s so funny, really great marketers don’t end up just talking about marketing. They’re interested in a lot of different things which adds to their marketing.

A guy I want to mention who most people don’t even know and who never writes under his name. His name is Jay Weintraub. He runs LeadsCon. If you haven’t subscribed to it, subscribe to DM Confidential, Direct Marketing Confidential, that’s the only pitch he’ll ever give. He always writes under editor, he’s funny. His stuff is genius. He talks about the CPA world, he runs a lead generation thing at a level you can’t even hold a candle to. When he talked about the fake blogs, he talks about them without being holy and righteous. He looks at the business models.

If you go in the guru circles, most of these guys don’t know what this other higher part of the market is doing which is very much driven by one or two person teams. Jay Weintraub has brilliant stuff. There are a lot of people I follow. Quite honestly one of the things I always suggest people do is go beyond just the marketing advice, look at ted.com.

David Jenyns: Yes. I love ted.

Declan Dunn: You get so much. You want to expand your brain. Spend twenty minutes with any of those people and they are all over the place. Don’t just limit yourself to marketers.

I love Jeff Walker. I read his stuff religiously. You know what I really liked? I’m not really buddies with Jeff. I’ve known him but it’s not like we hang out. I really respect what he does. Being on his list, he actually wrote me once about the discipline of gratitude. It was wild to see. He’s a really great marketer and normally in the old days, marketers wouldn’t show any sign of weakness. But he’s talking about looking and being grateful for the people you’re working with. This is powerful stuff. What he told me was Tony Robbins’ influence.

David Jenyns: Yes! You can see that shine through. You see that in a few guys at the moment. Obviously there are the few things going on at the moment with Frank Kern and the whole interview series. It’s filtering through and it’s fantastic to see.

Declan Dunn: You know what Kern does and it’s so cool. I’ve never really hung out with him, but I’ve been around the same circles for many years. The thing I really liked about his videos, he has this ability to just be himself on video. It’s not unteachable. It’s about being comfortable with yourself. His stuff is brilliant. Some people say, oh, it’s so simple. Yes, simple is genius. Making things simple is one of the hardest things. I don’t think he oversimplifies at all.

I think it’s his beauty is that message in his video. If you want to study how to do video, I would much more look at him than most of the people I see who are very stiff. You can see it, their hands are clenched. They’re not really comfortable being there and they’re not comfortable being able to say something and screwing up or being funny just being themselves. It’s funny. In most of my stage stuff now, I say, here’s the real key. Here’s the secret to twenty-first century marketing, are you ready? Be genuine. Be yourself. People try to be somebody else.

There are so many of these guys now that I follow. I’ve been marketing a lot to women. So I’ve been studying a lot of different ways and the whole marketing style to women, moving into markets that are not less competitive but have some opportunity.

So I study a lot of people there, Lorrie Morgan Ferrero’s one of my favourites in that space, because she talks a lot about marketing to women. It’s interesting, she comes from a direct marketing and Dan Kennedy background, so it’s not all. ‘Oh, women are different.’ You know that is so phony. Women are women, and you can talk to them but there are certain things that drive them. What’s really cool is you learn that, I can apply the same things and understand how men market and how they react to things. It just gives me a different perspective. So they’re some of the people I listen to.

David Jenyns: You’re definitely someone people should listen to as well. If they want to keep on the pulse of what you’re doing and I know you’ve just pushed back the launch of the New Media Game a little bit. If people want to keep on top of that and make sure that when it comes out they grab a copy, what’s the best way to do that?

Declan Dunn: Go to my blog which is at thenewmediagame.com and add ‘/blog’ if you actually want to see the blog. I’ve started putting a few things out and actually next week, October 15, I’m going to be doing a regular video inspired by Vaynerchuck, inspired by Kern et al. One of my series will be Just South of Paradise, which is where I live in the canyon.

Paradise is up the mountain. It’s great because I’m not quite in paradise but I’m just south of it. That’s my inspirational end. I’m also going to be talking about releasing a whole lot of information about how to do marketing and hopefully in a cool way come out of being a little bit underground in a good way. I’ve been in this business a long time. I stepped off the stage for three or four years and I’m coming back strong in 2010, but if you catch up at the end of this year, it’s going to be me, no virtual admins, no people pretending to be me, no me pretending to be me.

I hope that will be a blessing. Really I’m from the early school of the internet and I wish I could tell you guys. The one thing you guys are missing now, that we had, and I don’t mean ‘Back in the day it was great.’ But there was a camaraderie, a friendship, an appreciation of the other guy. What happens when markets grow, people start plunging and pillaging and taking everything. There’s nothing wrong with that; just grow up, that’s the way it is.

But I’m building little communities and I’m seeing this all around. We’re actually coming in with the intention to do something different and that’s just for a limited number of people. It’s not about 10,000 it’s maybe 100, 500 maybe 1000 people. You see these in all the circles. I really want to tell people that what that’s about, it’s not just about being able to trust people, but being able to grow where people are really sharing ideas. They’re not so phony, they’re not scared of you taking it, because, you know, it’s a big market. People will take your idea and grow. Don’t yell about that. Ideas are a dime a dozen.

My friend Mizel taught me years ago that it’s not the ideas, it’s the execution on the idea.
Building communities where people can come in and have a place where they can really learn and not learn under this veil ‘That’s right, and there’s more’ pitch fest is really coming out. That’s part of what I’m into and I really encourage them.

I can tell you, the very first internet marketing summits, for my opinion, were run by Jonathan Mizel. I can’t tell you enough, Jonathan Mizel is one of my close friends, I’m totally biased. I think he changed my whole life seriously by far, not just as a friend but what he taught me about marketing and really talking.

When we came to the Boulder summits, everybody was brilliant, everybody was strong egos but everybody was listening to everybody else. Collectively we would all come out of the thing and people grew businesses. I’ve actually got a picture on Facebook of Yanik Silver, Ken McCarthy, Yanik was sneaking into the meeting. It was so funny. ‘Yes’ I say, ‘you were sneaking in.’ He was great. He was a newbie. What was funny was he was a really great guy. Jeff Walker used to go to those. All of us. Jim Edwards, I could go on and on. Corey Rudl. All these people would come in but it was, you met there, your brains just grew. It wasn’t just, oh, I’m following this guy.

Everyone was following their own piper but everyone was listening and respecting everyone else. I’m not saying it’s going to go back. I think things come around and what we’re seeing are smaller communities of people. You can still do the big thing, they’re still valid. But small groups masterminding at a level to grow their businesses really big and to a point you’ve got to have trust, David, you’ve got to have trust.

David Jenyns: You’re definitely one to keep an eye on so I’ll be watching to see what happens later this year and then hopefully early in 2010 and I’ll be doing all I can to support you. You’re very generous with your time. Much appreciated for everything you’ve given everyone today and I’m sure they appreciate it. If they want to find out more they can head over to declandunn.com and also check out thenewmediagame as well just to keep on top of everything. I’d just like to thank you so much, Declan, for the call. It’s been great.

Declan Dunn: A pleasure. Thanks very much.

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Martin Wales

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Name: Martin Wales

Industry: Publicist, Online Marketing

Website: Customer Catcher

Martin Wales’ Bio: Arguably one of the hottest online strategists in the world today. Martin’s so good Microsoft sponsor him. He hosts the entrepreneur e biz radio show and the Microsoft “Your Business” show.  He’s also the co-author of Guerrilla Marketing with Jay Conrad Levinson and author of  Success Secrets of Internet Superstars.

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David Jenyns: Hi guys welcome to another call for the SEO method. I’m very excited today to be joined by Martin Wales. If you haven’t heard of him you’ve probably been under a rock. He is very well known online. He is an excellent online strategist. He’s been the host of the Entrepreneur E Biz Radio show and the Microsoft Your Business Show as well. He’s very big on offline marketing. He is excellent with automating systems. He’s a co author of Guerilla Marketing which is a book with Jay Conrad Levitson and also the Success Secrets of Internet Superstars.

Suffice to say he really knows his stuff and I know in a lot of the calls we’ve been talking about SEO specifically but I want to talk to Martin Wales just to round out that picture. It’s so easy to get honed in on SEO and focused in on that but there is so much more to marketing, offline marketing and so on and that is where Martin’s skill set is. Martin, I’d like to welcome you to the call.

Martin Wales Happy to be here David. I’m always excited to talk to my friends on the other side of the planet.

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s right. What time is it where you’re at? I’m 11 am over here.

Martin Wales It’s 9.10 Eastern where I am.

David Jenyns: Well I’m from the future because it is Friday here for me. I can give you the little inside that the future’s looking bright. I appreciate your time. Maybe if we dive really straight into it. I wanted to find out a little bit about, when you’re first setting up a website, whether you’re working for yourself or if you’re consulting for someone, what do you do in terms of driving traffic? I know it is a very broad question, so start wherever you like.

Martin Wales You can see the value of finding different ways that get you more bang for your buck right away. You can see the benefit of having your pre existing resources, so pre existing websites, pre existing links, powered up to help you get that site well known. The top thing that I recommend that probably differentiates me from what I would call purist internet marketers is publicity, especially the use of offline publicity, in addition to online publicity.

If you’ve got others sites, I always put the links down the bottom, so I leverage the spiders to take advantage of any pr ranking that I’ve already had before.

David Jenyns: Here I was thinking you weren’t the SEO guy. That’s a good bit of SEO right there.

Martin Wales Thank you. Now that we’ve reached the depth of my knowledge of SEO, we can go on. I understand certain things. I wouldn’t go into the algorithmic level. Basically one of the items on the list is longevity. The next would be links from other sites or well known sites and resources. If you’re linked to momma.com and no one’s ever heard of it, it’s quite different to being linked to microsoft.com. One of the publicity things that I do, and I’ll define publicity in a second, is I host radio shows sponsored by big companies. So I teach people how to get sponsors to sponsor your internet radio show, even your offline radio show or a podcast.

So Microsoft, I got them to sponsor a show. They paid $45,000 for me to be on the air in Toronto, Canada. It is the fourth largest media market in North America. They paid $3,000 an hour for me to be on the air, and I’m very pleased about that. They actually paid me too which was really cool. But I got to promote my own brand, my own websites. The site is still up where I would send people for affiliate programs. I don’t know if you’ve discussed that with your people. Affiliate programs are links that pay you commission for referring people through them.

Microsoft paid for the show but I would say, go to yourbusinesslinks.com. The name of the show was Your Business. Microsoft took the recordings from the show, put them on their site, the audio recordings. But there are links still today from microsft.com to martinwales.com or to yourbusinesslinks.com. That was at least two or three years ago.

You mentioned that I was the host of Entrepreneur Magazine’s E Biz show. Entrepreneur.com is one of the most visited sites on the planet by entrepreneurs of small businesses. They had links to the radio show; those archives remain.

One of the things you want to do is create content that stays around when you do articles online. Ezinearticles.com is a very well known; there are other ones. However, they are the leader of the pack. The reason you do that is, every time you write an article in the byline, you put a link to the site that you want to promote. The more links you have in to your site, as you know, the more relevance you have in those keyword terms. You want to tag the articles, you want to have a certain amount of keyword within the article. So certainly keyword strength and the percentages there are important. You don’t want every other line to be Easter baskets, however.

David Jenyns: The keyword density. I did want to dig a little deeper, because you talked about that idea. I wanted to explain why that was so key. When you are building links for websites, you can go out there and get 10,000 pr1 or pr 0 sites but then you go ahead and just get one link from Microsoft or Entrepreneur and if that link is going to stay, that benefit, it only takes you one of those links to get all of the same benefit you may have got from all of those other links.

Martin Wales Absolutely. When I started eight or ten years ago, really getting onto the internet, I was on it before it had pictures! It just took two and a half minutes to download a 50 kilobyte picture. To give an example of what you just said, when I hosted the Entrepreneur Magazine E Biz show, it was hosted on a station called wsradio.com. They’ve got a lot of internet radio shows on it. But they also host eBay radio.

EBay has hundreds of millions of members, but the important thing is, eBay’s home page cycles ten times. So every time you hit the refresh page, it cycles ten times. It may have changed since. Because eBay radio was hosted on WS radio, I was second cousin if you will to eBay’s home page. My page rank was five or six out of ten.

I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how, it didn’t matter. It was five out of ten. Because eBay was linked to WS radio, WS radio was linked to customercatcher.com which was my brand. That enabled me to have a high page ranking. I rely on different ways than search engine ranking for people to find me. It’s direct relationships, direct referral, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing, all those sort of things are definitely publicity.

The online articles are great because people can immediately click. The next is online press releases. The online press releases are great because if you use a service like prnewswire.com and you don’t use the free one, you use like the $80 to $100, they have different price ranges. But if you use a minimum of $80 you can make it onto the front page of Yahoo News, MSN.

I’ve done press releases for companies and we’ve had something like 127,672 views in a single 24 hour period to our website, for $80. This is in contrast to sitting down trying to figure out what’s going on behind the Google black curtain and sand box and getting slapped and doing the Google dance and everything else. You write a press release really well, a good headline, newsworthy, helpful information, and you drive 127,000 people to click on a link.

That’s the objective. One of the things that you teach that I really like, is systems. What you really need to focus on first before you build your system is, what is the objective? Is the objective of your website to increase your credibility? Is the objective of your website to get people to sign up for your newsletter? Is the objective of your website to get people to click and buy?

Whatever your objective is, you have to work your system. If you’re building a canal for ships, it is, I want the ships to go from Lake Ontario to Lake Eyrie. So I know the direction I’m going from, where I’m going to, do I want to blast through bedrock or do I want to dig through clay that I can easily take care of? I go a little bit longer route, but I get there just the same. The objective is gained, I save a ton of money, I don’t blow up two dozen people in the meantime.

Once you know what your objective is, then you can balance off what software you want to buy, what free stuff you want to use, how you’re going to do natural search engine ranking versus pay per click. If I did pay per click to get 100,000 clicks, even if I just got it down to a nickel, you do the math, that’s quite a bit of money versus $80 for a press release.

One of the other things you can do along the lines of publicity when you do those articles is send it to a syndicater. That syndicater takes that article and distributes it to other sites for you. So it’s something you can do once and then someone else is doing the work to distribute it for you.

David Jenyns: With all these things that you’re touching on, I love the idea of creating good evergreen content that gets out there and people want to link to. We’ve talked about this before, the idea that putting out really good content, SEO happens naturally. People will start to link to you if you’re putting out those articles, if you’re using PR Newswire.

These are all things that happen naturally. Obviously what Google wants to do is serve up the most relevant results to the user and whatever the user is looking for. So they’re trying to basically filter out all the rubbish out there for ones that people are actually looking for. The way they do that is, basically when we’re talking in terms of SEO, it is natural for things to get inbound links and for those links to grow over time. You have all this good content out there.

Even though you talk about not being an SEO person, a lot of the things that you’ve just ticked off there are all part of the SEO method and what we do to get those inbound links. You’re just going about doing it by putting out really good content. I love hearing that cross over.

Martin Wales Thank you. Again to begin with the objective in mind, it needs to be evergreen content, so quality content. If you say the first version of iPhone is excellent, well they are on the 3G now, so in technology it is a little more challenging. If you’re in a niche where you can put it out, like human resources training, where it’s talking about How to Get Along with Difficult People that’s great. That’s been going on since cave man got a mother-in-law.

If you can write an article even within your industry, even in technology you can do a general article on how to pick technology. Call other customers of the software, read the industry magazines. You can always come up with this generic tip or check list, no matter what you industry is, even if you have specific information that changes over time. When I teach people radio, we have a site radiotalkshowhost.com. We give a lot of tips on how to increase the ability to make money, but also to increase your credibility and your celebrity.

Lucille Ball, I don’t know if my friends in Australia and New Zealand know who she is, but I believe she is a global phenomenon. She was a funny lady doing sitcom television in the 1960s in black and white – she’s on Blueray now. She didn’t know what Blueray was and in fact she’s passed away years and years ago. Her content is evergreen because it is funny, humorous, slapstick stuff but it stays around forever.

When I had executives on the radio show, I would say, you’re coming on the radio show, why don’t you have your publicity people, your PR people do a press release? What do corporations and companies do? They put their own press releases on their websites. You have to be smart enough to suggest it. They pay a PR company $5,000 a month to do stuff for them. I’ve now got a company paying $5,000 putting my links up on their site. The next wonderful thing about corporations is, once they put something on their website, they hardly ever change it. So now you’ve got the longevity. Now you’ve got a link.

I did an interview with the world wide vice president of marketing for salesforce.com. They were doing a big push. On their website they have a link from a press release because David Findlay is appearing on the Entrepreneur Magazine E Biz show. The last time I checked, I remember that being up three years later. They had their own publicity going. So even though it wasn’t a direct link to me all the time, the fact that they had a link there to your site means you’re going to rank higher in the search engines.

The other thing we discovered is that video ranks higher, faster. Google made a foray into video a couple of years ago and I was at a conference in London and somebody mentioned this thing called video.google.com. I had some video with me and I just threw it up. I was number one in sales and marketing for quite a long time because other people hadn’t even heard of it yet.

Google likes fresh material as well as good material. They like fresh content. This is why blogging is so important. It all interweaves. We just keep going around in circles with the material. You do a press release, you do a video, commentary on it for a minute, you have your own YouTube channel. By the way, the number two search engine now is YouTube. Most people don’t think of YouTube as a search engine. They think of it as a toy, a place to go to in order to see the latest Leggo Star Wars. But you can go on there, and people search on there for ‘real world’ ‘business information’.

David Jenyns: Video is a huge opportunity and it’s very easy to get rankings because it’s not competitive yet. Like you said, you were doing that a couple of years ago and people still aren’t catching on yet. People are starting to but video is still a big open field. You can go and get easy rankings, easy pickings.

You talked about quite a few different things like video and press release and working with companies and getting links back to your website that way. When we talk in terms of systems, a lot of that appears to be quite hard, to create systems for outsourcing. I think the ezine articles and that sort of thing are much easier. Where do you try and implement systems into your business? Where do you spend your time, because it would be very easy to get caught up in these types of things.

Martin Wales The number one thing is to keep it simple. The shortest number of steps between the prospect and you or the visitor and the sale is best. The best is, they click once and they’re on the order form, if that’s what you’re doing. As far as a system overall, I drive people to the landing page. Even though I use video, even though I use press releases, even though I use tele seminars or webinars, or whatever it is, I try and drive people to one central place.

Focus your energy. Remember the objective. My objective is to get people to a website where they sign up for free stuff, so they join your list. That’s pretty stereotype, solid, nothing ground breaking or space age about it. Get people to a website, get their name and email. On a YouTube video on my channel, we create a channel, we have a customer catcher channel. On that one we put our videos, and at the same time, we always tell people, if you’d like to see more videos, if you want twenty free videos, go to customercatcher.com and let us know where to send them and we’ll make sure you get them. There they are.

Ezine articles – here’s an article on Top Ten Ways to get New Customers Without Spending Money. In the byline it says, this article is by Martin Wales, the Customer Catcher. If you want more free tips and tricks in marketing without spending money, go to customercatcher.com. Really you don’t want to have ten websites, you want to have one place that you’re always driving them to. So have that master mothership domain name.

When I first started, we had customercatcher.com/free. In the domain name we applied or used the keywords. I probably could have done a better job, but I was more for short than I was for keywords. My recommendation to a client would be, it’s customercatcher.com/freemarketingtips. You want the keywords in the domain name.

The system behind that is, I use auto responders and email market. So the name cap I use my private label of the one shopping cart system is thehancerybusiness.com to capture the name and email and then I send them the auto responder with a link to the video in it. Generally the plan is I help my clients more than myself. Then you put a link in the bottom of the video page. So you give them the free one or two minute video tip but on the bottom of the page is either an affiliate link or a link to a sales page on your own site.

That’s really the one core system that I use. Outside of that I use, if I’m selling a membership product, I’ve used aMember. I’m looking at new WordPress membership software right now. Really as far as the core marketing point is, it’s just driving people to a web page even if I use a classified ad in a newspaper, which I highly recommend. I actually Twittered about this today. My Twitter is martinwales as well. Classified ad is very affordable, brief, it has impact because you can test it and track it and you drive people to a web page.

If you buy a full page ad offline, it costs you $5,000-$40,000 in a well known magazine. If you buy a classified ad it can be as little as $10-$25. In a good magazine it might be as high as $125. But do you want to invest $125 in a business or $40,000? You drive them to a ‘full page’. An infinite page, of four colour, audio with video, headlines, name capture, the whole deal, and there is no risk. A sales person will not call, they’re going to a web page. So they can go to a web page, sign up for something free and off they go.

In the business section I would put: Want More Customers? Or Free Marketing Tips-get more customers. Check out the free twenty videos at the website. The system behind it is free, driving them to a page with a name capture and then using an auto responder to drip market them.

David Jenyns: From a promotional point of view, we talked about quite a few different tactics there. Maybe talk in terms of if you’re consulting with a client. Where is it that you actually start with those? Do you have a process where you go step one, we leverage off whatever we’ve got. We send any links off our own network to sites that we can do. Step two, we do some form of video marketing. How do you map out and create a system or a flow of how you’re going to promote something?

Martin Wales Great question. It’s customized each time, but essentially the general steps are, yes, take a look at existing resources. If they’ve already got a website or if they’re a franchise, for example, then there are other franchise sites. They have links off the mother ship so to speak. However, let’s just take a small independent business. They’ve had a website up online. They probably have little to no search engine ranking.

One of the most beautiful things is local search. It’s so huge. If you’re a barber shop, write barber and the city name. If you own barberauckland.com, then you’re laughing. So do it however you want to do it, so that’s an advantage. We take a look at their existing site. We look at the mistakes they make on their website. Big mistakes on the website are generally, one, the banner is too big. Number two is the banner is not named, it’s just 1-2-3. jpeg, it’s not barber.sydney.com. They don’t have the keywords in the alt tags or whatever it is for that.

But their main thing, and this is important on YouTube and when you do internet radio, search engines are based on text. Write that down. So many people get excited about video and audio, make it and put it up but there’s no text to go with it. They don’t use their keywords well in their description of the video or the audio.

When we do an interview on Customer Catcher radio let’s say, we make sure we write an abstract that’s a two to four sentence paragraph that has the keywords for the interview but also hopefully keywords related to what we do, which is get more customers. So, ‘today we talk to Alan Parsons about how to get more customers using color graphics. Then next week we’re going to talk about Suzy Q about how to get more customers using audio files.’ Each time that you post it you get the keywords in there and it’s text.

So even though the audio is great and it’s a twenty minute interview or even an hour long interview, search engines cannot read that. So many times I see people put content on their site that’s just not findable, it’s not searchable because it doesn’t have a text that linked to it.

A big mistake here is that people put pictures on their website. Say you’re at a conference, David, and you meet some famous person like Zig Ziglar. You want to put a caption underneath the picture, ‘David meets Zig Ziglar and talks about how to get more customers’ in the caption. Even when people do a Google search on images, they’ll find you.

David Jenyns: The first two steps being obviously leveraging off what resources you’ve already got. Then you want to look at your own site, do whatever on page optimization you can which would be both SEO and also from a conversion point of view when you’re talking about the banners and things like that. Once they’re leveraged off what they’ve got, they’re cleaned up so that when the user hits that site they really do start driving some traffic. You’re getting some benefit which takes advantage of what you were talking about, what is the focus of what we’re trying to do here? Why have you got this page up? We’re not just building a site for building a site’s sake. We want it to generate leads or we want to go straight to the sale, whatever the case may be.

Once we’ve done that from a promotional point of view, where do you move from there?

Martin Wales Really from a promotional point of view, when you create a website, just like any other marketing event in the past, it’s an event. So you launch a website. So that is in effect an excuse to talk to people. It’s an excuse to talk to partners, joint venture partners. The number one way to get people to your site is joint venture communication. Whether it is an email blast, whether it’s a joint venture tele seminar, whether it’s in a newsletter, whether it’s articles, really it comes down to a bunch of questions.

The first question I ask in this evaluation is, what can we do for free? It doesn’t really cost you anything to call somebody you know who has a list of two million people and say, we’re launching a new site and we’re giving everyone a free Taco if they go there. That you can essentially do for free. Generally we want to do something that doesn’t cost us any money.

I work with a site called free-ebooks.net. They give away free e books. They have thousands of e books to give away. You can go to that site and upload an e book for $20. That site gets twelve million hits a month. It gets 360,000 unique visitors. It gets 1200 – 1500 subscribers a day. Find a high traffic site and then put your free stuff there. You know the big stadiums where they play football and soccer and whatever else?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Martin Wales Ostrich races? The concept here is, I call it the hot dog theory of marketing. It cost $350,000,000 to build the stadium. It cost $150,000,000 to buy the football team. It cost $70,000,000 a year to market the team. It cost $2,000,000 to market this weekend’s game. You know who I want to be? I want to be the hot dog vendor who makes $1200 a day selling a $2 item that the customer does most of the work for and builds and customizes it for themselves and it’s low risk, low inventory.

When it’s all said and done, I attach my cart to my van and drive away. The hot dog theory of marketing is put your low, cost free stuff in the path of marketing that others have spent millions of dollars on. Is that a clear enough analogy?

David Jenyns: Yes, I think getting in that slipstream of what someone else is doing is good. One thing we do along those same lines is if you look at, depending on what products you’re promoting, who’s about to launch a book, who’s about to launch a product, what are you seeing on the news and then you’re going for it. People are eating up this offline media and where do they go to find out more? They go online and they search for those keywords.

A lot of times these new breaking trends people aren’t necessarily optimizing for. So you can leverage off all these big boys that are out there marketing it and be there when the user is searching for it and then hopefully your solution can solve that or you point them onto a way to hopefully solve their problem.

Martin Wales That is an excellent point. What you really need to do is recognize when you’re looking at keyword searches for example. So Michael Jackson’s death got a lot of coverage and so on. Because I teach internet radio and I teach to create content that lasts a long time, I put it in my Twitter Radio Money Coach (that’s my Twitter for the radio stuff we do.) It said ‘Michael Jackson is immortal, because he created quality content that’s going to outlive him.’ You need to create quality content for your radio show.

On average, when I post a Twitter, I’ll get two to three people follow me. When I did the Michael Jackson one or I do one that’s around keywords, not necessarily directly related to industry so the music pop industry isn’t necessarily directed to the internet marketing talk radio podcasting industry. But by linking them with a current event, you get the people who are looking for that anyway, finding you.

So I may want to buy a photocopier, but my family all eats pizza. If I come across free pizza coupons sponsored by Canon or Xerox or Ricoh, you can still get customers. That’s what I call seed marketing. It’s not like the home run, but if you consistently, everyday, do something it has results. If you go to Twitter, right now the trending topics are she looks good but he looks good but flash forward Kanye West. If I was attracting customers, I would say something like I would never hire someone like Kanye West to be a spokesman for my company. This is a risk.

Some people say, get a spokesperson. If you don’t feel comfortable on TV or video online, get a spokesperson. What are the risks of a spokesperson? He may be an idiot and get up on the stage at the Emmys and interrupt somebody’s acceptance speech. He may be accused of a crime. So you tie in your tips to the current event keyword and that will drive traffic to your site.

David Jenyns: That is the same thing with PR. PR 101, when you’re coming out with a press release, you tie it something that is already newsworthy and that is the way you get attention to your press releases. As I’m seeing it now, the first thing is, see what resources we’ve got, we make sure we optimize on page and clean up what we can. Then we look through our own networks for JVs and looking for what’s easy and also leveraging off other sites that are in line and maybe complementary for what we are doing.

I’m imagining when you’re working for a client, the first thing you’re doing is going through all this brainstorming and mapping out a strategy and writing down, here is what we’re going to do next. What is it after we’ve gone through this easy low hanging fruit stuff, what is the next step?

Martin Wales Actually there is some more easy low hanging fruit. Would you like to know what it is?

David Jenyns: Ok.

Martin Wales It’s hidden resources. Very often you sit down with someone and they say, we’ve been buying this type of advertising, we’ve been doing a newsletter to our clients, whatever their general list of things is. Most of the time the biggest mistake people make is, they rely on only one or two channels of marketing. So they’ve been doing direct mail for a long time and they haven’t really leveraged the internet. Or they are on the internet but they’ve never done a postcard marketing campaign.

There are things called hidden resources and that is where I will ask them, who their relatives are or who are the people they know? Where have they spoken before? They’ve spoken somewhere at a trade show last year but they didn’t videotape it. They didn’t even audio record it. The next thing in the hidden resources is their customers. Very often they don’t use testimonials effectively, they don’t have a capture method for testimonials.

The next thing we do is, look at the hidden resources where they already have processes in place. Say they install curtains in people’s homes. They do house calls and they measure the windows and they install curtains. But they don’t take a flip cam with them or train their installation people to have the person stand in front of the newly installed curtains and say, I just had Bob’s Curtains in my house and they took off their shoes at the door, they cleaned up all the wood and plaster shavings before they left. Not only that, I have a beautiful set of curtains and it was a great price.

You capture the testimonial in the moment. They’ve already got somebody on site, they’ve got a happy customer, and maybe they send around somebody after who does an inspection but that person at the inspection doesn’t ask one more question. Would you mind calling this special 1800 number and leaving a testimonial or better yet just have something in their hand, a voice recorder and record a testimonial. Give them $20 off to show your gratitude.

So that is just adding one more step to existing processes.

David Jenyns: When you talked about some of these different stages, you had the existing resources, you’ve got reviewing their sites, also the possibility of JVs and also some of those hidden resources. I know there is a little bit of overlap there with a few of those different areas, like the existing resources and also your hidden resources as well. When you’re working with a client are you looking to get one or two of these tactics per category and implementing it? What I’m trying to figure out is, how do you actually start with a person?

At the moment we’re just listing a whole lot of tactics and the first few stages were really clear to me and I’m just wondering how you evolve from there?

Martin Wales Essentially it brings us full circle back to the objective. First we set the objective. We want to get twenty more leads a month for a company, let’s say. That is their objective. Next is the strategy. The strategy is the high level big picture. We want to get twenty leads but we want to do it with pre qualified people who already have money in their pocket, have a preconceived notion of their pain and respect value. The strategy is to target those prospects. The tactics are then the things, well what do those people read? So I’m going to go in this newspaper, I’m going to go in that magazine, I’m going to get quoted in that magazine, I’m going to go on this website. So that’s tactical.

I know you’re drawing the road map sort of thing.

David Jenyns: This is good. We mapped out the way you work through it, so when you get to the tactics point of view and you know obviously what your objectives are, obviously you’re going for the lowest hanging fruit first because you’re looking at hidden resources and existing resources on where to tackle first. Once you start working on those, do you just pick out one or two things or are you firing as many arrows as you can?

Martin Wales Yes. In the military, when the United States invades whatever country they want to take over, they throw everything at it. They bomb it from up high, they shoot cruise missiles from the water, they do everything that they can to just obliterate the place before one human even sets foot on the place. It’s safer, it drives the industry for them to build more bombs to make more money for the Vice President. Not to get too political. It’s the maximum use of available resources.

Yes, but you do need to prioritize. Here’s the key. Where most people fail is, once they start implementing tactics, what they lack is leverage. The leverage comes from something that you’ve already mentioned, automated systems. If I can set it up and then go away, it’s good. I’m stuck on military analogies. If I set up a trip wire over here, I can go away and leave that and if someone comes along when I’m not there, wham!

If I can set up satellite websites, landing pages where people can come in, that’s the idea. You have core keywords and you have secondary and tertiary keywords where people are looking. I might own a retail store but someone’s going to type in brown shoes and someone’s going to type in kids’ clothing but I still want to drive them to my main retail site.

But on the internet I want to type in brown shoes and I want to land on a page that says brown shoes. That’s what I call the 7-11 strategy. 7-11 is a big chain of corner stores usually with gas stations that sells bread and milk and convenience goods but they charge you double. But it’s a real estate play. Do you want to be the great big department store, the old imperial Darth Vader store built in a great big mall? You’ve got four floors and escalators and try to drive everyone to that place and hope they find what they’re looking for amongst all your stuff.

That’s how a lot of people build their websites. They only have one, what I call, store front, versus having these satellite sites where people can come in through different doors. That’s leverage; it doesn’t cost me any more versus 7-11. Every two blocks it costs them more in real estate. Online it doesn’t cost us more to have more landing pages. A big mistake people make, is just having one core site without having satellite sites or landing page sites or back doors or whatever you want to call them. Really it’s about taking leverage between the tactics.

Let’s say you get invited to go speak somewhere David. Do you pre market it? Do you tell your list you’re going to be there speaking? Do you have the people who invited you, do you help the people with their marketing? Do you give them the copy to put in their newsletter and on the website, rather than letting them write about you? When I’m invited to speak somewhere, I want to fill the room. I don’t want to leave it to chance they might fill the room. Do you at least audio record it? Do you video record it?

Even if you’re going to take an excerpt from it but you don’t plan to make a product. But I can take out at least thirty seconds where I was brilliant for a minute even by accident. You want to take that. Now I can put that on my website. Now I can put that on YouTube. This is where most businesses don’t suck every drop of juice out of every opportunity.

Then I do a press release that says I’m going to be there. I call everyone in town that I know and say, do you want to do an interview live and in person because I’m going to be in your city? Then once I’m done, I put out a press release that says, I was in that city. You send a list to your list saying, if you’d like an excerpt or an audio or a transcript of the talk I gave in Sydney, then send me an email.

David Jenyns: That sort of stuff sounds hard, even though we talk about leverage there, that sounds hard for an outsourcing point of view. That is you in there, getting your hands into it. Is that where a big part of your time is? Certain things can’t be outsourced.

Martin Wales You can get a virtual assistant to do that for you. That’s sort of a combination of traditional publicity with online stuff. Let’s look at someone on the internet, someone who doesn’t want to go anywhere, someone who doesn’t want to leave the home office, doesn’t really want to do anything.

Let’s say you’re on a tele seminar. A lot of people phone in to tele seminars. They sit there and they wait for it to start and then it starts. People say, introduce yourself. So people say, Hi, this is Bob from Texas, Hi, this is Mary from Queeensland. Do you want to be from Queensland, or do you want to be Hi, this is Martin from customercatcher.com? It’s a verbal driving people to your site.

I know you like doing the search engine stuff. I’m saying while you’re there, this audio is going to be online later if they give the replay. If they provide the transcript, then your website is stated in the transcript. Even when people convert it to a pdf, that link is usually live from the pdf to the transcript.

I’ll show up to educational events and ask a question. Everyone stands at the mike and says, Hi, this is David from Australia. No, you’re David from theSEOmethod.com. So you’re from your website. That’s just a small example of just taking a different thinking pattern and getting leverage out of a tactic. I have the automated systems in place for the people to sign up to get their free videos and so on all from that same domain name.

I want to get back to your outsourcing question. Most people when they have outsourcers, train them every time when they get a new outsourcer versus recording it with Camtasia, saying this is how I build my websites, this is how I think, giving people an idea of your personality when you outsource to site designers for example, or educating people about the system that you use. Here’s how to get into my shopping cart, here’s how to do email marketing, here’s the type of template we use. Educate them about your systems with a system.

That’s how McDonald’s basically made its millions of dollars. They documented everything better than anybody else.

David Jenyns: That is a big thing we talk about in the SEO method. With the stages you go through, having that documentation down and that’s really where we get that key leverage is because you can just plug someone else into it and even if that person drops off the perch for whatever reason, you’ve got that system recorded. It’s very easy to plug someone straight back in.

I see a tremendous amount of leverage there. The areas I’m trying to find out more about are things like, we were talking about getting links from Microsoft or Entrepreneur or something like that. They are high leverage because you’re leveraging off the business they have already built. To line something like that up, is still very much, you need to do it.

Martin Wales Here’s an example you don’t need to do. If you can get someone who can write a basic article for you, or a basic blog post, do you think they could write a letter to the editor? If they comment on a new product, write a letter to the editor, they post on the forum, or the blog provided by that site. It doesn’t have to be you. If they have some generic knowledge of your industry, anybody can take some of your industry documents or transcripts from your tele seminar, a piece of your article and then Google and find sites that have forums or blogs and then post to them.

Posting to blogs you can outsource fairly readily. There are certainly spam ones where I get, ‘gee, this is a great blog. I hope you keep posting from coylids.com.’ It’s not that difficult to make a real comment on comments that are already posted. John Reese, from nowincome.com is famous for his Traffic Secrets. If you’re on his mailing list, he sends out a link to his blog and says, hey what do you think of my new pet squirrel Rocky? You write in and say, hey, I’ve never heard of anyone who actually had a pet squirrel anymore, so good luck to you and Rocky. MartinWales customercatcher.com.

You can have someone outsource that with your signature file for helping you to get customers: twenty three videos at customercatcher.com/free. It’s my signature file but I said, hey, good luck with Rocky the squirrel. You can outsource that.

David Jenyns: The things that you personally outsource for your business. So let’s say when you’re working with a client, what sort of processes do you have in place for your system? There are lots of things that you can outsource. It’s not possible with twenty-four hours in a day to do every tactic under the sun, so when you go through that process, what things are you doing? Certain things you’re going to need to do. You’re going to sit down with a client, you’re going to need to talk objectives, strategy and map out the tactics. Then when it comes to the time of implementation, we talked about some of those tactics.

Obviously to try and do all these things in one go all at the same time is going to be quite heavy going unless you have some heavy duty systems in place. Which ones do you implement?

Martin Wales Do I personally implement or how do I?

David Jenyns: Yes, personally implement or even when you’re working with a client. How do you go from, here’s what needs to be done, to getting it down without you necessarily really being in there in the real world. Yes, we can go ahead and do blog comments. Is that something you actually do when consulting for a client?

Martin Wales Whenever someone asks you, as a customer, can you do this, the answer is always yes, how much money do you have? It depends. On a higher level, if the person has a website but they have no free offer or free report, I’ll often interview them. I had a health care company who taught doctors how to not cut off the wrong leg, using an air safety checklist.

David Jenyns: That’s important.

Martin Wales Oh yes. Something like 90,000 people a year are killed in the United States in hospitals by medical mistakes every year. That’s like a 747 Jumbo crashing every day. If a Jumbo crashed every day, the place would be in an uproar but because it’s someone’s Grandma in a little hospital and they get a shot with ten times the dose that they need and they get killed, it’s not news. But 90,000 people a year get killed by medical errors.

One, I train them on how to say that. They would go round saying, well, 90,000 people get killed in the United States every year, and everyone says, well there are 500 million people, that’s acceptable odds. Contrast that with putting an image to it, a Jumbo jet crashing every day. Oh gracious, the horror! because we’ve ridden on planes.

On a higher level, I’ll work with them on the strategy. I’ll create an audio where I interview them. Hi! Welcome to Healthcare Matters. Today’s show is focused on the mortality rate in hospitals across the United States. This is totally unnecessary. With us is a special guest and expert Bert Steveharden who is the owner of the company and knows all this stuff. I interview them. Now they have a free audio to give away on their site.

That kind of thing I will be personally hands on because it’s fairly strategic, it’s something that’s creating media, so I’ll be on the video or on the audio with them.

However, once we’ve made the number of audios, and you can make twenty to forty videos in half a day, easy, no script, no nothing. They already know the information, they just need to be cued. So I’ll help them with that.

Then for anything else, the systems, like the video placements, the YouTube and all that, I’ll have subcontractors that I outsource to. Their role is really just to put in the keywords, the meta tags and get it distributed and they’ll use a tool like Traffic Geyser from my friend Mike Koenigs. I find a tool. I usually have two or three that we’ve tried. There are quite a few things that go bust. We’ll go through suppliers until we find the right ones.

Everyone who is doing this outsourcer thing doesn’t want to hear that sometimes it doesn’t work. Eventually what happens is, the cream of the crop rises to the top. Over time you eventually find one to three suppliers in the area that you want that you keep under your wing and those are the people you subcontract to if you’re offering services.

So I’ve got a great web designer. He can have a blog up in twenty-four to forty-eight hours for my radio show clients. He just turns it around. He knows how I work, he knows the system I teach to people. They need a PodPress blog, they need a banner, they need a footer, they need a two or three column blog and here’s what goes on it. There’s a pattern to it. Once you’ve got a relationship, we just give him the pattern and there are just things you can’t work around, like experience.

I’ve worked out several projects. I say, remember what we did with that guy in New York, do that again, only this time make it red. So any time you know you’re going to duplicate something for someone, use your own experience as a template. That is the best thing I can say there. There is no easy answer. There is no God coming down from heaven with a golden finger touching people’s websites.

David Jenyns: I think you gave as good and as close as you can get, which is that idea of building the virtual team. You’ve got a web guy, you’ve got someone who helps with your off site promotion stuff as well. You’ve got a few key players who’ve been skilled up in particular tactics and some of those tactics were the ones we talked about. It sounds like you’ve obviously got a video guy, someone doing some sort of article or writing related stuff and then after you’ve mapped out that strategy, you just talk to your team and say things that need to be done.

Things that you need to be involved in are things where it’s really at the top end working with the client generating the content. Then it is going to be distributed out through the different media, be it taking the videos that you do and getting transcripts done and positing them out as videos or posting the videos themselves. I’m assuming you’re involved as well in the make over of the site. That sort of stuff is hard to outsource.

From there you’ve identified what your objectives are. You pick off what those low hanging fruit, easiest hidden resources are and go for those methods? Is that pretty much on the money?

Martin Wales That is pretty much on the money. I can go now. Bye! That’s a great summary. We get so busy and running around, but you get me in a creative mode here. I come back to mind maps. I often use mind maps because it is popcorn thinking. But really, I’ll stress again, it comes back to the objective. We get so caught up in the process. Which software do we want to use? It’s not even serving your objective, it’s creating more work and you’re spinning your wheels.

