Internet Marketing Magazine

Donovan Kovar is the CEO and chief strategist of the 24-7-Sales.com agency. Donovan has a strong background in Adwords, Search Engine Optimization, Lead Generation, Sales Funnels & Multivariate testing, just to name a few. Donovan’s impressive list of clients include but are not limited to Perry Marshall, Ryan Deiss, Perry Belcher, and most recently myself Greg Cassar. Lot’s of business owners talk about ‘they just want free traffic’ with SEO but there is also a valid argument about the benefits of paid before free. What’s your take on this horse before the cart argument? Many businesses speak to us about "I want help with SEO" and what that conversation leads down the path to is “You think you just want SEO, but what you really want is better conversions. You want traffic that's really targeted. You want a workable, predictable model." I turn the conversation to looking at paid traffic first, because we know we can control paid traffic, and the days of firing a bunch of backlinks at a site and ranking number one for your main keywords are gone. Google has changed their algorithms, and they've cracked down on link spam, and the things that we used to do that were considered legitimate article submissions and blog posts - we have to be much more careful about that now. So, I've turned the focus to Adwords as it is scalable, consistent, and can be used to consistently build a business on it. Once Adwords is optimized and we know what are the 20% of the keywords are that bring 80% of our buyers, then we can then focus on the SEO part, and we can tune the website. We can start to make sure the website is optimized for those keywords and that they're being used properly. In some of the backlinks, but not many of them, we would use that keyword. I position SEO now as icing on the cake. Any traffic that you get organically is icing on the cake, but it could be gone tomorrow, so don't build your business based just on it. Greg: Another point here is people think about Google Adwords on its own. I could have a guy as skillful as you do my Google Adwords account, but if my site is ordinary, then it doesn't matter how skillful the Adwords guy/girl is. So a focus on the page and call to action that we are sending the traffic to is also crucial to see that it’s optimized for them to take the primary desired course of action. You work with organisations of all sizes on their Adwords optimization. What are some of the main ways that you see businesses wasting money with their Google Adwords? Donovan: That's an interesting question, and it varies across the board. But mostly I would say not utilizing negative keywords properly; not split testing ads and spreading ad groups out too thinly. Effective Adwords advertising is a constant pruning process. What I do is similar to a gardener or somebody who's running a vineyard - You're constantly massaging and training your vines. Making sure they're getting what they need, and they're being trained to move in the direction you need them to go. When I go into campaigns, the first thing I look for is whether or not conversion pixels are properly placed. You really need to make sure that you're properly measuring what's going on, and that's where conversion tracking is crucial. Also with Negative Keywords I like to think "Is that part of the buying vernacular? Would a buyer actually use that word?" And if not, then in a shared library I build a master negative list, and we just keep adding those keywords - I like to keep them broad matched, one keyword, if possible. Negative Keywords when applied correctly really does eliminate a ton of waste. With Adwords, it's really about being vigilant about eliminating waste, eliminating negatives, split-testing your ads. There is a distinction I call ‘Ad Control’ - Ad Control is being in control of your ads. And if you're not in control of your ads, guess who is? Google, and they want your money.

