The Foolish Adventure Show | Internet Business Radio

In this episode you’ll learn what it takes to live anywhere and keep running your business. Some of the advice may be seen as a sacrifice and if you feel you’re sacrificing instead of gaining something new, then the Hobo CEO lifestyle may not be for you. But if you’ve got faith that living where you want and running your life the way you want My guest, Chris Kirkland of Artweb.com, shares his journey of leaving England for Japan with a round trip ticket. You’ll also hear how and why he skipped the return flight and stayed in Japan. Chris has taken the concept of Time, Income and Mobility freedom and truly integrated it into his life so that he can travel (and live) where and when he wants, have enough money to support the lifestyle he desires and enough time off to be able to indulge his interests. Chris also shares the trials and benefits of having business partners. Even if you’re not interested in traveling while running your company, you may be interested in learning how to deal with partners so that you can grow your business and limit the downside risk of bringing someone into the business. This is definitely a Time, Income & Mobility episode to listen to.

8 Common Analytics Mistakes Made By Online Entrepreneurs I’m joined by my good buddy, Dan Norris of Inform.ly, to talk analytics. Since Dan runs a startup that helps entrepreneurs analyze and keep track of their analytics he is seeing several mistakes being made over and over in online businesses. Dan is going to walk us through these mistakes and show us how to correct them. The Eight Mistakes 1. Not having good access to data 2. Not measuring anything 3. Not thinking like an experimenter 4. Not measuring the hard stuff 5. Addicted to vanity metrics 6. No idea about LTV or CPA 7. Drawing incorrect conclusions about experiments 8. ?????? Here are the shameless plugs Dan mentioned in the episode: Most important metric – Quora CPA Calculator Content marketing analytics Actionable analytics email course These links are also great examples of content marketing you can implement into your business.

For today’s guest, Terry Groulx (pronounced grew), the answer was definitely, “Yes.” As he shares his story of searching out and buying an existing business, you’ll learn why and what happened before, during and after the purchase. Even after doing his due diligence, Terry found several surprises that had a big negative impact on the business. But, you’ll hear how Terry overcame these problems and how he fixed several problems in the business he knew about. As Terry went to work on the business, he was able to quickly achieve profitability even with repaying the Small Business Administration loan he took out to buy his company, Ahna Inc. If you’re interested in buying an existing business, then this episode will give you plenty of insights to help you find, evaluate and purchase one.

In today’s episode of The Foolish Adventure Show your intrepid host (that’s me) is joined by adventure philanthropist, Scott Brills. Indiana Brills (no one calls him that) shares his tale of driving a shoe — yes, a shoe, from the United Kingdom to South Africa. Scott and several of his friends turned two Subaru cars into Converse sneakers and drove them over 13,000 miles to raise money to help educate children in Ethiopia and to fund water wells through Charity:Water. You’ll hear how Scott ran his business with limited Internet access, overcame break downs (both mechanical and personal), evaded bandits, and so much more all while having a Foolish Adventure of a lifetime. What I love about Scott’s story is that too many people think they have to work their whole lives, save their pennies, retire and then go have adventure, or worse, to start doing good in the world. Scott shows us through his actions that you can help those in need while running a business and designing a fulfilling life. Don’t wait for someday. Have adventures now. Do good now.

Do Not Feed The Trolls I’ve been known to take a tough-love approach to customers and prospects, but… I’m good at customer service. I really care about my customers so I do my best to go above and beyond their expectations especially when something goes wrong or their not satisfied. However, I’ve learned over the years that sometimes the best way to deal with some customers or audience members is to fire them. In this episode, my guest co-host Lain Ehmann comes back on to ask how to deal with haters and how to know if someone is a hater or actually has a legitimate criticism of you and/or your business. Listen in an implement these lessons in customer service.

Get Your Content To Market Your Business In this episode, my good buddy and mastermind member, Damian Thompson of Linchpin.net shares how to create a content marketing playbook to guide your content creation. No more haphazard approach. No more publishing whatever comes to mind. When you create your playbook you’ll be just like a coach guiding the players on the field. You’ll be able to make changes to your content to fit the needs of your market, which will attract your target audience and get them to know, like and trust you. Inside you’ll learn why a “Big Idea” is important to your success and how your content reinforces it. You’ll set your content marketing goals so you know what is effective and to create an efficient system of creating content and getting it seen by your audience. Listen in now and start building your Content Marketing Playbook.

Increase Sales and Lifetime Value of Your Customers Using an autoresponder email series, you can generate more revenue by… get this, helping your email subscribers to actually achieve their goals. My guest today is John McIntyre of DropDeadCopy.com, a friend I made while visiting the Philippines. John had set out to become a copywriter and found his niche. Writing compelling email autoresponder series that get prospects to know, like and trust you. In this episode, John shares his strategies for crafting emails that get results. He does this by writing as if he was sitting down with a friends over coffee and sharing stories that can help them get what they want in life. He uses his fruit and vegetable juicing site as a concrete example on how to do it. We go into the technical stuff too. John and I both use Aweber for our autoresponder, but we mention several others that are very popular and used by some of our friends and peers. Take notes because you’ll get the steps to creating your own compelling autoresponder series in this episode.