David Jenyns: To shift gears, because we talked about how do you go about implementing some of this online and off line publicity to drive traffic to the sites. We talked about some of the mistakes people make, new people make. One of them is that they don’t use leverage. Are there any other really big mistakes people make? If there are one or two little golden nuggets you could drop in someone’s lap, where do you see a lot of people going wrong online?

Martin Wales There are still some very internet marketing 101 things going on, like there is no offer, no call to action on the site mainly around an opt in box, whether you use a squeeze page or an opt in box. The biggest mistake is it’s below the fall. The other biggest mistake I continue to see is in the copy and that is that the information is more about the company than about the benefits that the visitor will get from buying the service or the product that you recommending or talking about or sell.

Other than that, the big one that I mentioned in the new media is not having text to go with non text media. So search engines cannot find you if you’re using a lot of audio and a lot of video. I’ve seen a lot of video blogs with a lot of great information but there’s no good headline or summary of that information, it’s just, hey, check out my latest video post. People aren’t sitting down searching, ‘hey, video post.’

Number one I still see is the keywords people choose are still the solution and not the pain. So if you’ve created this new invention and you expect people to be searching for it, that won’t work. The most basic example is, people type in headache or migraine, they don’t type in paracetamol. I continue to see that on keyword selection.

David Jenyns: Keyword selection is one of the most important things and one of the first places, at least when you get to the point of building your website that you need to focus on. It’s important to figure out the point at which your clients, the cycle they have, the point at which they’re about to be in the buying part of that cycle. How do you get in front of them and then find those keywords?

We talked about researching long tail keywords. Let’s say they’re going after a particular camera or something like that and you go for the specific model number because that is a buying person. Similarly, if someone has a problem with a headache, what is it that they’re typing into the search engine at the time of them having a headache?

Martin Wales Right. How do I turn down this computer monitor’s brightness?

David Jenyns: The other thing I’d be interested to find out as well is you’ve definitely had a lot of years experience. Looking back now, it is that age old question, if I’d known what I know now… where do you see some of the key points in your development online, where you identify, when I did that, I saw a huge impact? One or two points that you can look back on now and say, that was a key thing for me to do.

Martin Wales I would say that the best online deals are made offline, is the biggest thing that I learned. The internet and websites is the delivery tool, but the people that I met at live events and networking enabled me to make the most money in my business and my career.

So you shake hands and see eye to eye offline and then you implement the online automated system together online. I would meet someone three to five times around the world. I spoke at the X10 seminar on the Gold Coast in Australia several years ago. Someone I’d met there I met in Los Angeles and just by being there you had credibility. Even if you weren’t a speaker on stage, which I was, you were dedicated to educating yourself in the industry. There were subconscious things like you could afford to be there.

Just by meeting that person, having a meal with them and so on and there are people I’ve met offline three to five times at different seminars. The first time I met them they were like, who are you? Stay away from me, security! By the time you’ve met them the fifth time, they’re saying, wow! You should hire this guy. He’s great at marketing. That’s led to a $500,000 contract over six or seven years with one client. It’s lead to that single JV tele seminar where we did a mailing and did $167,000 in sales off a seventy-five minute tele seminar.

All those ‘immediate riches’ that people make on the internet are made by traditional business practices: shaking hands, trusting each other, building relationships and saying, ok, hey, let’s do it. Then you pull the trigger, and all of a sudden manna falls from heaven.

David Jenyns: Yes, that age old thing of an overnight success usually takes ten years. I usually like to finish up most of the interviews by asking something about mentors.I know you mentioned Mike Koenigs over at Traffic Geyser, and he has a great service over there and is one of the people that you respect. But are there any other people in the internet marketing niche that you keep an eye on, that you like to watch what they’re up to?

Martin Wales I’m on too many people’s lists. There is the rat pack where I look at Talman Knudsen, Mike Fulsame, Frank Kern from a personality point of view. I think Yanik Silver is the steady work horse. He’s got great copy. I just try to look for trends amongst them. There’s no real one, hey, there is the superstar. I sort of pick and choose from what they see and make it my own, making it congruent with who I am and my character and what I do.

Frank Kern’s done a great thing of just creating character. There’s Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy’s not an internet marketing guru, but he’s allowed other people around him like Doug Glazer, with Yanik Silver’s help, to turn his analogue business into a digital business with membership sites. I like just watching people transition over time.

Definitely using the trend of using email to drive traffic to html sites or websites, whatever they’re coded in, it doesn’t matter. But using email to drive people to websites is the most important thing. Whether it’s through Twitter, or other social networks, Facebook, whatever it is linked in is actually pretty strong. Most people ignore that from the professional business point of view.

So really I just watch for the trends. I look at the subject lines in emails and just try and keep a pulse on it rather than say that’s the absolute best thing and I’m doing exactly that.

David Jenyns: I think you’re definitely someone people will want to keep an eye on, so if people want to find out more about you, Martin, where are some good places to look? You mentioned Twitter and maybe a primary website.

Martin Wales The primary website I mentioned, if people want some freebies they can go to customercatcher.com. There’s a video series there. If you’re interested in internet radio and podcasting and how to make money from it, then go to radiotalkshows.com. That’s pretty well it. I came to chat with you and spend some time with you. It’s been fun, stirring my brain into the evening here. I appreciate your energy and enthusiasm, and most of all having me here and letting me share with your friends.

David Jenyns: Perfect. Thanks again Martin and we’ll talk soon.

Martin Wales Alright, take care now.

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Jason Jell

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Name: Jason Jell

Industry: Internet Marketing, online marketing

Website: Keyword Elite 2.0

Jason Jell’s Bio: You might not know Jason Jell but I’m sure you know his product – Keyword Elite. Yes, he’s the other half of the Brad Callen dream team. I love the look and feel of all of his products in the Elite range… from the website to the product, there’s a polished professional look often over looked by many other internet marketers. Clearly they take pride in his work.

One of the first products I ever got started with was SEO Elite, a fantastic keyword tool. It was a pioneering product paving the way for many other keyword tools to follow.

With the recent launch of Keyword Elite 2.0 I wanted to find out more about the team behind its development. I got in touch with the man himself Brad Callen and after a little backwards and forwards, Brad line up a call with his right hand man, Jason Jell.

Before this point I hadn’t heard of Jason Jell but after our call I shifted him into my top 10 SEOers of all time… he’s one smart dude. Moreover, what he shared with regards to the way Brad does business, only elevated my perception of what Brad’s built.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Welcome to another call for theseomethod.com. I’m excited to be joined today by one of the main guys who is influential in the Brad Callen’s line of software, the Elite software, like the SEO Elite and Keyword Elite. He’s been in SEO for a Fortune 500 company, does SEO consulting, does a lot of the training for Brad’s products. He really does know SEO extremely well. So I’m very excited to have Jason Jell on the phone.

Are you there Jason?

Jason Jell: Yes, I’m here. Thanks for the nice intro David. It’s a pleasure to be here, and it’s a pleasure to talk to all your people. I hope we can give them some good information.

David Jenyns: I always love talking about SEO with someone who knows what they’re talking about. If we dive straight into it, one of the first things I wanted to talk about was when you’re about to launch a new website, what are the steps and the process you go through for getting that website ranked? I know it’s a pretty broad question so perhaps tackle it however you like.

Jason Jell: I think in just trying to do these types of things when I was coming up and when I tried it and I failed and when I tried it and I actually succeeded, I think the biggest steps for me were coming into it with a well defined keyword plan.

People will create a brand new website and they’ll slap pages up and they never have legitimate keyword targets. They don’t spend the time to look at what kind of search volume, who am I targeting here, what kind of competition am I targeting. They’ll just slap pages up and then six months later they’ll look and they’ll say, I have no traffic. Then they’ll realize either they targeted terms with no traffic or they targeted a term they couldn’t possibly compete in a reasonable amount of time.

For me, when I’m coming into a new site in particular, I will spend twice as much time on keyword development, keyword analysis before I write one bit of content. Then I know when I do get to the point and I start on content generation, I know I have legitimate targets, I have measurable endpoints so I can say, I’m going after this set of terms. This set of terms has x amount of searches, so if I pull a certain amount of rank, then I know I’ll pull this much traffic. If you can’t pull the traffic, you’re never going to get anywhere.

It’s a pretty standard procedure for me across the board. I see consulting is always the biggest thing that people seem to get wrong. They don’t put in the proper amount of time for the keyword research.

David Jenyns: Does it vary depending on the site, if you were going for a sales letter site versus an e commerce style site with lots of different pages? Do you see keyword research vary between those styles of websites?

Jason Jell: Definitely yes. A sales letter site you’re never going to have a lot of keyword targets towards it. I would look at the two and I would say the e commerce site would probably be the easier of the two. If I’m dealing with a thousand pages, I know my chance of getting a lot of traffic’s going to be a lot better. I’m probably going to be pushing for a lot longer tail terms. I’m probably going to be able to rank a lot faster.

If you’re pushing a sales letter you’re talking not nearly as many pages and not nearly as many targets. So you’re either having to go for a bigger target which tends to take longer to rank for and tends to take a little bit more effort, or you’re going to have to look at some free traffic generation methods.

So you start pushing into maybe social media channels, definitely start pushing towards PPC. You do have to expand out quite a bit more when you don’t have as many keyword opportunities.

David Jenyns: With that initial keyword research as well, do you start off picking out, say, ten, fifteen, twenty different keywords you’re going after and then build specific landing pages targeting those particular keywords? How is it that you’re using it? I know you mentioned pay per click. But I suppose from an SEO point of view, how do you structure where you go? I know part of it would also be determined by the resources you’ve got. Some projects you might have more cash to spend on than others, but do you have a guideline there?

Jason Jell: Yes, your second comment really speaks to exactly how I would handle it. It’s very dependent on the client and very dependent on the resources. I’ll give my best case scenario depending on limitless budget, this is the pie in the sky version, then I can give my more realistic version , how most people probably would end up approaching it.

There are two ways to go about it for me. If I don’t have issues with budget, then I will take, and I will generate content against a set of keywords. Say I have fifty keywords that are potentials for me, I’ve already vetted the fact that they have search volume and that they’re not over the limit in terms of competition. When I say that, I’m looking at a term that the leading sites in Google have a lot of links. We’re talking a lot of links, not just a couple of thousand, but 5,000 or 10,000. It’s pretty easy to spot something that you’ll never be competitive with in a reasonable amount of time.

Obviously I’m not going to test those and those probably wouldn’t be the best for this test anyway. I can talk about why. So I’ll toss those out. I know I’ll have terms that I can realistically be competitive in within less than six months for SEO. I’ll take those fifty terms, I’ll generate content against it. If it’s e commerce then I’ll just be pushing their product pages. If it’s lead gen or if it’s a sales type of process then I’ll push them towards targeted content around that. In the best case scenario I would test all of those through pay per click before I would SEO anything.

I’m pushing traffic through pay per click, not really spending a ton of money but I want to know that if people come in, if they buy. So there’s an ROI associated with them. If I test those fifty keywords then I see that twenty-five of them have shown maybe over a thousand clicks, that twenty -five of those terms result in a buy. Then those twenty-five I will turn around and I will start dedicating some link building towards them. I will structure my internal linking, I will make sure all my base SEO, my on page stuff is right and then I’ll really start chasing link building.

The other twenty-five I’ll probably dump until I’m in a position where the ones that I know are converting are up and running and making me money. So for people who have a PPC budget, if I could give anybody any advice, I’d probably say that’s the most important and the best step you can take to make sure that you are making money with SEO: testing through pay per click. For people who are intimidated by pay per click I would just say, go out there and give it a shot.

If you spend maybe $200 or $500 on your test, for some it may sound like a lot. For me it sounded like a lot for a very long time. But if you can show that you do make money if you do get traffic for that term, then that money is very, very well spent. That’s my best case scenario. So if I’m in a situation where I’m consulting or I’m working with a larger company, I would definitely push for that.

If I can’t get that, I would probably take the next case scenario where I would just take my longer tail terms and I would build content. I would optimize for those and try to start pulling traffic as soon as possible, then I would start to scale up. I tend to take a very bottom up approach rather than going top down with my keywords.

I’ll chase my least competitive keywords first. I know I can get traffic from those before I can get traffic for anything else. I’ll set my site structure up from the outset: top to bottom. My most competitive term is at the top, highest up in my architecture. My least competitive terms are at the bottom, which is a pretty normal site structure. Then I will SEO the bottom terms. I’ll try some link building for the bottom terms, maybe I’ll do some Article Marketing or whatever types of methods I want to do for that particular site.

I’ll rank those and then I’ll start to push up the pyramid and I’ll start when the bottom row ranks, then I’ll step up to the next row. I’ll start chasing those, and then when that ranks, I’ll step up gradually. As you start to rank your lowest ladder terms, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to rank the next step up because your site’s going to be gaining credibility, gaining links, gaining trust. As your domain gets stronger, then everything gets easier.

David Jenyns: Very good. You talked about building up those pages and putting some relevant content on it. Are we talking just some basic articles or what sort of content are you building and what sort of guideline, even, I know it can vary the number of words on a page, but we’re not talking one paragraph, hundred word paragraphs are we?

Jason Jell: Again it’s very dependent on the content. Generally you’re going to want at least three hundred words I would say at a bare minimum. Even if you’re e commerce or even if you’re pushing some kind of an affiliate product, you’ll probably need at least three hundred words just to make sure you’re giving yourself a legitimate shot at being indexed and sticking.

I tend to really focus more off page. My on page content doesn’t necessarily have to be huge or super in depth. If I’m going through Amazon or if I’m pushing some kind of CPA offer or something like that, I’m just throwing some options out there, then I’ll just pull related content. I’ll have it written. I’ll make sure it’s good enough so that if somebody lands on the page, it’s very on topic, it’s very focused and it’s definitely not rehashed from another page or scraped from another page.

I don’t go crazy on length. I’ve never thought that is helpful for the end user for one. In most cases, most people aren’t going to go through a ton of content just to even read it if it’s there. If anything, they’ll just skim it. So I wouldn’t put a ton of time or resources into generating one thousand word pages or anything like that.

David Jenyns: With that particular content, is it spammy type content or is it good content of value? The user comes there and gets benefit out of it?

Jason Jell: The stuff that I push, if I put up a site, it’s always going to be valued. If I’m working with a client, I’m always going to push value as an end point. There are two potential sources of traffic. I will get traffic from SEO regardless of how good my content is. You can SEO a blank page and get traffic. So your content from that perspective doesn’t matter, but if you want to convert it, it better be quality.

From that standpoint, you really do have to think about your end users. SEO is constantly pitched as just a traffic generation method but SEO as a whole really encompasses user experience too, and conversion.

David Jenyns: What are some of the other factors it looks at as well? People talk about age of the domain name, the PR and I’m interested to get your thoughts on those sort of factors and how you feel they play a part in doing some analysis on keywords.

You mentioned too when talking about some of those keywords that you are targeting and then setting up these pages, hopefully for the high conversion rates, you talked about some of the keywords that you may not pay as much attention to. They are those hyper competitive niches or on the other end of the spectrum, things that people aren’t looking at. When you’re looking at competition and what’s out there, what are some of the factors?

This is going to play for both things, being able to analyze the competition and see what factors make up good ranking. When you go looking for links, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, and also when you’re deciding whether or not you’re going to go after something, you need to do some sort of competitive analysis. I know there are some good research tools in SEO Elite. There is also Keyword Elite 2.0 which I haven’t fully checked out yet. I think you mentioned there is a market research tool where you can look at the competition. I want to know what sort of factors you think make up good rankings and therefore something you need to do analysis on.

Jason Jell: One of the things I’ve done in the past was we did a membership site. That was a long time ago. This was actually before I started working with Brad. We were providing products to people. We would provide AdSense sites to people. We would build out these little mini content sites and kick out sets of content sites to end users. One of the things I had to do a lot for that was new keyword generation.

For AdSense you would have very specific targets. I used Keyword Elite quite a bit when I did that. I used it more for the automation aspect than anything else. I would look for very specific end points to keep or ditch a term. I never looked at KEI. KEI has been outdated for quite a long time. I would use another measure to quickly keep or dump terms like R/S ratio. Are you familiar with R/S ratio?

David Jenyns: No

Jason Jell: I would always look at R/S ratio as a first pass at a keyword. R/S ratio is, if you’re not familiar with it, is the number of results versus the number of searches. So if you had a term that had a lot of results and not a lot of searches, it wouldn’t really show up as a very good term.

It doesn’t really tell you anything immediately about competition but it does tell you something about market scale. For terms that had a lot of searches and not a lot of results, that would set up an alert up for me to say, maybe this is something I want to look into a little bit further. I would look at that.

There is another thing I would look at. This is something I picked up along the way that I think is a useful thing that people should monitor which maybe they don’t think about when they think about SEO. If you have a tool like Keyword Elite or another tool that generates this kind of data, look at competitive data to see how many clicks a term gets in AdWords.

AdWords is a different kind of animal. Even if you’re not going in to AdWords, it takes a certain type of person to drive through and click those types of ads. You’re working with a small subset of users. If you’re dealing with people like us who’ve been in internet marketing, maybe we’re a little bit more blind to AdWords, but there are a lot of users who aren’t. So they’ll click on ads. When I saw a term that say, had a lot of searches, not a lot of results, and I saw a lot of clicks in AdWords, that term tended to convert very well.

I would keep an eye on how often people would click on an ad in AdWords. Keyword
Elite would pull that data for me. When I’m scaling terms, I look for something that has a very high search to low results ratio and actually was registering quite a few clicks in Google AdWords. Those were my first pass checks before I even started looking at anything on the SEO side.

David Jenyns: Some of the other things like the Market Research Sleuth in Keyword Elite 2.0,

Jason Jell: The Market Research Sleuth tool was originally geared more towards AdWords, number of AdWords clicks. Then it gives you ballpark organic clicks. It’s a ballpark number of how many searches there are. If there are 5,000 searches and you get the number one spot you can expect to carry maybe 70% of that load. It’s just based off market trends in Google.

The one that I do look at quite a bit when it comes to SEO competition is another tool called the Search Engine Dominator. We’ve seen tools where you put a keyword in and it says competitive or not competitive and we spent a lot of time on how that type of data was calculated. You would see terms that would take the number of Google results for a term, the number of in titles for a term or the number of in anchor results for a term. We’d ballpark that and it would say competitive or non competitive.

As an SEO, Brad and I and others in this team all thought that wasn’t necessarily telling of true SEO competition. There are a lot of factors in true SEO. Really these days off page drives a lot of that. You’re talking about number of back links to a domain, number of back links to a site, PR, site age, allinanchor position. These were, if you’re looking at the top ten sites that rank for any keyword, those are some of the main factors that determine where those sites fall in that list.

Rather than taking a single term and saying this term is competitive or not competitive based on some extraneous data, we actually polled from the top ten of Google and we polled and we analyzed and we set up this algorithm on SEO competitive factors that people legitimately use. We basically set up a ranking factor to say this is a very competitive term. We vetted this tool over hundreds of keywords. What we would do is, we would take a keyword; we put in, say, weight loss. That’s super competitive and we’d see how it would score.

I don’t know exactly what the scoring falls out on, I can’t remember, but we did set ranges where we said this is super competitive, this is competitive but you can make rank and you could rank in a reasonable amount of time and the other ones would fall under long tail. We would go in, we would test the tool against a bunch of keywords and then we would go back and we would cross check them manually, looking at all those factors ourselves.

So we would look at page back links, we would look at site back links, we would look at page PR, site PR. We would look at the anchor text percentage used in the back links, we would look at allinanchor position. We looked at so many different factors and we tweaked this tool until we got it to a point where it would basically give us the same answer that we got when we manually checked what was happening in Google’s top ten. I’m especially proud of that one. That was a couple of months of toying back and forth until we got that one ready.

David Jenyns: I suppose the brilliant thing now is it makes it easier, especially when you’re doing that first analysis you were talking about of the fifty terms when you’re first going off and doing some testing. It would really help you see straight away, is this something I’m going to have a shot at, before you load it into for PPC testing. If it shoots out the other end after the PPC testing you can go, oh, this is also a converting term and worthwhile going after. You’ve got a really good shot of doing it.

There’s a lot of information in the SEO Method and my guys are familiar with the on page basics, making sure you’ve got the keyword in the right places, the title tags, the meta descriptions a few times throughout. You also made reference before, saying on page optimization, you can get a blank page ranked. The lion’s share of rankings in search engines comes from off page factors.

Once you’ve got the on page factors right, let’s say you are working with a company as a consultant or you’re actually doing the work for them, what’s the next stage? You’ve built up these pages, you’ve got the terms. Do you have a system that you follow step by step, such as, I’ll first go and get x number of articles done, I’ll publish them here and here? What sort of things do you do off site?

Jason Jell: There are two ways that I generally approach it. There’s SEO and then there’s traffic. It depends on the situation again of course of how I go about it. If I’m looking at traffic, then I will have a tendency to lean a little bit more social media. Some of the social media sites will drive traffic and not necessarily be as SEO focused as some of the other methods I’d use.

In terms of SEO, by and large, directories are pretty much out these days. I’ll probably still use Yahoo. I’ll submit to Dmoz and then cross my fingers. Maybe I’ll use Best of the Web. I’ll tend to stay away from large directories at this point in time. It hasn’t really shown the return that it did. Even a year ago it hasn’t shown the return that it did.

If I’m doing directories, then I tend to fall back on niche specific directories. I do actually use one of Brad’s tools for that as well. In Keyword Elite one of my favourite tools, and this is one of my favourite tools to help me gauge how I’m going to approach link building, is I believe it is Project 7, finding authority websites. What it does is if you go in and say, for the top thirty sites recognize cross linkages that are happening within these top thirty sites that rank for a keyword.

It will go through and say for all the top thirty sites, eighty percent of them are linking to this website. Then I will look at that website and sometimes it’s a niche directory. So I can dig out some niche specific places to link to very quickly using that tool. For a lot of markets there are some very good niche specific directories that tend to be really easy links. Maybe they’re paid, maybe they’re $20-$30 but they tend to be very strong links because they’re heavily cross linked across the niche.

If you’re talking a heavily weighted link, those tend to be very easy ones to get that do push quite a bit of rank. I’ll look for those.

David Jenyns: I do love the way you talk about, especially with these analysis tools, is the reverse engineering. It really is the smart way to go for looking at what the competition is doing. You’re identifying, here is where I need to strike and here’s what I need to do. It is a lot more precise, and it will take a lot of the hard work out and you can see the rankings very quickly. It’s a smart way to do SEO.

Jason Jell: I actually have a science background before I was in web. I was a scientist actually. Those types of approaches make sense. In SEO as a whole always came to me like that. I always think of it as a very scientific approach. There really isn’t a lot of mystery to it. There isn’t a situation where you can’t give me a keyword and I can’t tell you why this guy ranked over everybody else under him. There isn’t a mystery behind that.

There are metrics, there are numbers, you can pinpoint exactly why one person’s doing better than everybody else. It’s not necessarily deconstructing Google’s algorithm but ninety percent of the time it is pretty straightforward.

This guy has more links and more of those links have the right keyword anchor text. Find me a niche where allinanchor doesn’t line up with rank. It almost doesn’t happen.

David Jenyns: I suppose the key thing then is, you talked about identifying what keywords you’re going after from a competition point of view. Then you say, is it worth my time and the resources it’s going to cost me to get to that, how big is my back end and what is the pay off for that keyword to then determine whether or not it is something you want to go for.

I also like the way you talked about first going for those lower hanging fruit keywords first. That all helps to build momentum to funnel that page rank and Google love, whatever you like to call it, up to your primary keyword that you’re going after. I think you mentioned one of the first areas you go for is your directories. Apart from niche specific directories, where do you go to from there?

Jason Jell: I will take a similar tack looking at if there are any other methods outside of that I can easily identify that competitors are doing. Most of the time, it is not really straightforward. You’ll see some obvious link purchases which maybe you can do, maybe you can’t. You’ll see some obvious relationships that have been established. So you’ll find, this guy is associated with this guy and they cross link and that is a heavy link that you’ll probably not get.

You also see some situations where the end user is obviously creating rank themselves. They’re building other portals that are pushing or funneling rank in. Those are all things that help you identify how they got to where they are. But that doesn’t necessarily guide my direction as much as it gives me an idea of what I’m up against. The end goal is still going to be, I need x amount of links that carry more weight than this guy’s got and then I’ll outrank him.

I still do tend to fall on content marketing and when I say content marketing, it does encompass things like Article Marketing. I do still like Article Marketing. I don’t necessarily go as wide as a lot of people tend to do. So I won’t go and submit to every single place that I find. I’ll stick to the big ones, Ezine articles, GoArticles. I think Article City is one I haven’t manually done in a while to be honest with you. I’ll stick to maybe the top three or four depending on the client that I’m working with. I probably will still submit through ISnare which spreads it around but I don’t tend to get a big push from it.

I think there are two things that tend to really push Article Marketing over the top. The first one is not necessarily just dumping it out there and leaving it in these directories. These article directories are largely pits for this type of content. Maybe it gets picked up, maybe you get a little bit of rank from the actual directory itself.

Where we get the bigger pushes, is really in relationship building and getting people to actually republish your content just really through getting out there, getting the word out, contacting people who have the type of content that is in your niche. So if you have a blog or you have another person that runs a site it’s in a niche that you’re not competing with.

Google’s definition of a niche is wider than I think a lot of people give it credit for. If I’m selling camping gear and there’s a website about traveling to the national parks, there’s going to be an overlap there which would be a really great link, and I’m not necessarily competing directly with that person. That person may be willing to republish my content if I give it to them for free.

Rather than just putting it in an article directory hoping they pick it up, I’m going to be a lot more proactive and I’m going to go these web masters and I’m going to say, I have this content, would you be willing to republish it on your site? In return, leave my link there. So I control the anchor text of course, I control the message and that person gets fresh content.

A lot of times you’d be surprised, it is a lot easier than you might think to do. I think a lot of people are actually intimidated by the fact that earlier I’ve got to go and chase this person down and he’s not going to want to talk to me. Web masters value their end users, they value their content, and to be honest with you, this is a really good example. You contacted Brad because you saw Brad had something that your end users would value. In return, we’re coming, we’re giving you content and in return for us giving you content, you’ll link back to us.

Your users will get benefit from it and we’ll get benefits from it. So it’s a win win. So that’s one of the most overlooked and one of the most beneficial strategies, is really just chasing the link rather than waiting for it to happen.

When you have content, and you have good content, this is where literally good content comes into play. You’re not going to be able to get a web master to pick up your $5 article So either be prepared to pay for better content or be prepared to step up and write better content that is going to set that web master apart from other people that he’s competing with and help him stand out and help him get more out of it.

David Jenyns: Are they the two main streams of content marketing that you go after, Article Marketing and relationship building?

Jason Jell: Yes, and then even apart from that, these day especially, I tend to push that content to social media as well. So I will push that to Squidoo, Hub Pages or one of those other major networks where I can create links for myself. One of the greatest things about being web master, or being in SEO these days is the explosion of social media and the power of social media. The fact that these sites do continue to grow, and the fact that these sites allow you to step in, add content, and grow outside of your own domain.

Maybe a couple of years ago you would have people creating a PR pumper site, so to speak, where they would funnel tons of content and then they’d no follow everything except for the links to their site. That was what they were trying to do. Now you’re in a position where social media sites have got so big. Something like the Hub Pages go in and you can put your content on there, you can create something that has a lot of value, and you can piggy back off a ton of domain weight that Hub Pages has.

You can send that to your site without having to chase anybody down. Social media gives you hundreds of link outlets that are just sitting there waiting for your content. There’s nothing that’s stopping you from going out and getting those links. The only thing that’s stopping you is you going out there and putting your content out there and putting the link back.

David Jenyns: When you’re first going after these keywords, and let’s say you’re working with a particular client and you can see what the competition is up to, do you go down so granular to say, here are the number of links I need to get to these pages to get these keywords?

You talked about a few of the different ways you then go out to get those links and the quality of links you do need. Then you just say, here’s what I need and then I’m going to spread it across these different methods? Or do you just say, I’m going to get, depending on the competition it’s going to vary, but you might just say I’m going to need roughly ten articles submitted through GoArticles, Ezine Articles and ISnare. Let’s go and get a minimum of twenty links with this relationship building and I want to build be it Lens or Hub Page or whatever. I’m going to get x number of social media pages and then obviously it’s a good idea as well to promote those pages.

I’m just thinking more of a strategy, how do you pull it all together? We talked about the different methods, but how do you know how you go for implementation?

Jason Jell: It’s a good question. It’s a hard question to answer because it’s totally dependent upon the niche. If you do step into weight loss for instance, you’ll see some of the top sites. A spammer will have 30,000 links and maybe the number one site has 5,000. It would take his 30,000 links to outweigh the number one guy’s 5,000. So there’s a lot about link quality which is hard to assess. There isn’t necessarily a tool out there that can give you a gut reaction of how much quality is there and how much of that quality is pushing towards that keyword. At least I haven’t seen anything.

You can do back link analysis and you can look at how many of those links are using the anchor text for that keyword. But even that’s probably not a good way of saying how valuable their links are that contribute to that keyword. Even the ones that don’t have the anchor text are contributing domain values. The domain is really going to garner how much power that site has and you have to overcome that as well as overcome whatever level of anchor text or whatever level of keyword strength they have. It’s definitely going to be a very straightforward type of situation.

What I tend to do rather than actually setting some kind of priority like that where I need to do x, y and z, I will just begin with whatever I can start with. If I have content to market, if I have ten articles, I’m going to put my ten articles out there in as many places as I can get them. I’ll put them out through the networks and then I’ll try to share whatever I didn’t syndicate through the networks. I’ll spread them out as much as possible to prevent any kind of duplication because I don’t want to run in to that.

Obviously I wouldn’t want to approach a web master and say, I wrote this content for you, would you put it on your site? He finds it on Ezine Articles ten minutes later, that’s not going to look very good for me. But I do tend to begin with as much as I can to start with. So if I have a resource available to me to help me with content generation, then I’ll have them write it.

Then when I get the content I’ll say, I know if I have relationships I can leverage, I’ll go to those first and I’ll pitch the content to them. I know that those links are going to be more valuable. If I don’t have a relationship to leverage, I’ll split between Article Marketing and I’ll split between social media because I know those are easy link outlets. I know the social media is going to give me a link, especially if I have some kind of existing page there. It’s going to give me a link that will stick and will have some value to it.

I also will probably hit the Article Marketing networks if I can, if I have enough content. What I tend to do is just monitor my own anchor position. So if I’m starting on week one and I submit ten articles and I hit five social media sites or whatever and my on anchor position went from fifty to twenty-five, then I know that I have a better idea of how much or how fast I need to scale to move up that ladder. If I do the same exact process and my on anchor went from fifty to forty-nine, I know my work is cut out for me.

David Jenyns: I like that because it is almost like a litmus test. With some of those things you mentioned, with the Article Marketing and social media, are you outsourcing that? I think the relationship building itself is harder to outsource. How much of this process, especially when you’re working with clients, are you doing yourself, or that you have systems in place to help this come together?

Jason Jell: The social media stuff you can definitely outsource because it tends to be pretty straightforward. Just as much as you can outsource Article Marketing, you can create a bulleted list of, these are the places that I want you to go to. Take this content, use this link, use this anchor text, that kind of stuff can be fairly easily outsourced. But I would tend to agree, the relationship building, if you want it to count, then, you better put a face, you better put a brand, you better put everything you can behind that to really make it stick.

That relationship, and those one, two, three or however many links that you can pull on a personal level, probably are going to outweigh the twenty or thirty articles that you submitted over the past month. I’ll weight that, and I’ll weight it very heavily because I know how much clout a niche specific authority site can pull for me.

David Jenyns: We touched on those three pillars there for content marketing. You also alluded to earlier, at least looking at the competition, someone may be out there building 30,000 pages through some sort of spam network or something like that. I know you’re more of a white hat person. Do you build quality supporting sites to help build up your own network to rank an individual page, or do you focus more on using those social media? You said initially that’s why a lot of people were setting up those networks, was to get the same benefit you can now get from the social media sites.

Jason Jell: There are a couple of different schools of thought and I think I fall under one versus the other. Some of them will create massive networks. They’ll heavily interlink those networks even and create, some people call them link wheels. Are you familiar with link wheels?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Jason Jell: A lot of people I think are really hot on that right now. I almost think it’s not necessary. It’s interesting to me when I look at it. I see them and people spend so much time making sure that A links to B but not to C and this and that. I’m looking at it and I don’t necessarily think that there is a benefit there.

I think to be honest with you, it’s a flag. Google’s not stupid, and Google’s identified something very easy over the past couple of years. You are creating cross linking and you are creating a footprint no matter how much people think this isn’t your site. It funnels into your site eventually, and I think just creating that funnel is a lot different than just going out and saying, I’m going to create my Squidoo page or my Hub Page or my YouTube video, they’re all going to funnel, into my site but I’m not going to cross link them.

I think the value you get isn’t lost by not cross linking them. So I won’t do that but I do think that I’m still building my external network and I am still funneling in PR by doing that. A portion of PR from each one of those sites that I create is going to funnel in and it’s going to help me. I don’t think it’s going to be bigger by cross linking and creating that wheel like people talk about.

The benefits that I do see with that type of thing, and one of the things that I am glad to see coming out these days, are people talking about promoting their promotions. I think that’s where a lot of people tend to drop the ball and things like link wheels are bringing that type of idea to light. If you say you create this mini network in order to make your little mini network work for you, then you have to build links to that so it gets indexed and Google finds that.

That type of idea is one that I think a lot of people should really grab hold of. So one of things I really do like to press is if I’m going out and I am creating an article or I’m creating a Lens or I’m creating a Hub Page, every single url I create, I log. I know where every single one of those is.

However outdated people might think this is I still ping them, every single one that I create. Every single link that I create in the internet, I make sure Google knows about. Every single RSS feed on every site that I create is submitted to RSS Submit. Every chance that I get, I will push article content to market my Squidoo, Lens or I will push article content to push my Hub Page or my YouTube video just as much as I will push it to promote my own site.

The links that I do create outside my site that I’m controlling I will add value to them so that they do push more value for me.

David Jenyns: I feel like the modern day pinging method that a lot of people talk about is using book marking. You’re still using pinging and I know that works; we use that as well. What are your thoughts on comparisons between using Pingoat or something like that versus social book marking to get things indexed? It sounds like the reason you do that is for indexing, not necessarily for building links.

Jason Jell: It’s to get my links to stick, yes. There are a lot of situations where I will do both. There are a lot of tools that automate the process of social book marking. If I have the resources available I’ll say ping these urls, book mark these urls, and that’s just another check box for me. I just make sure it’s done and then I move on to the next thing.

Daivd: A couple of key things came out of what you talked about there. One, logging the urls that you are submitting out there so then you can promote the promoting pages. I think that is really key, just making sure that you do have that logged. The other thing was, it really doesn’t sound as if you get caught up in these new ideas. It’s easy to get caught up in things like different linking strategies and building networks.

I know when I first got started with SEO, I got all involved with trying to set up different hosting accounts and making sure they were on different class C IP blocks, making sure I had the domains registered in my Mum’s maiden name because I didn’t want the surname to be the same and a different address. It even went to the extent of popping down to the local library to check my Google Analytics stats because I didn’t want them to log the same IP address. I took it to a stupid level.

In hindsight, I sit there and think how much more bang for my buck would I have got for effort to reward just by, instead of doing all that, just putting out more content, putting out a good article, building a relationship with someone, posting something on a social media site? You get so much more bang for your buck. Just as a side note, that whole network that I built up did get taken down anyway because Google linked it all together and then they banned my Google AdSense account and all of it was for nothing.

I look back on that now, and I see the real key is having almost like a system in place that you can repeat. Stop trying to game the search engines, just follow the good fundamentals that you talk about. This leads me to, I know the importance of getting a variety of links. But let’s just say you had to pick one, for argument’s sake. Where do you think you get the best bang for your buck for links? What would you say the best bang for the buck is for time, ROI?

Jason Jell: You’re going to laugh, because it’s one a lot of people probably slap around. I think in terms of bang for your buck is going to be blog commenting still. I think blog commenting is still strong and I think a lot of people tend to devalue that quite a bit, probably more than necessary. There are still quite a few blogs out there that are no follow. There are still quite a bit of PR you can get just from a simple comment. It’s free, except for time. There is a lot of that out there. Ask the spammers, they know.

I would say the same case for forums. There are a lot of places where you can jump into forums, you can be a voice, and you can get a link back. There are so many free sources these days: Ask and Answer sites. Yahoo Answers isn’t probably the best model because you really have to build a rep before you get that link. One that I use a lot is Yedda, Ehouse, sites like that. You could go on.

I go into some of these Ask and Answer sites and I’ll just answer questions for half an hour and I’ll get five links. Those five links will stick. In terms of time and energy that’s a great deal less than it’s going to take me to generate new content. There are so many free linking sources that bang for your buck is really high these days.

David Jenyns: Some of the things you were talking about, and you talked about Article Marketing and you mentioned you haven’t done that manually in a really long time. Some of the things you’re automating, and some of the things you’re doing yourself, even the comments you mentioned. I’m curious when you’re working with different clients and that sort of thing, are you particularly focusing on one client at one point in time? So your time and energy is focused into that? How does it work for how you are managing it from a day to day business?

Jason Jell: I’ve done it both ways. I’ve done it where I work with another guy and we manage twenty clients at any point in time. Obviously it was very hands off except for checking rank, checking that links were growing, checking that allinanchor was moving. If those things weren’t moving, then that would be flagged for us.

When it’s just me and whatever resources I have, then I tend to be more involved. Then if it is one client, then I know where all the links came from, I know how much they’ve grown and I know specifically how they’ve grown, what the rate is, what the anchor text that’s being used. I’m keeping a very close eye on it. In a lot of cases I still do manually do some of this stuff. It just depends on the situation and depends on the needs. My hands got dirty for a long time and a lot of times if you sit through eight hours of meetings in a day then you’re totally happy to be in there doing the dirt.

David Jenyns: Yes. It sounds like having worked with those clients as well you’ve gone after both big niches and little niches. Do you have a preference? How do you carve out your foothold about where you’re going to go after?

Jason Jell: That also very much depends on the client. You’ll walk into some situations and you’ll have somebody that has a website that went up in the mid nineties. Regardless of what they’ve targeted and how they’ve targeted it, I could punch in and I could do on page only, I can make sure inter site linking is good, I can make sure we’re using the same anchor text. When we do link for proper pages, I’ll nail on page and I’ll rank within the period of a couple of weeks to a month without link building.

David Jenyns: What are you thoughts on that? Why?

Jason Jell: Domain strength. Domain strength carries way over a lot of factors we can even control. The best advice I can give anybody is if you’re starting a new site, buy an aged domain. Buy something that’s got some weight behind it. You’ll save yourself some hassle. There’s a lot to say for the strength of a domain that you can’t overcome with link building in a reasonable amount of time.

David Jenyns: When you say strength as well, we’re talking about age as opposed to number of links. Obviously when you buy some aged domains a lot of them are going to have links as well. Are you talking about one of those key factors really being how long that domain name has been around?

Jason Jell: That’s not as much part of it as it is the links. The links are definitely the bigger part. Even if you’re buying a domain that has x amount of links and the anchor text isn’t exactly what you wanted it to be, a link profile doesn’t have to be exactly what you want it to be. In most cases it never will be, which is fine. If you make a link profile fit exactly the mould that you want it to fit, then you’re raising every flag that you could raise.

If you’re going in there and you have dozens of links that point to something totally unrelated, they’re still good links. That’s the other thing that people need to realize. No matter how much people say it better be on topic, it better be same theme, at the end of the day, links are links, PR is PR, link popularity is link popularity. These are still going to push value to your site.

So if I have 100,000 links and those 100,000 links have nothing to do with my site, if I chase one page on my site and I want that one page to rank for a specific topic, it’s going to be much easier for me to rank that because I’m pulling all that weight behind me.

David Jenyns: Yes. We interwove how SEO Elite and Keyword Elite can help identify those characteristics especially when you’re looking at the competition which was under the Search Engine Dominator in Keyword Elite and there were those different factors. What are the other things you use from a tools point of view when you’re doing your SEO work for yourself or for a client?

Initially you’ll start off and you’ll do your keyword research, you’ll do some competition analysis. Then it sounds as like as well you’re monitoring the rankings that you are getting so you can also get a bit of a litmus test as well talking about submitting a certain number of articles or doing something to see how many of those links are going to stick. I’m wondering. do you have tools for these things or are they manual? I know the first couple I mentioned definitely, the Elite software series. Is that what you call it, the Elite series?

Jason Jell: Yes, that’s what Brad calls it.

David Jenyns: The Elite series of software can do a lot of that. Things like monitoring where you’re at, that’s also in SEO Elite. Are there any other tools you use?

Jason Jell: A big one for me, and I touched on this earlier I’d look at allinanchor and look at how you’re gaining allinanchor. There’s a toll built in to go through and check allinanchor and monitor allinanchor. That’s a big one for me. I will look at position, but not nearly as much as I used to. I tend to look at traffic.

If I have keywords that I’m focusing on then I will monitor how they’re moving. But there comes a point where you have your targets and you chase your targets and you know what your traffic is and you’re trying to influence your traffic.