Justin Brooke is a Traffic Strategist of the very highest magnitude. Justin is a hard core direct response marketer with his finger very much on the pulse of the ever changing Internet Landscape. Justin’s agency IMScalable has generated billions of ad impressions and sold millions of dollars worth of products for their high profile clients including Snuggie, Trump University, Agora, Russell Brunson, Rich Schefren and many others. Many people associate you as a ‘Facebook Guy’ because you have been so vocal in that space online in the last year or so, but I see you are now very big into Adblade and other Native Advertising.  What can you tell us about advertising on these platforms? Justin: There is a huge world outside of Facebook, but over the last year or two, that’s what everybody wanted to hear about and as an agency that’s what clients wanted to buy so that was what I was vocal about. But I’ve been buying traffic for almost 10 years now and there’s a lot more networks out there that don’t have nearly half the rules that Facebook now does. Adblade is a great platform to check out. Adblade used to be just ‘display advertising’ (banner ads). I call them ‘The Cockroaches of the Internet’, not in a bad way but because they’ve been through it all and they will probably outlive everything else on the internet as one of the oldest form of traffic. Display advertising is the great grandfather of all Internet Advertising. Native Advertising is taking that to another level. With Native Advertising our ads don’t look like ads, they look like everything else on the page - like a piece of content. Often times you may be reading Forbes or The Wallstreet Journal or BuzzFeed or whatever blog you read and you’ll see they have ‘Related Posts’ at the bottom or at the side bar you’ll see things like ‘From Around the Web’ or ‘Recommended Reads’ -  those are native advertisements. Native ad just means it looks native to the platform. It’s native because it looks like it’s supposed to be there and it doesn’t look like an advertisement. That’s why these things are on fire right now as the consumer doesn’t just tune them out. They don’t have banner blindness. Where you might have had .1% of people clicking on a banner ad, with native ads you see 3%, 4% and sometimes as high as 13% click through rate on some of our ads. Greg: So often they're like a headline and an image and that links over to a related article. Is that what you're trying to do? Get them over to your site with some great content, and then re-market them and send them off to your offers? Justin: Yes, and some networks out there only allow you to send the traffic to another content piece, so from one article to another article. That article can be written persuasively with a formula of problem-agitate-solve. So that means you start the article with “Are you having this problem?” and then you agitate it, “Are you having all these other problems forming because of that problem?” and then solution. “Well the solution to that problem I found is my product you should buy it now.” Adblade is different. With Adblade you can send the traffic straight to a Video Sales Letter (VSL) or to an advertorial – an advertorial is a content piece that presells the product. Everybody always ask me which works, “Should we send the content? Should we send to VSL?” The answer is ‘it depends’, you kind of have to test it. I mean, a good advertorial will beat a bad VSL and a good VSL will beat a bad advertorial, so it’s really test and measure. Remarketing is obviously great for plugging the holes in the bucket and ascending prospects through sequences of pages.  Do you have any ‘go to’ remarketing tools and strategies that you really like? Justin: When you are using all these traffic methods, I consider those the fire hose, that’s where you’re going to drive your mass clicks from. Now of those mass clicks, let’s say you drive a hundred thousand clicks to your website,

Greg: Dave Jenyns is a serial entrepreneur with a complete all-around knowledge of business, mindset and marketing. Dave's impressive journey begins as an author and coach to hundreds of day traders back in his early twenties. His business experience includes interesting projects such as selling the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the MCG, developing and franchising retail stores and building a multi-million dollar portfolio of over 500 domains and websites. Dave is now the founder and director of Melbourne SEO Services and Melbourne Video Productions who, together, help businesses grow through innovative, online marketing systems. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Dave. Dave: Thank you, Greg. Thanks for having us. Greg: Yeah, very welcome. I've been looking forward to this. For those who don't know Dave and I, we sort of knew each other online for a while and then I've only really met in the last year. I would say that we easily, you know, got on straight away. Both are, I would say, avid students of marketing and really enjoy the game. Would you say that would be accurate? Dave: Yeah, and I think you’re just good fun to hang around. Greg: I think we're both in similar stages, where, you know, with the way I look at this, the whole business and entrepreneurial thing, you got to do your 10,000 hours and then when you start to come out the other side, it's just a damn amazing ride and just a heap of fun. I think we both sort of, we both network with amazing people and creating good lifestyle, and helping a lot of people along the way which is, which is fantastic. Yeah, cool. Do you mind, let's dive straight into it. I know you've been an entrepreneur for many years now. What have been some of those key parts of the journey that have really helped you evolve to this point in time, knowledge, mindset, that kind of thing? Dave: Yeah, I think, I mean one of the biggest things is very early on was I got hooked into Amway, and I got started listening to tape of the month and it wasn't so much the business side of things, because I was still at school at the time, so at seventeen years old, still listening to your Anthony Robbins and getting all the right motivation at a young age. I feel like that really set the foundation and there's a lot of talk, particularly from Jim Rohn, the late Jim Rohn, talked a lot about delivering value and giving more than anyone ever expects from you and those sorts of things. I think that's probably one of the biggest pillars that's hung around for me is this idea of no matter what business you're in, you really need to be delivering value because that's what