Using The Myers Conceptual Design Model On today’s show I have Keyser Soze, aka Jon Myers, who is an international user interface designer, digital nomad and secret agent. I kept hearing about this Jon Myers guy who was super-smart and worked on really cool projects for big international corporations, governments and military contractors and is a serial startup entrepreneur. Through the use of a few dead drops and an assassination of a banana-republic dictator, I was able to get the elusive Jon Myers (who was holed-up in a luxury hotel in Dubai) on Skype for a conversation about good design principles and how they affect the success of your product — whether physical or digital. This episode won’t teach you to be a designer, but it will give you the insights you need to work with a designer or for a designer to guide clients to a successful design. Inside you’ll learn about Jon’s 4 Part Design Model he uses to articulate design principles to his clients and his own startups.

Well, Chris Ducker of ChrisDucker.com is here to help. Chris fully admits to being a crap manager, but… He has a growing company with over 200 employees. How can a guy who says he isn’t a good manager run such a large and continually growing company? Listen in to hear Chris Ducker’s UnManagement Secrets.

Many times we don’t analyze our sales funnels to see if we have accidentally put barriers between our products and our customers. Sometimes the barrier is that there really isn’t a funnel in place — just a buy button. Sometimes we mimic other sales funnels we’ve seen and put in steps (or don’t have steps) that aren’t needed for customer acquisition. In this episode, I bring on Rob Hanly to discuss how to create sales funnels that actually work. Rob gives us basic frameworks to work with from finding our ad channels to getting people to take action.

Do You Have A Business Or Are You Self-Employed? Out of the hundreds of businesses that I’ve worked with very few had a sellable company. That means that after all the work they put into their business it wasn’t worth anything to anyone else. Even though I’ve call myself a marketing consultant I end up doing a lot of systems consulting so that my client can gain control of their Time, Income & Mobility. In almost every case my clients don’t have the proper systems — software, hardware and people, in place that would allow them to 1) have a life outside of work and 2) have an asset that they can sell or retire from. Another area I work with my clients on is to take some of their net profits and invest them into other cash-producing assets and even to just set aside some cash for savings. You’ll learn about these systems in this episode and more as James Schramko and I discuss building and accumulating assets. One of the reasons I like having James guest co-host the show is that he is so open with how he is building his business that you, dear listener, get true insider information you can use in your business.

Special guest, Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers, joins us to talk about copy. I do like learning about copywriting, but it has always been something I’ve struggled with. I’ve practiced writing copy on and off for the last 14 years and I feel I’ve gotten good at identifying good copy, but have a hard time writing it. So anytime I get a chance to talk to an excellent copywriter, I take it. Joanna has gone from “creative writer” to copywriter extraordinaire by learning some relatively simple copy practices which she shares in this episode. Inside you’ll learn how to: Swipe your copy right from your prospects’ mouths Research your market’s secrets… that are hidden in plain sight Have others write your headlines and have your customers love it Use the 3 levels of a call to action to increase your conversions and much more. I will warn you… I was in a goofy mood when I spoke with Joanna so you may get bombarded with my bad jokes along side Joanna’s brilliance.

Get Unstuck By Rebooting Ever have that feeling like something wasn’t quite right in your life? Derek Sivers of CDBaby & TED Talks fame had a similar feeling even though he was successful by most any measure. After selling his company, he almost started another company since that was what his operating system was programmed to do — have idea and act on it. Derek set out to change his operating system. A complete reboot of the scripts that ran his life. I’ve been on a similar path since 2008 when I started giving away my personal possessions. I was running on a script of make lots of money, spend it all and repeat. I needed to examine the scripts I was operating by and then systematically reprogram them to get new outcomes. That’s what this episode is about. If you feel like you’re operating on the wrong programming then listen in to gain insights on how to get unstuck by installing a new mental operating system.

Start, Grow & Profit From Email Did you know that email marketing is dead? Yep. It died years ago. Unfortunately, no one told all the people who were making anywhere from thousands a year to 10s of millions from their email lists that email no longer worked. Well, there is a renewed interest in email marketing now that all the social media hubbub is cooling down. I’ve been pushing email marketing onto my clients for over 13 years and the power of email hasn’t diminished — changed? yes, but not lessened. In this episode, Patrick McKenzie of Kalzumeus Software shares with us his experience using email marketing in his software company and for his clients. You’ll learn why email is important and how to get started. You’ll also learn effective ways of communicating with your list — first lesson is that it isn’t just a list, these are real people who have entrusted you with their attention. I’ve been wanting to cover email marketing for awhile now and I think this is going to be a part one on the topic. I intend to bring on additional guests to talk about their best practices so that you get a well-rounded knowledge base for your own email marketing.

I invited my friend and mastermind member, Jesse Lawler of Evil Genius Technologies, to come on the Show to answer a question I get frequently in my inbox, “How do I make an app if I’m not a programmer?” Jesse is in the business of making apps for other companies and for himself so I reckoned he would be able to tell us what process we should take to get our ideas turned into apps. Listen in as we cover some pitfalls of hiring developers and what you should do to have a successful outcome when working with a developer. I’m probably going to bring Jesse back for a part two since there was so much more for us to cover. Enjoy your Foolish Adventure, Tim “Kiss My App” Conley