There are probably going to be a lot of situations where I’ll set my goals and I’ll set my targets and I’ll want to make sure I’m hitting those goals but I’m not going to be monitoring where I was this week versus where I was last week. Maybe I’ll be checking monthly or something to that degree but there definitely isn’t daily scanning for me. Even looking at traffic, I’m not going to be daily scanning. If I’m going to be scanning anything daily it’s going to be revenue. If there’s some kind of a revenue flag, that’s when I start digging a lot deeper.

David Jenyns: There are two things you mentioned there that triggered a question I want to get your comments on. You talked about allinanchor and you kind of alluded to this throughout, that the single biggest ranking factor you see is, it’s all to do with getting those inbound links off page factors. Do you look at varying those inbound links using different keywords and that sort of thing or how do you handle the actual inbound links?

Obviously you’re going to get certain keywords targeted sent into the individual page with the keyword you’re trying to rank for but then within that do you vary it at all? How do you work that?

Jason Jell: Generally most of my pages will have my one target that is my go to. I want to rank for this term on this page and I’ll have enough variation in that term that I could come in with, a lower hanging fruit that’s directly related to that term. I can’t easily create another page for that term. Maybe I have shoes as my big term and my secondary is sneakers. I don’t have content that I can make that separate shoes and sneakers. Maybe that’s a secondary that if I do enough mixing with my anchor text then maybe within a year’s time I’m ranking for shoes. I’m starting to also rank for sneakers.

So I’ll set secondary targets for most of my pages and maybe even tertiary targets if there are enough keywords to justify it. That’s a part of what I do in the initial process in vetting out my keywords. I’ll set up, here’s my architecture, here’s page one, here are my keywords that I’m going to target for that. I’m ranking those keywords one, two, three or whatever. When I build my links, you vary the anchor text, especially if you’re driving it all through channels that you influence and it’s not happening naturally.

You’ll get the slap. I believe the number is something in the neighbourhood of 70%, which is easier to hit than a lot of people think.

David Jenyns: You’ve tested lots of different things obviously in the creation of the software and also just through your own consulting as well. When new SEO people are starting out, where do you see people going wrong?

Jason Jell: Not sticking with it. Obviously everybody, myself included, got into this because we wanted to make a lot of money and not do what we were currently doing. I think a lot of people think it’s easy and a lot of people think it doesn’t take a lot of time and it doesn’t take a lot of effort. But it’s a job like any other job and it’s going to take a lot of effort, and it’s going to take a lot of time.

With SEO I think one of the thing’s that’s great about it, I don’t want to devalue this at all because I love SEO, but it doesn’t take a lot of thinking once you’ve established your keywords and your targets. It takes a lot of action. A lot of people will just submit and get ten links and then they’ll turn around and they’ll ask a hundred people why they’re not ranking. They could have turned around and got fifty more links in that same amount of time.

A lot of people focus on the prize and stop the actual resources and effort necessary to get to that point. I’d say 90% of the people I’ve dealt with and I’ve trained and I’ve worked with, fall into that bucket. They’ll do 10% of the work and they’ll expect to get 100% of the return and it doesn’t work like that. It’s more you’ve climbed up this hill for seven hours and you’re at the top of the hill now and you can roll down now because you’ve put in all the time and the effort in.

David Jenyns: Obviously you do a lot of testing on your own as well. When it comes to looking at other people in the industry of SEO is there anyone you look to for insights or people you keep your finger on the pulse of? Obviously Brad is definitely one you’d watch out for. Are there any other guys you keep an eye on?

Jason Jell: I read a lot of blogs. I tend to read Search Engine Land, I tend to read SEOmoz quite a bit. I like them, I like the writing styles. I’m a big unsubscriber, so I don’t follow a lot of stuff just because I tend to get a lot of noise and I’m trying to filter the noise out and just stay focused. Jerry West is a big one. I like a lot of what he writes and I like a lot of what he says. He’s definitely somebody who knows his stuff. Marc Lindsay, I know he’s a great guy. He knows his stuff very well too. It’s kind of a wash for me beyond that.

I really try to stay focused on what I’m working on and staying as close to my goals as possible.

David Jenyns: Very good. I hope I didn’t take you too far off track with this call. I really appreciate your time. You’ve got such a really good solid understanding of SEO and I just love to chat about it and hear some of your insights as well. If people want to find out more about SEO Elite and the Elite brand of software, they can definitely Google SEO Elite or Keyword Elite or Brad Callen. Through Brad Callen’s website, you can just about find all of this stuff. Or they can check out theseomethod.com/elite and they’ll get there as well.

Let’s say people want to find out more about you Jason. I know you fly pretty much under the radar. Is there any way people can get in touch with you or are you happy to stay under the radar?

Jason Jell: I’m totally happy to be under the radar. I’ve got a couple of pretty good things going so, no blog, no website, no nothing. I’ll pitch it all to Brad at bradcallen.com.

David Jenyns: If anyone wants to find out mere they’ll just have to keep tuning into these calls and I’ll see if I can line up another call with Jason. Thanks again for your time Jason.

Jason Jell: Thank you very much.

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Daryl Guppy

Name: Daryl Guppy

Industry: Trading

Website: Guppy Traders

Daryl Guppy’s Bio: Daryl Guppy is founder and Director of Guppytraders.com Pty Ltd. He is an active private position trader trading equities and associated derivatives markets. His most recent book is The 36 Strategies of the Chinese For Financial Traders. He is the author of several books including Share Trading and Trading Tactics and Bear Trading and Chart Trading (Also availabe in Chinese as ) and Trading Asian Shares and Market Trading Tactics and Better Trading and Better Stock Trading (Also available in Italian as Lo specialista del Trading.) Snapshot Trading examines short term trading strategies. (Available in Chinese early 2008)  Trend Trading has become a best seller and is available as.   in a Chinese language edition published in Beijing.

He developed the Guppy Multiple Moving Average Indicator which is included in Metastock, OmniTrader and other charting programs. He delivers accredited courses for the Singapore Stock Exchange and Society of Remisiers, Singapore. He is an appointed foundation member of the Australian Government Shareholders and Investors Advisory Council. He is a regular technical analyst commentator and guest host on CNBC Asia Squawk Box.

As a technical trader he relies mainly on chart and live market information to make trading decisions. He is the publisher of a weekly Internet newsletter Tutorials in Applied Technical Analysis, which explains technical analysis techniques and shows how they are applied to current markets. There are Australian, and  Asia & China and India editions of the newsletter, with each concentrating on local market solutions and trading education.

He is a regular contributor to the Sydney Futures Exchange magazine, Your Trading Edge, the US trading magazines Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, Active Trader, Working Money, Bridge Trader, Australia’s Shares and Personal Investment magazines, Singapore’s Smart Investor magazine and The Edge business weekly and Personal Money in Malaysia. He has a regular column in China’s Weekly On Stocks magazine and in Shanghai Securities News. (Chinese language only) He also contributes to Poland’s Profesjonalny Inwestor and provided sector analysis on the Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Philippines markets for i-invest handbooks.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from meta-formula.com. I’m extremely lucky and honoured today to be interviewing one of my personal mentors. I’ve watched Daryl’s work for a very long time. If you don’t know who Daryl Guppy is you must be hiding under a rock. If you check out his bio page it’s unbelievable. He’s written so many books. I think the latest one is The 36 Strategies of the Chinese for Financial Traders. That’s the most recent one. I love also there’s Trend Trading, there’s Share Trading, Bear Trading, so many different books. He’s a contributor in numerous trade journals. He’s a regular contributor to CNBC in China, is it?

Daryl Guppy: It comes out of Singapore but it goes globally through to the US and Europe as well.

David Jenyns: Yes, so suffice to say Daryl really knows his material and we’re very lucky to grab him. He’s actually in Melbourne just for a short time for the Traders’ Expo and I thought I’d take the opportunity and see if I could get some questions answered for you guys, so thank you for joining us.

Daryl Guppy: No problems.

David Jenyns: I’ll dive straight in, Daryl. I suppose one thing I’m trying to work with helping traders achieve is designing a trading system that really matches their style. A lot of people are finding the stumbling block in that they still don’t know what a complete system looks like. I know you trade using various strategies but if we try to just isolate one of the trading systems that you use and if we could talk through the process of what makes up this trading system. Maybe starting with the market, maybe we start picking a market and go from there?

Daryl Guppy: Well that’s always the important point. What you do is you pick the sort of opportunity. All of us are accustomed or comfortable with particular types of opportunity. That might be that you’re happier to be an intra day trader or a short term trader or a break out trader or a trend trader or a position trader that you wanted to join in anticipation of the market changing or after the market’s changed.

So you’ve got to identify where you’re comfortable for a start because that’s the important point. It’s not finding a system or designing a system, what’s important is that you have to create an approach that is appropriate for the current market conditions. So if you’re trying to use what you used in 2006 or 2007 now, you won’t have any success. If you try and use what you used in 2008 and apply that now it won’t have any success. Some of it will succeed but most of it won’t.

So there’s always a challenge to adapt and adjust your trading style and approaches to suit the market conditions. The big thing that came out of 2008 was a significant change in the nature and the character of the market. The market has become much more volatile. We still have what we call an underlying secular trend, so it’s still going up broadly or down broadly but there are lots of what we call volatility wipes. So you’ll get days where the market will move three or four or five or ten per cent.

Go back to 2006. The Dow did a 3% rise, it was all over the front page of the newspaper. It was massive headlines, we all sat back in shock. Three percent now, that’s not particularly important. So these are giving us massive wipes in trend trades, in break out trades, so you have to adjust what you’re doing to what the market is telling you that you must do. Now there are times when you will not be able to trade that market, where your particular comfort isn’t anywhere near what the market’s doing. It’s a good time to take a holiday. But when the market comes back and gives you the sorts of opportunities that you can take advantage of, that’s the time to come back in.

David Jenyns: I think the hard thing that a lot of traders have is identifying, ok, well that market’s changed and they’ve read all the books and they hear you need to have a trading plan, you need to be following your trading plan. When you’re at a point of indecision, that’s when you revert back to your trading plan. How can you build something into your trading plan that allows for change? You want to follow your rules, but ok, the market conditions have changed.

Daryl Guppy: The rules are independent of the market conditions. So the rules are relatively simple, and that is, you don’t lose money. If you’re going to lose money, you lose a very small amount. So that’s the basic ground plan. What you do on top of that is another question. And that’s where all the different techniques and processes come in.

But the market has this really simple score book. If you’re in touch with the market, if what you’re doing is consistent with the market, you make money. If you’re not, you lose money. That’s when you tell if the market is changing, because you use a technique that has been successful and suddenly you find that instead of going from a 70% success rate, it drops down to 50% or 30% so that you’re taking more trades but fewer of them are being successful. That tells you that the market conditions have changed.

If you assume that your analysis is correct, that your exploration is correct, you’re turning up the right sorts of opportunities, material that has worked in the past, that stops working, that’s a change in the market, not necessarily a change in you.

There’s one very important exception to that. That is that if you have been through a traumatic event, it may be the loss of a family member or something similar, in my case it was having my office wiped out by a flood in 1998, a car accident or something like that, what it does is it changes your relationship with risk.
David Jenyns: Once bitten, twice shy kind of thing.

Daryl Guppy: That’s right, and when you come to the market, even though it’s not related to the market, when you come to the market, the levels of risk and the type of risk that you were comfortable in handling, you may find that you can’t handle. If you’re still using the same methods, nothing wrong with the methods, the analysis, the techniques, but the way in which you react to risk, the way in which you act on your stops, before your stops often, that will change the result.

David Jenyns: I suppose then having those sets of rules and you’re following it, ok, you’re starting to see your trading system might dip. Ok, we need to change our rules. The other thing as well, let’s say, having excellent money management in place you can sustain a string of losses. Let’s say, I don’t know if you do much back testing or anything like that or you look back to previously what you’ve been trading, at what point do you go, ok, I’ve now had seven losses in a row or ten losses in a row, at what point do you pull the pin and say, right, this strategy is changed and it’s not just part of the normal market aberration and that’s just part of trading, losing?

Daryl Guppy: It’s difficult to say and that depends to some extent on experience. There’s no hard rule that says 7.5 failure sets it up, I’ve got to change my system. You’re looking at the way market conditions are changing and that includes things like volatility, it includes trend persistence and trend continuity. It looks at impacts of other factors, other instruments that are coming in, whether that’s taking speculative money out of particular secular trading.

So for instance you go back, five, six years, most of the speculative money was sitting in warrants. That market is now dead. That speculative money has shifted to CFDs. So you can still apply the same techniques in trading warrants, but they will not be as successful because your range of choices is more limited and the market reacts differently because of the lower liquidity. But you can’t take the methods you used in trading warrants, the time decay factor for instance, and transfer those to CFDs because they’re a different instrument and a different set of behaviours.

So trading is a whole combination of different features. As I said, it does give us an easy way to assess whether we’re succeeding or failing, we make money or we lose money. When you make that change, that depends again on your own feelings about the strength of what you’re doing. So our core methods remain the same over years. It’s like a tool box. You take a tool box, you can use the same tool box to work on a motor bike, on a bicycle, on a car, or on a truck. You’ve got to work out in the market whether it’s a car or a truck or a bicycle and select the appropriate tools from your tool set.

So you don’t want to try and develop new skills, and there are a limited range of skills that can be developed, what’s important is the application of those particular sets of skills.

David Jenyns: Well at the moment, like you said, we’ve seen a big shift in the way the markets have been moving, they’re a lot more volatile than they’ve ever been. What sort of trading are you now adopting if we walk through a system? Are you still looking to trade unleveraged stocks or are you doing CFDs like starting off with picking a market first, Forex? Where do you start and then perhaps we can talk through what methods you’re trading at the moment.

Daryl Guppy: Ok, you’re looking at top down, you look at what the market is doing. So what sort of opportunities is the market offering at this point in time? One of the things the market has at the moment is a fairly high compatibility with certain types of pattern trade break outs. So you look for those. That’s an eyeball scan. Rather than sit down every day and go through all the stocks that are listed, what you’re doing is you’re looking at other sorts of stocks and you’ll see these patterns jump out. They go on a separate list.

If you’re looking at the market at the moment, at this point in time the market has had a good run and is now consolidating. There is a reasonable danger that we will do a retracement in time and price, similar to what happened in Shanghai in the last couple of weeks. That means that we’re looking at maybe a 10, 15% price retreat, I think October is a good time to do that sort of thing, followed by a sideways consolidation and a continuation of the trend.

So that sets our strategy. If it says open positions, we’ve got to be prepared to cut and lock in profits. If they’re new positions we have to be prepared to cut quickly and take a small loss. That’s number one. Number two, when the market drops, if we’re going to get a correction in price, in other words it’s going to fall very rapidly, what we’re looking is for stops to retreat back to solid underlying trends. What is a solid underlying trend? Ok, we define that with a multiple moving average, so it comes back to the lower edge of that. That tells us we’re ready to sit there and watch for a price rebound to develop.

Now we look at Shanghai market, because Shanghai market in behavior is leading what’s happening in the world, it’s moving much earlier, usually three to four months prior to behaviours we see in the US and other associated markets and ourselves. So we can see that once we get this correction in price finished, the correction in time is created with a whole series of short term rallies. That means we need to shift our focus to the short term rally trade.

Now whether we do that by looking at, say, let’s say the banks for argument’s sake, the ANZ pulls back, ok, how do we trade that rally? The most effective way to trade the rally is to shift into a leveraged derivative rather than to trade the underlying. We might get a 5% return out of ANZ if we trade ANZ but we might be able to generate a 15 to 20% return if we traded on a leveraged basis.

But it’s not an investment because the probability is that the market will have the price correction, we’ll now look for the time correction, rally, retreat, rally, retreat. It gives us an opportunity to trade short on the down side if we wish, if that’s our particular skill set. Once we see a break out above the top of that trading band, then that sends a signal for a recontinuation of the up trends. That’s when you position yourself to be able to take advantage of those longer term up trends. So you would be looking for defined trading band breakouts as a trigger signal to end up in longer term trades.

David Jenyns: What you’ve explained right there is one of the things that have really set you out among the pack as far as your expertise. You’ve mapped out what the market’s doing, you’ve got the different strategies and we’re talking multiple markets. A lot of people, especially when they’re first starting out are going to have trouble identifying that sort of insight that you just gave just then. How can we break that down? Where should someone focus?

I think we were talking about, ok, what stage are we in at the moment with the current climate? Ok, we’re looking for those breakouts. Are we saying, how about we start out with stocks, you only look for breakout patterns, just get breakout patterns and let’s do this right for this time in the market? Is that right?

Daryl Guppy: Yes, that’s right. The market has thousands of opportunities to lose money. They’re there every day. So what you need to focus on, particularly when you’re starting, is a particular set of processes or opportunities which suit you exactly that you know you’ve got a great deal of success with. You sit down and you trade paper trade. A lot of people talk about paper trade, it’s a waste of time. It’s not real and all the rest of it. That’s garbage, that’s back testing, and we were talking about back testing before and I didn’t answer your question. The answer is, I don’t back test significantly.

You tell me where we can pull out a bit of history, that’s the same behaviours or even similar behaviours to 2008. It’s not there. We can’t go back to the 1930s, the 30s are different, different behaviours, different instruments, different levels of volatility. You go back to after the tech crash, again, not there. So the market is unique in a very significant extent. When major changes take place, you can iron those changes out. That’s what a lot of back testing does.

So we’ll start from 1901 and we’ll move it forward to 2009 and 2007 and what that does, it makes 1930 look about that big, and it makes the collapse in 1987 look about that big and it makes that collapse in 2007 look about that big, so it looks very small in longer term charts. So what we’ve just been through also looks about that big. That’s not quite true, I’ve just lost a fortune and a half of my grandmother’s inheritance money, that’s pretty important to me at that point of time. Historically it is a small blip, but in real time it’s a major blip.

So when we back test, we back test systems that reduce the impact and significance of major market events of 1930, 1987, 1960 and so on, then you don’t have a system that really works. It’s not adjusted to what’s actually happening now. So that’s one of the key factors.

So how do we back test? What you look for is compatibility. In other words you’ve got an approach, an idea, you go back and you look at twelve months of data. If I acted on this signal over that twelve months, how many false signals would it give compared to the number of valid signals? This is on individual stocks, not on the market as such.

When we look at an index, the key factor with an index is index is made up only of winners, not of losers. So it’s always going to go up. It’s a wonderful thing, it can only pick winners, retrospectively it’s always going to go up and just drop the losers. People say, the market is always going to go up, I can’t possibly lose. Talk to people who bought Citibank, or GE or HIH in Australia, all of these, they’ve got lots and lots of problems.

Citibank for example, looks really good because what it did, it fell down below the trigger level for the Dow. So the only way that they could continue to remain as a Dow component, they did what they called a one for twenty reverse split. We call it capital reconstruction. So you own twenty shares? Now you’ve only got one. While officially, the price increases, it remains as part of the Dow, it’s a winning stock. Not quite true.

In terms of back testing, I’m looking for compatibility, in a current market over a twelve month time frame. Normally, let’s say prior to 2008, we’d look for compatibility over two or three years. Although the market for 2005 through to 2008 looked like it was similar, looked like it was the same, there were subtle changes that were taking place. As we went through 2007, you could see the market accelerating, you got clear warnings in November 2007- December 2007 that we were moving into a bear market. We called that in a number of international publications as well as Australian publications. We said at the time, ok, you go to cash, you close out positions, you move to short term trading because time is the risk factor in the market.

So you’ve got to look at the changes that are taking place. You do that by short term back testing. Take the stock, take the method, apply. In the past, has it given reliable signals? If the answer is yes, then here’s a high probability it will continue to give those reliable signals into the future.

David Jenyns: So, we’ve picked our market, we’ve identified that we’re going to be looking for some breakout opportunities. We do a little bit of back testing of that method over the last twelve months to see what sort of results. Everybody wants to know, we talked about breakout, what are some easy breakouts? Are we talking about breaks above previous high? At what point are you looking for consolidation, just so someone can sink their teeth into an actual entry signal.

Daryl Guppy: You can go and buy a million dollar ruler, it would cost you about 5c. In other words, a straight edged trend line is one of the most powerful tools in the market. So if I’m looking for a break out, I’m looking for a combination of three factors. First I’m looking for a trend that can be defined with a trend line. There are lots of trends out there that can’t be defined with a trend line. Ok, I’m not interested in those.

David Jenyns: When you say defined, just touch the line at least three times?

Daryl Guppy: At least three times. You’ve got a marker that’s moving down. I can define the upper edges of that trend with a straight edged trend line.

David Jenyns: And the time frame?
Daryl Guppy: Let’s go back six months, or go back twelve months, but say six months for a minimum. There’s a clear trend, there are no sudden spikes that are above it and dip below it and there is not a lot below the trend line. It’s clear, when you see it, you’ll see it. If you’ve got to sit down and ponder…

David Jenyns: Then it’s probably not there.

Daryl Guppy: No, go to another stop. There are lots of choices out there. Find the stop that gives you the clearest compatibility with the method you want to use because what that means is when the exit signal comes, there is no room for prevarication, there’s no room for saying, well, if I just adjust this it will be ok. So that’s what you’re looking for. So number one, do I have a stock that can define the downtrend with a clear trend line? No arguments about where it ought to be, whether it should be up here or down here, there, that’s where it is, four, five, six, ten connect points, no breakouts above it. That’s number one.

Number two, can that trend also be defined with a GMMA, a Guppy Multiple Moving Average? Does it give me a good set of solid, reliable signals, no false breakouts? That’s the key factor. If there have been no false breakouts in the last six months from that relationship, then when I get a crossover or a signal that’s telling me the GMMA is compressing across multiple time frames, then I know it has a higher probability of reliability. So that’s what I’m looking for.

So I’ve got number one, the trend line, number two, the GMMA. The GMMA I’m maybe looking at a test, a retest, maybe a third, fourth test. So when I’ve got a price that closes above the trend line, and I’ve got a GMMA compression relationship across two sets of moving averages, two time frames, then it increases the probability that trend break is genuine. On top of that, I then want to define that breakout with price volatility. For that I use a count back line. You can use something like 2 x 1 x ATR.

David Jenyns: I got the count back line from you, it’s fantastic, especially in stop loss as well.

Daryl Guppy: That’s right, but we’re using it here as an entry point. What we’re looking at here is the price has to rise by more than its normal volatility. It’s essentially what it is. It’s a self adjusting volatility measure. So once it moves above there, it’s my entry signal. I’ve got three things lined up in a row.

Now let’s look at those three things. What does the trend line do? The trend line defines what’s happening purely with price, it’s not related to any other calculation, it’s purely a chart recognition pattern. Multiple moving average is a technical analysis factor, it’s just taking price and it’s manipulating the values for price. So it’s measuring this trend in a different way.

Then you’ve got a count back line which is measuring volatility based on price. So you’ve got three different measures that are giving you three independent conclusions about what’s happening with the trend. So when that breakout develops, there’s a higher probability that breakout will be successful, not a hundred per cent guarantee, but a higher probability.

If there’s another stock out here that has pretty similar relationships but there are a couple of days where it’s spiked well above the trend line or where we’ve seen a GMMA compression and failure and so on or the count back line hasn’t been successful, I’m not interested in that stock.

I haven’t got enough money to trade a thousands stocks. I’ve got money to trade one stock, so part of the process is to find the stock that is most compatible with the techniques that I want to use, that hasn’t in the past given false break out signals, given false signals of any description and it’s compatible with all of my approaches. So when I enter it, there’s a high probability it will continue to be compatible moving forward.

David Jenyns: Do you look at volume as well?

Daryl Guppy: Volume is unimportant. Why? All of the material that is written on volume really goes back to the 1930s, 1940s. If you take The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal in the 1940s was about the same size, you’ve probably got a suburban newspaper somewhere, one of those free advertising things that is about that thick.

David Jenyns: Yes, like Beat magazine or something like that.

Daryl Guppy: That’s right, that was The Wall Street Journal in the 1940s. Now, before it went back online, they’re looking at weighing more than 2kg. So that tells you that the flow of information has increased exponentially. We know that, but more importantly the access to that flow of information has increased dramatically. All the volume work is really based on the idea that information is restricted, that it’s only the large players that really have access to it. So if you look at large volume, it’s the large players in operation. Jesse Livermore did it. He always said, look at the volume because in his day it was the large traders that set the scene on a limited number of stocks. So it’s an old fashioned idea that belongs to old markets. I’m not trading in 1930, I’m trading in 2009.

So what happens with volume? You know yourself, you use Metastock, you do all sorts of scans. What are you looking for? What’s your basic scan? Price and volume. How many other people are doing exactly the same thing?

David Jenyns: Probably everyone.

Daryl Guppy: Out of price and volume, what is the more important thing?

David Jenyns: Obviously price.

Daryl Guppy: That’s right, so you’re scanning for price, you’re looking for instances for all those stocks that have increased more than 10% today.

David Jenyns: Yes.

Daryl Guppy: Then you’ll do a secondary scan for the volume on those stocks. But price is your first thing. So is everybody else. You’re all doing the same thing. They see the price going up 10%. It’s like the schoolyard fight. How did you know a schoolyard fight was on? Did anyone tell you?

David Jenyns: You looked for a crowd.

Daryl Guppy: Suddenly, there’s a crowd. The same, the price is the fight. When you find a 10% increase in price for argument’s sake, you can guarantee that there are lots of other people doing exactly the same thing. Tomorrow, they’ll be there. That’s what creates the volume. So what happens now, that’s the most important change in this particular discussion that’s taken place, let’s say, between 1930 and 2009. In 1930, price followed volume; in the twenty-first century, volume follows price. So it’s a major change in what happens in markets.

Volume becomes important only in terms of can we get into this trade. I wanted to trade at this size. Ok, the market is not deep enough for me to be able to do that. I’ve got a choice, do I reduce my trading size or do I look for another stock?

David Jenyns: Yes, excellent. So we talked about identifying the market, we talked about making sure that our strategy matches what’s happening, we talked about some entry rules that you identify prior. We’re making sure we’re trading with the trend.

Daryl Guppy: Ah, but we’re not trading with the trend, that’s the key factor. In a breakout trade, you’re trading against the trend.

David Jenyns: The longer term uptrend.

Daryl Guppy: In a breakout trade we are betting against the trend because the prevailing trend has been down and we’re saying, ah, that’s about to change. We’re walking against the lights.

David Jenyns: We’re waiting for the breakout above and then we’re looking to make sure the volatility is there as well, using the count back line. To identify these trading opportunities exhibiting that criteria, I can’t imagine you’re eyeballing every chart. Do you have those basic things coded in and you’re scanning the market for things exhibiting that criteria?

Daryl Guppy: We have a number of explorations that we do that get us to the general area quickly. The GMMA scan that you developed a few weeks ago and finalized for us, allows us to do that much more quickly so we can find all of those stocks where we we’ve got a GMMA crossover taking place within the last three day period. So once we see that compression crossover developing, that goes on what’s called a stock pool. So on my stock pool list one, we’ve got all those stocks that need that technical scan. Then we can go back and look at those visually and say, do they meet our down trend line scan? If the answer is yes, ok, that goes on stock pool list two.

In three days it’s too soon for a count back line signal, so we look at our stock list tool, we watch that over the next three, four, five, six, ten days, once we get a CBL confirmation, then that becomes a trade opportunity.

David Jenyns: So we enter into the trade because we’ve identified it now and we’ve been watching it, it ticks all of our boxes, we’re into the trade. Obviously, just before you get into the trade, you want to do position sizing, and figure out your initial stops and trailing stops. Can we talk through how that happens?

Daryl Guppy: Position sizing, the basic rule we use is that you don’t put at risk more than 2% of total capital on a single trade. Now what that means of course is not that you’ve got $100,000, you only take a $2,000 position, what it means is that the difference between your entry point and your stop loss exit point, the total loss is not more than 2% of your total trading capital. That’s the key factor.

How do you decide that? Ok, what do we use to define the trend breakout? We’ve used trend line, GMMA and count back line, or price volatility. So when we take our position, we’re using the same methods. Because we’re looking at the breakout, we can’t use a trend line to define the rising trend, there is not enough price data at this stage. So we can’t use that method. Sometimes you can, but often you can’t.

So you’ve got to use price volatility. So we use the count back line to set a trailing stop loss. We take the highest high that’s developed after the new breakout , do the calculation, there’s my stop loss point. So my plain entry point is here, my stop loss point is here, put that onto a spreadsheet, work out what my maximum position size is. That’s the first thing. Given my entry and my exit and my risk control, then I can spend $100,000. Unfortunately, I haven’t got $100,000, I can only spend $10,000. So I will take a $10,000 position and that actually reduces my risk.

The first calculation is the maximum position size. I enter here, I exit here and I lose 2% of capital, that’s my maximum size. Then I usually scale back from that. What that means is that I may say, take a $10,000 position at this point and I can exit here and I’ll only lose $300, or 0.3% of my total trading capital.

It’s like an airbag in a car. You hit the stop, the market’s gapped through it which is what it tends to do these days, so it closes 2 or 3c lower but because your original stop was only 0.3% of capital you might actually blow it out to maybe 1% of capital. So you’re still only 2% limit. So you adjust your position size to also reduce your risk in another sense as well. So it allows you for gapping activity, it allows you for overnight volatility.

David Jenyns: Now we were talking about current volatility of the market and I think one of the ways that you talked about for combating that, I’m assuming we’re setting, especially if you’re needing to scale your position sizes back like that, you must be having your stops set reasonably tight?

Daryl Guppy: The stops are set reasonably tight in relation to the trend volatility. Before 2008 we assumed that trend volatility was the same as price volatility. When you use count back line, average true range, all these sorts of approaches, they are using price volatility as a proxy for the behavior of trend volatility. That was pretty good.

When we’re using a trend line, we’re doing exactly the same thing. We put the trend line under a rising set of prices and we say this defines the volatility of price, we don’t expect price to drop below it, and this also defines the rising trend. So price volatility is the same as the trend. Two thousand and eight destroyed that. It still hasn’t happened in 2009. So what we developed in 2008 as a short term solution to volatility in markets we are now finding applies in a longer term basis, and we call it a trend volatility line.

What happens is that we use the relationships in the Guppy Multiple Moving Average. GMMA is for ease of comprehension as it were, defining what traders are doing and what investors are doing. We know that investor behaviour defines the trend. The wider the separation, the stronger and more stable the trend. Trader behavior can drop quite dramatically into that long term group. As long as it doesn’t penetrate below, then the trend is probably pretty much in place.

So what we do is first of all, we use trend volatility, TVL, as our way of managing our exposure to the trade. It doesn’t define the beginning or the end of the trend. It tells us what we need to do in relation to our entry point. If you make an entry, it’s like everybody, you’ve done all this research and you buy the stock. You hope that you’ve made the right decision. Then later on you become more confident that you’ve made the right decision and you eventually become certain that you’ve done the right thing.

You can define those points exactly. So take your entry point. What we do is, and this is all in the Trend Volatility DVD that explains it in much more detail. So you take your entry point and you essentially draw a horizontal line. That’s your reference point, that’s your break even point. While price is above there, that’s ok. If it hits that level, and you get out, then you’re going to get out at break even. That’s your entry price, plus whatever you paid to get in, plus whatever you have to pay to get out.

When that entry point, when that break even line is equal to the lower edge of the short term GMMA, you can be much more hopeful that you have confidence that your trade is developing correctly. When they intersect the upper edge of the long term GMMA you move into a situation from hope to confidence. When it intersects the lower edge of the long term GMMA you can be very certain that you have made the correct decision that the trend is stable and reliable.

That gives us positions where we can scale into a trade with exact points. No guess work, that’s where we do it and that’s where we do it. Or you just take your single position from the beginning and you don’t scale in but you have a measure of your change from hope to confidence to certainty. But then what’s important is, we then need to define the trend volatility, not the price volatility. We do that by looking at both the amplitude of the trend and the duration of the trend. Amplitude we simply get by, we’ve got this break even line coming across, once it intersects the lower edge, the long term GMMA we draw a vertical line to the upper edge of the long term GMMA. It’s much easier to see on the DVD. That gives us the amplitude of trend volatility, not of price, of trend volatility.

So the more strongly supported that trend is, the greater the amplitude. Then we draw a horizontal line. Now at this stage it just projects into the future. But when that horizontal line intersects the lower edge of the rising GMMA, that tells us it’s time to change the stop loss calculation for the trend. So amplitude is the distance between the lower and upper edges and that horizontal line is the duration, the amount of time that that current stop loss is relevant to this trend. That will be quite different to any short term stop loss adjustments you might make related to price.

David Jenyns: Interesting.

Daryl Guppy: It’s telling us about the trend, not about price behavior. Again, repeat the behavior, amplitude, duration, amplitude, duration. Typically at the end of a long term trend what happens is the long term GMMA begins to compress as investors join sellers. So they will take profits, investors will think, oh, we have to get out as well, so you see this compression developing. When the compression develops, what you’ll find is a tightening of the stop. The amplitude decreases, the duration might increase particularly as the trend begins to move sideways, but it may then go up of course, in which case your amplitude will increase again, but if it drops below that, you’re out of the trade. So you’re defining the trend, not the price.

David Jenyns: Yes, once we’ve defined that trend and we’ve figured out that volatility and we’ve drawn our line across and said this is the point at which our original stop loss falls away and now our trailing stop loss kicks in, at that point can you explain through again just how that trailing stop loss works?

Daryl Guppy: Yes, so what you’ve got, it’s time to adjust your stop. You know that because the horizontal line has intersected the lower edge of long term GMMA. So you draw a vertical line to the upper edge of the long term GMMA. That gives you the amplitude. That’s how much you need to adjust your stop by. This projection tells you how long that stop needs to be in place. So with the count back line or ATR for instance, you may be changing your stop every three or four days. With TVL you may be changing your stop every six, ten, twelve, fifteen days because although price has done this, the trend is still stable. You’re measuring the trend, not the price. That’s the key difference.

David Jenyns: I’m going to have to look at that on the DVD. That was Trend Volatility.

Daryl Guppy: Trend Volatility, the TVL DVD, yes.

David Jenyns: Excellent, I’ll have to check that out.

Daryl Guppy: There is a lot more detail. We originally developed it for short term intra day trading.
David Jenyns: To reflect the current climate.

Daryl Guppy: To reflect what was happening in 2008, because 2008 it was an interesting learning experience for lots of us. A lot of people just lost money in 2008 and didn’t learn anything. That’s not good. You can lose money, that’s ok if you learn, and TVL came out of that particular process.

What we found is that, first that we were using it on index trading, on short term basis, one minute charts, that we could then improve our exposure by capturing the trend by three time frames higher. So we applied it to a three minute chart and verified our exit signals on a one minute chart against our three minute chart that was in the longer term trends. Then we found we could change that in from a one day trade to multi day trades. We also found that we could apply that to an end of day chart; in other words, for example where each candle represented one day rather than one minute or ten minutes or whatever.

So for instance let’s take a stock we’re trading in Singapore at the moment, using the techniques I’ve just discussed, we got into that particular trade. We used TVL as our trend management method, that’s currently sitting on 150% return and that’s been an open trade for the last six, six and a half months. That’s had tremendous volatility in price which has given many false shake outs. But we’re still sitting there because we’ve defined the trend.

The key factor is the trend volatility line does not define the trend, it defines how we manage the trade based on our entry point. So it’s not an objective definition of the trend, but it’s an objective management of our exposure. So if I enter at $1, your TVL will be in a different position than if I entered at $1.10 but it’s still valid, it still gives us a way to understand the trend volatility, not the price volatility.

David Jenyns: Monitoring that volatility and basing your system around that makes so much sense because obviously when the market is more volatile, you need to give the stock more room to move. As it starts to compress, that’s logical, that’s when you want to be tightening everything in.

So we really talked through I think pretty much from start to finish how you would design a trading system. We talked a little bit about the back testing as well, which is more you do it over the last twelve months. When traders out there are in their system design process and they’re going through, what sort of characteristics should they be looking for? They’re mapping out their strategy, what sort of draw down, how many strings of losses, even some ball parks?

Daryl Guppy: There are no ball parks. I say that for the simple reason that each us has a different appetite or capacity for risk. So you have what you would want to call a freeze or a flinch point which I’ve written about in Better Trading. If you can’t stand on the bridge out here and throw away $2000 and not flinch, then you can’t trade with a stop that’s going to lose you $2000. We all have a different capacity and when you first start trading, often you’re coming in with limited amounts of capital and each dollar is pretty precious.

So if you really can’t come to grips with the idea that you’ve just lost $1000, then if your stop is set where you’re going to lose $2000, then you’re not going to act on it. It doesn’t matter what your systems testing does, it doesn’t matter what all of your research does, the reality is, when it comes time to act, you will not act.

So you must decide and you must discover as quickly as possible what your flinch point is. Now if your flinch point is $1000, then when you enter your position, you need to make sure that the maximum loss that you’re going to incur is less than $1000, otherwise you won’t act, even though technically, theoretically, on the spreadsheets, it’s all correct. So you need to adjust.

As your trading becomes more skilled, as you have more success, then your flinch point will grow larger. So you’ll get to the point, $2000, ok, $20,000, not a big problem. But if you start off with the theoretical results and find you can’t act, that’s when you’ve got problems.

David Jenyns: Start where you are. I feel like we’ve talked through that system design really well. We might shift gears slightly and I’ve just got a few other questions if I may. We talked a little bit at the start of our interview here about where you saw the current climate and how you imagine things developing.

I know you do a lot of work over in China and China is a great leading indicator and barometer on what’s going to happen in the rest of the world as are some of the other emerging economies. China is really I think at the front of that. The market gets smacked, the market has bounced back so strongly. What are your feelings on where the market will head, the current climate as you see it?

Daryl Guppy: There is a ghost in the room. The ghost is 1930. The market collapsed in 1929. In 1930 the market staged a 47% recovery.

David Jenyns: It sounds familiar.

Daryl Guppy: And then it collapsed and made new lows. Then it recovered again and made another 27% recovery. The low point of the market is not 1930, not 1929, not 1928 but 1927. We think it went poof, that was it, but in fact it continued to fall with major rallies in that process. If you take the peak in 1929, that peak in the Dow was not achieved again until 1954.

David Jenyns: Wow.

Daryl Guppy: If you’re in the market for long term, well this is a generational thing, several generations to get through.

David Jenyns: But the markets always go up, Daryl.

Daryl Guppy: That’s still measuring the winners. So that’s the ghost in the background. People like Mark and others are saying, this potentially could be a bear market rally, a prolonged bear market rally. That’s a possibility.

David Jenyns: There’s the stimulus as well.

Daryl Guppy: In the Depression people did the same sorts of things. Not to the same extent but there were all sorts of factors and the best stimulus following 1930 in fact was World War 2 because you had this massive ramp up of production. It was a consumer led recovery because everything is instantly destroyed and must be replaced, planned obsolescence at its best. That’s what really dragged the markets out of the depression period. So that’s the ghost in the room. On a very broad level, there is that possibility of a major retrace. But things are different, they always are. History repeats, but never in quite the same ways.

That’s what makes China interesting because of the correction in price, a rapid, rapid fall of 10 -15% and the correction in time that takes us back to the underlying trend. That’s what we’re looking for in the US markets and our markets.

We look at Korea KOSPI for instance. China can’t be traded by people outside China, it’s only restricted to domestic trading. So if you look outside of China, you look at KOSPI and KOSPI is leading market for behaviour that we see in the rest of the world. If you look at KOSPI breakout, you had this downtrend, you had this equilateral triangle that developed and then a breakout from that.

KOSPI lead that, Korea did that first. Then it developed a trading band. The breakout from the trading band, you project it up once. You hit that target. You project it up twice, you hit that target. The same thing happened in many other markets.You saw it to a lesser extent in the US.
The rest of the markets outside of the US are following this behaviour, so is Australia. We are now sitting at the top of that third band.

David Jenyns: Interesting.

Daryl Guppy: So what we’re doing is watching what’s happening in Korea because that Korean market behaviour gives us a reliable leading indicator as to what’s likely to happen here. So when Korea goes down, for instance, hits the bottom of that current trading band, and sits there, that’s the sort of behaviour we’re likely to see repeated here. John Murphy wrote Intermarket Technical Analysis and he was looking at platinum and gold and so forth. That’s ok. If we look at the world market, we see the same sorts of behaviours.

See when you wake up in the morning and you turn on CNBC, the first thing you’re looking for is what happened with the Dow and the S&P. When the markets in Asia open, they look to see what’s happened with the Dow, they look to see what’s happened in Australia and Japan because we’ve got the same time, except when it’s daylight saving.

We look at what’s happening in Australia and Japan. When India opens, it looks at what happened with the Dow in Australia and Asia. When Europe opens, it looks at what happened in the Dow, etc; the influence of the Dow is progressively reduced as we look back. For us the most recent market is closed is the Dow, so that’s where we look. For Asia, the most recent market that is opened is Australia, plus the Dow. We do that all the time, every market is self referential. Go back and read George Soros The Alchemy of Finance. It’s a reflexive system.

David Jenyns: Something I find interesting as well, we talked about Korea and the way their market moves. Where do you see Japan falling into it? Is it a real leading indicator?

Daryl Guppy: Not at all, and this again is another factor. Korea has only become important in the last twelve or eighteen months, not before that. Before that, that relationship didn’t exist. Now we go to daylight saving in Australia shortly. Look at what’s happening in Australia, look at what’s happening in the Nikkei. What you’ll tend to find, what’s happened in the past is that you can look at the Australia open, and its behaviour and that’s duplicated in the Nikkei. So you can develop a strategy for the Australia open on index trading and apply that to the Nikkei an hour later and trade it successfully.