you get paid for - delivering value in the market place. With that kind of bedrock, and you touched on some of the different things I've done, as any good entrepreneur, you jump from different business opportunities, and from here and there you kind of grow and evolve. Part of it is just being flexible and being able to change as markets change and I saw it hugely in the stock market. I mean we've seen, I was in the stock market education niche and there's been huge developments in that industry, particularly as the internet came online and they started reforming a lot of the legal requirements here in Australia, and as the rise of the internet started to happen, you've got these trading robots and things. At the time, I kind of didn't recognize that this change was an important part of business, but now, having sort of jumped from multiple different industries and worked in multiple different businesses, you see that's sort of one those fundamentals. Change is going to happen and you need to be flexible, light on your feet, be able to spot these trends and I think that's one of my core skills sets, is identifying where things are going and kind of jumping into the future, imagining how it's going to play out, then coming back to the present moment and then going, "Right,

Greg: Ajit is the Co-Founder of Blink Webinars and Evercoach. He is also the CEO of Mind Valley Media, the publishing arm of the Mind Valley Group. Ajit also works as a mentor and sits on the board of multiple organizations. He's very strong in the areas of sales and marketing, business growth training, pay per click, in particular AdWords, Facebook advertising, landing pages, and sales page optimization, creating funnels, just to name a few. It's quite a skillset there. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Ajit. Ajit: Hey, Greg. Thank you for inviting me. Greg: Yeah, excellent. We obviously met in the States over the course of this last year. We're both in the digital marketer war room environment and I heard Jake give a presentation really about some of the clever things that they do at Mind Valley. I already knew you were a clever cookie and then when I heard that I thought, "Wow. We've definitely got to get you on the podcast, and particularly on the cover." So thank you very much for that. Ajit: Thank you very much for inviting me, Greg. Glad you liked the presentation. Greg: Yeah, it was good. All right cool, so, if we drive straight into it. You're now the CEO of Mind Valley Media, but obviously you didn't start there. So what really learnings or experiences have led you on that path. Realistically you're a very highly sophisticated marketer and entrepreneur these days. Ajit: So it starts a long time back. It kind of relates to my childhood and how I grew up. So when I was growing up, like in my teens, when you are looking for space and time and a lot of fun, I was growing up in a joined family. That's how the Indian families are a lot of times. But your uncles and aunts, and everyone is living in the same house, and we were 23 people in the same house, which was of course, not a very comfortable or very abundant in terms of money or space that you were living in. I remember one of the nights when I was sleeping and there was a guest over. So were sharing the bed and I slept in a little corner. Because it wasn't that we had to sleep in a corner, but it was just many people in the same room, we had to share the space and I slept. I remember waking up the next morning and when I woke up I was still in that little space curled and still against the wall in some way. And that I decided that this cannot be my future. I don't want to ever feel this way. I don't ever want to be in a place where I don't feel comfortable, or I don't have the abundance of time and space and wealth, and be able to be very, very comfortable in my life. And that changed everything ever since after that. I wasn't ever A-grade student or anything like that, but that made me become an extremely hard working individual. I started working when I was 18. Of course, at that point I started as a typist and a designer which I'm terrible at. But it was working out fine for an 18-year-old making $100 a month kind of thing. But it was good at that point I was like, "What the hell? I've got to do this." But that also led me to learn how humans and we as human beings work, how people reciprocate, what makes people like other people. So that made me as a person, being able to be someone that at one time attracted you, as a person, you will find it very easy to connect with me. It's not very hard to feel connected, because early on, I had to gain that skill to be able to connect easily and efficiently with everybody. Also that made me someone that people would put on the frontline often and say "Okay. So you've got to be the marketer because you can relate to the clients really well." And so when I was looking for my first real job after my graduation, I was 23 at that time, and I was put into a high-end sales environment straight off the bat. So until that time I was just another student organizer and doing okay, doing some part time jobs, but not really marketing anything. But once I entered this high-end,

Greg: Dan Faggella is a national Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion and also, a very talented online and offline entrepreneur. Dan his took his passion for martial arts and turned into an online niche with sales exceeding $40,000 per month. Dan is also the founder of CLVboost, an agency dedicated to helping startups and early-stage companies maximize their back-end conversions and e-mail marketing campaigns. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Dan. Dan: Greg, I'm really happy to be here. This is great. Greg: Excellent. You've got quite a wide skill-set. And starting from, I guess, a different background through a lot of Internet marketers. If we dive in there, Dan, you've really got an interesting story with getting started as a martial arts instructor in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu space. And then, morphing into the online space. Can you share with us a little bit about sort of how that came about with you getting started with your first product, etc? Dan: Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of my initial transition to online marketing, you sort of put it right. I don't necessarily know if I had the same sort of start to IM [SP] that a lot of other folks do where they get introduced to ClickBank or something like that. For me, really, I started a martial arts gym in a very small town here in Rhode Island of about 8,000 people, a really tiny place. And I was building this gym because martial arts is really my passion; I was a competitor and a teacher and everything else. And I still am a teacher in a lot of respects. And when I went to graduate school in Pennsylvania, I went to University of Pennsylvania, so I realized Ivy League grad school was going to be really expensive. And at the same time, I was going to be driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island kind of eight hours back and forth. Pretty frantically; I was the only guy doing sales, the only guy doing marketing. So, all of a sudden, I was living on my own paying rent with just sort of teaching classes and private lessons. And I realized, "Man, I'm in such a small place. If I run out of leads, I could actually run out of them." When you're in a big metropolitan area, you really can't necessarily run out of people in New York City. It's really hard unless have just the most unheard of thing ever. But mixed martial arts in my town is pretty unheard of. And it actually was relatively difficult to scale. So, I had to learn e-mail marketing and really maximizing my ROI from e-mail and keeping any and all leads that I had on rotation; making sure I could get them in for appointments. Triggering phone calls, triggering specific messages. Rotating broadcast offers to really get people in the door. And it's really from there, actually...I had sort of a pretty rough incident at the academy where we actually had a little bit of a roof collapse in our martial arts gym because our building was really old. And it made me realize, "Man, I should probably have another income stream to pay off this grad school stuff than just this physical gym." So, we got close to about 100 students at one point there and I had actually sold it to the fellow that owns the place. But before then, I had taken a bunch of seminars that I had taught in a whole bunch of areas, topics around beating bigger opponents. And had used the same really calibrated, really focused dead set e-mail marketing online. And I realized there's a much bigger audience outside of my tiny town and that business really took off online. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, you took things that you were already teaching and then just start recording them on video and [inaudible 00:03:24] and selling them as individual products? Dan: Yeah, that's exactly it. So, to be honest, Greg, some people... They'll buy practically a movie set with a back drop and a blue light sort of in the background, a lot of fanciness. I had a camcorder that still had a little tape in it, actually, it was great.

Jake Larsen is a world-famous YouTube video marketing expert. Jake runs the agency and online training center "Video Power Marketing" at VideoPower.org. Jake has amazing insight and experience into how individuals and also businesses can increase sales and brand awareness using video and YouTube. It is with great pleasure that I say "Welcome to the call, Jake." JAKE: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. GREG: Excellent. I was looking forward to this. This is a very exciting area of online marketing and I think an area that's really going to just get bigger and bigger. And I've been speaking to you over the last week and I know we met earlier in the year in the U.S. as well. I think once people become more aware of what's happening in this space, that's going to definitely be more and more excitement around it. Would you agree? JAKE: Yeah. I just read an article today that video viewership in the next three years is supposed to double. So, if you think about how much it's just grown in the last couple of the years, it's just growing very fast. GREG: Yeah, it's a crazy exciting area. And I think there's amazing opportunities for...if you'd call them "early adopters" in this space. Before we get into the how the marketing works in this YouTube space, you've got a really interesting story with how you got started on YouTube with video marketing and how you got out of your day job. Do you mind sharing that with us at all? JAKE: For sure. A little bit about my background, I've always loved making videos as my video comes from video production. Like a lot of people, I can make really cool videos, but struggle to have people see them. You can post a video on YouTube and a month later, still only have 47 views. So, it was still really frustrating, right? GREG: Mm-hmm. JAKE: But I ended up getting a job at a company called ZAGG. They make mobile accessories; phone cases for your phone and all that stuff. And we did some scratch test videos for them and those kind of actually blew up and did really well. And it so well that the company became a case study on how businesses can effectively use video to grow their company. And so, grew their YouTube channel from zero to 35,000 subscribers and 35 million views. And so, then, when YouTube came out with TrueView; those ads you can skip after five seconds? That's relatively new. We've only been seeing those for the last year and a half, two years. Brand new platform. We were one of 10 companies asked by Google to be YouTube marketing ambassadors. And so, they kind of flew us up to the Googleplex and showed us this new TrueView platform which is done in AdWords. And we were one of the first companies to start experimenting within it and using it and kind of gave them some feedback. While I was there, they kind of shared that they want to take out TV advertising. Like, they have very high goals at Google. And the scary thing is, they're doing exactly that. Looking back a couple years later, it's happening. And it's the future. So, after this experience and learning how to set up this campaign, I also got a lot of opportunity to spend tens of thousands of dollars with the company's money and found out we learned what doesn't work and we learned what works. And so, then, I started getting a lot of calls from people "Hey, can you set this up for my company in doing this?" And I was kind of straddling that line. "Do I quit my job and help other people with theirs? Or should I stay here with the security and all that stuff?" Our firstborn child was coming in a month and I saw the future, I saw what I could do. And I saw the value that I can also bring to people in building these effective video campaigns. And I made the jump. I quit my job a month before our baby was born and haven't looked back. I've loved every second of it. And it's only been 10 months. And I have a team helping me, too. Because business has been good.