We currently do that between Australia and Hong Kong. We look at what happens in Australia and we find that’s pretty much duplicated in the openings in Hong Kong, unless there’s been a major event in China. So we can test the strategy on Australia in the first hour of opening and apply that strategy in Hong Kong in the first hour of opening. Global markets are interrelated. We’re a long way from the rest of the world and too often we’re disconnected from the rest of the world, but in fact the rest of the world gives us all sorts of trading strategies that we can apply here.

Just as we have leading and lagging indicators, leading and lagging stocks, some stocks develop patterns more quickly than others, then you have leading and lagging markets. What you see here, happens there. If you can test it here in theory, you can apply it in reality there.

David Jenyns: Excellent.

Daryl Guppy: New instruments like CFDs give us that advantage. Before it was exceptionally difficult. It was very difficult to trade foreign indexes. You had to deal in futures or have separate accounts all over the place. Now you can go along to IG markets, to CMC to City Index whatever. You can trade all those indexes from one desk. The world’s there. You’ve got a world of opportunity.

David Jenyns: Yes, it makes it incredibly easy.

Daryl Guppy: Life’s much easier.

David Jenyns: Some people find that hard as well though because they don’t know where to start.

Daryl Guppy: You just have one technique. Look at the average bank robber.

David Jenyns: Tell me about the average bank robber.

Daryl Guppy: How many techniques does he have?

David Jenyns: One I imagine.

Daryl Guppy: That’s all he needs. He robs ATMs. He doesn’t rob the bank next door. That’s too difficult, he’s just concentrating on ATMs. In Sydney aren’t they blowing them up or something? Or putting cameras in them.

David Jenyns: Credit card skimmers. He just has one method.

Daryl Guppy: He just has one method. We’re a thief in the market. What we’re doing is we’re trying to take money from the market, preferably without hurting anybody.

David Jenyns: And to use it for good like Robin Hood.

Daryl Guppy: That’s right, for our own good. But that’s what we’re doing, we’re trying to take money from the market. So you don’t need a multiple set of techniques. How many can openers do you need? You just need one. So what you’re doing, you’re using that technique to find the opportunity that matches. A stupid thief will hold up a taxi trying to get hold of money. He doesn’t know where the money is located. So he’s got the technique right, stock giving you money, but he’s in the wrong place.

So it’s the same in the market. We have to first of all develop the technique, the approach that we are most comfortable with. We talked about break out trade. Let’s just concentrate on that. So break out trade. So what I need to do is find a break out.

So I’ve got a whole range of technical scans that will help me identify, whether that is a Google Map, and I can apply it to an Australian market, I can apply it to a foreign market, because a break out is a break out. It doesn’t matter whether it is on an index, whether it’s on a commodity, whether it’s on stock, whether it’s a gold mine, whether it’s a bank, it’s all the same. That’s they way they behave.

David Jenyns: I haven’t actually heard that analogy there. It does provide some good insights. I suppose just coming to the tail end of the interview I have got a few subscribers who sent in some questions. So I might fire those past you if I could. Robyn Mosby actually wanted to know if you’re familiar with Dr Bill William’s moving average and the MACD and how does that compare to the GMMA?

Daryl Guppy: The key differences, Bill is on about chaos and has done a lot of valuable work in that area. But we need to take another step which is what the GMMA does. The GMMA looks like it’s simple calculations and it is. It’s only twelve exponential moving averages. What it picks up is volatility clustering in the market, points of volatility where they come together because a market is an inherently unstable system. So this is an extension of chaos theory. In chaos theory, part of what we’re looking at is fractal frontiers, we’re looking at volatility clustering and the way it creates instability, the degree or level of volatility.

What we do with the GMMA is put that into a trading solution. That I think takes it a step beyond what Bill Williams is doing. Bill is saying, here’s what’s happening, and his understanding of chaos and so on is excellent, no question about it. But he’s using older methods to measure new phenomena is perhaps the best way of putting it. The methods he’s using to measure are not new measures for new phenomena and I think that’s where GMMA steps in.

The market is a fractal and there’s another theory that talks about fractal behaviour in the market and again theoretically it’s very good but in trading terms it doesn’t give us the solutions we want. If I can sidetrack for a moment, ATR, average true range is a perfect example. You go to Metastock and you can view a wonderful display of ATR that does this. It’s perfect, it’s a correct calculation of average true range. It’s absolutely useless for trading.

If I put ATR on a price chart, it goes up and it goes down. How do I use it as a stop? First rule of a stop, never lower your stops of a rising trend. ATR is telling me to lower my stop. So what we do, in our trader’s application of ATR which we use in our own charting programs, is that the ATR never goes backwards. It rises, if the value of the ATR drops, we just simply keep on moving horizontally. The stop doesn’t adjust.

Once the ATR value rises above that level, then we readjust the ATR stop. So our ATR goes horizontally, not up and down. It’s the difference between the theoretical application and the trading application.
So when you’re looking at some of the work that Bill Williams does with MACD etc, it’s good work, but I find it more difficult to directly apply it in a trading situation.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I hope that answers your question Robyn. The next one I’ve got is from Aru and he wanted to know how to avoid non trending markets.

Daryl Guppy: How to avoid non trending markets. Look at the chart. If you’re not too sure, find someone who has got a young child. Promise them a kit kat and tell them, take a look at this chart, is it going up, down or sideways? A kid who has absolutely no preconceptions and no money involved apart from the kit kat will say, it’s not doing anything, it’s going sideways or it’s going up or it’s going down. Give him the kit kat and you’ve just saved millions of dollars.

Really what’s happening in a non trending market, you cannot see a clear trend. If you can’t see a clear trend, look at the chart, it’s not going up or down, ok, it’s not trending. That’s all you need to know. There are some charts that are too messy to be able to trade. I was doing a training class in Singapore a couple of weeks ago for brokers and dealers. They were saying what about DBS which is a major Singapore development bank, a major bank.

It’s a good blue chip stock but it is untradeable because you cannot apply any analysis method that will give you clear, consistent entry and exit points for a stop loss management method. So from my perspective, it’s a stock I wouldn’t be involved in, because once I’m in it, there’s no method I can have that will reliably tell me this is the time to get out or this is the time to stay in. There are lots of messy stocks like that in the market. You have 1000, 1800 stocks to choose from, you only have to trade one or two. So find the one that is most attractive and trade it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I’ve got a final question here from Joe Nemec. He wanted to know what formula/system is most accurate in predicting a stock’s next day price range? That’s the holy grail Daryl.

Daryl Guppy: In predicting the next price range or the next stock activity, there are a couple of chart patterns that will give you a high level of probability. But there is nothing there that is reliable and consistent. You’ve got to decide in the market whether you’re a gold digger or you’re a pirate. What a gold digger does, he’s looking to uncover gems out there, all he’s got to do is find them. By finding them before someone else, they’re his. I spend a lot of time chasing gold, physical gold. Believe me there is an awful lot of dirt between the gold. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Yes, you get some good rewards, but, hey, it’s hard work.

That’s the same in the market. There is this belief, that goes back to the 1930s, that if we have information before someone else, we can make a fortune. It’s called inside trading, but when we do it, that’s ok. We call it just more skill, or whatever. That’s our thinking. So if we can develop an indicator that will tell us when the market is going to move more quickly. Think about the hours that have been spent taking a moving average combination, let’s say 10 and 30, and trying to adjust it so that the crossover signal is moved back in time so that it is equal or coincides with the actual change in trend, or better still a bit further back so it gives us early warning.

What’s the result of fifty years of computer analysis? The result is zero. We’re not there.

David Jenyns: When you apply it to real time, it doesn’t work.

Daryl Guppy: It doesn’t work. So that’s the gold digger. I’m trying to find something no one else knows and don’t tell anyone because that’s my claim.

I’m a pirate. The largest resources of gold were discovered by the Spanish in South America. You can go and watch all sorts of wonderful films about the deprivations people went through to try and get hold of this gold. What they eventually did is put it onto ships. There was an annual treasure fleet that traveled from South America via the Philippines back to Europe.

David Jenyns: You’re going after that ship, aren’t you?

Daryl Guppy: We’re going after that ship. In other words I want other people to find the gold for me, put it all together, then I’ll join them. That’s what we’re trying to do. I’m not interested in trying to find the gold, we’re pirates, not gold diggers.

David Jenyns: Hearing some of these questions and some of the questions I’m sure you get all the time and all that you’ve learned over the years, you’re an avid reader and studier of markets, looking back now, it’s that age old question, if I‘d known what I know now…

Daryl Guppy: I still make just as many mistakes. That’s one of the key factors. It’s the difference between trading and other sorts of things. If I go and sit an examination, then once I pass the exam that’s it. I don’t have to resit. In the market we have an exam every day. It has no relationship to what we did yesterday or the day before. So our success is always conditional upon the success of our next trade or the next trade or the next trade. There is never any mastery of the market. It doesn’t exist.

What happens is you have to constantly adjust, modify, change because markets change and you also change. You’re not the same at fifty as you were at thirty as you were at twenty. This is due to the fact that you have more money, or more experience or that you’ve been though a variety of different experiences, your reactions become different. Actually your reactions become slower, you’re not as fast on the mouse as you used to be. All these come into play.

So you as a trader undergo development. Your needs change. So what you saw as an attractive opportunity twenty years ago is not the same as it is ten years ago, it’s not the same as it is now. Then the markets change, the behaviour of the markets, the volatility of the markets, trending continuity, all of that changes. The instruments change. When the instruments change, the methods you can use to trade, then that changes flows in money in the market. So money that used to be in some sectors of the market is no longer there.

For instance, what defines blue chips these days? Go back ten or fifteen years, blue chips were those stocks that were held by investors, by rich people. Now they’re held by funds and fund managers. They’ve got different characteristics to individuals. What’s the relationship in the speculative market? What’s left in the spec market? What happens when we talk about dark pools working in a market? What impact does that have? What happens when we talk about multiple exchanges when Chi-X come and works alongside ASX? Where does the institutional money go, it goes to Chi-X, it doesn’t go to ASX. When it goes to Chi-X, when does that trade get reported back to the underlying market?

How can we find the best price? Do we end up in the situation like we have in the US where you can trade five or six different trading platforms, different markets and where you can’t get the best execution price because they’ve gone to the elite? All these factors challenge the nature and character of market behaviours. We’ve got to adjust all the time.

David Jenyns: Yes, I suppose it has to make you incredibly humble as a trader because you constantly have to learn, when you find, oh, I haven’t got this right and continue to evolve.
The final question I usually like to finish up on the interviews because especially with you having studied so much and continue to study, you really do have your finger on the pulse. Who are some of the people you keep an eye on as they’re developing their material? Where are your new sources that you’re helping to develop, the insights you’re getting?

Daryl Guppy: I am fortunate. I do a lot of work on CNBC. They’re bringing in top traders and investors, fund managers all the time as guests. I’m talking with them both on air and off air about various odds and ends, so that helps broaden the perspective to some extent. I’m looking at material being written. I’m working with individual traders, that’s part of the reason I like doing seminars and workshops because students are giving me feedback, giving me ideas and by forcing me to explain my thinking, that helps me to improve my thinking.

The market again, is not about secrecy, it’s not about gold mines, it’s about sharing. There’s a book by Alvin Toffler called Powershift, not one of his most popular books, in fact the second half of it is really not particularly useful. The first half is ok, but there is one sentence which he wrote which is most important. It says that everyone can use the same information at the same time and make money. That’s the key underlying difference in the market.

None of us have an advantage. We all get the same information at the same time and ninety per cent of us get it wrong. You get the same end of day information, you cannot act until the market opens tomorrow morning, we’re all using the same tools. We’re all using the same charting techniques, we’re all using the same analysis methods, but reaching different conclusions. So why are we reaching different conclusions? It’s not related to the tools, it’s not related to the market, it’s related back to ourselves, the way we see what’s happened.

So if we can improve the way we’re seeing and we do that by talking, by understanding what other people are doing, then we can improve ourselves.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I think you’ve provided so many tremendous insights along the way. I know you talked about just one sentence in that book. I feel like if someone watched this interview a few times they’d find many fantastic sentences there. I really appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about you, they can go to guppytraders.com. That’s a fantastic way to see what you’re up to. Are there any other ways they can get in touch with you?

Daryl Guppy: Usually just go through Support. I tend to travel a little bit so I try to keep on top of my emails. It’s not always as successful as I would like but we always answer all our emails within twenty-four hours. If the staff can’t answer it, it comes through to me and I will answer it. But of course there is a range of DVDs and books and so on and you’re handling some of those, so you might find that useful.

David Jenyns: Alright guys, well I know you’ve really enjoyed that interview. I’m going to see if I can talk Daryl into organizing a special deal for you guys, so stay tuned and I’ll be in contact about that. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed it.

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Mike Koenigs

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Name: Mike Koenigs

Industry: Online Video, Online Marketing, SEO, Traffic Expert

Website: Traffic Geyser

Product: Traffic Geyser

Mike Koenigs’ Bio:You might just know Mike Koenigs  as the brains behind Traffic Geyser – a revolutionary content publishing platform for videos and much, much more. Well here’s maybe a few things you didn’t know.  He’s been in the game for years making the first branded ever CD Rom game. He’s consulted for several Fortune 500 companies including Sony and Twentieth Century Fox. He’s worked with  Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Welcome guys to another call for theSEOmethod.com. We’re extremely lucky and privileged today to be joined by Mike Koenigs. For those who don’t know, he’s been in the game for years. He’s literally been in the game, because he got his start making the first games. He got known for making the first branded CD-ROM game.

He’s consulted for some Fortune 500 companies, including Sony, 20th Century Fox and Dominos. He’s worked with Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins. More recently in the internet marketing world, he’s known for his service Traffic Geyser which really does make up a large part of the SEO method. I’d just like to welcome Mike Koenigs to the call. Are you there Mike?

Mike Koenigs: I am. Thanks for having me Dave.

David Jenyns: A pleasure. I’ve got a series of questions that my listeners are eager to listen to. So I’ll dive straight in. I know you’ve got a really strong background in video marketing and also just online marketing. When you’re first starting up a new website, how do you drive traffic to a website when you first set it up?

Mike Koenigs: There are always two primary methods of course. There is the paid method and the free method or what we call organic traffic. So if we’re starting at square one, that’s what it’s all about, You’re either doing paid ads somewhere or another or partnerships. In my case my specialty is getting organic and using video and more specifically social media to do it. Video is a huge part of this but I always tell people if you really want to take advantage of getting a massive amount of social media/video traffic/video/organic you’ve got to look at this like spokes on a wheel.

The main things that everyone needs to understand is Google rewards you for frequent, relevant content. I often get people saying, I put a video up three months ago and I don’t get any traffic. Would anyone ever expect to put an ad in a little magazine in a small town a thousand miles from you and expect to get any traffic or to get regular traffic? The answer’s no. Anyone who builds a business does this on a frequent ongoing basis, That is number one.

Number two is you’ve got to create relevant content. In other words you can’t be talking about snail collecting to hunters, for example. It is just a mismatch. So in our case, what I teach people to do, is create simple short videos that range anywhere from thirty seconds to three and a half minutes. It turns out that the average viewer on YouTube watches videos that are about three and a half minutes long each on average. They spend an average of twenty-seven minutes per session watching videos.

What you want to do is name these videos that you make, the same names that people are searching for. What you’re going to do if you’re smart, is you’re going to use some tools, like we recommend HexaTracker and another one is Marketer Samurai, which are two really good tools. Of course you can use the free tools from Google as well. Do some keyword research on whatever topic it is that you are focused on generating traffic for.

The key is, answer some simple questions and name your videos the same things that people are searching for. There are some tricks to determining where the competition is and that kind of thing. You submit them and ideally you’re going to submit videos because it is the most popular content online, to as many video sites as possible. You’d want to social book mark those videos so the social book marking sites grab. You’d want to put them on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter.

You’d also want to create podcasts out of them and submit them to podcast directories. If you were smart, you’d also put them on as many blogs as you could. You’d also transcribe your videos and turn them into articles You would turn them into blog content and then you’d social book mark the blogs. So it sounds like a lot of work and that’s really why I designed Traffic Geyser in the first place. Traffic Geyser essentially automates that entire process. If you had to do all this stuff, it would take you about a week per video to submit to all the places that we go out to.

Traffic Geyser not only does all this stuff but we’ve paid close attention to what Google is doing at any given time. So if we notice that Google is showing a tendency or pattern of blocking organic listings when it sees a whole bunch of similar content from a lot of similar places, we’ll vary the frequency that we actually submit your content, so Google recognizes it as being unique.

The other thing we do is, we have a scheduler built in so you could make maybe twenty different short little videos, schedule each one to go out maybe a day or two days apart. So effectively, you can blast your content and dominate keyword listings rapidly. The net result is when you use this basic formula what ends up happening is, you dominate organic listings.

Also because your content is going out to so many authority sites in different orders, you’ll frequently dominate four, five, six, even ten out of ten listings on a top Google page. Google won’t see it as being duplicate. A lot of authorities are pointing at you saying, this is important stuff. One thing that most people learn when they do paid versus organic search engine optimization, a paid listing is a third less likely to get clicked on over an organic listing. If you own a lot of organic listings in the top pages, you’re going to get a lot more clicks.

I know that was a lot of content, but this is a recording so I hope your folks will be able to either have this transcribed or listen to it again.

David Jenyns: That was fantastic. You touched on a few really key points there, especially giving Google what they’re looking for, that’s absolutely key. One word you used as well, you used the word formula, and that triggered something for me that I know you’re known for when it comes to actually generating the content. That is the 10 x10 x 4 formula. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about that formula.

Mike Koenigs: Yes, any business, anyone, anywhere it doesn’t matter if you’re an internet marketer, it doesn’t matter if you’re a chiropractor, a doctor, dentist, lawyer or you’re selling a product or service of any sort, or you have a hobby, you basically build a relationship with a visitor, viewer or a friend or whoever it is by answering questions. Whenever those questions are being answered in a way that doesn’t appear to be self serving, in other words it’s not marketing or sales, they’re more likely to trust you and believe you and even like you. It just makes sense.

We all love to be around people who are super knowledgeable but operate from a place of giving versus asking and taking. Once you’ve developed a relationship with someone, people are very likely to say, what do you have that I can buy? Do you have any products of services? I’d like to hire you, I’d like to get your stuff. It’s just a natural pattern of relationship building.

The basic idea behind the 10,10,4 is, I had a lot of objections when I started internet marketing, doing video marketing specifically because people would say, I don’t like the way I look, I’m not comfortable on camera, I don’t know what I talk about, I have no idea how to create stories and scripts. I thought why don’t we come up with a simple formula people can follow step by step? Here’s the way it works.

I might do it with you right now, and I’d say hey, Dave, you’ve been interviewing people, you’re also an expert in SEO. So what are the top ten questions that you get asked all the time? Maybe give me three of them, what are the top ones?

David Jenyns: How do you get to the top of the search engines is probably one of the first ones. There are a lot of questions in regards to myths that you get. Like, blog farms, are they a good strategy or what’s a good strategy for getting particular rankings? Some of the other questions we get are, how do you build your own network of sites?

Mike Koenigs: Great. I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and then I’m going to ask you one of your top questions, you’re going to say the number one myth that I get, such as what search engine strategy definitely does not work and why. At the end, tell me where I can go get more free videos just like this one. So we’ll make up a domain and you’ll say the seomethod.com.

David Jenyns: So you want me to kick off with what’s the biggest myth?

Mike Koenigs: Yes we’re going to do the biggest myth. So introduce yourself, tell us where you’re from, then tell me what the top ten question is and the answer and tell me where to go to get more. I’m going to time this.

David Jenyns: This is David Jenyns from theseomethod.com. I’m just going to answer one of the biggest myths that people always ask when they first get started in search engines. I get this question all the time. People come on board and they want to know, are blog networks a way of gaming the search engines and can they actually hurt your website rankings? The long and the short of it is, it really does depend on who’s setting up the network and how it’s structured. There are a few key questions that you need to ask to make sure you’re going after the right blog networks. If you want to find out more about those, head over to theSEOmethod.com.

Mike Koenigs: Ok great. So that whole thing was 45 seconds. I think you did a great job. You told me who you were, where you’re from, what the question is, you answered it and told me where I could go to get more. What I would probably do if I were you is, I’d give them a little more meat. In other words, I’d give someone a specific example of what does work, what you’ve seen work, and something that doesn’t work. The more specific you are, the more likely they are to believe you and trust you.

After all, you’re promising something in your headline. The title you might go after here, in terms of what you’d optimize for, is Do SEO Blog Farms Work? Or something like that. I’m just doing a quick search here and there are about 113,000 competitive pages for that. I didn’t put quotes around it but the top one just says Building Blog Farms for SEO and there’s an SEO web posting. There is How to Create and Use a Blog Farm, How to Make Money Online with SEO.

The bottom line is, I don’t see any videos here. So if you just made a little video like that, using a cheap $100 camera like a Flip or even a web cam and you submitted it, there is a very high probability, almost for sure you would instantly, it would show up in about fifteen minutes some of your content, and you would probably have a Google top ten in less than twenty-four hours.

What you’d probably want to do here is a little more keyword research. So if I just went to the Google keyword tool, which I’ve just done; I just type in Google keyword tool. I then type in blog farms and I’m also going to do SEO blog farm. I’m doing this in real time, we didn’t plan this. I’m looking at Monthly Global Search Volume here, and the top one is Farm Blog and Farm Blog Spot, Blogs Farm. So obviously farm blog is about real farms but you’d basically find some keyword phrases that would somehow be related to this.

You’d pick that keyword phrase, make a video that uses those keywords in it and submit it. I don’t know if that would be money phrase but it would certainly be a way to find and target and get people who were interested in SEO who are probably more advanced because they know what this is, to come to your site. If you offer them the top one hundred myths about search engine marketing as a little e book which would basically be a transcript of all your videos, and then your top twenty videos, that would be a pretty compelling reason for someone to join your list.

Bottom line is, we could sit here and do twenty of these little interview questions and probably in less than an hour we could broadcast them out in almost no time and in an afternoon, you could be almost be guaranteed you could completely dominate a search engine niche using the strategy. There is more to the 10,10, 4 than this, but we’ve made a good start. We started out with the frequently asked questions but the next ten videos we make, the next ten are the should ask questions. If I say, Dave, how long have you been doing SEO?

David Jenyns: A good seven years now.

Mike Koenigs: Ok you’ve been at it for seven years. In order to learn what you’ve learned, you’ve gone through a lot of trial and error, studied a whole lot of stuff, you’ve probably bought a whole lot of products, some of which work, some of which don’t work and you’ve arrived at certain conclusions.

If I came to you and said, Dave, I went a crash course in search engine marketing and I want you to tell me, if I wanted to learn as much as you know in as short a period of time as possible, what should I ask you right now? What is the number one thing that makes the biggest difference?

David Jenyns: The biggest thing you could learn is how to have a system and a method in place that you can repeat. It doesn’t mean that there is an exact or perfect formula for getting rankings. There are a few golden rules to be following. It is all about getting your inbound links with the right anchor text from a variety of different sources. It‘s just a matter of coming up with a repeatable process that you can put in place so that you can then be outsourced.

The real key, the leverage that you get, is the outsourcing of that method. You can keep on learning different tricks and tactics and there is a new one popping up every week. The real key is actually getting something into place and getting it actioned.

Mike Koenigs: Great. This is what is interesting about this. They should ask questions, it doesn’t matter what the business is, they’re all basically the same. In your world, what a lot of people are looking for, they’re looking for a magic bullet. They’re looking for a shiny object they can game the system, get an unfair advantage and get a whole lot of traffic really fast.

I would suspect at the end of the day, there is no such thing. If there is such a thing, you really run the risk of getting banned and getting your domain banned by Google when you get caught. Eventually they will, because they’ve got a dedicated staff. Am I right or am I right?

David Jenyns: Spot on.

Mike Koenigs: Instead of trying to game the system, you should focus on, like you said, building a replicable system which generates consistent results and then outsource that method by maybe creating some good training materials that you could give to someone who doesn’t cost a lot of money and you can virtually be guaranteed that you’re going to be making some money. So what you need to do is create some good content and give Google what it rewards you for, which is frequent relevant content.

What we’d do is construct the question in such a way of the most powerful single strategy for getting massive search engine results. So if I did a search now on best SEO tip, best SEO strategy might be another one. I’m going to check out the Global Monthly Search Volume. We’ve got search engine optimization, 823,000 searches, and I can guarantee that’s going to be hyper competitive. There are a whole lot of varieties here.

I’m going to try best SEO strategy and see how many times that gets searched for. So what I look for is, any time there is under 300,000 results, I know I can dominate and actually score very high. I didn’t put quotes around this and I got 8.2 million competing pages. However, none of these that show up are videos. I’m looking through right now and I always look for video icons. It’s not until I get to the third page and there’s a video for Best Business Ideas for Your SEO Strategy and it’s on Metacafe.

Because there are no videos, if you worked at this and you focused on a series of keywords and built your campaign on the series of keywords and you were consistent about delivering this content, which is very important, and put it in lots of places, I’d say wouldn’t common sense dictate that would probably push you to the top?

David Jenyns: It does. A lot of it has to do with putting out that good content. Really good natural SEO happens by putting out good content. People start to link to you because you’re putting out good content. As long as you’re following the fundamentals with basic on page optimization, you really can’t go wrong.

Mike Koenigs: Just to review what we’ve done: first of all you come up with the top ten questions. The second part is coming up with the ten should ask questions. When people hear this, they clearly recognize you as being an expert and an authority. Then we get to the 4 of the 10,10,4. At the end of every video, you always say, if you want more, go here, basically a call to action, telling them where to go.

The second video is what you put on your squeeze page or your lead page. Hi, my name is Dave, I’m the founder of the SEO Method. I’ve been doing SEO for over seven years. I want to give you twenty videos that will teach you the most powerful strategies and tactics that I’ve learned in the past seven years of doing search engine optimization. All you’ve got to do, is enter your contact information, I’ll send you all twenty videos and this free special report The Top One Hundred Mistakes Most Companies Make To Get You Banned from Google Forever.

You put a little scare in there. Myth busting is very powerful. All those little techniques are just from transcribing your videos. The third video is what we call our thank you page video. Hey, this is Dave. I want to thank you for taking the moment to enter your contact information. I just want to let you know I’m never going to share your contact info with anyone. You can always opt out. Just send your confirmation link. Click on that link and I will send you all twenty videos.

The fourth one is what we call the buy my stuff video. What I’ve been telling people these days is to combine number three and number four together. This essentially means, hey, I have something else for you. I’ve got a new product I’ve just created. I’d love you to do a free trial. If you just cover shipping and handling, I’ll send this out to you. If you like it, keep it, I’ll bill you the balance whatever that number is, thirty days from now. If you don’t like it, send it back and you owe nothing, no hard feelings.

The bottom line is, at some point after people watch all your twenty videos, they’re going to want to buy something g from you. You’ve established yourself as a credible expert and authority. By giving that stuff away, they’re going to like you. They’re going to say, what do you have to take this the next step? I want you to help me. Tell me what to do. I’m not even going to tell you what to do, I’m going to show you what to do. I’ll coach you or whatever it is. Put them on a continuity program or something like that.

It’s a perfect strategy and it works with literally any business.

David Jenyns: Fantastic. I think coming back to that thing I was saying, the biggest should ask question being, having that replicable system in place. You’ve really given a system there someone can follow and take and use and guaranteed they will see fantastic results.

That’s something I think when someone’s first starting out they can use. You’ve had over three hundred different websites, and numerous products. When you’re launching a website, is that the formula you follow, or do you have other things you do as well when doing some initial marketing for a website?

Mike Koenigs: Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to answer your question, but first I’m going to tell you a story that’ll explain something I just did that worked really well. As usual, I’ll always say I don’t ask someone to do something I don’t do myself. Actually two of the three are going on right now. The first one was with a gentleman called Bill Glazer. Have you heard of him?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Mike Koenigs: He’s Dan Kennedy’s business partner. Dan is arguably one of the greatest direct marketers alive. Bill have a new book coming out. Anyone who’s ever written a book learns very quickly that selling a $20 book is harder than selling a $500 or $1000 product online. It’s just getting people to take action for a little book is tough. He came to me and I’ve done a lot of stuff in the publishing and author space. I’ve worked with a lot of authors. My wife is a two time best-selling author and I’ve worked with a lot of best sellers.

He heard my name come up a lot of times and he said, Mike I’ve got this book. I want to sell 25,000 copies before the book is actually available so it’s instantly a best-seller. So it’s a tall order. I said, why don’t you come in? I’ll sit down with you in my studio and we will record 10,10,4.

In this case, we ended up only recording nine videos. I recorded these nine videos and I went through his book and I found the top questions that I wanted him to answer. I also sent out a message to my data base and I said, I’m going to have Bill Glazer, Dan Kennedy’s business partner in my studio. We’re going to talk about Outrageous Advertising, that is the name of the book he has, what are your top questions for Bill?

I usually get several hundred questions right away, so I basically took the top questions I had from my list and then the top things I had from browsing his book that I wanted to know more about. I had him sit down and I interviewed him.

Every interview is anywhere from six minutes to sixteen minutes in length. We sent them out with Traffic Geyser. We did some keyword loading. I did some keyword research. I plugged him and some of them I said, interview with Dan Kennedy’s business partner, Bill Glazer because I know Dan Kennedy gets searched for a lot.

Other ones were Small Business Advertising Tips, and things like that. I did a bit of keyword research, plastered it out and in general, those videos are generating about up to twenty leads a day. That might not sound a lot but if you take thirty times, if you take it as conservatively, ten a day, that’s three hundred leads a month. Not only am I adding them to my data base but I’m actually sending people to Bill’s website to buy his book. On average about 30% of them buy the book. So I’m selling books every single day. He upsells them into other programs and I’m getting paid an affiliate commission. Very good.

The next thing I did was, I blasted it out to my own data base. I’ve got about 100,000 on my data bases right now, sent it out and sold over 400 copies of his book plus a whole lot of back end upsells. That’s pretty good. Bill sends me a video message saying, I’m blown away with the results I’ve got because you’ve been my number one affiliate for selling my books and I’d like your permission to use these videos and promote them to my list and my data base of 200,000 names. I think, do I even have to ask? I said, Bill, of course.

He sends out a mailing to his entire affiliate base first. He said, just got back, I’m so blown away. I did this interview with Mike Koenigs at his studio promoting my book,. It’s been a big best-seller. Why don’t you check out the lead page he put out and you can see what these are. He basically sent out his top affiliates to my website where I got a bunch of them opted in. I sold sixty more books and I got to parasitically grab his best affiliate data base, this is what my guess is, so now they’re part of my data base.

I gave him all the videos. He put them on his own blog. He’s sending his 200,000 to the blog to watch videos for nine days straight. He sends me this video saying, I’m selling as many as five hundred books a day. So 9 x 5, so even cut it in half, that’s thousands of additional book sales, and I know it was more than that. He told me what the final numbers are.

It made me basically famous overnight to his entire data base of almost 200,000 because he’s always mentioning my name. You get to see me asking him questions and we had a really good rapport on camera. Why does this matter? It’s because what’s beautiful about this strategy is you don’t have to be the expert. You can go to someone else who’s an expert and be the interviewer, or what I call the reporter. It’s a very powerful strategy.

The next thing is, these can be used in a ton of different ways. When I know that someone’s got a new product coming out, I try to secure an interview with them. I bring them into my studio, I sit down. But I also go to trade shows. I’ll bring one camera, a little portable tripod, set it up, clip on a microphone, interview them right there. It’s easy to get anyone to do an interview. Once you build a reputation for that, you get people coming out of the woodwork asking you to interview them and they’re going to promote you to their data base.

I’m parasitically generating thousands of new opt ins every month from other people’s lists. When this thing gets broadcast, you’re going to get the attention of the media. They’re going to see you and they’re going to say, this person is clearly knowledgeable. Think about it, what’s a reporter going to do when they want to find the answer to something, they go out and search for an expert.

Looking at an article, or finding something in an article directory versus actually bumping into a video with someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about and then gives you the opportunity to get even more, who do you think they’re going to call? If you’re dominating the organic search engine listings, who do you think they’re going to pay attention to? Who’s going to get the traffic? This is just a win win all around the block.

It’s my belief that video is, among anyone who knows anything, that this is the way to market nowadays. You can clearly demonstrate that your product or service works. You can clearly demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. People can immediately determine whether they like you if they want to do business with you. Your personal brand is the most valuable thing you can ever create. This is the thing that gives you immense leverage no matter where you go.

Speaking from experience, I’m just a guy who grew up in a little town in a lower middle class home. Now I fly around and people stop me in airports and say, I watch your videos all the time. You’ve made a huge difference in my life. They treat you like they saw you on TV.

David Jenyns: I think the expert positioning you get as well, it’s almost like you’re getting an endorsement for that person you’re interviewing as well. That rubs off on you and further positions you as the expert. It’s almost like a snowball. Just look at what you’ve done in the internet marketing niche and come out from the gate. Traffic Geyser is only a couple of years old now and you’ve really positioned yourself now as one of the big boys who rubs shoulders with the big names. The effect as well is fantastic and I think it could work in any niche.

We’re talking about internet marketing here but when we talk about the SEO method and applying it and using all of these different steps, if you applied that to any other niche, because internet marketing is light years ahead. Probably the only niches that would be ahead of internet marketing are gambling and porn. We’re so far in advance. If you took this out to dentistry or if you took this out to your local car shop or something like that, there is so much potential there for pretty much dominating a niche.

I think that is a big reason I see Traffic Geyser playing a really big part. We talked a little bit about doing some interviews and trying to use that 10 x 10 x 4 formula like you did for launching Bill’s book. That was setting up a new website from scratch. You have lots and lots of different domain names. Is there anything else that you do, or do you purely focus on just using the Traffic Geyser service? The good thing about Traffic Geyser is it hits multiple things. You’re obviously getting podcasts, social book marking, blogs, transcription and then you’ve got all the video benefits as well.

There are a lot of different things that you’re hitting there. Are there any other things that you do for ranking?

Mike Koenigs: Yes, what I typically do is, first of all when I’ve got anything going on, I create like a product demonstration. I optimize for that. I have a strategy for that I call standing on the shoulders of giants. So if I can associate my name with someone else’s name and embed that with the keyword, I’ll do that. I’ll also do tagging where I’ll share tags with the most popular videos which are on the various sites.

Everything I do revolves around number one, an offer. Without an offer you’ve got nothing. What you’ve got to do is have a list building strategy. Every single time I do anything is, how am I going to generate a list and who is that audience, what is the message I need to deliver to them, in other words a message to market match and what is their pain? Then I figure out what product I want to sell to them.

The beauty of a system like a 10, 10, 4 is, it’s designed to attract the people who you want to sell something to into a list. You then build credibility and trust and affinity with them and build that relationship in such a way that it is automated and then get them to buy your stuff. If I’m doing an affiliate sale, for example I was involved in producing a product with Tony Robbins recently.

For that I created a series of outbound videos, broadcast them out again. My name associated with Tony does great things. I ended up doing an interview with him that was a tele seminar that turned into a bonus. That would be an example. Another time with the Bill Glazer I obviously gave that one away. I did another one with John Carlton the copywriter. It was a series of interviews I sent to my lead page. I ended up sending them over to either opt in or buy his product. When I introduced me with him, not only do I get the affiliation but I can promote it as well.

Let’s get really practical for a moment and let’s say you’re a local business. Maybe you’re a chiropractor or an auto dealer. If I picked an auto dealer for example, what do you want to do? You want to drive people to make calls and come in and test drive a vehicle. That’s the key to selling cars. Your goal is to show your inventory.

We’ve got a gentleman who I’ve got a great testimonial from. What he started doing is making mini videos of every single car and inventory and then he would name the video the car name followed by the city he was in and the state he was in. So if it was Nashville, Tennessee or Sydney Australia, a 1997 Mustang etc. I always tell people to try to do two videos, one with the location before the product name and model, and then one after. Basically submit them twice.

Now in the old days, you could take the same video and resubmit it multiple times but you can’t do that anymore without it causing you some duplicate content problems. This guy’s got hundreds of cars out there and when you search for used car and whatever the city name is that he’s in, his videos completely dominate the organics. Even if that car is gone, I tell people keep them up there. It’s an advertisement, it’s a billboard.

His whole goal is, that car is gone, but I’ve got these other ones in here and he’ll at least get the call. So every one of his videos will have a phone number right on what we call the bottom third, or right on the video, along with a link to or the domain name to go see the inventory of cars. You also want to make sure your description has a url embedded in it as the very first thing.

Even though some people say these days that Google doesn’t follow no follow tags, it’s rubbish. They still do. When you embed a url in your descriptive copy, a thing shows up as a link, it does generate back links for you. It’s not uncommon for a single video to generate several hundred back links within forty-eight hours.

David Jenyns: We know that is an absolute key factor in getting pages ranked. I’ve jumped over to Google and I’ve typed Traffic Geyser into the search engines to have a look at what you guys are doing. One strategy I’d love to talk about is, you’ve very much dominated the first page of Google. I’m having a look here and obviously trafficgeyser.com is coming up number one. There are also some other domain names where we’ve got Traffic Geyser SEO, trafficgeyservideomarketing.com, trafficgeysertrial.com. I’m having a look at those and it looks like all of them are yours or perhaps one of your affiliates or something like that.

You’re definitely dominating that first page. Perhaps you could talk to that strategy. It’s not video, there are more domain names that are coming up.

Mike Koenigs: Here is the basic deal. They are most likely all affiliates. That is the very first thing they are going to be affiliates that are doing it. We teach a lot of people strategies on how to optimize and do affiliate marketing and it just makes sense that our affiliates will do the exact same thing. Most of what you see up here is yes, our own content, or it’s our partners’. I don’t mind paying someone an affiliate commission if they’re successfully generating traffic and sales for us. In fact the reality is, I don’t spend any money at all on paid advertising because a) I’m not good at it and b) it’s risky. I’d rather pay per sale. Google isn’t going to do that for me so why not have someone else do it?

David Jenyns: I think leveraging of affiliates is hugely powerful because obviously you get super affiliates out there. They’re doing all the hard leg work for you and then like you said, you’re paying them based on the sales. So it’s really at no cost to you.

You mentioned you’re not doing any paid advertising, but you still type Traffic Geyser in then it comes up even in the page search as well, there are at least four or five people paying for the advertising that is ultimately driving the traffic to you and building your business.

So getting affiliates to help grow your SEO efforts is definitely an area we haven’t really talked much about in the SEO Method. Clearly from what’s going on over at Traffic Geyser, it’s a key strategy. Something that I’ve implemented in my stock market niche outside of theseomethod.com, but over in my stock market niche, affiliates really do drive a lot of the traffic and a lot of business.

We talked about so many things there, and I think anyone, if they went through they could pick out all the gold bits. I usually have a few regular questions that I ask people I interview. You’ve managed to answer quite a lot of them as we go. One of them is the single biggest opportunity you see for ranking. Clearly video is where you see the biggest opportunity. Do you have any more to add to that, or really video is where you go.

Mike Koenigs: The big thing is, I always say is it’s spokes on a wheel. Just doing a video isn’t enough and just doing an article isn’t enough. You want to have a concerted process and a system. The next thing that I think is really important just in terms of big opportunities out there (I know I’m not answering your question exactly, but I’m going to answer a couple of them at once) is where is the money?

The money right now is in local search. If you work with local businesses, everyone always needs leads. It doesn’t matter what the economy is like, businesses will pay for leads. Without leads they are out of business. It’s an evergreen business and in a great time you can get a lot for leads and in a bad time you can get a lot for leads.

The beauty of organic traffic and organically it’s especially those which are generated without tricks and without scams and without work arounds and without magic bullets; they’re generated with real content by real people providing really valuable information. So the conversion rate is going to be considerably higher.

Sometimes when you generate a lead via a scam or you generate traffic via a scam, people are always going to be disappointed when they get to your site. It doesn’t work. The work arounds are a big waste of time. If you spend you life trying to find free money, you’re going to be someone who is going to be broke and miserable your whole life. You can’t get something for nothing, it doesn’t matter how hard you try.

If you do it right and provide real content, not only are you going to get high quality traffic and high quality leads, but that stuff isn’t going to be taken away from you because it was built on and based on without lying. It’s built with integrity.

Another thing that can generate a great deal of income these days is actually providing social media marketing services to local businesses, small businesses. Everyone knows they need it, everyone knows they need to have better web marketing, they know they need to have higher quality traffic.

They want someone who knows what’s going on and can do it for them or with them. We have a lot of our clients or customers are actually people who start little multi media marketing agencies or social media agencies and work as consultants. Being able to help someone construct an offer, a lead page, create some content, even just taking testimonials and teaching them how to capture great testimonials.

What I always tell people is, if you want to get amazingly great results on products and services, what you should consider doing is getting a whole website filled with testimonials and have a great offer on there, something that has low risk. They can’t all be lying, that is a pretty good case right there. You can demonstrate your product or service being used and the results it generates, and I’d like you to try it out too and if you’re not happy, get your money back.

Talk about conversion rates! That’s crazy. It just gets back to, there is no magic bullet except just do it right. If you just think about it, take a piece of content and broadcast it out to the maximum amount of places that are going to give you links back to you which are social media sites in every format imaginable. You’re going to be appealing to people on their time, using whatever mobile device, or using a PC or laptop or soon in the living room, you’re going to be easy to find. You’re going to show up on lots of search engines.

Once again, the credibility comes from the fact that if you show up in a lot of places, you must be doing something right. That’s the beauty of good SEO. Again, trying to rely on tricks and scams, you’re messed up. It’s just a matter of time before you’re found out. All that extra time and effort, and all these work arounds, that same amount of energy could be invested in something that will never be taken away from you. Google will never punish you for giving them what they’re asking for and what they know their customers want.

The reason Google works so hard to filter out the rubbish is because nobody likes spam.
So why try to spam? Why try to come up with a scam and a work around when no one wants it?

David Jenyns: You’ve obviously been working with a lot of new people when they first come into Traffic Geyser. Is that one of the biggest errors that you see people make? They get that idea of trying to game the search engine or come up with a scam? Are there any other mistakes that people make along that same line?

Mike Koenigs: The big thing I would say is this. The biggest mistakes they make is they look for the magic bullet, they’re looking for something for nothing. It’s just plain laziness. The other thing they don’t understand is the psychology of how and why people buy. Let’s think about that a little while. I’ll ask you the question. What makes you want to buy a product or service?

David Jenyns: The biggest thing is, it’s going to solve a problem that I have. I believe in the fact that it is going to solve the problem. You were talking about testimonials before and that resonated with me. I’m mindful that when people are online, the biggest thing is how can you trust what people are saying?

Mike Koenigs: Exactly. The number one thing you need is social proof. That’s going to be what people want to connect with and see, is there someone who’s just like me who’s got results, who I actually believe and trust? That would be number one. Number two is, show me that it works. Demonstrate results. Number three is, establish yourself as a credible expert and authority. The fourth thing, which is really the most important, is have an offer.

You can give away a whole lot of content. You see this all the time. I will give you an example. This is the stupidest thing, but a reporter called me up. Do you remember when the real Steve Job’s blog was around?

David Jenyns: Yes, they did that on Twitter as well.

Mike Koenigs: Yes, great idea. It turned out that some reporter got a great deal of attention. He wrote this article how online advertising is dead because I only made $1000 and I had a million and a half visitors to my website. I couldn’t help saying to myself, you stupid idiot, you got exactly what you deserved. You blew your opportunity to actually build a credible name for yourself and become an authority. You squandered it either out of ignorance or something else. Here’s what I told the reporter.

I said it a lot nicer, but I wanted to say idiot in this review. I just don’t have a lot of patience for this stupidity. Here’s the deal. If he weren’t an idiot, what he would have done is presented some content. He clearly had some idea after all the blog comments and the visitors, of what type of person was coming to his site. It’s pretty easy to profile them based on what kind of questions they ask and what is important to them. He would have created a little free offer, an e book that would have provided some kind of value that would have spoken to that audience.

He would have said, enter your email address. You have a million and a half visitors. If you have a good opt in, a good offer on your site, when I create a single offer, I get 20 to 50, as high as 60% opt in rates. That’s to a single page that’s built to generate leads, as opposed to a blog which has a whole bunch of stuff on it.

There are a couple of lessons you learn about optimization and generating leads. That is, if you give people more than one option, they do neither. You give them one option which is sign up for my stuff or go away, they do one or the other. If your offer’s good, you’re going to convert most of them, or at least the ones that believe you. If you come from a place of speaking from your heart and being authentic, there’s a high probability they’ll believe you, especially if you have a bunch of testimonials so you’re associated with a celebrity or something like that.

The first thing is the basis of what he did, he had no integrity. He was a liar to start with, so that was the number one problem. Let’s say we get past that for a moment. He’d offer something really good to them and then even when he got found out that he was a liar, he would have said, I created this to do a test or whatever his story is, he could have spun it just fine. But I had so much great feedback from people who wanted to know about what I wrote about, I put together another guide. Then he could create continuity program. He could start doing advertising and promotion and actually delivering solutions that would help his viewer and help his subscriber to increase the quality of their life.

It’s a question of value. The bottom line is that guy could have made millions of dollars and he could have even transitioned from being a fake Steve Jobs to being a real person. He could have done it without losing a lot of these people. But the fact is, he didn’t develop rapport with them. He didn’t develop trust, he didn’t provide any value other than basically creating news porn essentially. It didn’t have high value.

That’s a long handed way of answering your question, but traffic by itself doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a conversion mechanism in place. The best conversion is proof. Proof that what you have works, proof that other people use it in form of social proof, and being able to demonstrate before and after ease of use. Or, as I often teach, the Mary Kay solution: is it easy, does it work and can I do it? If you answer those three questions, and you can do it in thirty seconds, you own them.

You own that relationship, you’ve generated trust and people are going to flock to you. The other thing you do is, you generate authority. That’s done again by writing an e book, a special report or actually writing a book. I’ve been in the process now of writing a book and the way I do it is I answer questions on video and I have them transcribed. I give them to an editor who is putting it all together. You could basically write a book by just answering questions. You could probably do it in two weeks. Survey you audience, not too hard.

David Jenyns: One of the real take aways I’m getting from you and is echoing through a lot of what you are saying is, it’s all about giving really good value, serving the client, coming from the right place and then making someone an offer. So you want useful, but incomplete, that’s the type of information that you want to give and then you just make people an offer. If people just take that and run with that, it would be good.

Even if they don’t have the content themselves, you can do what you were talking about before, leverage off someone else, someone who does have that content. Then you become the conduit between getting their material out there and their ideal client using Traffic Geyser or any other sort of marketing. Everybody’s got something that they can build. You really want to be just giving clients good value and then making them an offer.

We talked about some of the mistakes people make when they first start out. I’m also interested to find out, because you’ve just launched yourself into this stratosphere as far as internet marketing, positioning yourself as an expert. What are some of the steps you took? Obviously there were the interviews and aligning yourself with the right individuals. Were there any other key things you think back now, after having achieved success, I can see that point there, when I did this, that created huge excellent results?

Mike Koenigs: There are a lot of ways to answer that question. I’ll tell you why I got to where I am right now. I’m going to read into your question and just basically say, if I knew then what I know now, what would I do to make the process faster?

Here’s the way it works. It’s so interesting. I’m going to get a little feathers and crystals on you here. The sooner you operate from coming from the heart, the place of authenticity and focus on giving first, without expecting in return, the faster you’re going to get where you want to get.

Even Google operates that way. It comes down to frequent, relevant content. The first thing you need to do is realize, and I learned this from the publishing world, it’s called the platform building. One of the products I created many years ago, it was the second information product ever made. It’s called Everything You Should Know About Publishing, Publicity and Platform – A Handbook for Authors. The website is everythingyoushouldknow.com. I’m not plugging that product so much as to tell the story.

I worked with a woman who is considered one of the greatest book publicists who ever lived. Her name is Ariel Ford. She basically quit the business because she reached a point where she just didn’t like working with authors anymore because she found she repeated herself constantly, everyone was looking for the magic bullet, everyone thought they had the next big book that should be on Oprah. They said if they’re not on Oprah , then it would be the end of the world or whatever it was. The reality is they weren’t ready.

No one ever becomes an overnight sensation. It happens very rarely, one in many millions. People who appear to become an overnight sensation are people who have been building a platform for an extended period of time and then everything hits all at once. It’s almost like the perfect storm occurs. Let’s talk about what the perfect storm is, and how that works and then I’m going to answer your question.

Number one, a platform is, by definition who you are, who you know, what you know, how big your list is, your reach, how many people like you who have essentially given you permission to communicate with their audience or their platform or their audience or their list, how media friendly you are, what kind of an expert, what kind of authority you are, who believes you are an expert or an authority, how many times you’ve been interviewed, how many articles you’ve written, how many books you’ve written, how many letters you have behind your name, i.e. if you’ve got degrees and stuff like that.

It’s all these things you earn. No one gives them to you and you can’t really buy it.
People who try to buy in are never really respected. That’s why second generation wealth is usually not respected. It’s one of the burdens, one of the curses of being born into money, because people say, oh it’s Daddy’s boy, it’s like so what, what good are they other than the cash they have? This is just human nature material.

What happens here is, if you become an expert on something and you can clearly demonstrate success and show a system and show proof that it works, showing physical proof, as in bank statements and photographs and it is verifiable, that’s great. I teach this in a formula, I teach people how to create a perfect video testimonial. You basically are story telling.

I’m not talking about making something up, I’m talking about actually weaving truth into a story that the human brain loves to hear. We all like a beginning, a middle and an end. We all love happy endings. We all love the story that someone came from nowhere and we all love the story of the small town boy who did good and the small town girl who did good. Everyone wants to hear it, it’s just the way our brains are wired.

The whole deal is, if you can tell stories within that context, it’s going to work. You’ll notice career sales people are story tellers, the greatest authors are story tellers. They understand. They either intuitively do, or they’ve learned how to tell great stories. There are also parables. The greatest story ever told of Jesus Christ for example. At least a lot of people believe it, and if you don’t believe in Him, there are other messiahs in every religion in some form or another and they all tell stories. They were all story tellers. They were wise.

I’m being very esoteric here, so let’s bring it down to how can I use this right now? First of all, understanding that there is a formula to selling, a formula to becoming successful is the first thing. There is actually a process. I always tell people the most important thing to realize is, you have to generate a system that consistently yields predictable results.

Let’s get back to the platform. If you want to generate a platform super quickly, what you want to do is hone a skill, become an expert in a tiny niche. A tiny niche is just fine. Prove that it works and give away a whole lot of information. Share and teach people your skill set. You’ll become recognized as that authority and someone is going to want that skill in their lives. From there, you’re going to build on it. I’m going to tell you my story and what’s happened and put this all in context.

Growing up, I was a small town boy and I had no resources and no mentors. I was the son of a barber, I was the oldest of four kids and was terrible at school. I had a C- average, but taught myself to program when I was fourteen. That was the first breakthrough to speak of. I had no mentors and was bad at school, and hated school and was rebellious.

Some people in the neighbourhood found out I liked computers so they said, can you teach me how to do x,y,z on my computer? Yes, I’d love to do that. It got me away from my situation. I got paid to do it and I got to be a hero for some people. I liked that. Then someone else, an insurance agent, said, can you make a data base? Someone else said, can you write some accounting software for me? So I started honing this skill set. I was sixteen, seventeen years old being treated like an adult and I got to be a little superstar for the first time in my life.

Eventually all I really wanted to do was write video games and play pinball. I got to know some computer pirates. They used to pirate software. One guy knew a guy who ran a MacIntosh game company. It was like, that’s what I want. He set up a meeting. I met the guy and he said, if you want to work with us, you’ve got to write a game.

So I went home and I taught myself how to write video games. I wrote a game concept in three weeks. I went to him and I said here it is, and he said, here’s a job for you and he paid me $14,000 a year. It was less than I was making. I was working for slave wages at the other place, but I loved it. It was the first time I was around other game developers. No money in it!

Eventually they sold the company and here I am stuck again. I ended up getting another job. I started a little company called Digital Café. It was one of the first interactive marketing agencies in the world. This is pre web. It was back when there was Company Serve, Delfi and 300 baud modems and 1200 baud by the time I got there.

I learned a lot about online stuff. I was programming more and alongside I was interacting with someone on company serve, and they said, do you think you can make a screen saver to promote something? I said, yes, we can do it. It turned out was a guy from Twentieth Century Fox. I also met someone from Sony.

Once one of them heard about it, another one heard about it and these guys are switching jobs going from company to company. Then they said can you do CD-ROMs? Yes, we were doing the first CD-ROMs to promote movies, and eventually the first websites when the web started and we were putting video on websites.

I became like a little legend, we became experts. I eventually sold that company and discovered internet marketing. I knew a lot about video. I knew something about programming, and I went to an internet marketing event and saw these guys on stage. I said, someday I want to be speaking there too.

I walked out of there excited and created my first product called the Infomercial Toolkit. I wanted to know what is the secret to selling stuff with video? What’s the magic bullet? What’s the shiny object? I interviewed a whole lot of experts. One of whom was Joe Sugarman, one of my great heroes who sold BluBlocker sunglasses, almost a billion worth of sunglasses on television. He became my mentor. He also became my friend because I was the internet marketing guy sand understood how to make internet videos.

All these old infomercial guys said, we know our businesses are dying. It’s too expensive nowadays. We’re turning to the internet. So they’re coming to me. That was interesting. Eventually all the internet marketers said, we’ve got to do this video thing. They didn’t know what equipment to buy, they didn’t know how to compress their stuff, they didn’t know where to put it, they didn’t know how to program it. I became the go to guy for them. Then they asked, will you speak at our event? This internet video stuff is getting to be pretty hot.

Along the way, I developed Traffic Geyser to solve some problems. Then celebrities hear about me. So eventually I’m working with Tony Robbins and Paula Abdul Just now I’ve
been working with Brian Tracy recently in Samoa. They all say, we know we’re not using video effectively. My name shows up. Authors hear the same thing. What do I do? I give. I interview. I show them how to do it and I teach them how to do it. They say what can I do for you? I say, sell my stuff.

This wasn’t a short process. It took me twenty years to get there. Some people would say, you popped out of nowhere in six months. I see you everywhere all at once. It’s because I’ve been honing my skills. I didn’t know anything. I became an expert in a little field, and now my skill set is very much in demand and desirable and useful.

But let’s get back to the big question. How can I do it quickly? Is there a shortcut? There isn’t a shortcut to learning a great skill and becoming a master at it. It’s been said in the book The Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours. That’s five years at 2,000 hours a year which is an average work period, or if you’re willing to work twice as hard, about 3,000 hours, it would take you three and a half years. That’s usually how long it takes to build a platform and become a best selling author. That is the shortest time, the best case.

Tim Ferris, for example, it took him a few years to do it. He wrote 4-Hour Workweek. Now he is a sensation. He still is. He has been able to leverage greatly out of that. What you can do is serve. Find a pain that everyone has. Become an expert at curing that pain. Along the way, gather proof. Show evidence that you’ve solved that problem. Get testimonials, endorsements.

Write a book. That’s the best to prove you’re an expert and authority. I’ll know for sure in the next three weeks, but I basically put together and wrote a book in about eight weeks. I’ve got a writer working with me on it and I basically wrote all the content. I gave him a structure to follow. I’ll have it done inside of eight weeks. Not too bad.

What am I doing? I’m already planting the seeds with off line old school publicity. I’ve been interviewing and talking to other syndicated writers and building relationships with them. I’m getting ready to bring this out. I’m making some videos, speaking regularly.

Being able to create your book with your credibility, turn it into a product. Now you’ve got a back end because you don’t make money from a book, you make money from selling products and services that are replicable. How long does it take to make that? You can make a product in six months. You can figure out how to sell it in another six months. So realistically, I believe someone can come from nowhere, hone some skills, become a reasonable expert and build their back end, their funnel so to speak, inside of about three years.

Could you do it faster? Here’s how I’d do it. Find a topic that you want to be an expert on, identify the experts and become a reporter. Interview them. Help them sell their stuff, using your expert product. You could do that in about six months to a year. Have your name associated with the best and the brightest in an industry that has more opportunity. Could you do it in six months? I think you could. It would be difficult, but it is possible.

The bottom line here is, you’re looking at six months to six years. I’ve seen people who’ve popped out of absolutely nowhere, they didn’t earn their place, they did something, they basically came up as a reporter, but the fact of the matter is, they didn’t have a back end system to consistently generate traffic and generate business. They weren’t really an expert. They weren’t ready.

You hear of someone who wins a lottery for example. What usually happens to them within one year?

David Jenyns: All their cash is gone.

Mike Koenigs: Yes. The reason is, they are not ready. The reason whoever might be listening right now is not a millionaire right now, or not rich and famous is because you’re not ready and you haven’t earned it yet. You don’t have the skills and the resources and the tools in your arsenal and you don’t know what questions the people who are like that have yet.

You have to find someone who can mentor you and teach you those skills so you’re prepared to do it. A lot of people are just never ready for fame. They just are never ready for fortune. They haven’t built the resources, the relationships, the wealth building and wealth keeping resources to get there.

When you’re ready, it happens. It’s not something you get. You get it because you’re giving and you’re giving the right things and the universe pays you back. That might sound a little spiritual but I’ve observed it and I’ve proved it time and time again. I hope this is useful. It might be off on a wild tangent.

David Jenyns: You’ve provided some tremendous insight. It’s clear that you’ve got some mentors that you’ve listened to and who have helped boost you up on the shoulders of giants. In the world of, not even so much SEO, but internet marketing in general, and even any other mentors, who are the people who you watch out there? Who are your mentors and gurus?

Mike Koenigs: I say this happily. Every one of my mentors and gurus have become great friends of mine. I’m honoured that I’ve become valuable enough that they treat me as friend and as mentor as well. I’ll tell you some of my friends who used to be my mentors are. Obviously Tony Robbins. I was in a very dark place in my life back in the late nineties. I went to one of his events. I actually bought his stuff on an infomercial. I listened to one CD and I knew instantly that this was the right thing for me at the right time.

That’s the thing. You’ve got to find someone who speaks to you wherever you are and when you are. He did. I went to his live events and within nine months I had basically rescued my business from near personal bankruptcy. I went from being fat and unhealthy and recently divorced and in a dark place to selling my business and really catapulting the quality of my life both mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Tony for sure, he has now become a great friend. I just came back from spending almost a week with him in Singapore. I can contact him. If I send him an email, he writes back no matter how busy he is, within twenty-four hors, sometimes within half an hour. He knows I take care of him and won’t waste his time and I’ve made him a lot of money. It’s a great thing.

Joe Sugarman is another one. Back before I knew what direct marketing was, I loved his content. I used to read his advertisements. I’d buy magazines just to read his ads when I was a teenager. I studied direct marketing not knowing what it was. I always loved it. I met him at a live event. I walked up to him and I offered things. I said. Joe, here are all these things I want to do for you. He said, no, you don’t understand, I’m all about teaching, I’m done getting. I’m all about giving now. What can I do for you?

I actually started to cry. It hit me so intensely. I can’t describe it. Here’s a guy who’d clearly attained a state in his life where he had really become a great man. He is a great man.

So the next gentleman is a gentleman called Gay Hendricks. He’s written thirty-three books. He’s become a close friend and a mentor to me. He is just a highly functional being you could say. He is very successful in business and emotionally.

There is another guy named Bob Serling. He’s an expert marketer who has become again a great friend. Frank Kern. I consider Frank to be certainly one of the greatest marketers who has walked the planet. He is a remarkably complex, interesting man. He created Mass Control which was based on Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. He’s a great copywriter, he’s a great Dad, he’s a good friend as well. We live minutes apart from each other. I think right now he is the Mick Jagger of the internet marketing world, except he’s not old. He’s one of the top tier guys.

There’s another man John Carlton who many believe is one of the greatest copywriters alive today. He was friends with the late Gary Halbert. All these are people who are givers. They operate with a high degree of consciousness, they are very generous with their time and with their skills. They give an amazing amount of information away. They obviously sell products too. They are successful financially.

I’d consider most of them to be very happy people and they have rich, complex lives. They’re free. They’ve surpassed what I call the thirty day monster. They don’t have it chasing them anymore.

David Jenyns: They’re definitely some people to keep an eye on. One of the things that really stands out for you for me is how much you speak from the heart. You’re generous with the story you have and your time and information. I wanted to thank you very much for your time on this call.

If people want to find out more about you, and I know you’ve got your new book coming up, where can they go to find out more about you? Maybe we can finish off by talking a little bit about Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser plays a big part in the SEO Method.

Mike Koenigs: Here’s what I’ll tell you. I’m going to give you a couple of resources. First of all my personal website is just my name: mikekoenigs.com. The shortcut url is mrbz.com. I’ll also give you a free gift. It’s my interview I did with Tony Robbins, which was more of Tony talking. It’s really powerful. It’s a great giveaway. It’s basically a blueprint of his personal success. It was a remarkable amount of content. I’ll tell you the url to go to for that. It’s www.siteproweb.com/tony-robbins-interview.

Then of course if you just go to Traffic Geyser and opt in, I give away a lot of videos there. The whole idea of how we get people to become our customers is, we give them a lot of great information free. We give a lot of tools and resources and videos which will help them learn how to think right. I always say it’s never about the technology, it’s always about the psychology. The more you understand about how you think the better. The single most powerful transformative exercise you could do is called Theatre of the Mind.

You imagine yourself to be where you believe you need to be and imagine yourself being the person who’ll attract the things you desire most in your life. It sounds a little spiritual, but once you learn to see yourself as you really are versus the way you wish you could be or the way you think you are versus the way other people see you, great things begin to happen. Being honest with yourself on a core level is part of becoming a great marketer.

As spiritual as it sounds, everyone of these marketers that I just described practises that either consciously or subconsciously and you learn it right away. It’s called empathy. When you can feel what you customer feels without you and what you’re going to get from something, that’s when you learn how to speak to them in a completely authentic way. It will help you be a better marketer and it will help you be a better human being. It will help you give more effectively and prepare you for getting on a massive level.

David Jenyns: Great. I’ve actually listened to that Tony Robbins interview as well. Do you still have the PDF accompanying that as well?

Mike Koenigs: Yes, you get the transcript and you get a summary, which is the blueprint which I call The Success Blueprint. It was so successful that I’m actually in the process of producing a movie project right now, calling it Success Needs Clues. It’s actually all about that very thing, which is giving people the tools they need to achieve business success and personal success. If you go to successleavesclues.com it will actually drive you to that opt in page with Tony.

David Jenyns: So if anyone wants to keep an eye on you, go to mikekoenigs.com. Definitely check out the interview. If you want to find out more about Traffic Geyser, you can Google Traffic Geyser or visit theSEOmethod.com/tg and that will take you through my link. Definitely check out Traffic Geyser, it is a great service.

Mike, I can’t thank you enough for your time, it is much appreciated. Did you have any final parting words or just wrap it up there?

Mike Koenigs: First of all, you’re a fantastic interviewer, you ask very thoughtful questions and I appreciate this. I wish you the greatest amount of success. It’s clear you’re a man who operates from the heart as well. What I’d recommend to all the visitors is, make sure to visit theSEOmethod.com/tg because you deserve to earn a commission for giving like you are. I can’t imagine that your listener wouldn’t want you to be repaid. It doesn’t cost anything from their pocket. You’re not only doing them a service, you’re doing yourself a service, and you’re certainly doing a service for me too. Thank you, you’re really a great guy.

David Jenyns: Too kind. Thanks again.

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Marc Lindsay

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Name: Marc Lindsay

Industry: SEO

Website: Article Marketing Automation

Marc Lindsay’s Bio: Marc Linday and his partner Dan Turner from Article Marketing Automation are friends from way back when…

One of my fondest memories of those boys is us both duelling it out at Ed Dale’s Over The Edge conference as to who was the #1 internet marketer in the world. After much debate, if my memory serves me correctly, they both agreed it was me.

But seriously, as much as it pains me to say it, Marc probably is probably in my top 3 smartest SEOers of all time… and to top it off, he’s a top bloke too. Together with Dan they do business on their own terms, not getting caught up in the ‘guru’ hype.

They’ve built a tremendously successful SEO business with many other “SEO gurus” employing their services to build links to their sites… and that’s not to mention the many real world clients they have.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (8 videos):

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from the seomethod.com. I just got a call this afternoon with Marc Lindsay. Marc Lindsay is a guy I’ve friends with for a long time now and he’s pretty much an absolute expert guru on SEO. When I’ve got issues and questions, I’ll go to Marc. He’s one of the guys behind the PLR Pro and also they’ve got their own SEO company ltseo.com and he has many achievements under his belt. We’re very lucky to have him on the line. Are you there Marc?

Marc Lindsay: Yes I am David, thanks for jumping on the line. It’s good to be able finally to record an interview with you because I don’t think we’ve actually had the pleasure to join work forces yet.

David Jenyns: No. And I almost feel as if every call we have we should record, there is so much good content in there, so hopefully this will be the first of many. I know you’ve got a tight deadline, so I’m just going to jump straight into it. I’ve been interviewing a few other people as well and I wanted to find out, when you’re about to launch a brand new site, you haven’t done any promotion to it, you’ve literally just registered the domain name, be it you’re working for a client or one of your own sites, what’s the process that you go through for promoting that site?

Marc Lindsay: Well I guess to start, the process begins before I register the domain name. If I can get on a client before they’ve even registered a domain name, and depending what their purpose is, it can come down to a tactical play on the market that they’re trying to target. As you know, a better domain purchase that might be keyword rich in url, assuming it’s going to make sense and match for the over end goal will give them some quick wins for anything that is related to that keyword match in the domain url. Of course everything else outside of that you’re going to have to do authority building and all the rest.

If I can I like to get in on that level. Most people already have their domains, that’s the situation they’re in. So you’re working with what they’ve got. You come in just after they’ve purchased, like you said, and you’ve got the domain sitting there, it’s ready, it’s a brand newbie.

David Jenyns: Just on the domains names, I have a quick question. You are talking about the different domain names and helping them with keyword rich, there are a couple of questions that always come up. How do you feel about .net and .org and the other extensions? And my other question is as far as dashes in the url, what are your thoughts on those two things?

Marc Lindsay: Ok, .nets, .orgs I don’t use them, purely because I’m a little more forward think now, so I tend to think five or ten years down the track. If I want to try and resell that domain, what has the greatest value to me? So if I’m building a website, I’m building a real business around it in any industry and I have a .com after it, it has a much higher resale value in comparison to a .net or a .org. .Nets can go pretty high, especially if you’re talking about two word domains and things like that, although a lot of them are gone now. It has to be a pretty special domain that normally would be worth tens of millions in the .com version to get a good price for it as a .net.

So I always try to go for a future in mind and that future is either to resell that domain as a business later on or for branding purposes, in which case a .com is going to trump everything else.

David Jenyns: Yes. And how about dashes?

Marc Lindsay: I prefer not to do dashes. If I absolutely have to to break the word up, I will, but I don’t use dashes. You can see when doing almost any search in Google now that they can usually quite clearly pick out the phrases that it matches in the url.

David Jenyns: Perfect. And then you were about to lead into how you then take it to the next level.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, how we produce SEO smackdown. Basically what we do, where possible, we try and get off right from the get go from doing good planning. If you’re not doing good planning, then you’re already behind the eight ball. Most people miss this step right from the start. This is when you end up with messy sites down the track or you don’t have your structure in place or it just can get really messy. I always say, and you’ll hear this analogy in a lot of industries, basically for every hour you spend in the planning process, doing the right sort of planning, is ten or fifteen times that which you’ll save later on.

Basically I sit down and I draft an imaginary view of what my site would look like but I do it in an Excel sheet. You might be familiar with this Dave. I think I’ve shown you some of the breakdowns for it. I know we go through a good part of it in our keyword training course. It’s the structure of your site that you’re trying to set out.

People just seem to skip over this important step very early on. They say, oh, I just want to put a site up. I want to use some AdSense or some affiliate sales. But that’s what they’re saying now depending on what level or where they’re sitting at. Then they’ll get twelve months down the track or eighteen months down the track and they will think, I really wish I’d planned that through a bit better. That’s what I hope I can impress on you now to avoid rushing straight into that.

So I start up an Excel sheet, I start mapping out my structure as per column and breaking down into how I would envision the site would look from a category point of view and how I would basically go and set that up. That does two things at this point. One, it saves you a great deal of time, not only in going forward with SEO but also even in just planning SEO, and both of those are two very important points.

The reason it saves you time is because, Dave, you know when you’re in the zone and when you’re researching a specific industry, you get keyed into that industry. So, if I’m keyed into that industry, I’m doing all this research now, and you might be just trying to find your first fifteen pages of content to start with, but you’re already keyed into this industry. So if you were going to go through and finish off the research and do the entire lot of research and lay it out properly in a formatted way, then you might only start with fifteen pages. In that case you select your style, you elect your phrases you’re going to place under that, you find them out, you get them written and you put them on your website. They are usually also the basis of where you want to start with from an SEO point of view. So it stands for two purposes.

As you’ll notice, I’ve combined content/structure creation here as part of the SEO process because it is a very important part of it. By planning that out now, let’s say it’s two months down the track when you’re ready to put more content on your site. If you didn’t have that plan there, you’d get to two months down the track and you’d say, oh, what do I do now? What keywords?

The biggest thing that I appreciate more and more as I go through my learning phases, because you always keep learning and it can be in anything. In sales, you want to reduce the friction of the sale as much as possible. The harder you make it for somebody to do something the less likely they’re going to do it. And that is for me as well. Friction for me to get my work done, friction for me to do something. This is why, for example, affiliates, if they get an email or if they get everything they need to promote a program it makes it easier for them to do it. So the friction for them to promote your program is gone.

What you want to do is reduce that friction you put on yourself by doing as much of the work as possible when you are in the mood for it. I guarantee if you get two months down the track and you then start to look at this website, and you say, oh, what do I have to do content about now to keep my site growing in phrase potential and the rest, if you have to sit there and work out firstly what were you trying to do with the site when you set it up, because it is not always clear on the vision you had there, especially if you didn’t write it down.

Secondly, what content do I actually already have up and thirdly what phrases would then be the next best target to go through? So you’re looking at at least thirty minutes more research just to look for the next lot of things you want to do. Or you’ll rush it out and you’ll just put anything on the site. They’re both the worst things you can do. Imagine having to do that five times throughout the year. Basically you end up with a disorderly site that’s not properly structured and no clear goal or focus for the website.

David Jenyns: When you actually go to that keyword selection, what keywords are you looking for? Are you one to actually look at the competition that’s out there? I know your course goes into this in more detail. As a rough outline, are you going into looking at competition, how many people are searching for it and those sort of things when you’re doing that keyword analysis?

Marc Lindsay: We have our own algorithm that we use. I tend not to go by competition values now, because they don’t exist to me. Competition’s not a battle and usually it’s not a true indication because it’s just a rough competition thing. The best thing you can do for a major level phrase, if it’s something really worth you jumping into, is to analyze the top ten. Analyze the top ten, look at what they’ve got for back links, look at how they’re doing things and that will give you an indication of how hard the industry is.

I do come at this from a different angle and that angle is from pure confidence in our ability to get sites ranked. It means that I can just push competition values aside. So at the end of the day, if a keyword has more traffic for it and a bit more competition and you have a keyword that is along the same lines and has a little bit less traffic and a little bit less competition, I usually end up ranking for both variations of that keyword, just by virtue of doing good SEO.

Of course I do go for a longer tail lesser competition value, but it’s not something that I meticulously select out any more. If I had the choice between meticulously selecting my keywords or planning out my site structure first, I know I’d get a much larger payoff in doing proper planning than I would in being very meticulous with phrases.

It is different if you’re going for a one niche thing. If you’re trying to build the best possible one shot to get a site up, to get it ranked super quick and get wins in the door, absolutely, it’s a different process. I’m just saying how we do our process for a lot of our larger sites we go for. So if you are going through for a more niche specific then you’ve got to go for what is going to give you the quickest win. That’s either going to be buying phrases or product related phrases, author phrases if you’re doing digital downloads of books and so on.

Usually for us now, we’re not trying to hit that nth degree level of lower competition. Quite often it can limit me in what I can do with the page if it is a long tail very specific phrase, it limits the type of phrases I could have ultimately coming into that page. The more specific I go, the less options I have on that page as far as being able to craft it after other related phrases as well.

David Jenyns: Yes, for sure. I’ve noticed that on one particular site I’ve got in mind where I’ve got quite a lot of keywords that I’m going after. I’ve deliberately positioned them to almost go the root part of that keyword series. I pick up for that same page about five or ten different variations on that same page even though I’m not specifically targeting for that one. I suppose that really is once your domain name is really quite powerful. You can’t do that if you’ve just put a website up and you don’t have many links to it or authority; you have to build that over time.

You talked about the keyword selection, getting the right domain name, then mapping out your structure. Once you’ve figured that out then obviously you’re going to do a bit of on page optimization on those keywords you’ve planned you want to after. Is that where we’re up to now?

Marc Lindsay: Yes basically now we’re up to I’ve laid out my domain, this is your site, this your site map for the next, in some cases, for the next two to five years. You don’t have to do that much. You can take it toward the next six months. But I do say you have a clear goal to what you want to achieve firstly and then do that lot of work and then follow through on that before moving on from there.

Once you’ve got that I then look for quick wins within that industry. When you go through the full expanse of doing keyword research, you will have categories that are in vertically related industries, you’ll have categories that are slightly off from the direct buying phrase, maybe slightly information, slightly buying. What you want to do form there is select what would be the best quick win for your domain that would give you best result as far as traffic in the minimal amount of time and sales in as well.

Basically you’re going for buying specific, non research phrases at that point, and depth. That’s how I usually go when I first start the website off.

David Jenyns: And then you’ll optimize pages. Let’s say you’re working for a particular client and they’ve already got a site up. You’ll either optimize pages that they’ve got, or create those content pages.

Marc Lindsay: Yes exactly. If they’re open to having content pages created, not all of them are, then we go through that process and restructure their site and go through that process with them. Otherwise it is on page optimization that is done first. You always have to set the base and go through from there.

David Jenyns: The you’ve got your on page optimization right, and then obviously we start on the off page stuff.

Marc Lindsay: Yes. What areas do you want to cover? I assume cover on page to its fullest in what you’ve go there anyway. It would probably a waste of your readers’ time to over that.

David Jenyns: Yes, we pretty much follow the fundamentals. You just need to have the keyword in the appropriate places throughout the page and all that sort of thing. I think on page optimization should be fine. As you’d agree, off page optimization is where it’s all at when it comes to SEO if you had to pick one or the other.

Marc Lindsay: Yes. Ideally you want to be working on a combination of both. I’ll just make a comment here to everyone because I see it quite a lot. Don’t try and SEO a one or two page website. It’s just going to be a waste of your time. Try and go for at least ten pages. If you’re going for a really specific one phrase only site, you can probably get away with a few pages. But if you’ve got an ebook site and you have a sales page, don’t try and SEO that, you’re just going to waste your time. There is no point.

If you want to build sales to that product, build ten or fifteen vertically related feeder sites around that purely designed for content to bring in traffic and then push them through a sales funnel to the sales page. Don’t try and rank the sales page site. I just see that quite a lot and I wanted to throw that out there while it was jogged in my memory.

David Jenyns: I think that’s good because it also echoes something that Michel Fortin was talking about. He was talking about not wanting to necessarily over optimize a sales letter because it takes away from the primary reason you put up the sales letter which was to convert the traffic. We talked about using feeder sites, funneling the traffic over. I reckon there is obviously a few reasons why that works. You’re talking about it also from an SEO point of view. You want to try and go for more pages.

I had one client contact me and say I want to rank for this particular keyword, which was funny t-shirts. I said, wait, if you want to go after something like that, how about we look at some of these other keywords. You really want to go for a lot of these longer tail keywords and variation keywords, try and get a base of those and then further down the track you might pick up that really highly competitive term. Use those other things, like you said, the quick wins, that’s what you want to go for straight off the bat.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, absolutely. Like you said, quick wins. And if he’s in funny t-shirts and things like that, he’s got a lot of opportunity to expand that infinitely, because there are heaps you can do.

David Jenyns: Yes. Where do you go from there?

Marc Lindsay: Basically I think we go to the off page point of view which is when you said I would tick off pages as the next most important. I agree with that. But you can never just pick one, we always have a fairly extensive content build out for our own sites and we always try and do it for clients. If I someone has a site that is too thin as far as content is, then I won’t take them on. I’ll offer to help them with it or I’ll tell them how they can do that. they just have to have a certain amount.

It’s fine and well if you go and do the optimization yourself and you make a mistake for yourself but when people come in to pay me for a service it’s my duty to tell them whether or not they are going to be doing the best thing for their website. It doesn’t work for anyone if they’re paying me for a service and they don’t results because of some core limitations. It just doesn’t work out like that.

It’s always got to be a good combination of both and I tend to go pretty heavy on content these days. Sites can range from fifty to a hundred to three, four, five, six hundred pages. That’s pure content, not community driven content there, so it always adds into what you’re trying to do.

David Jenyns: On a page, how much content do you like to see? Obviously it’s going to vary, but is there a minimum, a certain number of words?

Marc Lindsay: I like to see content that doesn’t look like it is just search engine fodder. Wherever I can now I get my writers to include images with them, I basically fill them out to a properly structured article that’s giving something back to the user with a minimum of five to six hundred words, the odd article with eight hundred to a thousand words. I don’t have one standard word format throughout the site. I ask them to write until they think the subject is covered enough that it would give a good read. Sometimes it’s five or six hundred words, other times it’s eight hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred words and a couple of articles are like three thousand words.

David Jenyns: It sounds like user optimization, giving the user something of value as opposed to just creating some gateway spam pages.

Marc Lindsay: Yes. And don’t get me wrong, unless you want to talk them gateway spam pages, I tend to call them search engine fodder, same thing, they have their uses. You can set up sites very quickly and you can monitor an industry on whether it’s going to worth going into without investing a lot of time and effort into it. But I just say that for a site that I know is going to be a very big asset to my company or to the future, I like to set it up firstly with base level content and then I’ll usually end up going back and totally rewriting it.

When you’re getting two to three hundred pages written I’d rather start it off on a base level rather than pay, because a good piece of content can cost you a lot of money, some of my content I can pay $70 or $80 per article. That’s where it needs to be industry specific, really high quality. They will decimate you if you don’t have it right and they will point it out.

So I start off with cheaper content for sites and I put a lot of pages out there and I see what comes back. If I start to get a lot of traffic and a lot of interest on that then I know that by increasing the quality of that site, by increasing the quality of the content, I can bring back more visitors and get an even higher response and higher result from that website.

Then if we’re skipping straight over to off page I basically follow a concept now which in part is in alignment with our algorithm that we use to find our own pages to rank. Basically it is the main phrase or the ego keyword as I call it is not the phrase you want to start going for straight away. Plan for the very top end but start with the very bottom. If you’ve got the content in there, the very first pages you want to start optimizing are the ones that have the best opportunity for you to get rankings quickly.

I tend to do a percentage work split. Let’s say I have a hundred points in work. It can be broke down however you like. I’ll usually say I have in the first three months between 30-40% of the work will go for the main level phrase which is going to be the ego word, the biggest payoff from. It doesn’t have to be an ego word, it can be, for example, a very good buying keyword but it might be a longer end target. You might not be able to get there very quickly. It might take you a long time to get there.

In that case that falls under the same thing as the end result keyword, the desired keyword, or the ego keyword, meaning the keyword you can boast the most about. So only put 30-40% into the set of ego keywords and then the other 60-70% goes fully into individual pages and the long tail. That’s where I know you’ll get the quickest wins in the first three months. That is by far where you’ll get the most out of it. So that’s what we do.
Then what we do is we come to the three month point and we usually flip it. So we’ll start targeting, or start taking it down a bit as we start targeting towards the higher end phrase and a little less on the lower tail phrase to start reversing and bringing out the main phrase quicker.

Usually what I find here, especially if you’re going to a competitive market and you want to be a little bit tactical about it is by the time you start to flip the work and go for the large phrase you start to see not only the large phrase but almost all the intermediate phrases come to the first page round about the same time if you plan it right.

Now what this means is if you hit the page really early for a big level phrase, your competition finds out about you really quickly and they’ll come and they’ll hunt you down, find out what’s going and if they can they’ll put you out of business. This is of course in cut throat industries.

It’s not the same in small niche industries, but it can be something to worry about later. Especially if you have something that is unique to you as far as a business process and you’re still trying to capture ground for the market share, if they see someone come to the market very early with something that they haven’t done yet, usually they can effect that change and do the same thing before you can get a front page ranking or before you can capture enough of the market share.

So by focusing on everything other then the main phrase you build everything they’re not looking at every day. If someone’s there for an ego phrase, they’re searching that main phrase every day to see where they are, or just because they can because that’s why it’s an ego phrase. They’re not looking in the long tail phrases, they’re not looking for all the variations.

By coming up for the variations and then the main phrase, it’s what I call market domination before they realize you’ve jumped up behind them. They realize you’re on the first page for that phrase so they start looking more. They say, oh, he’s everywhere.
So before they’ve even had a chance you’ve ninjad out of nowhere.

David Jenyns: I like the idea of building the strength up on those longer tail words. That’s going to feed through to your ego keyword. You’ve got all your on page optimization linking structure set up correctly so all that’s feeding in. When someone does see, oh, he’s taken my ego keyword, when they go to try and reverse engineer what it is that you’ve done, it makes it a lot harder. You’ve got a lot stronger structure there holding up that ego keyword.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, especially if people have a lot to their main pages, it’s very easy to look at it and instantly say, yes, I know exactly what he’s doing. But if someone has a tool that’s maybe not as smart as some other tools and it doesn’t pick up links to pages as well, or they’re having to analyze it, they’re trying to analyze that. They’re looking around and seeing keywords coming in for other phrases but not for the main phrase and it can throw them off.
You really brought home something there that I would reinforce and that is, by working on the longer tail phrases, you’re still always working towards whatever the highest subset of that keyword is, as long as you’ve got your flow correct in your website and your site structure. So even though you’re working on the smaller phrases, it all helps on the main phrase.

I’ll give you an example of this. If you’re coming into a competitive industry and it’s a large phrase or the ego keyword usually it doesn’t matter what you do you won’t be able to get to that first page for that keyword for a certain amount of time, depending on whether Google decides it’s raining or sunny today. So whilst everyone starts with that main phrase and they keep going and going, and you can get there pretty quickly for it but it still does take playtime to get out of the old sandpit.

If instead you’re bolstering all your supporting phrases in that time period, when you actually go to start working on that main phrase, it’s a lot more ROI positive use of work. The reason I bring it back to ROI positive is you could waste a lot of inventory, you could waste a lot of resources trying to get that main phrase work and not necessarily move ahead any quicker than if you were to start and get all of your long tail phrases ranked.