Greg: Keith Kranc is a world-famous Facebook advertising expert. He is currently co-authoring The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising with Perry Marshall. Keith runs the agency Dominate Web Media to help businesses to effectively use social media marketing, video marketing, Facebook advertising, mobile marketing and other cutting-edge, Internet marketing strategies to grow their businesses and their brand. It is with great pleasure that I say, "Welcome to the call, Keith." Keith: Hey, thanks, Greg, it's a great pleasure to join you today. Greg: Absolutely. We met each other at a James Shrempko [00:08:00] gig in Australia and I've been following your stuff especially over the last year. I know you are doing a lot of really clever stuff online, and a lot of people know you in this Facebook space. You've got a very similar background as me with running an agency, which I think is great, because you learn from a lot of different businesses and it can make you very strong. Can you share a bit of your story, especially with what you've been up to over the last year or so? Keith: Sure. Before I was into the whole Internet marketing space, I used to own several, different, local businesses, part of two different franchises. When I started really digging into the Internet marketing space a few years back, when I fell into the whole Facebook advertising thing, I fell in love with it right off the bat. I didn't realize why until recently. It was because we would do a lot of traditional advertising and marketing like direct mail, Val Pac, the money mailer things... We would do some billboard stuff, local T.V. and radio. We would typically spend $10,000 a month on a billboard on an okay road. On a fairly busy road, you can spend much more than that. When I really started to get into direct response marketing while in the Internet marketing world. I was like, "Wow, are you kidding me? We can put up a billboard to our exact, ideal audience for free, basically setting that up." It's kind of like having a billboard and not paying that $10,000 to set up, and it's more like a digital billboard where it wouldn't display to all the cars. It would only display to the cars in your exact, ideal, target audience and people that liked your specific interest that your audience liked. That's what really drew me in, I think. Looking back now, I know it is. I just went all-in and learned everything I could, buying every single course. Greg: That's very clever, because that's what the Facebook news feed is like, isn't it? Keith: Yes, and I never really tried to coin myself as a social media guru, because I just didn't have the time to go do that and spend a lot of time networking on Facebook. For me, the internet marketing was a new venture, and I love the feeling of looking at a client and saying, "Hey, we can get you new customers tomorrow." I was doing video marketing, search engine optimization and those types of things, but like I said, my background of traditional business was when I saw Facebook ads, it was like, "Bam." Holy moly. 90% of your customers are typically not searching for something. They might be interested if they knew more about it. We can do that with Facebook now for so inexpensively. You can get your message, as long as you have the right message and process, which we can talk about in this interview… that's a lot of the big mistakes that people make, doing things like trying to sell too quickly. That got me to fall in love with it, so I started learning everything I could, buying every course, and the next thing you know, two-and-a-half years later, I wrote a self-published book called The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising, which I don't promote anymore, because it's so outdated. It's like three years old. That book landed me one big client which ended up landing me a few other clients, and a long story short, he started telling other people in his circle, which was a pretty high-level circle,

Jock Purtle is an online business broker specialist, who owns and runs the full service website brokerage Digital Exits.  He specializes in helping online business owners find a buyer when they want to exit their company. Jock personally exited his online business in 2013, and is on track to facilitate over 20 deals in 2014, ranging from $100,000 to up to 5 million dollars.  It is with great pleasure that I say, "Welcome to the call, Jock." Jock: Thanks, Greg.  Very happy to be here.  Looking forward to sharing some information. Greg: Yeah, excellent, excellent.  Jock and I, for a bit of background, we just met only maybe a month or two ago at the Digital Marketer Higher Level Warren [sp].  We had something in common, obviously, because we were both Aussies.  Jock's a young guy, but I straight away knew he was very clever, very switched on.  We had a good chat and resonated, and I said I really wanted to share some of his teachings with the Internet Marketing Magazine community.  And that's how this whole thing came about.  So, Jock, I know you've achieved a lot of success at, really, a younger age.  Can you share us a bit of your story and how you got to where you are right now? Jock: Sure.  