Then when it comes time to rank for your ego keyword you already have such a good structure there and such a good founding, that any work into that is actually a much more ROI positive work because you actually already have traffic, you have rankings for all your other phrases. You have keyword diversity and you have site authority that it just comes up much quicker than it normally would.

David Jenyns: Yes, and I think as well if you go for those longer tail keywords, depending on what you’re trying to push, you’re going to be making sales, and that’s going to help further pay for the SEO work and the resources required to go for that ego keyword. If you go just straight for that primary keyword, it might be incredibly hard to get. So I agree. It’s better to go for those long tail first.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, absolutely. So that’s the off page plan that we follow as far as how we direct all of our work. It’s very effective, it works and it’s a good use of resources. You’re not wasting anything.

David Jenyns: Those links that you’re sending back to the different pages as well, like the anchor text that you’re using for that, obviously you’re using the keyword that you’re trying to rank for. Do you put any variation in there as well?

Marc Lindsay: I do, yes. It depends how many I’ve got going into the individual page. If I have a lot I use more variation but I always tend to go for around about the top five that would be relevant to that individual page.

David Jenyns: And then where are you sending these links from when you’re actually doing that?

Marc Lindsay: You have to go through a process always depending on where you’re getting your links from. I know we do a lot of tracking and a lot testing to find out what is the most efficient spend of resources based on output provided. You can go and get a link built that will cost you time wise, and therefore time is money, more to actually get done rather than a link that good be quicker to get done based on time. The overall effect of that means you can get more out and you can have a larger increased overall benefit rather than getting ones that cost more time to get.

Basically to put that in really simple terms, high quality links versus low quality links. It’s probably one of the largest things that people are worried about, is should I be building really high quality links to my site or really low quality links?

David Jenyns: So what’s the answer?

Marc Lindsay: If I put my good hat on, that says you need to be always building towards future sustainability of your website.

David Jenyns: Sounds like a text book definition there.

Marc Lindsay: Yes. Since we’re all here to be getting good tactics, to start with you need to be building more than one type of link to your website. That means if you’re only doing article submissions, stop. Start finding something else you can do as well, because the larger the profile of links that you’re building to your website the less change can happen to your website if Google decides to devalue a type of link. So that’s just like 101 for me. If you’re building with one type then you need to be building with multiple types.

102 says to me go with what works for the least required investment of time. To me that is anything to do with article submissions is a very good use of time still, niche specific directories and even non-niche specific directories, as long as they’re one way links, and I’ll make that as a clarification, it’s still a very good use of time. There’s a lot of social book marking and whatnot I use only as an indexing tool, not as a ranking tool.

WordPress comments are still very effective, although I tend to do it with proper writers who write the comments for it so I get more acceptance there. They would be the easiest use of time and resources that would give the largest benefit or the largest payoff.

Now obviously other things that come in very good require a bit more time to do. there’s traditional link hunting, which means you need to go out and look for people within the top thirty results for vertical industries or industries that are related to yours but not in competition with yours.

That can be an extremely effective way to get links and basically you can offer them a high quality piece of content or some sort of mutual benefit to both. Usually it’s a high quality piece of the content because then they get content on their site and you get a link back to your website.
Other ways that are a little bit more creative is to create tools in your industry or to create super high quality content that has a high spreadablity factor so people will want to spread that content around. Create tools that can go viral as far as blog badges and things like that. I usually don’t talk too much about that because it does require quite a substantial amount of effort and a certain type of site to actually do that on. Usually you don’t want to just do it on a basic niche website. For that sort of thing you’re going to be doing some of what I deem the lower quality methods.

The only reason I define them as lower quality is that they’re cheap and quick. If anything takes longer to do then, in most cases it’s higher quality but I’ve seen some people put out some work that is more expensive and takes longer to do and it’s certainly not higher quality.

David Jenyns: You talked about quite a few different strategies there that you do use. I know that you guys are pretty systematized over at the LTSEO headquarters, If we were going to break it down even more, and I know this is digging quite deep into your business, if a client comes on board, what’s the first method of links you go after, second method, third method? I know it will vary depending on the niche you’re going after and the type of competition you’re going up against. Where do you start?

Marc Lindsay: It’s all base knowledge. Everybody knows all this stuff. You know this, every other person who’s in SEO knows it so I can tell you exactly the kind of links that are built. The power doesn’t actually come from knowing how to build the link. The power comes from having a systematic process that you can replicate time and time again.

David Jenyns: That right there is gold for anyone who’s listening.

Marc Lindsay: That is where it comes from. I could sit here and we could rattle SEO all day and give the most important facts away, but nobody would be able to replicate it unless they can come up with a system that they can follow that guarantees that the work gets done on a consistent basis and moves their site forward. They need to be constantly seeking and looking for new phrases and new ways to promote their site within that structure.

Having said that here are the immediate ones that jump to mind. We have an A-team who basically do research on all the new types of things that they can be doing, test them for validity, if they actually make an effect. That’s quite nice. They come up with ideas now and then before the rest of the market does. Obviously I can’t talk about those, but they’re quick win stuff, it’s not a long term strategy for those. They are usually a little be edgier. They’re things that I’ll use on my own sites.

I keep all my clients’ sites on stuff that’s been around a long time and has been well trialed and well tested. It’s not what I use for client work, it’s what I test and play around with. Having said that, feeder sites from as many of the Web 2.0 sources as you can actively get your hands on. Some of them no follow their links, some of them don’t, you’ll have to look at those. I don’t manage which ones do and don’t any more. I have other people who do that.
Forum posting – find forums that are specific to your industry. Almost all of them allow you to have a footer link in that. You mentioned the Warrior Forum. I know they used to let you have a footer link in there and in that footer link you can have an anchor rich link in there. There is article posting, both unique to EzineArticles and also to our own article distribution network. One way back links from sites, usually from site specific directories. You run a site on dog training and you have a partner’s page on there.

David Jenyns: You mentioned Web 2.0, you’ve got some forums and ezines and some directories. I know you guys have a full team over there. You say, here’s a client we’re promoting, you get your keyword research done, liase with the client, get them to know what strategy you’re about to do, they give you the all clear, you pass it back to the team and say let’s promote this.

Each one of these things you mentioned, do you start building all in one go and do you try and stagger it out? Do you have a system down to the point where you say right, I want you to build ten Web 2.0 pages on a variety of things. I want you to make twenty posts on these different forums, I want you to submit twenty articles to Ezine or whatever. Do you have it down to that granular point?

Marc Lindsay: Yes, absolutely. I do, but you know what? It’s based quite simply on how much the client’s paying me. That varies from site to site and it varies based on the size of the plan. While a site may need x amount of quantity of work, sometimes the client’s not prepared to pay for x amount of quantity so I go to them and say, looks it’s not personally what I’d be doing on your website, but having said that, this is what you want, this is what I can deliver for it. Then you go through the delivery process. It breaks down however you like.

I can definitely tell you I am weighted more towards what is more effective to be done, and as I’ve stated before, what is most effective is going to be the quick win links at least within the first twelve months. After twelve months we change to a slightly different tune or a slightly different method for those sites and follow a bit of a different thing.

Something we always like to do is constantly measure and weigh the return on investment for what’s being spent. That doesn’t always come from getting that site ranked. It might get to a point where you’re covering a lot of the industry and to go for extra phrases just to get more traffic to the site that may not be higher converting traffic.

Then you have to say, hold on, as an SEO company do I offer to start setting up related websites so they can gain more exposure on the first page? Or what do I do nest so I can help them get the best ROI on what they’re spending? So it’s not always just a matter of just what keywords need to be ranked and what links need to be ranked? We take a bit more of a higher view from a business perspective than just an SEO perspective. Sometimes it is a better ROI or a better use of resources to then set up a totally new site that is specific to just one area of what they offer.

David Jenyns: You mentioned you obviously weight a lot of your time and a lot of what you work on to those methods you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck for. I know that it’s important that we spread out our links and we never just want to go for one particular type of link. But if you had to pick, just for argument’s sake, where you get the best bang for your buck on links, where do you go?

Marc Lindsay: It’s going to sound so cliche but it’s got to be my own service. It’s got to be the article site.

David Jenyns: We can lead into this. I mention this to my clients. Marc is the guy behind AMA, Article Marketing Automation, and it is a fantastic service and I know is being picked up left, right and centre. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is, what it does?

Marc Lindsay: Yes, absolutely. It is a user created blog network. Every site that is in the network and a site is a WordPress site that takes on content, is created by users. This means there is a very large spread of hosts and IP addresses and who is information and all the rest and is an important thing to have.

Basically users enter their site in their, they’re looking to distribute content for other people, they provide their users or readers with more content to read or look or comment on. They add it in there because they’re looking for actual content. Maybe they’re setting up a feeder site or maybe they’re testing out an industry and they want to get content related to that industry to see how it flies.

As an actual poster or an article distributor you’ll log into your system and you’ll put an article into the system and go through a spinning process that you can have every version of the article that goes out unique, and for that you get to place a link in your article anywhere within the body of the test. There are no footprints for it, and your article is slowly fed out over sixty days to the sites and the network that are looking for content on that category.

So it means that you’re basically get in content links anywhere between 120 -240 websites for each article you put out. And you can also automatically have it so that you vary the anchor text link that goes to each one by using spinning methods and what not. So it is extremely effective at what it does and that’s always my first place I start off with.

The reason I start off with that, and this is for my personal sites here, my clients’ sites I don’t go so heavy on that. The reason is if a client’s paying me for work and they see that I offer a service that is for the internet marketing industry or for just general article publishers and they see that it is $47 per month, they instantly say why am I paying xyz for work that is $47 per month? They don’t even have to think about the fact of all the other work they get for it.

For my clients, the AMA is just bonus work, it’s not even in the charge, it’s not in the fee, it’s in none of that. I put any article I get into that system because I own and operate it. I’ve just found regardless of what you show, the image has been formed, and they’re not entirely happy about it. It does depend on the client too. Some people are willing and happy just to leave everything in your hands knowing you’re the best at what you do, and they go on with it. Some clients will want to have a bit more of in depth control over it for whatever reason. They may have had a bad experience or they need to be satisfied with every single point. At the end of the day that’s what we have to do for them.

So if you’ve got your own sites, I use it for every single one of mine. I think the stats now are something like 45% of all links promoted in the network have a page one ranking in Google and the total up to top three page ranking in Google is something like 78% of the entire network.

David Jenyns: How many pages are we talking, that are in the network?

Marc Lindsay: I’m talking about individual links promoted to individual sites. I’d have to check the stats on what that is, but we’re edging on 18,000 or something like that.

David Jenyns: That’s really impressive.

Marc Lindsay: That’s like you and me putting our sites in there to get them ranked. Total content distributed is around 4.6 million articles or versions of articles.

David Jenyns: That’s definitely impressive and I think the chats that we’ve had about what’s been going on behind the back end, the way you monitor your stats and that sort of stuff is extremely impressive. The biggest thing a lot of people worry about with blog networks is the ability of someone to be able to somehow reverse engineer where these links are coming from and then say, oh these somehow linked as a network and that whole network go down. We’ve seen that happen before. What sort of methods and structures do you have in place to keep AMA from going that way?

Marc Lindsay: To start with, AMA is a user run network. For Google to put a footprint on the whole network would a) be very difficult to do, because we don’t submit to the entire network ever whereas most sites will let you submit junk to the entire network or they sell page rank which is definitely not what we do. That’s the first point. The second point is there is quality control in it. It’s up to the publisher whether or not to automatically accept content or not. They do have a manual process if they want it. They can reject content if it’s not up to standard.

The third thing is a few things that we want to have come into place for community control over article quality. I’ll just leave it at that for the moment because it is not out yet.

David Jenyns: Definitely keep an eye on it. If someone wants to check out more, they can go to theseomethod.com/ama and they can find out more about that. I’ve got a final couple of questions to finish up on. I wanted to find out your thoughts on going after big niches versus little niches. I know you have a whole variety of clients that you take on. You do go after some really big niches. Do big niches scare you at all?
Marc Lindsay: No, not at all. I love it. Give me the top level. If it’s worth it for me, I’ll go for it. At the end of the day, it comes down to confidence and resources. I never used to be able to do that. It does come down to working within a lot of industries and just being smart about it. Sometimes it’s not always best to start with the largest spot in there. Sometimes you can make a lot of money by going for the niche specific to start with.

A perfect example is poker. If you want to go for poker tips or poker advice or poker on line it is a very big industry. If you want to go for an individual program and do a review site just around that program you’ll have a much better chance of getting rankings for that program than the whole poker industry. There’s a lot of money. In that case I’m not scared to go for a big one. It depends on exactly what the product is and where it targets to start with. If their site is already in a big industry then usually I’ll max out that site.

If you start on an authority site or a large site, you usually end up niching that down into a specific in another site. Once you’ve done as much as you can on that site sometimes it’s better to then start releasing niche specific versions of the same concept.

If you’re starting out and you’re not sure where you want to start, niche it down. Go really specific because you’ll get the best win out of it. Let’s say you’re doing a product based website around, say, mosquito spray. You take a look in what’s available and you can see that there is Enviroguard as an example, or whatever a brand name happens to be.

What you want to do is you’ll target your site entirely around mosquito repellent as a phrase, and then you want to break down as much as possible for the content of your site into the individual types of mosquito repellent and the longer tail phrases. So really niche it down into hitting the specifics for it because you’ll give yourself the best chance possible to win. That’s what it’s all about early on. The more you win early on, the more confidence you have in yourself and the more likely you are to tackle larger industries and go forward.

Having said that, a failure is never a failure as long as you learn from it. It’s only truly a failure if you don’t get the lesson out of it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I suppose leading in from that we talk about getting rankings and that sort of thing, where do you see opportunity for getting easy rankings. You talked about going for a lot of those longer tail keywords. Are there any points on where you see easy rankings? Can you perhaps comment on using video to rank for keywords?

Marc Lindsay: Yes. Like you said, video is a very easy way to get a top level position on that first page. Google will usually have a position there just for video. Most people don’t do optimization for their videos and optimizing for videos is just like optimizing for a site. Pick the right phrase for the url and all the rest of that. More importantly point the right links at the thing. We include an easy way to do that within the Article Marketing Services at the link Dave mentioned before. You can also do it with any other link building method as well.

In saying that videos are a very easy way to get ranked and if you have the right video there it will give you an opportunity almost to pre sell them into your service. Unfortunately while it is a very quick and easy way to do it, I find that it doesn’t necessarily lead me to sales. At the end of the day I want sales. A video is perfect for pre selling a product.

So if they come in they hit your YouTube video, they go to the YouTube and they go through and they take a look at it no worries, they like what they see they have an opportunity to click on the right side of your link. But see here how we’re sending them to YouTube? They go to YouTube, they can get lost, they can start watching videos.

There is a tag that you can add into your own pages that specify a video. So if you’re using that tag and you’ve got video embedded in your own page, you can actually use tags that specify and identify that content as video content. You can say hey, Google, when you spider this page, this one’s a video. Your video will show up like a normal YouTube video would in the results.

David Jenyns: I’ll definitely have to have a look into that.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, so you need to take a look into that. Basically it shows, even when it’s listed down there it will show up and it just looks like a video listing in there.
So you get very high click throughs and you get all the good stuff that comes with that. But otherwise very easy rankings is anything that has a huge list of products in it, aka e commerce. E commerce stores I just love them. You can’t beat them.

David Jenyns: The amount of pages as well. We’ve got one or two e commerce stores for our own stuff. You were talking about going for buying phrases. When you’ve got the product name, and the person is typing that into Google and you’ve optimized for that keyword that user is a qualified person who is ready to buy. They’re not someone saying, digital cameras, they’re saying Sony camera XPF 654.

Marc Lindsay: Exactly. It’s the most qualified you can get. It’s also very easy to put in qualifiers in the footer of your store that instantly add another whole plethora of phrases. Qualifiers can be pre or post qualifiers for the keyword, or even locality. You can do some nice tricky stuff with an e commerce store. You can put now delivering xyz and have the product name inserted there too. Then if you’re in Australia, all around Australia but also too, Sydney, Perth, Northern Territory, Darwin and the main localities there and will instantly add to every single page all locality based phrases as well.

David Jenyns: Yes there are definitely huge opportunities there and I think that is an area where still I don’t think there is enough attention focused in on those e commerce sites. I know having chatted with you with some of the clients’ niches you’ve gone after it’s astounding to hear some of the results you can get. You can get those from what seems like quite an obscure niche but you can dig incredibly deeply into that niche.

Marc Lindsay: To be honest while we’re on the topic, you have to start somewhere always. If you can’t get into e commerce don’t get discouraged. Build up whatever you can to get to the point where you have the connections, you have the context and the confidence to get into any industry you want. For me if I was to hedge where we do place our bets so to speak online now it is in e commerce, lead generation and high level affiliates or industries with a lot of traffic and usually on an authority site. basis.

David Jenyns: Yes. Talk about going full circle and we go all the way back to where we were talking about planning out, mapping out the domain name, the keywords you’re going to go after and getting that structure right. That goes full circle, and I think if you go into any one of those three areas, the e commerce, lead generation or any high level affiliate stuff, you’re going to position yourself to succeed.

This is the perfect time to lead out towards the end of the call. I know you’re one of the guys I listen to when it comes to SEO. I’m interested to know who you listen to. In the SEO world when you’re keeping a pulse on what’s going on.

Marc Lindsay: That’s a really good question. Look I don’t have anyone I follow anymore. I base my learning on results. This is for everything I do. I’m always building a resource. I’m building it for the resource. I’m not necessarily building it for the initial input.

For example my entire SEO company is not based round offering an SEO service. I am not an SEO company. I’m a media company. Our SEO company is actually more like a lead generation company that we get paid an exceptional amount from businesses that need our services. But it’s a lead generation company to find businesses that 1) are serious and 2) have a good back end and product offering. Out of that few select, we’ll find a certain amount of companies that want to strike equity deals with us. And they want us to become their front end marketing arm.

That’s where we drive a lot of power from. How it gets to that is because our SEO company is just a really neat way to get paid for building a resource. As I build up more and more clients and I can look across 120 websites at any point because I’m a tracking freak. We track every link built, the time it was built, the site it was built to, the anchor text that was built, where it’s coming from, all that is built so I can see an exact snapshot of when that happened.

By having the resource and owning the resource I can do analysis on exactly what’s happening in an industry at any second. I can see what’s happening I don’t have to hazard a guess. The one thing I read religiously is called SE News, searchenginenews.com. It comes into my mailbox, and it was recommended to me.

David Jenyns: Do you have any other people that you admire not necessarily follow who you respect what it is they do in SEO?

Marc Lindsay: I’ve learnt from a lot of people. If you talk about, admire, respect and look to now, it’s a different question to people who I learnt from. It depends what the question is. There are plenty of SEO smarts in the industry. A long time ago I took myself out of the game of chasing and following and put myself into the game of actioning and doing. When I started to do that it’s quite funny how quickly your results start to change but it also means I lost a little bit of touch with that side of the industry.

There’s always Leslie Rohde and Dan Thies of SEO Fast Start. SEO Fast Start is one of the best starting bases. I say starting because it will just give you a nice solid overview for it. It won’t give you the motivation and the in depth content that we’re talking about now and that you have in your course. But he’s really good at what he does.

Leslie Rohde I think is very good from the technical point of view. There are individuals like that that I can look at from a specific point of view but to be honest I’m getting a lot more from the conversion industry than I am from the SEO industry. There’s only a certain level you can take SEO to. Once you get to level where you can dominate any industry and have it on an automated process, well, who do I look up to?

I’m not saying I’m at the top by far. I’m still learning all the time with it but it then becomes you gain and drive knowledge from looking back on how plans have gone and how results have been achieved and by analyzing that. That’s where you get information from, that’s where you find out from. I do like anything from SEOmoz, anything to do with viral linkbaiting. To me that’s like an awesome use of resource.

Anywhere I can find stuff like that, I don’t have a specific one, but I know I get a lot of that from SEOmoz. Like I said searchenginenews.com is enough to keep me up to date with just search engine changes, not so much tactics but more about what’s changing in the industry, what’s news, what’s not, what’s happening. They have some nice resources there as well. When it comes down to tactics and tips it all comes down to call like these.

Once you get to a certain level you’ll start meeting people in you industry, you’ll start discussing what’s working and what’s not and you’ll start analyzing your own results. You’re definitely someone to watch. If people want to find out more about the AMA service they can head over to the seomethod.com/ama. If they want to find out more about you Marc, where should they go to find you?

Marc Lindsay: You can go to ltseo.com.au. That’s our corporate level site. We’re doing a lot of changes at the moment to how we’re doping our more internet marketing. Perhaps I’ll give you a link when we’ve actually sorted that out to give a place that people can go to that will be more in line with how we do things now.

David Jenyns: I’d like to thank you very much for your time. I do appreciate every time we get on the line and I know anyone who listens to this call is going to get a lot of value from it. So thank you. I do appreciate it.

Marc Lindsay: Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me, it’s been fun.

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Mike Woo Ming

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Name: Mike Woo-Ming aka “The Marketing MD”

Industry: Online Marketing

Website: The Marketing MD

Mike Woo-Ming’s Bio:  Dr. Mike Woo-Ming is a much in demand internet business consultant and entrepreneur. Once working a full-time income as a Mayo Clinic trained physician, Dr. Mike built a passive income by starting his own internet business while still maintaining a 60 hour work week. His companies have created over 80 information products in the last few years and maintains a seven figure income that started from his bedroom.

An expert in lead generation, he has personally generated over 700,000 leads in 11 different markets. Dr. Mike consults regularly with million dollar companies in the corporate world, while still traveling around the world to sold-out workshops helping small business owners and solo entrepreneurs attain their own financial success.

A graduate in family practice, at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dr. Mike also hold’s a master’s degree in public health at the University of Michigan. A devoted health advocate and educator, he believes there is no doubt that the stresses and pressures of working full-time in society leads to the many health problems that are prevalent today including depression, anxiety, and obesity.

Mike has decides to start teaching entrepreneurs who are motivated to utilize the power of the internet as a goal towards financial freedom.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from theSEOmethod.com. I’m really excited today to be joined by Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. I’ve been following Dr. Mike Woo-Ming’s stuff for many years now. He actually started off as a full time physician and built up his IM business on the side and then swapped over. He’s got over eighty information products in a whole load of niches, everything from health to wedding, different marketing stuff, business to business. Later in his internet marketing career he became known for generating leads. He’s generated upwards of 700,000 leads.

These days he does consults and runs one on one work-shops and is very highly in demand. So I appreciate having him on the call. I would like to welcome you, Mike.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to the interview.

David Jenyns: Great. I will dive straight in. I really want to jump straight into how you drive traffic. I know you operated in a whole lot of different niches. If you’re about to set up a new website, this is a pretty broad question, so we’ll let it go where it wants to, but if you’re just setting up a new website, what are some of the steps that you take very early on with building traffic and driving traffic to that website?

Mike Woo-Ming: I guess you’re really getting right into it. This is the stuff I wish I knew about when I got started. For some of you who may not know me, first and foremost I want to say I’m not an SEO expert and I’m not a technical in any shape or form. I think some of the reasons people follow me are because they like that. A lot of people who go into internet marketing they focus on doing joint ventures. I’m still a fan of joint ventures but if you go into obscure markets like where I go to, you really don’t know who to go to to do joint ventures with.

I’m in one market where, for example, we’re in the pet market, particularly the lizard market. Now David I don’t know if you know any big gurus in that particular market off the top of your head. So what I like to do when I go to a website, especially when you go to obscure markets like that is, first of all when I get my website created and I need to drive traffic, there are a couple of things I do.

We’re already figured out that you’ve checked your conversions and made sure your sales letter is up to par and if you send traffic it’s going to convert for you. The reason that I say that is, the first thing I do is some pay per click so I want to know if the site’s converting. So when I say I want to send a hundred visitors, I want to know to make sure those hundred visitors, it’s actually converting into sales for me.

I’m assuming that’s already been taken care of, you’ve already been optimizing your site. The thing that I do then is, I start to drive traffic basically a few ways. First of all, I do a press release. When you talk about press releases, some people shy away. They say, launching a website isn’t newsworthy. Here’s the dirty little secret about a press release, it doesn’t have to be newsworthy. Certainly just announcing that you have a website, you’re basically announcing to the world that your site exists.

The reason I do press releases is it creates a centre of influence. If you use a page site like PeerWeb, or if you use a free press release site like prlead, those are established press release websites. That’s telling the internet community that you have a site and it exists and you’re trying to get links to that site. A faster way that I know how to do it, is to submit a press release. So what I do I send press releases, announcing for example if we’re talking about lizards or something like that, Mike has just launched the lizard site that is going to show how to get the best tips about lizards, and how to take care of your lizards. This is going to be the ultimate site for lizard care.

Basically what I’m trying to do is get a link and if you do a press release and you used PeerWeb and you used something like, you pay for it, but there are different levels. Some will get you to Google News and Yahoo News and social media sites. But that’s all going to be driving traffic to your website. That’s what I start with. You’ll have to do it about once, maybe twice, but once is usually all I need. That is step one for me.

The second step is, I’m sure you had a lot of SEO experts saying this, but it still works great, and that is article submissions. I get articles created. The great thing about the internet is all this stuff can be outsourced. I have articles written, for example I outsource all this. I have about ten articles created. Every article is basically, what I like to do if you’re selling a product, is you have ten articles and each article represents a benefit of your particular product.

So for example , let’s say if we had Lizard Care Secrets. Let’s say your book talks about what’s the best lizard food for your lizard. That’s going to be covered in your e book. Let’s say you have an article and it says here are the three things you didn’t know about lizard food. Basically you talk about it, but the benefit is in your e book. The goal is you want to sell your e book.

I like to have one article written on a particular aspect that is basically a selling point to go to my e book. You have your article and you have your by line, if you want to find more about this, you come to lizardcaresecrets.com or whatever your site is. If you do that consistently, you will get traffic. People say, oh, writing articles and submitting, that’s so old hat. The thing is, it still works great, you don’t have to think about it and you completely outsource.

I can’t tell you the last time I actually personally submitted an article myself. You have people out there who will do this for you at pennies on the dollar. I send out each article once a week or once every two weeks to all these different article directories, like Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles. There are all these different article directories out there. We do this on a regular basis.

When I first get started, I concentrate on press release and then I concentrate on article submission. Again, the great thing about it is that it can be completely outsourced.

David Jenyns: I think drilling down into a couple of those things, I think you touched on some key points. One is the idea of first starting off with pay per click and making sure that you’re getting those conversions. When you’re loading keywords in that you’re using for pay per click as well, are you doing any sort of monitoring for which keywords are converting and they’re the ones that you’re going after from an SEO point of view? Or when you think of SEO you’ve just got your primary keyword that you’re going after and then all the links that you’re firing to through your press release and your articles are just going after that primary one?

I know you’re going after information based products and typically they’re the sales letter type sites. You can only optimize each page for one keyword and if you’ve got one sales letter, unless you’ve got some second tier internal article pages, you’re really only going for one keyword. How do you structure that? Is that something you think about?

Mike Woo-Ming: I do, and I wish I could say I do it perfectly. The thing too is, we change a little bit of a step here. I sometimes don’t send them directly to the sales letter. I send them to an intermediary page. Generally what I do is, I send them to a landing page. A landing page you can optimize a little bit more. You put an article in the landing page and you can change some things. The reason for that too is, when I send people to a landing page. I know I’m getting a capture audience and I can contact them again through my auto responder.

When I first get started with it, sometimes I send them to a sales page. If that’s really converting, I send them to the sales page. If it’s not converting, I consider sending them to a landing page. The landing page does allow you to tweak some things that the sales page won’t be able to.

David Jenyns: This method that you’re going through now, I know in the very early days you were involved in the whole Underachiever Method with Frank Kern and Ed Dale type of building websites. These eighty information based products that you have in these oddball niches, is that built on that sort of foundation there? I know you were instrumental in developing that. Is that the type of websites that these are? Almost like Underachiever style sites?

Mike Woo-Ming: For those who are new to the Underachiever type sites or maybe new to what we’re talking about, what David’s referring to is creating niche sites in terms of, you’re basically going into these really obscure markets and you’re finding a need based on that particular e book. The reason those e books were created was where you asked questions in that particular market and based on those questions you create the product based on that. A lot of these were based from it.

My sites have gone beyond that. I would say they are Underachiever on steroids. I’ve actually gone into the market and done two or three different products based on that particular market. From those eighty products that I have, I found that there were some markets I could go deeper in. In the last few years, I’ve actually concentrated on going deep in those particular markets. To be successful, you find a market that you go in, and then you go deeper into it.

I’ve gone away from that wide, I don’t know how many products it was and just focused on particular markets. That being said, a lot of those guides I created and information products started out as Underachiever type products.

David Jenyns: You’ve provided some tremendous insight there. I know when I got started, I’d been following a lot of Jeff Johnson stuff for many years. He’s all about throwing up as much stuff as possible. I almost went down a similar track as you, getting a whole lot of Yanik Silver’s Public Domain Goldmine stuff.

I took all of those e books, loaded them up on sites, selling $15 e books in 500+ little niche sites. Looking back now, that same level of insight that you provided there and you distilled it so well, now you’ve picked out those one or two niches that you’re going after and you’re going after deep. You’re building a sales process where you’re building up a data base, you’re capturing their names and then continuing to sell products to that.

At what point did you come to that decision that, hey, I need to be focusing on these niches instead of spreading yourself so wide?

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s something that I talk about in my coaching, that identified some markets you can go deep on , and then there are some markets which I call linear markets. That is, after you sell the one product, it’s very difficult to sell them something else. I’ll give you an example. I’m in a lot of health markets. I had a client who was in the heartburn market. He created an information product on how to end your heartburn. After he sold that e book, what else could you really sell to them? There really wasn’t much to go to.

I know that some people have chronic heartburn, but after you’ve solved their problem, it’s really difficult to sell them additional products in that particular market. It was finding those same kinds of markets after you’ve ended that particular market. What else can you do? For example, there is the wedding market. I have an e book on how to create an outdoor wedding. After the wedding is done, what else are you going to sell them?

I guess you could sell them how not to get a divorce after a few years. I’m not saying the wedding market is not good, but I know I have a limited time frame with those particular people, less than a year. There’s not much longer I can sell products and services. After that, I’ve got to get new leads and new prospects.

David Jenyns: There’s the baby market after that.

Mike Woo-Ming: Exactly. You could probably do it, but there are a lot of other markets that are a lot easier. So for example, my father–in-law is a golf enthusiast. He’ll buy everything related to golf. Anything he can do to reduce strokes to improve his game, he’ll buy. There are some markets that are a lot easier to sell more products down the line. I hope that makes sense.

David Jenyns: For sure. So we start off ,we do a little bit of pay per click where you’re driving traffic to landing pages where you can build the data base and continue to sell them on the back end. You’ll identify what keyword’s working, then you go back to the actual website and you’re doing press releases and you’re using the links from that. Are those links in the press releases? Are these all getting shot back through to these landing pages, or are you also sending stuff straight to the sales page as well?

Mike Woo-Ming: Basically how it turns out is, how well it’s converting. If it’s a really converting site and it’s an impulse buying, I’m going to send them to that sales page. If the site’s a little bit harder, I need to massage them though the process, build a relationship, then I’m going to send them to an opt in page. It’s not 100% but actually in my head that’s how I basically quantify.

First, just how people do in pay per click, they send them to the sales page first, see how that does, if it’s not converted, oh I need a good opt in.

David Jenyns: You make that decision and then you use your PRWeb and PR Leap and then you also look at article submissions, getting those written, submitting them out to Ezine and the top tier article directories. From there, is that the main promotion you do for driving traffic, or where do you go from there?

Mike Woo-Ming: We have our own technology that we use, and I could probably talk about that a little bit more. I also use things such as videos. Videos are probably the easiest and one of my favourite ways of getting things on there. What I’m talking about here is, I’m basically focusing on products when you’re talking about SEO. My methodology that I use when I do consulting or when I work with brick and mortars is a lot different because I focus more on local search and things like that.

If we’re going to continue our conversation on the information products, I do videos. I do very easy to do videos. There’s a reason YouTube is owned by Google because they love that content. We send videos with a link going back to that site. Those are probably the three main things that I do to get traffic to my website.

David Jenyns: With systematizing, and I know you’re such a big fan of outsourcing and the importance of doing it, there’s no way you could personally get out there and come out with eighty information products, if you’re doing each press release, doing each ten articles, making sure it is distributed.
From a process point of view, how does that happen? Are you passing the topic to someone and then saying, here, go get me an e book written? They come back and you say, now take it to the promotion stage? Perhaps you could talk me through the way you’ve actually developed that as a system, and even the people involved in creating that system.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now we’re getting back a few years, because the way I did it a few years ago is a lot different to what I do now. Now I have an in house staff as well as an outsourcing staff. A lot of things I do now are completely different. Now I hand it off to somebody. For example, today, somebody was doing the auto responder, somebody was working on the articles, somebody submitting it using videos, submitting it to Traffic Geyser which is a video submission product most people are aware of.

Today it’s completely outsourced. When I first got started it was all me. It’s just like everybody else. It’s getting first, the product creation. The first e book I did I wrote myself. Now I outsource everything. First I identify a product that needs to be created. Now I use in house writers, before I used an Elance to get a guide created. They create the product, I go ahead and look at it. I write up the sales letter and then I would be the one submitting the press release, I would be the one submitting the articles. Then after I learned that I could have better use of my time, I continued to outsource it but then I had a manager to do all that for me.

The manager I had was very familiar with all these traffic strategies we talked about and it was great because I didn’t have to think about it. They knew how to submit articles. Before I did all this and outsourced it, I created a Camtasia and I said, here are the articles, this is where you go. You go into my Ezine article account and go ahead and submit all these articles. Next week you can do the same thing.

That’s what I love about using Camtasia videos and things like that, there is no grey area. They see exactly what you’re seeing, they know how to put it in your account and if they have any questions they can ask you. I just basically have article submissions every week. Now there are a lot more products and services out there that do it for you. We have our own services that we sell that, do it for them. Back then it was still very early, so that wasn’t made available.

There are services out there, but it’s now come to the point, what is the best use of your time? It’s very easy to outsource it and a lot of people who are on these freelance sites know how to do this kind of stuff.

David Jenyns: You mentioned having a manager and that was a good step forward. I think the idea of getting people in house is a fantastic idea. As much as we all talk about this internet dream of having everything virtual, when you have somebody that comes in with you to the office, you can impart so much. There is that brain connection, that brain width, where you’re in the same room and you can share things like that. Especially if that’s the person who’s managing the assistants, then it works a lot more smoothly.

When we go even a little deeper into the actual processes that you use, and you’re recording stuff with Camtasia, let’s say you’ve chatted with your project person saying, here’s a particular niche we’re going after. You’ve got your Camtasia videos and you’ve got your different assistants, have you got it down to a point where it is literally a slippery slope? Once the press release has been done, the next person is notified and they start with their article promotion. With the article promotion, you talked about ten articles, this is for the initial push. What ongoing promotion do you do to maintain some of those rankings and continue with the traffic?

Mike Woo-Ming: I wish I could say I test everything and I check everything. But like everyone else we get bogged down in our own multitude of projects and things like that. It’s funny, earlier today we had a Mastermind Group that’s composed of some big time marketers, who are various successes online. The big thing is, we’ve all got too many projects and too many things.

Basically I am not the person to go to to make sure my rankings are up there. I do notice, however, if the sales are dropping. For me, in terms of getting the rankings back up, I’m missing out on something. I’m not keeping up with my article submissions. Maybe there is more traffic going to another site and that’s pushing my rankings down. For myself, in terms of making sure the rankings are up, I’ve noticed that if I can do another video it’s good. The fastest way of getting consistent, is just getting more content, more information. The fastest way I can do that is putting up another video on something or creating a blog or something like that.

The thing that’s great about some of the markets I’m in is, it’s consistent. I’m in a lot of these markets where it’s not as competitive as, say, stock markets. It’s generally more consistent. I’m lucky in that aspect in terms of what we’re talking about. Submitting a video or introducing blogs and things like that can easily get you back up there as well.

Using things that we haven’t touched on, like social media and things like that, are going to have an increased importance as we move forward. We’ve already seen that on the internet. Luckily it hasn’t been an issue for me, but if it were to be an issue, those are the kind of things I would be doing to make sure I’m staying up there.

David Jenyns: So your real core part of your promotion is those three things, press releases, articles and videos. You did touch on some other ones, which are not core. You mentioned blogs and social media. I’m assuming when you mention blogs, it is building you own supporting network of blogs to help funnel those links. Is that what you mean?

Mike Woo-Ming: Correct. Another aspect of this as well is affiliates. Affiliates can often fill in the gaps while these things maybe missing. For myself, if it is a product, and you’re selling it on ClickBank, usually those three things I mentioned are enough to get you going. What’s going to continue to keep you going is your affiliates. I’m willing to give 50%, 60%, 75% of my product, because that’s all for me. Your affiliates are the ones who are going to make sure your rankings are up there, and making sure the blog posts are being done and I’m willing to give out money on that. My affiliates are going to continue to do those things.

That’s a very important strategy that I almost forgot to mention. That’s the final piece of the puzzle to make sure you’re continuing to get links.

David Jenyns: I think with affiliates as well, Brad Callen, when he was talking about My Wedding Favors, I remember hearing an interview where he was quizzed. He was asked, what was the one thing, if you looked back now, after everything you know, you would have done? He said, I would have started my affiliate program sooner.

With some of the different things you do, and the different niches that you operate in, with starting the affiliate program, do you typically have the affiliates find you? Or are you also actively going out to recruit affiliates? I know in the internet marketing niche you definitely do, but how about some of the more left of centre niches?

Mike Woo-Ming: When I do these left of centre niches, it’s a lot different. Let’s take the example of an iguana. It’s a lot different for me to sell an iguana product. I don’t know who the affiliates are for the iguana market. However, there’s a great website director out there, Bob ClickBank that everyone should be very familiar with. That’s where the people who are actually putting in the keywords and searching for iguanas or weddings or whatever and you’re not actively doing that.

You can go on Google and see the top sites. But for me I’m lazy. I’ll just put up a ClickBank product or something like that and let the affiliates find me.

David Jenyns: I think you mapped out very well the strategy you use for those particular sites and the way you have your outsourcers handle it. You mentioned as well, because I know you do some consulting work : local search was one of things you touched on. Are there any other things when you’re doing consulting for local businesses? You probably go through the same processes of press release, articles and videos and adding local search. Are there any other things that you do?

Mike Woo-Ming: Just the main thing, make sure you’re in Google Local and Yahoo Local, making sure you’re in the directories by Google and Yahoo. For example, we’re working with a cleaning business and they’re in San Diego. We’re working making sure we’re in the right places that are on Google. We’re making sure we’re on yelp.com. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s where people can search and can submit reviews of a particular business. We make sure there is positive feedback on those type of places.
It is a bit different, but we still incorporate things like press releases and videos. The great thing about local is, it’s easy to get to the top rankings on Google and you don’t have to do as much work as you would for other general tech products.

David Jenyns: Especially when you’re working with clients, I imagine you’re going to have to be a lot more meticulous in documenting the process that you do. When you’re working with them, do you take them through a process where you say, we’re going to do one press release for you, we’re going to do ten articles for you, we’re going to submit you to local search and we’re going to help you do four videos, and you have a checklist and it gets passed around the appropriate people in your office to get through to completion?

What I’m trying to find out here is how does it actually happen? We talked about a lot of different tactics, but how does it happen in terms of what you offer your client to getting something delivered by your team? What’s the process? Do you liase with your manager and then that gets passed on to your outsourcers and is it divvied up? I’m just wondering how you manage it to make sure it all gets done.

I know you said you don’t pay as much attention to the niche sites, you might do a bit of promotion here and a bit of promotion there.

Mike Woo-Ming: Generally how it works when we’re doing consulting for other clients, we have now what we call traffic managers. Basically they have an account, and they’re in charge. Under that manager are people who are writing articles, people who are submitting, people who are creating videos and creating blogs and those types of things. For each person, for each client, they have their own manager who divvies that out for them. We found out that the client really doesn’t care what the steps are to create all these things.

They care in terms of making sure the content and what you’re doing is correct. But if you talk in terms of search engine optimization to a dog owner, for example, they couldn’t care less. All they care about is that you rank for particular keywords.

What we give them, is, we say here are the keywords we’re ranking for. We’re number five on this keyword, we’re number eight on this keyword. That’s all they care about, is making sure they are up in the rankings on the search engines. So we tell them, this is what we do, but I’m yet to have a client who actually focuses on exactly the steps that you’re going through. All they care about is whether they’re getting more traffic and then those traffics are resulting in sales of their products or services.

David Jenyns: Very much just show me the money kind of thing.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes, they’re too busy running their own businesses.

David Jenyns: You do quite a lot of consulting and you’ve got these niche products, when you look at all the different tactics and strategies you do, where do you see you’re getting the best bang for your buck both in traffic from users and the SEO benefit? I know it’s important to have a variety of different methods, but if you had to pick just one method, where do you see the best bang for your buck?

Mike Woo-Ming: That’s really hard to say, because it really is dependent on the market that you’re in. For example, in internet marketing a significant portion is based upon endorsed mailings, speaking at conferences and joint ventures and the like. There are some that are completely related to pay per click. There are some specifically related on traffic and SEO. There are some markets that we get from Twitter. I really can’t point to one particular aspect of it.

You know how Batman had these utility belts? The baterang worked very well, and then he had the bat grenade? There’s different arsenal for whatever situation you’re in. I really can’t point to a particular one. That’s the great thing in internet marketing, you need to know quite a bit in whatever setting that works well and you’re going to learn to do that.

David Jenyns: I suppose maybe, if not the biggest bang for your buck for links, maybe you could talk a little bit about keyword selection. It’s obviously going to be really key for how certain rankings are going to be to get. I know it does depend on the niche that you’re going after. When you’re thinking in terms of keywords, do you have any advice or tips on what keywords should people be going after?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes, and again it depends on what you’re trying to do. For example, there are some keywords that work better for something that they pay for, where they’re going directly to a sales letter. Some keywords work better for that than they do for something where you’re going to create an opt in list or maybe you’re going to give away something for free, that kind of thing.

For example, in the health markets, you may have heard this, but there are some keywords in health that seem to work better for us that we go after and people are more likely to buy our products. There are other keywords that don’t help as much. For example, if you go into health market, one keyword that’s very good that we found that works very well, is going after a keyword that says remedy. Remedy is one of these keywords that is a buy keyword. For example, we’ve got a product on ADD or something, an ADD remedy. Those tend to attract more than say, an ADD solution.

You really don’t know until you’ve been in this market, but there are some keywords that are better than others. It just comes from understanding your market and understanding what the expectations of that market that you’re trying to get into.

David Jenyns: I think we’re seeing a little bit of a shift in the internet marketing niche where people are talking about mastering your market. One of the key reasons that you talked about there of knowing what keywords people are typing in so you can be in front of that traffic. I know you’ve shifted, you said you were going after tons of different niches and now you identified one or two niches and you are going a lot deeper into those niches. Is that what you would recommend to people starting out or what are your thoughts on that?

Mike Woo-Ming: When I found out the market was doing really well, I actually formed a business for that particular market. So I have about six businesses where there’s one particular market that I’m in. It’s not to say I ignored the other markets, I just found that it was more profitable for me. I didn’t go in thinking I was going to sell eighty different information products. I basically found ones that seemed to work, for me, the more products I created, the more money I was going to make. So I was going to do as many as I can.

Things have changed. The internet has changed. For example pay per click is a lot more expensive than it used to be. What I would recommend, if you’re going to go into a market, not only that you think is going to be profitable, but it is something that you know. If you don’t know it, you will spend the time getting to know the market. When you’re going into a market you need to understand the language of the market. You need to understand the wants and needs of that market. If you’re going to provide solutions for that market, you have to know what keeps people up at night in that particular market.

David Jenyns: I suppose you need that to really speak to them. You know the health market and the internet marketing market. You can use the language that resonates with that individual. When I read your sales letter, you’re talking to me because you understand my language.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes, and that’s what you want. You want your sales letter to speak to one particular person. In that sales letter, something needs to trigger, this person knows exactly what I’m feeling. Maybe I can trust him to provide the solution to the particular need that I have at this time. So that’s why it’s really important to focus on that.

David Jenyns: Talking about this sort of thing, where are you seeing most people go wrong? Let’s say especially new people, but even people who have been around in internet marketing for a long time, where are people going wrong as far as some of the mistakes they’re making?

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s different for different people. I think the biggest problem that I see, especially for someone who is new to this and for people who’ve been around, is they listen to that voice in their head saying that this won’t work. They’ve either put a barrier up or they have an obstacle saying, this isn’t going to work. We all have these things. It’s how we adapt to these type of things. To be an entrepreneur you need to be able to take risks. You need to be able to do something and it’s going to turn out wrong.

What I find out is that there are a lot of people who have this fear that they’re not doing everything the right way. They say, for example, I’ll do SEO, I’m not going to create a product, I’m going to do Private Label Rights, or they do affiliate marketing. Then they don’t end up doing anything. My thing is, you stick to one thing and you do it correctly.

People don’t go to college and say they’re going to take every major. They’re going to specialize in one particular major or minor and they’re going to stick to that thing. The only way you can become an expert is to focus. I think what happens is that people are afraid that they’re going to do something wrong. The great thing about the internet is, you can do things wrong. I’ve done everything wrong, and I’m sure you’ve done things that are wrong. No one’s ever done it 100% right the first time that they do it.

Even if you make no sales on it, you’ve done it, and you can learn from that. There’s a reason they say, for every failure you have, you’re one step closer to success. The problem I see in internet marketing is, they think they’re doing something wrong, or they don’t have time to do it.

I hate it when people say that. I can’t fathom that because I was in medicine and I was doing this as a hobby. I only had maybe two hours out of the day for internet marketing because I was working. I was in a hospital, I had two kids, I’ve got a special needs child. I made it work. I wanted this to work for me. You have to have that drive. You’ve either got to do it or it’s not going to happen. So that’s the biggest problem I see.

David Jenyns: There were two ideas you touched on there. One, this won’t work, and also they’re buying every course and they never really get into it, they’ve got so many projects and things going. We talk about the idea of having too many projects on and the need to be able to focus.

You even talked about it at your Mastermind that you were at today, where you were saying everybody’s got too many projects going on, even at that level, because you move in some rather high level circles. Even at that level it still is a problem. Is that a problem then or have they found a way to at least try to, still having too many projects, but they maybe have fewer projects than other people who are going wrong?

Mike Woo-Ming: It really doesn’t matter what level you’re at. That’s why I like having Mastermind Groups. Even if you’re new to this, it’s always good to bounce something off others to see if this is going to work. We all have too many projects. But it is the implementation of what you’re going to do is one of the reasons I think I’ve been successful. I’ve done this for a while. I figure out which ones are going to go and which ones are not. You might be ready to pull the trigger on something, and then realize which project you can put on the back burner.

I’ve got projects that haven’t been done for three years. I’m stubborn because I think it’s going to be successful. I’ve got a business partner who’s in real estate. We chat. We’ve done all these different projects and made millions. We talk about our scrap booking project we’re going to do. It’s continuously on the back burner. It’s working out which ones are going to be successful and which ones you’re going to bring to fruition. We all go through this multi project type of thing. You’ve got to do something. Just take massive action on it and see what happens.

David Jenyns: I just have two quick questions I want to fly past you. With everything you’ve learned now, if you look back on the different steps you’ve made, can you identify a few key points of things you did where you saw that caused a really big effect on my business, when I did that, it had a huge leverage point? Are there any key insights you had along the way?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes, I think there are two main things, and they’re both related to each other. One was realizing that you can’t do this on your own. I began going to seminars and I actually met crazy people like me who do this for a living, that I wasn’t completely insane and I met like minded people who were entrepreneurial and surrounded myself with a good team of friends. I can count on them and I can call them on Twitter and I can Skype and bounce things off. I can’t go to my neighbour and talk to him about how can I best increase the conversions on my Squeeze Page. They’re going to think I’m insane.

When I want to seminars and met like minded folks and not only meeting but co owning a business with folks, that was a big step. The second thing was realizing that I can’t be a control freak and I realized I’ve got weaknesses and I’ve got strengths. I have partners who have strengths where I have weaknesses. For example, I’m not a very technical person. You start talking about PHP and things like that, my eyes are going to glaze over. I’ve got partners who you talk all day about that and they love that.

I realize I should focus on what I’m good at, and that is the marketing and there is the technical aspect and managing programmers and software, there are other partners who are better at that. I’ve got a partner in real estate, and that’s all she does, real estate. I don’t do that, but I can do the marketing.

Of course there are projects that I’ve done on my own. I also see my business change when I realize my own weaknesses. That’s another aspect people need to come to terms with. They become control freaks, but if you can find someone who does something better than you, partner up with them. You accomplish your goals much quicker.

David Jenyns: That is a tremendous insight as far as making those connections and you started off doing it through the seminars that you mentioned and then recognizing your own weaknesses. With some of the connections that you’ve made over the years in the world of SEO and even in IM in general, are there any people that you like to keep an eye on? I know you have a lot of projects, so it’s hard to keep up with everyone. Are there a few names that stick out for who you like to keep an eye on?

Mike Woo-Ming: Who I particularly focus on are folks who are not necessarily the big name gurus. They’ve gone into these really obscure markets. People like Ryan Dice who does theTotal Access Club. A lot of the stuff he does is in different markets.

David Jenyns: He’s in the Forex, isn’t he? A man after my own heart.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes, he’s in the Forex market. Guys like Frank Kern and Ed Dale and Yanik Silver. Recently I’ve been focusing on some people who are in the CPA markets. A guy like Mike Hill, I just had the pleasure of talking to him on the phone. They don’t sell typical internet marketing products that you see, but they have track records. And not internet marketing but just for my own nourishment, I focus on Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and those kind of things are just like food for the soul.

Internet marketing can be a lonely business if you let it. Most people are doing this because they want to work on a laptop and go to the beach and do those kinds of things but the reason people go to work is they have the whole social aspect as well. Now I have an office and those kind of things. I know for a lot of folks, they have to go to seminars to get that nourishment from other folks. It’s been a great ride.
David Jenyns: You’re definitely one of the people I watch and I know there are a lot people out there who keep an eye on what it is that you do. Your name sits very well in company with a lot of those names you mentioned. If people want to find more out more about you, what is the best website for them to check out?

Mike Woo-Ming: Just my general website is themarketingmd.com. It just basically talks about our different products. We have a mailing list to find out what’s going on. We do different workshops and different products. That would be the best place to go.

David Jenyns: Great. Mike, I can’t thank you enough. You’re extremely giving of your time. It’s very much appreciated. I know a lot of people are going to get a lot of benefit from this call. Thank you once again.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you Dave.

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Keith Baxter

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Name: Keith Baxter

Industry: Online Marketing, Traffic Generation

Website: www.keithbaxter.net

Product: Affiliate Radio

Keith Baxter’s Bio: “The voice of truth in a sea of insanity”

In a world filled with lots of online marketing gurus, Keith Baxter has concrete skills behind all his hype. Rather than selling programs with vague advice, Baxter specializes in a technique that generates so much Internet traffic for websites that it often causes online “traffic jams.”

Baxter has been online since the BBS days. He has run his own businesses since he was 13 years old. From dating services to fuel boosters, Baxter has always had a knack for business. In 1998, Baxter realized the Internet was the most amazing marketing tool the world had ever seen. He immediately began to chase down his fortune online.

Baxter is the first to admit that not all the projects he’s touched have turned to gold. In fact, he estimates that only one in ten have had a decent amount of success. He estimates that only one in fifty have really taken flight. He states that the true measure of success in his life had nothing to do with business. It was the day his baby was born.

Despite his modesty, Baxter is a self-made millionaire. His main focus has been in search engine optimization techniques. He found years ago that making even the slightest of changes to his websites made a dramatic impact on the daily traffic that would visit his sites. So, he decided to devote himself to researching the art and science of search engine optimization. Once he developed a decent amount of insight, he started writing and selling his knowledge to other Internet marketers.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from the SEO Method, welcome to another call. I’m very excited today because I’ve got one of my mentors when it comes to internet marketing. I’ve been following his stuff for a very long time. He’s been online for as long as I can remember. Way back in the early days, he was doing a lot of black hat, very aggressive marketing stuff: cloaking, doorway pages. He got his start very early on, before pop ups became annoying and people started hating them and people really didn’t know what they were. He’s been around since back then. I’ve followed his stuff with the Stealth Traffic Secrets. He talks about a whole variety of different traffic methods in that.

He’s always ahead of the curve. He’s sort of evolved a lot of CPA stuff through his website Modern Click. Really he spotted that out before CPA really started to take off in the internet marketing niche. Now it has evolved into what it is now. I’m very excited to have him on the line and find out some of the methods that he’s applying now, because no doubt again they’re a little bit further down the curve. I’d like to welcome you to the call, Keith Baxter.

Keith Baxter: David, thank you for having me and let me say just a few things really quickly that you and your listeners may not know. Modern Click was sold off about a month ago. I’ve now sold three businesses in the last eleven years, Modern Click being the last one. The reason is, and I think this is a big lesson. I know it’s not really SEO related, but it is a big lesson none the less. Modern Click, or any business that started at the beginning of a trend and then sold while that trend is hot, often gets a lot of money for the seller of that business.

We started Modern Click back in 2004-2005. Back then, people thought CPA meant Certified Public Accountants here in the United States. So there was a huge amount of retraining at least in the internet marketing business opportunity markets to educate people as to what CPA was and basically teach them what a hybrid affiliate network was. So we began launching a lot of special reports and joint ventures with brilliant marketers.

This is funny, and I’ll admit this on digital recording for the first time, the whole AdSense is dead. We fabricated that entire scheme in order to educate people away from AdSense and over to CPA in an effort to drive people into Modern Click. I know that’s a bit of a bombshell to drop right here but it’s interesting. If we look at how this began, it started with a report Ryan Dice and I did back in 2005 called Beyond AdSense. It talked about moving beyond and creating the evolution beyond just getting AdSense clicks.

David Jenyns: It was more about building a business, wasn’t it, that particular one? AdSense is just like one small part.

Keith Baxter: Exactly. And the interesting thing is, that report really went into how to use AdSense at that time as a market research tool. So it was really interesting. In 2007, I worked with another gentleman, probably one of the smartest guys I know and he wrote a report called AdSense is Dead. We had a joint venture. We were co owners of a product called Click Flipping at the time. Click Flipping actually started the whole trend of keyword tracking or tracking pay per click at the keyword level in Google AdWords.

That launched Click Flipping with the back end being, since you’re a customer of Click Flipping, come into Modern Click as a benefit of being a customer. It really established Modern Click as a pay per click as a CPA network. Now, this is funny, because here we are two or three years later, ppc to CPA is what everybody’s talking about. I know that’s not quite the whole SEO bit but nonetheless there are some interesting little facts there.

David Jenyns: With your past, and like I said, always being on the cutting edge and I know you really don’t like to talk about it too much, but if we do go back to 19999 when we were talking about the pop ups, and I know you were doing some stuff in the porn industry. That really is a cutting edge industry. I suppose because it is the most aggressive, because the most amount of money can be made online there, there are so many different techniques that have evolved out of there, having multiple memberships that all lead into one.

That was way back when Spyware got started. At least it was mildly legitimate back then. Dropping icons and trying to reduce the sales clicks to get through to making a purchase. A lot of this came out of that.

I think you talked about just then, the idea of CPA and selling it at the top of the curve. From a business point of view, if you’re going to build up a nightclub, you build it up, you get the crowd, you get everybody in there and then you sell your nightclub right at the top because that trend can change quickly. With all that said and done and showing you’re at the head of the curve, I’m interested to know, if you don’t mind me asking, where you’re heading to now?

Keith Baxter: Yes, absolutely. It’s funny because everything is cyclic. Speaking about the pop up days, and I’ll get to what I’m doing now in just a second, we were doing the kind of pop ups where you would visit a website and the pop up would pop up five minutes after you left the site. We were dropping icons, you mentioned that. I haven’t heard that in years from anyone. We were doing that back then too.

Another funny, interesting fact is we were one of the first sites to successfully use instant play audio on a website. So much so, that Alex Mandossian, a couple of years after that with Armand Moran came out with Teleseminar Secrets and Alex actually used my site as a case study for how to successfully do that. I was a student of Alex at the time and I just told him nicely, that site that you’re doing the case study on is one that I had for years. It was interesting.

Let’s talk about what is working now, why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it, just how I got there. As you said I have a black hat background which means that was my mindset, when it comes to content generation, when it comes to site development. Site development’s always been big and fast, the more domains the better. The content development’s always been keyword rich but yet spammy, often duplicate content. If it wasn’t duplicate content, it would have been machine generated.

And that was fine and well for years and years. I’ll make the caveat that we still make that work today. But I will say that what I am doing now on more of a mass scale is much different. It has a lot more sustainability built into it because, quite frankly, I’m tired of registering 2,000 and 3,000 domains spending $15,000-$20,000 on domains only to have all of them not renewed the next year because they were all blacklisted by all the search engines, not just Google.

So here’s what I’m doing today. I’ll give you the exact formula and then we can talk a little about that formula. Let’s paint the picture. A good friend of mine lives in the country. I live in Houston, Texas. Everyone associates Texas with wide open spaces for the most part. One of my best friends lives in the country and he does extremely well online and doesn’t work much. We just gravitated to each other over the years and developed a really good friendship.

One day sitting out on his back patio, smoking a cigar, watching his pond and just enjoying life a little bit and I said, tell me exactly how you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s working very well for you. We both have very different business models but we both end up at the same place.

He laid it out for me and for two years after he laid it out for me, I didn’t take action on it. I just said, that’s not the way I do things and I’m really not going to listen. Then one day, I said, just give his message a try and see if it works out. The kicker to his message is, it’s very labour intensive and I’m not a labour kind of guy. I want to have as few employees as humanly possible doing just enough to make the most amount of money. That’s my mindset.

There really is a magic button because there is that sweet spot and I found it a long time ago. But the problem is, as things change, either you change with it or you get left behind. That also means that the magic button shifts a little bit on the scale. Sometimes you have to bring in a few more people or you just have to work a little bit more to either make the same amount of money, make more money or just produce.

What ended up happening, I set aside a couple of days to do his entire process by myself just once, just to see. Basically it worked out to developing a five to ten page well written mini site. No big thing there. The whole key to the mini site is to provide value and answer the questions the market really does have. Not just questions that you assume they have, but questions that they really do have. You want to be looked at as, and I hate using the word authority because I believe a lot of people misconstrue the meaning of an authority site, but for the sake of this conversation, I want to say that you do want to be looked at as an authority. You want to be looked at as someone who is really answering some questions.

It’s rather like a mini Yahoo! Answers. It’s a little opinionated but yet you’re answering questions. Basically it’s a very small mini site and it’s promoted exactly the way I’m about to tell you.

I start off with some Link Vana links. I do about a 2:1 ratio of those Link Vana links, twice as many links to the home page as deep linked within the site. If I have a ten page mini site, and I’m going to do one link to each page, then I’m going to double that amount and point that to the home page. You have ten links going deep within the site and then twenty links go to the home page.

That’s critical. The home page always needs to have more links than your internal links within the site. Always. Here’s a big mistake too which I made for a very long time. My money page, the page that generated the action that I wanted a visitor to take, was always an internal page within the site and I would funnel links to that page. After a lot of testing, my money page is now my home page because that’s the page getting twice as many links. Why not make that the most authoritative page on my site? That’s big lesson number two.

Big lesson number three is article marketing. Let me tell you how I do article marketing. This is how my writer and my account creator do it, this is their process. Once the site is built, I have automated tools that will build the site. That site goes off to my writer with a list of keywords and questions that she needs to answer for the site. She begins writing those questions based on the keywords and on the questions she begins writing articles. She submits those articles at a rate of one per day to the site. In ten days the site is going to be done.

Now in that process, once the first articles are written, she passes it off to my linking guy. He’ll start the links with the first page and then at the end of the ten days he’ll initiate the links to the home page after one link has been submitted for each page to Link Vana. Then a second set of articles are written based on the same topic but nowhere in those articles is the keyword I’m focusing on listed. So they are relevant articles, just not keyword rich because, frankly, I don’t want those getting ranked, I just want the link juice. So a second set of articles is written.

But the key to this is, in the resource box of those articles there are two links and you can always have two links. Link number one, and I don’t really care how you write your resource box, for the sake of this exercise it really doesn’t matter. There are other artic le marketing experts that will tell you to lead into whatever you’re selling, affiliate program or what not. I don’t really care for the sake of this exercise.

So link number one, keyword rich anchor text is going to point to the page on the site with that link. If it’s an internal link within the site it’s going to be a second tier word/long tail key phrase or it’ll go to the home page. It doesn’t really matter it just needs to go to your site and go to the relevant article on your site that you’re aiming for.

The second link, and this is critical, is when that article is first published, it’s also going to be turned into a video. There is going to be an account created in YouTube based on the name of your domain. Then that video is going to be uploaded to the YouTube account. This is done manually. We get into the automation later. So manually the articles are uploaded and the second link in the resource box of the article then points to using one of the secondary key phrases that we initially found and targeted for this mini site points to that YouTube video.

Let’s recap. As an article is published to the site, that article is then turned into a video. That video is then uploaded manually to YouTube. Then a second article based on the same topic is written that is not keyword rich. Link number one points back to the article that was posted on the site. Link number two out of the resource box then points to the YouTube video. It’s pretty simple stuff to this point.

David Jenyns: Can I just dig down on one or two quick things? All of this is obviously is getting created manually. The way that you’re structuring it sounds like you’re probably using something like WordPress or something. Especially if you’re outsourcing it, that will make it easier for your assistant to do. Are these just little WordPress sites with content on it?

Keith Baxter: I am a WordPress nut. I am a WordPress freak. As a matter of fact my programmer, while he is very versatile and can develop just about anything, 90% of his time is spent right now on creating auto installers. Based on whatever target I have, he’ll create mass auto installers.

Since we talked about AdSense earlier, say I wanted to develop thirty AdSense sites based around ceiling fans. All of those domains are going to be keyword based domains. The way he has his auto installer set up, once I have the target set, I give him the target, he then uses the auto installer with our hosting and just uploads all of them. The auto installer uploads them, auto configures everything, creates to the point where then it’s sent over to the writer with the key terms that she needs to focus on and then she starts writing the articles after that.

It’s a very automated yet manual process.

David Jenyns: Yes, so from that point, you’ve written the content, got it on the website. You’re getting your ten articles on the site. Now are you going for real product specific stuff or are these mini sites based around a niche and those internal pages are longer tail keywords within that niche? Or are you going for specific product for these sites? It sounds like you’re doing quite a few.

Keith Baxter: We do all of the above. Surprisingly, we do Amazon single products and just focus an affiliate for Amazon. We do our own e commerce site so we’ll go out to China using Alibaba, find a product, import it. We do our own product sales. We’ll do products out of Commission Junction. We do AdSense, we do, of course, CPA. Whenever we find a good CPA offer ,we’ll promote that from other networks. That’s more for cost per click offers. Auto insurance, health insurance, dental insurance, anything that pays more than $2 or $4 per click, we’ll also build sites around those markets.

We don’t stick to one way to monetize it. Diversity for us is key. There is often, depending on whatever the trend is, let’s say schools starting up health insurance is a big topic. Our sites in the health insurance industry do extremely well. At the same time, our auto insurance while the auto insurance looks great in the summertime, it may decline at a certain point. So we like to diversify to keep the income levels high while mitigating any trend turn downs.

David Jenyns: So with the posting of the articles, we’re getting these new articles posted, are you doing just Ezine articles? Once that article is taken, is it published in multiple places?

Keith Baxter: Yes, it’s published multiple places. I said that these aren’t necessarily keyword rich articles being posted. We really like to use a service called Unique Article Wizard. It sends out a unique article to a couple of thousand places over a period of time. The links are slow coming in. You could set out how many links you want to post out daily through Unique Article Wizard. Using other article submission services, it’s like a one day blast for the most part. We set our links to around fifteen links per day where their default is around fifty. So we really do slow their system down quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the learning curve for Unique Article Wizard is a little high. But when you’re paying someone $500 a month for a job, who cares if they spend a week learning the system, as long as they learn to do it efficiently and correctly?

David Jenyns: I know with Unique Article Wizard, having chatted with some of the guys over there, they’ve literally come out in the last couple of weeks with a wizard that is supposed to make it a whole lot easier. We’re just testing it out at the moment. Hopefully that makes it easier for outsourcing purposes.

Keith Baxter: That’s been the biggest issue with Unique Article Wizard, the learning curve. But once it’s down it’s down. So your article writer has to write thirty versions of the article. Who cares? The amount of links you’re getting coming in, and in some cases fairly quality links coming in, makes it well worth it.

Let’s move on in the system itself. By this time we’ve initiated our links campaign, we’ve initiated our manual upload to YouTube, we’ve initiated our article marketing strategy which gives power to the YouTube video as well as brings links internally and to the home page of the site. Next we take that article that we manually uploaded to YouTube and we blast that out on a four time submit through Traffic Geyser, eliminating YouTube from the mix. We don’t re upload it to YouTube, we’re just now distributing that video out to the other video directories.

The key there is how you set up your description. Our descriptions for that, one, our title is keyword rich, so we ensure the keyword’s in the title, two in the description. The very first part of the description we obviously have the url pointing either to the internal page or the home page whatever our target is after that particular submit. Then we have a keyword rich description. Frankly, within the tags, we usually use about six of the keywords that are primary and five of the secondary keywords. We mix up those secondary keywords based on whatever our guy feels like doing at that point in time.

That’s the next step, is the upload to Traffic Geyser. The next step after that is, once all the content has been posted then we seed out the RSS feed to the RSS directories. While that’s not a big deal, most people get this wrong and they make this the very first thing in their system. The problem is, and here’s the key to our system submissions, you need to have at least ten pieces of content in your RSS feed to really get the biggest bang for your buck. If you submit your RSS feed with one piece of content, you’re not really getting a whole lot of benefit from submitting that RSS feed.

That’s the next thing, once you have ten pieces of content up there, which is pretty much a mini site, you then submit your RSS feed. That is usually more than enough to get a site done well. We haven’t even talked about Web 2.0 spamming. We’re not talking about getting blog comments. We’re not talking about buying paid links which by the way, depending on how much search volume you’re getting from this, buying and paying for links, there’s a big misconception out there.

In many cases it’s better value to pay for your links than it is to use pay per click. That’s a bald statement. It’s a statement that if you were getting traction using the system I’ve just laid out for you and then you go to target a secondary or a second key term that gets a good amount of traffic for that site, it’s often more advantageous to simply pay for links to boost your link count on that term than it is to pay on a per click basis through AdWords, YouTube, Seven Search, Bing, all the engines we all use for our pay per click.

The key to this is, this is not spamming, it is built for long term use. The links coming in initially are fairly decent high quality. There’s nothing that we can be gamed here. We’re finding that the three month mark is really the sweet spot here for this whole thing. About the three month mark, we can gauge the value of the site.

If we want to keep the site in our portfolio we can do that. If we want to turn around and sell the site we can do that. If we want to add more content to the site and focus on additional terms we can do that. Unlike the spammy stuff that I’m so used to do doing, there is so much flexibility that it makes sense to systematize the process, hire two or three people, set yourself a goal of maybe one to two of these mini sites per week, focus on products initially and then go into the cost per click CPA and additional monetary methods. It just makes a lot of sense.

David Jenyns: I know you’re really big on the systems and getting them in place, and I think that’s one thing that has obviously enabled you to do everything at scale. Is that where a lot of your time is spent? Obviously initially you’ve got to map out these systems and procedures and you talked about the way that you documented it. Do you also do the Camstasias and pretty much create that system and then push that off to the side and your main focus is to identify niches?

Keith Baxter: Yes, and I’ll tell you exactly how I do all of the above. When it comes to systematizing my process, once I’ve proved to myself that this is a worthwhile system to follow, and it had already been proven by somebody else, I just had to prove it to myself manually first. That’s step one-do something by yourself first and prove to yourself that it can be done, otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of time systematizing something that is not even a proven method.

The first thing I do, I usually spend about half a day to a day, and I take a pen and a piece of paper, I’m not doing it on the computer and I write out the process. Then I look at the process and identify what are the key components to that and what are the most likely people to do whatever. On my staff right now, I have a few article writers, I have a graphic designer and I have a programmer, I have a personal assistant and I have a project manager. This is for everything that we’re doing in my company.

The project manager is often my second level person. So once I’ve designed something, the project manager looks at it. I tell them what I think we need and then she comes back and tells me what she thinks we need. We figure that piece out. For this particular situation, we started with one writer, and just to gauge not only the quality of the small scale, because if you hire too many people too fast ,you’re overwhelmed. Initially I want to be able to oversee everything. I want to see the quality. I want to see how much quality output is being generated.

The particular writer who spearheaded our writing staff, herself could efficiently produce four high quality articles per day. We’re talking research, writing and good quality articles. We’ve had other writer s who could do ten a day, but they weren’t as high quality. So for us in this situation, we wanted quality over quantity.

Once we gauged her output, she was then passed and given a raise. She was then tasked to find other people like herself. We left that to her. Most people who are within an industry run with other people that are in that industry. I am an entrepreneur. I associate myself with other people who are entrepreneurs. Writers often associate themselves with other writers because that is their passion.

They can dip into that writing pool, find their friends who they want to work with and whatnot and bring them into the mix. We don’t really have titles, but she is the overseer. She brought in a couple more writers and it was her job to train those writers. Teach them what you do and do it just like you. That’s all we want.

The graphic designer, we have one and he does everything that we need him to do efficiently and with a high quality standard. My programmer, this guy can crank out a new program every single day if we want him to, he’s that good. Really the biggest expense we have is the writing staff. But for this particular project that I’m describing to you, that’s the key, it’s the content. We have a linking person. You can get a linking person from the Philippines for $300 a month. It is the simplest task of the entire process.

You can have your writers manage most of your linking campaign depending on how fast their output actually is and what your quota is. Other times you can have them double team the linking aspects of things. A lot of people get hung up and say, I’m doing all this myself. I can only output one of these mini sites with the proper linking campaign once every two weeks.

The problem with that thinking is, I have to ask, what is your time worth? Let’s say I say my time is worth $500 an hour. If my time is worth $500 an hour and I, by myself am producing a mini site and it takes forty hours a week for two weeks straight, that’s eighty hours at $500 an hour. So that site better be worth $40,000 the day it’s out the door.

That’s not realistic. Let’s say the typical American makes $20 an hour and you spend two weeks on it. That’s $3,200 for two weeks. If that site is worth $3,200, great. Is it profitable after two weeks and making that amount of time spent? You could have had a writer for $500 a month writing the content, freeing up, literally three quarters of that time. Where does it start to make sense that now out of eighty hours you can free up sixty of those hours which is worth $3000 to you out of your time and pay somebody $500 to do that task?

Then the big objection is, well I just don’t have any money to begin with. Let’s just talk about how you’re going to make this money fast. With sites like Site Flipper, you can build out a site relatively quickly, it doesn’t have to be anything monumental. You can often flip that for $500 fairly quickly. Ten pieces of content, nice decent site with a goal in mind, you can flip it for $500 and you take that $500. Sure it might have taken you a couple of days to build that out properly. We’re not talking about a two week project here, we’re talking about just slapping something together and reselling it.

You take that $500 and then you invest it in your writer. It’s tempting to take that $500 and pay the bills. But there are also things called business lines of credit. You could set yourself up with a simple corporation. Go to legalzoom.com and set yourself up a simple LLC. Go to your bank and set up a bank account. Get a small $5,000-$10,000 line of credit and work from that.

There is no business that’s ever been built from scratch with no investment capital whatsoever and made it. I have yet to know one company that started with absolutely nothing, not even $500 in seed capital, just zero. Everything started with some seed capital. So go get your $5000 line of credit and get it started.

David Jenyns: I think you just hit the nail on the head. You just need to make something happen. What you’ve outlined there, as far as the step by step method, that’s really very close to the system that we use and we’re getting really good results. You’re taking it to the next level in that you’re branching it out and really systematizing it and then getting it rolled out on these multiple steps.

We talked about the different traffic methods. It’s important that we get link diversity, but if you could say one particular link generation gave you the most bang for your buck, and if you had to pick just one, although I know it’s important to get that spread of links, where do you see, make sure you get this particular area right?

Keith Baxter: I hate saying this because I get sick of hearing it from other people, but really, the articles. The articles are a big deal. The problem and the reason I laid out the video strategy the way I did, with the linking from the articles is that, while I would love to say it’s our video marketing that gets the biggest bang for the buck, without having additional links coming into those videos, we find our videos drop after a week. They’re no longer listed at the top of Google.

But we’re able to maintain those top listings once we start getting some decent links coming into the videos. That tells me if it’s the article links that are giving power to the videos and keeping them up there, video links at a deeper level have to be more relevant or more powerful. They’re allowing our video marketing strategy to actually succeed.

A couple of things I didn’t mention. If you go to affiliateradio.com, just opt in and watch the video. I talked about some other things, some plug ins and the way that we structure our WordPress blog. They take advantage of a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff.

Also depending on how profitable it is and what the margins are, I know it sounded as if I was negative on pay per click, we do use pay per click on these sites if they’re profitable. So we’ll also throw in some pay per click campaigns. We’ll also do media buys depending on how profitable the pay per click campaigns are. By the media buys, that’s when we move our branch up into the CPV advertising. We branch up into the banner buys, we branch off into the email buys. Email buys are almost totally ineffective for us anymore.

CPV advertising, surprisingly Gauhur Chaudhry has come out with a PPV formula, which he calls pay per view, it’s actually called cost per view. Using his methods has allowed us to take our CPV campaigns to the next level. The beauty of our mini site foundation is, we don’t worry about quality scores, we don’t worry about gaming the search engines, iframing, we don’t worry about any of that stuff ,simply because our base infra structure is so solid.

I also want to mention this. You said this is very synergistic to what you’re doing. At some point in the evolution of this stuff, the minds that are really doing it and making the money with it inevitably all end up at the same place. You were doing this before I laid this out. I was doing this before I knew your system. We all find our way to the same place.

David Jenyns: You mentioned you’re not doing too much sneaky stuff. I am curious, where it is appropriate with the terms of service for certain affiliate programs. Are you doing any cheeky cookie stuffing or anything like that?

Keith Baxter: Yes, we were. There still are some wonderful stuffing programs out there. The issue with that is that when you lose a ClickBank account that had a lot of money in it, at some point you think is it really worth doing it? It’s just as easy not to fake the search engines or fake how your traffic is being driven as it is to just do it legitimately. You sleep a whole lot better at night not worrying whether or not your account’s going to be shut down for whatever you’re doing.

It’s a pain to get a new ebay account, it’s a pain to get a new AdSense account. It’s almost impossible to get a new Commission Junction account. Once you actually start making money from them, you have to treat them reverently. You want to put them up on a pedestal. I don’t want to mess them. I want to make sure they’re there three years from now, or five years from now.

David Jenyns: I love that. I deliberately threw that out there to get a feel for where you’re at now. You have shifted. We did a lot of similar stuff especially in the AdSense world where we got to a point where we were trying to keep our networks separated. I was going down to my local library to make sure I could log in on a different IP address so that they wouldn’t figure out it was the same person using different names, addresses, all that stuff. There is nothing worse than building a really good AdSense income and then having Google shut your entire network down.

Obviously they can link stuff together purely based on the fact you’re putting the same AdSense on different websites. It’s heartbreaking because you spend so much time doing that and then it disappears. They’re the judge, jury and executioner, and you say to Google how have I broken my terms of service, and they say, go read the terms of service. We’re not going to tell you what you’ve done wrong, we just tell you that you’ve done something wrong and three strikes and you’re out.

The idea of building these almost separate little businesses, it really does create a certain level of stability. I know you talked about all the different affiliate programs you go after as well. If one does fall over, or doesn’t quite work, you have got that rock solid thing. I am curious, linking different networks together, and if you’re building these out en masse with the method you outlined, once it gets to a certain point, you’re then further putting more energy into that website with Web 2.0, media buys and paid links. That happens after the website starts to prove itself.

What sort of tracking are you doing? Are you just putting Google Tracking Analytics on all these sites, now that you’re doing everything white hat?

Keith Baxter: Yes, Google Analytics. We’ve used Woopra. We’ve used several different tracking systems in the past. But we’re not doing anything sneaky.

As a matter of fact I do want to talk about this for a second, hosting. I know this is probably the least sexy subject we’re going to talk about today. But I will say that if you’re using a shared host and you’re getting any amount of traffic over a hundred visitors per day, you are going to lose money being on a shared host.

So our hosting for the most part is on dedicated servers. I also use SEO hosting, not that have separate IPs for doing any linking. We’re not doing any internal linking between sites, I just like it from a management perspective. There are newer servers coming on line and they’re fairly robust and we haven’t had any real down time from those.

But if you’re using a basic Hostgator $7 a day account and you’re getting more than a hundred visitors a day, I guarantee you’re losing cash. A t some point, once you’re profitable, at some point you have to make the decision to go to a dedicated server because that dedicated server has the uptime necessary. What’s going to happen? You have a high quality lead coming to your site. They’re visiting your site, they’ve hit three pages so they’re very interested. Your bounce rate is low on your site and then you notice that your sales are down.

You say, what’s the deal? This person saw three pages, they visited my money page, but I didn’t make any money. Probably it was because half the time when they hit that money page, the site went down. A lot of times people don’t look at that as a factor in the business. Any sizeable traffic numbers, especially if you’re on a server and a hundred of your sites on that shared server, that’s sharing it with two thousand other sites and all your sites are generating a hundred visitors per day and the server is down more than it is up. To me, that’s worse than black hat.

Now Google’s not going to index your sites well enough because half the time they visit, your server’s down, your load times are so slow that Google Bot is going to bounce after three seconds. So if it can’t load that page quickly or at all for that matter, what is going to happen? Your pages aren’t getting indexed, your visitors aren’t taking action, so hosting is a huge deal and I think that is something that nobody focuses on.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think having those right tools in place are very important, especially when you consider if your business is, I’m running websites, that’s your core business, then you should be happy to invest in infra structure, in terms of buying your own computer hardware and so on that you’re using at home. If this is your core business, you might as well spend the money and make sure you’re doing it right. You should treat it like a business.

Keith Baxter: Yes, that is my rant for the day. Everybody laughs at me because I always have a rant on every call that I do. This is a business, treat it as such. So many people don’t, they just don’t take this stuff seriously.

David Jenyns: I think that’s one of the areas you’ll see people going wrong, is not taking it seriously. Like you talked about earlier, it’s important to just take action. Are there any other sorts of mistakes that you see people making? It doesn’t even have to be new people, just internet marketers, and you see they just keep on doing this?

Keith Baxter: Cookie stuffing is one, always looking for the shortcut. I’m probably the worst person to give that advice because for years that is exactly what I did. It took a long time to change that mindset. But once that mindset did start to shift, my income went up, my stress levels went down.

I’ve always preached this. The one big thing that you want is a saleable asset. Most of the time when you’re doing any sort of trickery and you’re going to a broker or an investment banker and listing your business for sale and a prospect comes in to look at your business and the due diligence phase begins and you don’t disclose that you’re doing some kind of trickery that inflates your numbers and then your business sells and it comes up that there was trickery being done, you’re open to lawsuits for not disclosing certain facts.

If you do disclose that you’re doing trickery, that is a total turn off to a legitimate business looking to make an investment. So by doing it this way, your saleable asset is actually saleable. One of my core philosophies is always start with the end in mind. So if I’m going to build a site, if I’m going into a niche, are there targets in that niche with money that would be interested in buying this business?

While I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing that, in some cases I do, depending on what is my immediate goal for that. But that is something to keep in the back of your mind. Program your subconscious mind to think that way where you build out a mini site. It’s produced $20,000 for you over a period of a year. Based on what some brokers can get, usually a four times yearly return. So now you’re looking at a possible $80,000 sale for a mini site that took a week or two and a little bit of energy to get some links to.

Often if you start off with a good, aged expiry domain that already has links, we’re not even going to get into that tactic, you can accelerate the process of selling that business drastically because now you’re able to throw in the fact that your ten year old domain that is not banned, it has links before it even got started, so you’re able to do a little bit more manipulation. It’s not manipulation, it’s just acceleration of the sale of the business.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, it feels as if this call is a little bit like AA, reformed black hat marketers anonymous.

Keith Baxter: It is. It’s just like AA, if you think about it like this. Just like AA, those that have hit the bottom, understand the beauty of life, now appreciate what life can bring them so much more than somebody who’s taken it for granted the entire time, hasn’t hit bottom and constantly repeats the same stupid actions over and over again.

But once they hit bottom, they hit AA, they go through the twelve steps, start understanding that life’s more about giving than it is about receiving. But it’s like that. Here we are, until we hit bottom, and bottom for me was losing a lot of money from some accounts that got shut down, realizing that that business model was flawed from the very beginning and realizing a lot of my successes had been lucky up to that point.

I know this is a kind of universal, rather hokey thing, but if you don’t give back either in terms of knowledge, money, physical assistance, or whatever it is, if you don’t give back to the universe by helping out somebody else with something, you’re doomed. That’s a lot of the reason on this call in particular, when I agreed to do this call. For me, I’m not holding anything back. I’m telling you how it is because I hope at some point it affects somebody’s life positively.

So many of these calls are based on a hidden agenda of selling something to you. And that’s not what this call is about. You could take everything out of this call and use it.

David Jenyns: It’s much appreciated, and I know anyone listening to this would find it helpful. It sounds a little bit motivational but there was also a slight undercurrent of, we hope you hit rock bottom because that’s when you’ll start to appreciate things.

The other thing I want to ask, looking back, now you’ve done a great deal of stuff from selling businesses to the early days of internet marketing as well. If you could look back, and if you’d known what you know now, where do you see the biggest leverage points? The points where you can say, once I did one or two of these key things I really started to see my business grow? One of them you already identified, which was, now I’m really going to go white hat. I’m going to provide value, I’m going to reduce my stress, sleep better at night and I’m going to watch my income go up by building something of value.

Are there any other key leverage points that you can look back on?

Keith Baxter: Yes. I’ve sold three companies and it’s always what assets the company has. When it comes to online properties, one of the assets is a buyers’ data base. That is gold. The larger the buyers’ data base, the more money you’re going to get for the sale because that is just like easy marketing for the new owner.

Cash flow is king too. So if you have any kind of recurring element coming in, that’s good. I love white hat sites. There are a couple of things you can do if your goal is to start a business that is for sale. One is to add a very low price form or whatnot, something relevant to the topic to the site add it to the site. Russell Brunson is big on the free DVD, give away one DVD a day, whatever it is.

My big thing was, I created a lot of software applications and sold them for $1. The whole point of selling it for $1 is, I couldn’t care less if I made money. I didn’t make any money on those. After delivery costs it wasn’t a profitable thing but I was building a buyers’ list.

If I made a dollar, that is a buyer. If your goal is to sell the business, maybe invest in something that you could sell, give away and maybe even create the funnel earlier on, just build a list. I know a lot of people say build a list. But build a list with the intent of getting all the contact information and hopefully some kind of sale from somebody, 50c or $1, just to create the buyers’ data base.

Then when you do take this to a broker and they ask, list all your assets, you can say, I have a buyers’ list of 32,000 people who have all paid money to be there. There’s a lot more leverage in that than if you say, I have a cool site that is getting 32,000 visitors a month. Visitors per month can go away but your buyers’ list is a little more tangible.

David Jenyns: Even just the idea of selling the business, if you look back on some of the big capital events in your business career, do you look back and see the points where you sold businesses, where you got the most amount of cash?

Keith Baxter: Yes, not only did I get the most amount of cash. We made money every day. That’s not a big deal. But when you get a really large wire into your account, it’s almost like, I can’t describe the feeling, it’s almost surreal. It’s just a big deal. Realize there are a lot of strategies to selling a business that are not obvious. One is, cash offers are always going to be about half of what the actual offer is. I like to take cash offers. I just like the money right then and it’s still substantial for the most part.

In any major corporation the CEO’s job is for the most part fostering relationships, finding the opportunities to expand the business often through acquisition. That’s my role. A lot of people laugh, because if I were to list out all the businesses I’ve been a part owner of, within the internet marketing niche itself, a lot of people laugh.

John Jonas is an expert in outsourcing. He laughs at me, I mean we’re good friends, and he laughs at me all the time whenever we get together. He says, did you own that one, did you own that one? I‘ve owned a lot of businesses because I look at myself, I am a CEO. I’m a CEO of my business obviously, and how much reach can I have? How far can I take my business?

I’m not a household name, which is wonderful to me. I don’t have to be a household name because I’m not in the guru business per se, I’m in the business of business. This is what I do. I’m not a limelight seeker trying to speak at every seminar across the country to promote my business that way. That’s not how I see building a sustainable business. My approach is a little more tactful. It keeps me a little more under the radar. Through certain events a lot of people have heard of me. I shy away from attention. It embarrasses me and a lot of times it’s just odd. It just feels weird.

David Jenyns: To go for something a little bit cheesy, you’re a bit of a ‘do ru’ not a guru. To finish up on the tail end of this interview, one of the last things I like to find out a little bit about is, in the world of IM and SEO, who are some of the people you keep an eye on? You mentioned John Jonas.

Keith Baxter: Yes, John Jonas is a friend. I have a couple of little Mastermind groups and so, obviously, we all keep up with each other. I would say the smartest SEO guy in the world is a guy named Jerry West. Another guy I have a ton of respect for is called Nathan Anderson. When it comes to statistics about what is happening on a technical level, those guys are gold. There is no doubt about it. They’re numbers guys. They run numerous tests, look at the empirical data and say, this doesn’t make sense but the numbers say it does, so let’s run the test again. If the test comes back with the same results, ok.

Jerry is on my speed dial, so if I have a question, say my rankings are dropping and through my own knowledge I can’t quite figure out why, I call Jerry. Jerry is the man. That’s my opinion.

David Jenyns: Yes, anyone who gets out there and tests is great. That’s one of the things I really love about you is that you’re out there and testing it. It comes through in just the way you talk and the conversation we can have shows that you’re out there actually implementing it, you’re not just out there talking about it. If people want to find out more about you, and I definitely recommend that they do, you mentioned the affiliate radio website. What are some of the ways people can get in touch with you?

Keith Baxter: Right now, through affiliateradio.com. I’ve sold Modern Click, so I really don’t have that outlet. My vision for Affiliate Radio is interviews with experts, my own commentary, at some point an actual radio show with guys there talking throughout the day on various subjects. That’s my interest. Everything on there is for the most part free. At some point, I’ll have a back end built onto this thing. It’s all worked out, it’s just not the right time. So affiliateradio.com is a cool place. Come on, listen to some interviews, leave a comment, that’s it. It doesn’t cost you a penny to be there.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well, I can’t thank you enough again Keith, I appreciate your time. I know you’re super busy and very much a family man and that is your number one priority, so any time we can get is very much appreciated.

Keith Baxter: I had a great time in this interview and thank you. You’re in Australia and I’m in Texas so it’s probably nine o’clock in the morning for you. It’s 5.30 pm my time, so I’m just wrapping up my day. You had to wake up early. So I have more respect for you.

David Jenyns: It was well worth it. Thanks again Keith.

Keith Baxter: Thank you. Talk to you soon.

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Eugene Ware

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Name: Eugene Ware

Industry: Online Marketing, SEO

Website: Market Samurai

Eugene Ware’s Bio: If you’ve been watching the internet marketing world for the past 6 months there’s a very good chance you’ve heard of the SEO tool “Market Samurai”… It’s pretty much come out of the gate as an indispensable addition to any SEOers toolkit.

What you probably don’t know is who’s the mastermind behind it?

Today, I’d like to put the spotlight on Eugene Ware, one of the key player behind Market Samurai. You’ll rarely hear from Eugene since he’s a “behind the scenes guy” but he’s had more impact on the internet community than most people recognise.

Starting out in the early days with Ed Dale, Eugene was instrumental in the development of what has come to be known as the “UnderAchiever Method”… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns from the SEO Method, and I’m very excited to be joined today by Eugene Ware. I don’t think many people know this guy. He’s extremely underground yet he’s been around for as long as I can remember in internet marketing, but always behind the scenes. In the very early days he got started with working with Ed Dale and did some stuff where they built up a web development company and then also helps develop the precursor to the UnderAchiever Method which was called the Cashflow Machine. That’s where I first found out about Eugene’s work. That sort of evolved into the whole UnderAchiever Method with Frank Kern.

He really has been in information marketing for a long time and helped consult a lot of IM gurus especially here in Australia and helped build up and manage the propertyinvesting.com.au. That was for the whole Steve McKnight information marketing side of things. To cut a long story short, Eugene really knows his stuff. He’s more well known at the moment for the work he’s done with Market Samurai. He’s one of the main guys over at Market Samurai, I thought it would be awesome to get him on the phone, quiz him about SEO and what he does with his business and SEO. I’d like to welcome you to the call Eugene.

Eugene Ware: Pleasure to be here.

David Jenyns: We’ll just dive straight into it. I’ve got a few questions I want to ask. This is a particularly broad question. When you’re first starting a new website what are the sort of steps you’d take to drive traffic to a website? Where do you start and what is the process that you go through?

Eugene Ware: It’s sort of a mixed question. I could talk about people having online assets so online assets being products and content and links, the number of people on your prospect list, your customer list and your partners. The answer to that question really depends on taking a look at your own asset base, wherever you are at and looking at what’s most appropriate for you. So for me if I was to start today, I’ve got a very large data base, so my first action would be to email my database about that and drive a lot of traffic that way and then go on to talk to some of our partners promoters and do it that way. That’s talking from me personally where our business is today.

Saying that, over fourteen, fifteen months ago the current company I’ve got, Market Samurai didn’t exist. I had one or two things on my asset list which was I knew lots of influential people in the marketing world and so from that perspective, my first port of call was to try to do something with them that would be of interest to them that they would promote to their list and then of course be able to build my list up as a result of that.

That’s me personally as a company. From the perspective of someone starting out with essentially nothing, no large leveragable relationships or no list or those kind of things, thing I’d think of going either the SEO route o0f the AdWords route to start generating traffic and therefore start building a list is definitely where I would start looking at things.

David Jenyns: So I guess on of the key takeaways I got from that was the importance of looking to what you’ve got, or what assets, leveraging off those, work off where you’re already strong. Then look to build a list. You did mention pay per click as well. Let’s say you were starting out or even consulting with someone, where would you suggest they start, with either pay per click or SEO?

Eugene Ware: To answer that question is purely based on your asset base. If you don’t know what you’re doing in AdWords, you’re going to be very poor very quickly. It’s going to get eaten up very quickly, you’re going to waste a lot of money learning to play the game unless you know what you’re doing. So I wouldn’t necessarily be telling them to be doing the AdWords thing without having a very strong training or strategy behind doing that without buying some good course teaching you how to do it.

Saying that, though, I think there is no faster way for someone to test the market even if they’re losing money via AdWords. So if they’re looking at getting their toe in the water, and I’m a big believer in testing the market, then AdWords is fantastic whether you’re starting out or not starting out and you’ve got some online assets behind you, AdWords is a very quick way to put your toe in the water.

Saying that now, with some of the SEO methodologies around today, it’s very easy, if you know what you’re doing to actually dominate a keyword very quickly in a matter of days to weeks depending on the strength of the competition around the keyword. So it really depends on what your time horizon is to actually get a result.

So if I wanted to know in a couple of days I’d probably go the AdWords route. If I was happy to play around for a couple of weeks and wait for the results to come in, then throw up a site to SEO some keywords to get some traffic to test the commerciality of that traffic is something I would take a look at doing.

David Jenyns: With both of those it sounds like the first place you start is your keyword. We mentioned market research and then keyword research flows on from that. I know that’s a real strong point of yours. For the keyword research, what sort of process do you go through, and does it vary between the pay per click and SEO? What sort of process do you go through for identifying what sort of keywords to go after?

Eugene Ware: Well the same principles apply for AdWords and SEO. There are a number of things I look for for a keyword and most people make all these mistakes. We coin the phrase, there are three golden rules you need to get right when picking a keyword. The first is you need to pick keywords for traffic and while it seems really obvious, most people who just randomly pick a keyword will just have such abysmally small amounts of traffic around them to not even be worth your time to do anything about it unless you want to do this across tens of thousands of keywords.

So finding a keyword with traffic is really really important. Until about twelve months ago there was no good way to actually find out how much traffic a keyword had because Google kept all that information to itself. We had to use other services which really only extrapolated a small subset of that data, so until recently we had very poor data. Now we can find those keywords which have traffic.

After you’ve found the keywords that have the traffic, and this applies as much to AdWords as SEO, you need to pick off a keyword that has an acceptably low level of competition that you can actually realistically compete. The number one mistake most people make is they pick a keyword that is just too tough for them, If it’s starting out from scratch with no page rank, no links, then it’s not to say you can’t get any results but you are limited in the result you can get in a small window of time. You need to make sure that when you’re going after a keyword that you can effectively compete for that keyword.

Otherwise, and I think Guru Bob talks about this a lot, it takes exactly the some amount of work to succeed as it does to fail. For all this hard work, all this optimization, all this link building, if you pick the wrong keyword, and it’s just too hard for you, then you’re stuffed. So you need traffic and you need low enough levels of competition.

The third thing you need to check is the commercial value of the keyword. This is something that really blows my mind and no one really talks about. I can speak from personal experience.  This is a really valid way to look at the market. You need to make sure that the keyword that you’re picking has commercial value, that there is evidence of people selling something, hopefully something similar to what you’re planning to sell. You want to see evidence of people spending money in that market, particularly advertisers in that market. You need to make sure that people who are advertising are taking a look at their business models and making sure that there is a long term business model in it for you if you’re going to go into to a market.

There are ways of measuring that and people seem to pick keywords that they’re ordering first by how much traffic they have or how little competition they have, but very few people make the obvious thing and just say I want to pick the keyword that’s going to put the most amount of money into my pocket in the shortest amount of time. For me that commercial value is really important, and there is a range of cool ways that you can measure that these days.

David Jenyns: With the commercial value, I’ve heard of a lot of people talk about this sort of thing in the past, you look at two good examples of that. One is the tattoo market and the dream analysis market, both of which have quite a lot of searches, dream analysis even more so. There are quite a lot of searches there, yet commercial value on that particular keyword is low. Most people are looking for free dream analysis, and they’re not really going to buy anything. You might do your research like Eugene just said, tick off traffic and tick off low competition and say, ok, here’s a keyword I can go after. Then when you actually come to the market and try to monetize that you’re not really going to have anything.

I think a lot of people get scared away from markets that have competition, and if anything, I think Jeff Johnson talks about this, you want to go after markets with competition because it shows there is money there. All you have to do that is just a little bit better.

One thing you did mention that I was interested to find out more from you, because I know you guys do a lot testing over there at Market Samurai with the traffic component, and you talked about, of late or relatively recently, Google started providing some sort  of insight into how much a particular keyword’s getting, through some of the testing I’ve done, I’m seeing massive discrepancies. For example, you can have number one position ranking for a keyword and  not even get one tenth or even much less than that, click throughs on that particular keyword. What are your thoughts on the way to use that and do you take it with a grain of salt?

Eugene Ware: I think ultimately that’s the thing of testing, you do take it with a grain of salt and you do look to multiple sources. Just like with share trading you don’t buy something just based on one signal you look for multiple signals to be saying the right thing before you take action on something.

David Jenyns: I didn’t know you dabbled in the stock market!

Eugene Ware: Yes I did the daytrader HQ training and did a bit of day trading.

David Jenyns: That’s where I got started in daytrader HQ and then I went on to be a trainer for Home Trader.

Eugene Ware: No way! Small world! So you do take it with a grain of salt. Most people get so tied up with analysis paralysis, and particularly with the product we provide, we provide data that people can just get so obsessed about and it’s good that it does provide some discipline and some rigor to what can be a very risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I like to do an AdWords campaign first and actually confirm the data. I know that the AdWords data should be a percentage of what the full number of searches are and AdWords will tell you the number of impressions that your ad got as well. So if you’re looking for confirmation you could spend a little bit of money to get that insurance that the traffic is behind a particular keyword.

I certainly do the AdWords, throw it to a site and test the commercial value and the conversion and the traffic before I was to invest heavily going into that market.

David Jenyns: So one of the first stages, both pay per click and SEO is obviously to do some keyword research. Maybe if we head a little bit down the SEO track, because obviously you can take those keywords and load them into your pay per click and start to do your monitoring of conversion and that sort of thing and tweak things.

From an SEO point of view, once you take those keywords, how do you incorporate that into a site that you’re going to promote? Maybe we should start, are we going to talk about a sales letter type site or an e commerce site? But how would you go about a website once you’ve done your research? How many keywords do you pick out and where do you start?

Eugene Ware: I try to pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped with each other that meet certain traffic competition and commerciality filters that I put on them. So I basically say I’m looking for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, so it’s going to be worth my time, with a decent amount of commercial value is what I’m really looking at. Obviously it’s going to be the way my competition threshold based on what my SEO asset base is in terms of my other sites and my ability to get links. So I like to think of this cluster of keywords as essentially becoming categories. If it is a blog on my site I typically have somewhere six to twelve major keywords or something behind my site. But there’s definitely some semantic clustering of those keywords. They’re related to each other. That is really one of the cool things behind Google keyword tool. They’re actually giving you semantically relevant keywords and that’s really important.

What are you thoughts with that whole semantic thing as well? It leads into the whole LSI and is that something you pay attention to?

Eugene Ware: Well, not to argue about this for an hour. LSI is a specific mathematical algorithm which absolutely Google does not use. That’s very different from the perspective of saying well, does Google consider semantic relevance of content and semantic relevance of links? Absolutely it does. If you’ve got a website about a whole lot of unrelated topics and unrelated content, it’s not to say you can’t rank well, but you’re going to rank less well than someone who has a very tightly themed site.

So the LSI argument out there sort of misses the point. They’re saying, do they use this algorithm? The reality is they do use an algorithm. I’ve seen videos of Google showing semantic scoring algorithms that they’re using. So they definitely are using semantic algorithms in the background.

It boils down to quality. Google wants to serve up the best quality content for any keyword and if it finds a nice, tightly themed site which is all about a particular keyword then it makes sense that that thing should rank more highly than something else potentially.

David Jenyns: Once you’ve got those six to twelve very tightly semantically clustered keywords and you load them in as your categories, beyond that, if you’re making posts in there, are you going for even longer tail keywords?

Eugene Ware: The first thing, if my purpose is to test the market is to validate that there is traffic in that market. The key thing about testing is to risk the minimum amount to get a quick result back. So you don’t want to over invest in a website when you’re starting out. When you’ve tested the market you’re already in, you’ve done some AdWord testing, then you can go hard at it. But from the testing perspective, you should be still looking to put posts of those category keywords and then I’ll go into link building in a second, but do some link building and then just wait and measure what happens.

If there’s an action you look at the reaction and if you’re not seeing positive things then you have to start asking the questions why. At least you haven’t over invested into a market from an SEO perspective anyway.

David Jenyns: With on page optimization for those keywords if you’re creating posts, apart from the basics that most of my clients know everything, from keyword in the right places: your title tag, meta description keywords and then a little bit throughout the page, even an H1 tag, and a couple of links don’t go astray as well, is there anything much more that happens from an on page point of view?

Eugene Ware: Not really. Only just looking at internal linking structure and things like if you’re using a blog to rank, things like tagging and those kind of things are really important and actually looking at site structures to get the best bang for your buck on those sort of things. Really there’s not that much to the on site optimization. It’s the internal link structure which stuffs most people up.

David Jenyns: What are thoughts on the way of no follow? Leslie Rohde obviously made that really well known quite a few years ago now and it really did get used quite a lot. There are supposed to be some developments of late, some change in that. What are your thoughts on no follow at the moment?

Eugene Ware: I think it’s a bit disappointing. Google is on the back foot now. No follow is still no follow. It’s just that they’ve changed the rules to prevent something called page rank sculpting from happening. So a lot of those techniques that people were using to concentrate page rank on those pages in their website are not as effective as they used to be. It was actually a nice trade off between nice good  navigation for people who were visiting your website and the ability to pass page rank and guide you  to pages that you really wanted them to see.

The side effect of this decision is probably going to be a lot of people are going to be going back to what happened seven or eight  years ago just using a Java script links and those sort of things to try to create a set of links for navigation and a set of links for SEO. This is really sad.

David Jenyns: Yes. And I think for me now the first thing that popped into my mind was, well, now the aim of the game is how many pages can I create rather than really sculpt these pages and have that page rank funneled. Leslie Rohde talks about when you create a page you’re creating a page rank out of nothing. A brand new page with no links to it has some PR value in it, and it is between zero and one, but there is some value there. What you want to do is just all about the numbers of those pages.

Eugene Ware: To some degree. I think really the best way to think about page rank, and Google is on the record for saying that their published algorithm for page rank is really different now, it’s changed. Even when Matt Cutts joined he said it was very different to what the published patented algorithm was.

But aside to that, the original idea really was that page rank was the probability that a random guy surfing the web would land on your web page. So if you had more content out there it does makes sense if you link it well and you have external links to those pages, you have a higher probability of stumbling on the page if there are more pages out there.

Obviously if there are more keywords out there you can potentially rank for as well. So I think you’re right, although obviously you can go too far in that direction as well.

David Jenyns: Yes. So once we start to create some of these pages and we’re testing it. You do a little bit of on page stuff and then start on your off page campaign. What sort of things do you do? Do you follow a bit of the Thirty Day Challenge sort of process or do you have your own sort of process that you’ve adopted when you’re trying to rank a site?
Eugene Ware: The Thirty Day Challenge process is pretty much what we use in house, the first bits of it. The first challenge when you have some content is to get the thing indexed and build up some initial links to that content so that content gets discovered ideally with those keywords in the links linking to your web page. That makes a difference. So the first thing is using social book marking, RSS submission. Whether you do it manually, and we use Traffic Bug which was promoted in the Thirty Day Challenge this year.

That is essentially to build that first set of links. Each of those links is relatively low value. At that stage of the process it’s about getting indexed, getting relevant links for a bunch of low competition pages. Now that might be enough to see some good rankings based  on those initial set of low ranking links that you’re building into your content. But that is certainly where I would start because it’s so easy and it has become part of our publishing process and that’s why we’ve built it into our product Market Samurai.

After you’ve published your blog you just click a button and use the keyword and write some description about what your content’s about and you’ve got a couple of hundred links being  built  over time from social book marks and site directories and RSS submissions. It’s quite low value but it’s enough to kick start the process.

David Jenyns: When you said you might even get some rankings for some of the keywords, obviously you’re going to continue to build to links to some of the other keywords and your core domain name and the primary keyword. Let’s say you’ve picked up some of those secondary keywords, do you continue to build links for that? I know Ken Giddens told this story a very long time ago about outrunning this bear. All his friend needed to do was outrun his other friend and he would be fine. After you’ve got rankings for some of those words, do you then focus on other words?

Eugene Ware: I believe in having the best return on my time. Everything I try to do is in as leveraged way as possible. So I would take a look at where I am getting rankings and take a look at the associated traffic with those rankings. If I’m in position three for a keyword and  I know that with very little work and a bit of additional link building I can push myself to a two or a one, that is a massive percentage increase in the traffic from a positional increase of one or two.

I’m always going to focus on what’s going to put the most money in my pocket. So that is going to focus my link building. You look at what the ranking is. That is the importance of making sure you’re monitoring the rankings on a regular basis. My big problem with the world of SEO is you ask two hundred SEO people in a room the same question, you’ll probably get two hundred different answers.

What people need to do, and it’s really important particularly if you’re considering SEO being part of the strategy of your business that you learn to learn for yourself. Don’t just take what other people have said or believe a lot of myths that are out there. You need to learn for yourself. The only way to learn for yourself is to take an action and measure the response of that action. So use some sort of tracking solution to monitor what you did and what the response was is going to teach you a lot more about SEO than ten thousand dollars of SEO courses.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you hit on some key things there. For me it all comes down to taking that action and getting some runs on the board. By just doing something, I think that’s the real key.

You did mention things like monitoring your keywords. And for people who are looking for a way to do that, we’ll talk a little bit about Market Samurai. I know within Market Samurai there’s the rank tracker, which is a really good of keeping on top of what rankings you’re getting for particular keywords that you’re targeting. In addition to the social book marking and the RSS submission, what sort of other link building mechanisms do you go after?

Eugene Ware: I call that level one link. Level two link building is, when you are getting positive results, you don’t want to over invest in the market. If you’ve done a little bit of work and you’re not seeing any positive results at all, then you might want to consider moving on or not it depends on your understanding of what that market is.

The next thing I would do is move into leveraged link acquisition. There are few solutions out there where you can acquire hundreds, if not thousands of back links, certainly hundreds from a variety of different sources very quickly. That’s actually using article marketing or content syndication methods. The two I use are Article Marketing Automation which is ridiculously cheap for what you get and Unique Article Wizard which is a big article syndication network.

They’re two services by crafting an article from the perspective of getting other people to publish that content on their site, you can get a whole lot of links back to your site. The trick is actually how to use those links to your best advantage having a linking strategy that’s going to work for you. There are a lot of people that use it very poorly and just use it to spam a whole lot of stuff out there. But it you put the work in and particularly if you write properly spun content then you can for very little effort get a big result.

In most cases for most keywords you’re going to do very well using those solutions.

David Jenyns: Let’s say you’ve got a primary money site that you’re looking to promote using some of those services which could be argued to be somewhat grey hat. Is that something you try and distance.

Eugene Ware: I talked earlier about acquiring assets. I thin k the greatest asset for people playing in the SEO space can do is build up their own network of websites that have page rank, that have good authority and good reputation. So certainly you’ve got to keep your money site absolutely pristine. You might be doing a lot of these link building activities in your content cluster, you blog network that you’ve got outside and then channeling the power that your building up their to your main site. That’s why I was saying about the link building techniques that you were using. Make sure you are doing that effectively across your entire cluster of sites.

David Jenyns: You mentioned level two being leverage. Do you include stuff like your Ezine Article and those more Web 2.0, not that you’d call Ezine Web 2.0, but Squidoo and Hub Pages. Do you include that as part of that level, or is that level three?

Eugene Ware: Again I think it boils down to return on time. It takes time to write that content. If you write your content correctly for content syndication then you can take a unique spun version of that content which you’re going to syndicate anyway and submit it to EzineArticles first, because they need to have unique content on their site. They’ll do a due content check first. Wait until it’s accepted by Ezine of course and then after that’s finished then go and syndicate a version or spun version of that content using some of those syndication platforms we talked about before.

You can do the same with Squidoo and all the different Web 2.0 properties. That’s certainly a super effective solution. Again you’ll look at the time that goes into that as well. You want to take an action and see positive feedback before going back and investing further in it. There are solutions to build up leveraged 2.0 properties and submissions, but a lot of them are very spammy. I personally don’t use any of them.

David Jenyns: You mentioned with AMA and Unique Article Wizard as well spinning of the content and then getting that out. From a point of trying to get that out as high quality as possible, I know that’s something that we’ve had in the past outsourcing. You really do need to teach people how to use the system. They need to understand the way the linking methodology works so they’re shooting deep links in and they’re also shooting links off to other articles to promote your promoting pages. Do you have any tips on the spinning side of things?

Eugene Ware: Yes, a couple of things. There are some automated solutions out there. Ninety- nine point nine percent of them are rubbish. There’s at least one of them I know of that’s quite good – one called Content Boss, which does a pretty good job for an automated solution. We’re looking to integrate that into our tool very shortly. One of the critical limiting factors for most people for SEO, you need to have keyword and you need to have content.

For most people writing the content is really painful. If your not knowledgeable about the content, you’re going to outsource it and getting a spun version of that can be challenging. Content Boss is one solution for that and there will be some good human solutions available for writing spun articles shortly.

David Jenyns: So we talked about some of those different methods and then you try level three. They might be the more manual type, you’re not necessarily getting as much leverage. We talked about a few of the different things, like the EzineArticles. Where do you see 2.0 and any other strategies?

Eugene Ware: I think Web 2.0 is the thing that you logically pursue probably shortly after that leveraged stuff. I wouldn’t call it level three, maybe level two and a half. Some of these Web 2.0 domains are having a lot less impact today than they used to. There are still some ways out there to find some good sources of good quality back links. One thing Google is on the record saying is they’re actively going after sites which give links away too freely.

They can measure that and they can see that; they know what a blog is, and they know what a forum is. There is now a Google forum search that they’ve added in. Presumably they know what some of these Web 2.0 sites are as well regardless of follow or no follow. It would make sense that they discount the value of content that’s been built on that site. Whether or not that’s happening today, I’m sure a degree of it is or it certainly will in the future. From that leverage perspective you need to make sure what you’re doing has some long term value as well. You might use some things that are classified in the grey hat theme today, but you need to fundamentally provide value out there playing within the rules. That is so that long term you’re getting results.

David Jenyns: So that was level two and a half. Is there a level three?

Eugene Ware: There is a level three, but there is no panacea for level three. Level three just finding good quality places to get links back from. That’s when you or someone you’re paying is going out there and finding links manually building rank links from high quality sites.

For me personally it doesn’t make a lot of sense. From a time perspective, I know there are companies out there that do it. I would much prefer to own my own assets and build them up over time and then point those assets at my own sites. The fundamental of business strategy is the word control. You need to be able to control your destiny and be able to influence things. To the degree that you are reliant on getting links from those other sources in some way you have less control.

Ultimately you should be trying to build up your own assets so that you can influence the results and get the results that you want.

David Jenyns: In part of level three as well would you include building your own network?

Eugene Ware: For me that’s probably level four really. Level three is, what I tell people, is going to be manually getting links from people. Level four is really moving to the next level moving to build up your own assets.

David Jenyns: Is there a level five?

Eugene Ware: I don’t think so. I mean you becoming the platform that people are getting links from. You being the next Wikipedia or something like that, you being the next Web 2.0 site, potentially.

David Jenyns: We talked about all the different strategies you use going from the initial let’s get it indexed to some leveraged methods and then also talked about using Web 2.0 and the next level up going out searching for those really good quality links through some sort of content exchange or providing articles to have published. The next level obviously, level four is building the network and really owning those links. For what it is that you do, there’s quite a bit of work there. How much of this are you outsourcing or keeping in house? This is for you more personally.

Eugene Ware: We have our network of blog sites. To be honest we don’t use them for ourselves. It’s out testing bed, our laboratory so that we can test strategies just for the development of our own SEO product we know that whatever we’re doing is working, or when hear something we can test that it works. The reality is that for our own business we do very little SEO. It’s the cobbler’s son with no shoes sort of thing. It’s quite funny.
For us we do very little of that. What it boils down to is a discussion between SEO and business. I think the fundamental question to ask is, most people are asking what is the minimum I can do to get the biggest impact in  my life, and while it’s a good question to ask from a technical perspective, it’s a bad mentality to have. It’s a much better mindset to say, how can I serve the maximum amount of people.

If you ask that question you’re going to get a different set of answers than if you asked the first question. From our perspective for the business, we don’t necessarily use SEO in the way we talked about just then. What we do say is creating content should be part of every single business.  Regardless of what your strategy is. Creating content, having conversation creating fantastic value, serving as many people as you can through the value that you’re delivering through blog posts, through videos, through audios, through Web nars, through whatever form it takes, through software, put as much value out there as possible.

Now you’re going to put that content out there anyway. So why not put that content out there in the most leveraged optimized way possible? If you just put that content out on you own website and you don’t link to it and no one ever finds it, you’re not creating value for people. Value is created when people see the stuff that you’re putting out there.

When you’re putting out a video, using Traffic Geyser or something just to get it out to as many platforms as possible, when you’re putting out an article, looking how to syndicate that onto as many platforms as possible and using AMA with good quality content that you’ve written to get it out there as much as possible. Look at everything you do and make sure if you’re going to do the work once with a little bit of extra work you can receive a hundred times the reward particularly if you’re disciplined about doing it with every single piece of content that you put out there.

That’s personally how we use the stuff. We use our own content, leveraging things. One thing our product has been quite poor in the training of things. We’ve relied on third parties like Thirty Day Challenge and StomperNet and other people to create content around our product. We’re doing our own training and our own content to amp up the amount of content that we push out there. We’re putting in a very highly structured list to say if we do an article, we need to do this and this and just make that a part of every bit of content that goes out.

David Jenyns: Almost like a system there. I like it. One thing you mentioned, and I did hear Rich Chefron talk about it a long time ago, just by putting out good content, and by positioning yourself as the market leader, SEO happens naturally at that point. I feel like SEO really is the on ramp when you’re first starting out to get you to that critical mass. Once you get to critical mass you don’t need to focus on it so much especially if you’ve got that system in place. It’s something that just kind of happens I n the background.

You talked about providing good value products with real value to people, to the end user. You’re not just pushing out rubbish. I say this with a little bit tongue in cheek. As far as ranking, and we understand the importance of getting a variety of links to the website, but where do you see you get the biggest bang for your buck for the links you do get? If you had to pick just one, and we’re by no means advising anybody to do that, where do you see getting the best bang for your buck?

Eugene Ware: From links. Obviously apart from great content and just getting great organically linking stuff back, apart form that, I think just looking at AMAs and AWs. Had I known about these services earlier in my career, if I’d known some of these things existed, it would have been a different story. There’s some good bang for buck there. What I said earlier about getting links too easily, I think these services will decline in value over time but certainly make hay while the sun shines.

David Jenyns: Leading on from that, where do you see the biggest opportunity for getting rankings? You interpret that in any way you see fit. A big opportunity for rankings, is there any insight there?

Eugene Ware: Yes. There are a number of places. We all know that ranking in the long tail is really the ultimate. One of the things where the continual, new, fresh source of long tail keywords every single day is in new products that are being created. A lot of people are going to search for Samsung TV Model 1736, that kind of stuff. I know a lot of people are automating that kind of stuff, but there are still big opportunities in having a system that’s taking a lot of these new product names and just building content around them and links around them because there is such low competition.

If you can have a system which doesn’t require you or you can outsource that and leverage that up then if you go after a specific niche in the products that way then you can probably do very well.

The other area is just in localization. One of the massive opportunities, and you and I know about this being from Australia, is just targeting local markets whether at a country level or even a suburb or a state level. This is done by taking a lot of keywords that are proven money keywords and simply combining them with locality names and suburbs and that kind of stuff. It works particularly for things that people are more likely to search for that are specific to a location because maybe it is an offline business or service or something like that. I think there are massive opportunities there.

There are some changes in the search engines that I’ve seen where you can essentially type in a suburb or a postcode and say, show me the businesses or the results that are specific to that postcode. That is where SEO is going. The guys who are first to that market and start dominating there will have a really big advantage, so I think there will be opportunities in that market.

The other thing is SEO for video. Anyone who’s put out a YouTube video knows its essentially indexed the moment that it is published. Within minutes you will see it rank. There are a lot of big opportunities to SEO for video. The issue with video is that you are one step removed from a call to action. There are some changes to YouTube space to make it a lot easier for you to link off to your own web page over time and they will come through shortly. That will change the video SEO game as well quite a bit as well, so they’re the major ones.

David Jenyns: You’ve ticked some great ones there. To build on that local search as well, I know Frank Kern had that tool a while back and it was used more for your pay per click stuff where it added the keyword modifiers in. You’d put in your city state and they would just get plastered onto the front of whatever keyword you’re going after. Doing that in SEO I can see huge potential there, especially when you search on Google now and that little local map comes up. That’s more so for if you’ve got a real business with a locality.

I think there are some key easy at the moment what is low hanging fruit and a lot of opportunity there. Some of the ways to identify, we talked about this a few times, Market Samurai is a really powerful tool and I think the brains behind it, yourself, Guru Bob and all the insight that you’re getting from the Thirty Day Challenge team and now also with that StomperNet insight, I think we’re going to see some fantastic things in there. It’s really the one stop shop when it comes to keyword research. We mentioned the tracking function and the keyword research.

The good thing I like about the keyword research and the SEO competition is the analysis you can do on keywords that you’re going after to look for the factors that make for a website as to the ranking it’s getting: the age, the PR, how many back links it’s got, all that sort of stuff. It’s all very easily done within the Market Samurai. You guys are constantly putting any new functionality in there. I know you’ve got the AdWords module that’s coming. Are there any other sort of things that are coming down the pipe? You mentioned one of them a little earlier. Are there any other things coming down the pipe for the Market Samurai?

Eugene Ware: Yes we will be coming out with a link building solution shortly. We’re trying to solve what is quite a difficult SEO problem. We’re looking at how we can deliver the most value and make it acceptable for mere mortals because it is a bit of a nerdy thing to be doing really. The degree to which we can make it accessible for mere mortals to do and even professionals that just need to do it a lot faster.

One of the raw building blocks for successful SEO is keywords and when we launched that was the  major feature of our product,  keyword research and keyword analysis and doing the competition analysis we talked about before. And then content. To rank you need something to rank for. So the ability to find content or to write content is something that we’ve got some functionality to do.

You also need to find a way to make money depending on what your business model is. I’m not sure if you’ve had a look at the monetization module that we’ve released with Market Samurai, but that’s all about very quickly finding affiliate offers, so if you don’t have a product, with having a product and with a couple of quick clicks building up ads and then publish it straight to your blog.

The next logical thing we’re going to be looking at is link building. That’s a really critical factor. Fundamentally SEO boils down to that link building war at some stage. That makes it easy for people to do what they should do, what they know they should do, in a leveraged way with a couple of clicks and just build a whole bunch of links. They should do that for every piece of content on the website. That’s where we’re headed. There are some other things that I probably don’t want to talk about and that will be coming down the track. It’s essentially that we’re looking at the big problems. Most of the features that we built into our software, we’re just looking at what people are asking for and giving it to them and looking at why they are failing. We’re looking at giving them tools to help them in those areas where they’re not so strong.

David Jenyns: The biggest thing I see, and you see it with a lot of different tools especially with a lot of different functionality is the more tools you can add into something, you want to keep it as light as possible while being intuitive enough that you don’t get lost in it. At the moment I think Market Samurai has got that handled quite well. It’s quite logical and intuitive the way it goes down and I’m sure as you add in those different types of functionality you guys will hold onto that as well. I think that’s one of the things that sets Market Samurai above the pack as a keyword research tool, and the minds behind it are really quite sharp.

If people want to find out more about Market Samurai they can Google Market Samurai and it will obviously come up number one. Or you can head to the seomethod.com/samurai.

We all know about the importance of having your keyword in the domain name, and that’s an easy way to get some quick rankings, what’s the play behind something like Market Samurai. I think I have an idea why you’ve done it, but why did you go for something like Market Samurai as opposed to Keyword Research Tool or something?

Eugene Ware: Ok. There are two things there. One is why don’t we have the word keyword in there. We actually own Keyword Samurai and that will actually redirect through to marketsamurai.com. The vision we had of the software was, it’s hard, because when you start of with such a strong keyword tool you’ll always be remembered in the market as the keyword tool.

We don’t see ourselves as being a keyword tool. Keywords out there are free, we provide a level of analysis. In fact if you download Market Samurai today you actually get the keyword module free. It doesn’t expire. The other modules in the tool expire, but the keyword module which is why 90% people know us and is the most used module there, we actually give away free.

What we do see ourselves as being is a work flow tool. We want to be the internet marketing operating system if you want to call it that and you start from the keyword, and then you need to find some content and then you need to find a way to monetize that and then you need to publish some content, write some content and then you need to build some links and then you need to monitor your position in the search engine. So we see ourselves as a workflow tool that you open up every single day to actually get SEO done. That’s why we call ourselves Market Samurai.

When we have the AdWords functionality in there it’s going to be not just SEO, that’s why we used the name Market. The reason we called ourselves Samurai. Originally we wanted to use the word ninja. People talk about ninjas and that’s a real ninja tool and it’s where you get internet marketing space. I was coming up with a name for the business and the tool and I spoke to my wife and she’d just read about a famous samurai. They’re about discipline, about doing things ethically, integrity, they’re about honour, and it really encapsulated some of our views on business.

We’re not about getting rich quick, we’re about building long term sustainable wealth that will last. We’re about putting value out there. We’re about doing things different to, hopefully it’s seen to be different to some of the people in the internet marketing world who just want to make money.

So a bit of it is just what we’re about as a company and we want to create good quality stuff and really we do want to help people succeed. Google is a multi billion dollar business because they put out trillions of dollars of value. You’re a million dollar business because you put out tens of millions of dollars worth of value. So we’re trying to put a lot of value out there. With our tool, it is ridiculously cheap, people keep telling us that, but we really want people to have good experience and a high value proposition there because we want to work with our customers for the long term. That’s why the word Samurai.

David Jenyns: I think the way you explained all that and a lot of what we talked about tonight gives fantastic insight into the fact that you must have some really good mentors and some people that you follow. In the world of SEO who are the people you watch out for? You know SEO so what does the SEO guy look at when he wants to learn SEO?

Eugene Ware:To be honest a lot of the stuff we learn is stuff we try ourselves or from our peers. So I spend a lot of time on the phone Mark Lindsay and Guru Bob and people like that just because we hang out and we’re friends. So in terms of where the leading edge is coming from, they’ve either come up wit it themselves or read about it, so that’s the majority of stuff.

Aside from that, stuff I do follow quite religiously is obviously the Google Web Master stuff. I cannot believe how many myths and lies and old wives’ tales people are still talking about today when you can just read the Google Web Master blog, follow Matt Cutts, watch his videos. They tell you in black and white, this is the way it is and this is the way it isn’t. Getting it from the source I think is critical. Everyone needs to be listening to those people. If you’re not you’re going to hear it second hand, it’s going to be processed. It’s going to be people’s opinions about it. You need to go directly to the source.

Apart from that there are just a couple of email newsletters that I’ve randomly signed up with. One is called WebProNews which is quite good and SEOmoz is a good place as well. But for me really it’s people that are doing it and Gogle themselves. I would say they are the two key places and just what we learn from doing it.

David Jenyns: I think you’re definitely someone who people would want to watch out for as well. If someone wants to find out more about what you do, where can they? Obviously they can check out theseomethod.com/samurai or they can just Google Market Samurai. Are there any other ways that people can keep in touch with you, Twitter or a website?

Eugene Ware: Yes, my Twitter name is eugeneware all one word, and that’s one way you can keep tabs on what I’m up to. The blog that we’ve got is noblesamurai.com/blog my name might not be at the bottom of some of the blog but  will certainly a lot of the content and ideas do come from me. That’s another good way to keep in touch with what we’re finding out.

David Jenyns: Well can’t thank you enough Eugene for your time. Much appreciated. I think you’ve provided some terrific value just in this one call here. You’re very free and giving with your time and it is much appreciated.

Eugene Ware: A pleasure to be here.

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James Schramko

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Name: James Schramko

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.internetmarketingspeed.com

Product: SEOPartner

James Schramko’s Bio: A school buddy of mine (quite high up the Mercedes Benz corporate ladder) first told me about this guy using SEO to sell cars in one of their prestigious Sydney based dealerships. Despite being on a pretty good wicket, this guy decided to throw it all in to become a full time Internet Marketer… pretty cool huh?

Well he went on to build an empire, in what feels like, record time. Looking back now, moving into the world of internet marketing, was probably the smartest thing he ever did.

So who is this guy?

His name is James Schramko and now it seems like he’s everywhere (nothing like turning on your RAS)… another one of my school buddies is going to his seminar, he’s hanging out with friend Pete Williams, he chats with the PLRpro boys and he’s springing up on affiliate leader boards everywhere (just saw him in the top 5 for John Carlton’s launch)… suffice to say he’s killing it online.

Anyway, I decided to track the man down to find out what he’s doing. As it happens I was no stranger to James, he had seen my work before, and was only too happy to offer his time.

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