So, I'm childhood entrepreneur lucky enough to have a family business where I could learn and develop my skills from a young age.  I started working for mom and dad, probably around the age of 10. Greg: Was it traditional brokerage, was it? Jock: So the business that they had at the time was an auction company.  So, they had a general auction company where they'd have clearing sales- that's machinery, planting equipment, building materials, furniture, white goods, all of the above. Greg: Yes. Jock: So, they bought that business in 1996, but previous dad's always been a broker since he was young.  He had to buy the family business when he was 23 from his old man, or from his mother, because his old man died. He came from a brokerage background in terms of businesses, real estate, and stock. So he was a stock broker.  So, we were from the country in New South Wales.  So, it's in the blood if you put it that way. Greg: Yeah, got you. Jock: And then in terms of progression to the internet, I started off as a personal trainer.  Didn't have money to put ads in the paper.  Googled "personal trainer marketing” and found all these guys from the U.S. that were teaching how to market your personal training business online.  So, I taught myself WordPress, SEO, Facebook ads- I remember running Facebook ads in the mid-2000s, back when no one was even on there.  I remember getting 2 cent, 3 cent, 4 cent clicks.  Those were the good ol' days.  So then the progression was to doing web design, and SEO for small businesses.  Then, in 2009, I found some information on people who were buying and selling online businesses, and then bought my first online business which was an AdSense site for low 5 figures in 2009. So that was the progression in terms of the early days. Greg: Got you.  Now into running the brokerage from there.  One question that I know you hear a lot, but really what a lot of people want to know is, "what's my online business worth?"  So, I was wondering if you could share some your insights and wisdom into how do valuations work, and especially in this online space? Jock: Sure, online are business evaluations are slightly different to online business evaluations. Greg: Do you mean offline business? Jock: Yeah, sorry. Greg: Got you. Jock: So you generally, normally use a discounted cash flow valuation method for an offline business.  But what the market has accepted for online businesses, is a multiple of earnings method.  So, the valuation of an online business is based off profits.  So it's a multiple of the profit of the last 12 months, or trailing 12 months of your business.  So, for example, if your online business made $200,000 in net profit in the last 12 months,

Alex Pirouz has a wealth of knowledge in business creation and development in both business creation and development, Alex is a strong digital marketer especially in the LinkedIn space. Alex's work has been featured in over 50 publications including Ch...

Steven is an Australian Internet marketer with a large track record of success, particularly in the webinar space. Steven has an interesting background, with going from a panel beater to a rock star playing large arena, such as the Big Day Out, to now being a full-time digital marketer. Steven and his clients have done well over $20 million in sales from webinars, and it is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Steven. Steven: Good day, Greg. Hello, great to be here. Greg: Yes, excellent. Great to have you online. You've certainly got a great reputation. I've never heard anyone saying anything bad about you, and I think part of the reason why is just because the model that you're doing is really working, and also the stuff that you're teaching is really working, with some guys and girls out there getting some great results, which is excellent. Steven: Thank you very much, man. It's always nice to see, and that's what I always tell my students. It's like, the only thing you have online is your reputation, so I take that as a compliment. Our commitment to actually a strategy that has been–we've been blessed with it. It's a strategy that's very easy, and my success has really come from that strategy working so well. I've just been lucky and had great timing with coming into this space, so thanks, man. Greg: No, that's good. I think what you said about reputation management is so important, especially in this digital age of social media, where bad reviews can spread very, very quickly. I think you and I have got a similar approach, where you really try to do the right thing by everyone and really preserve your reputation. It's a great way to go, even if it wasn't in the social age. It's still a great way to go, but you've got an interesting background. You and I were laughing about it this week, going from tradesman to musician–was it hard rock, or what was the type of music you were doing? Steven: It was death metal, thrash and death metal, really fast and heavy and aggressive music. Yes, absolutely. I was a bit more of an angry man in my younger days. It was a great outlet. Greg: How's your ears now after all that full-on sound? Steven: I'm sorry? They whistle at night. I hear things at night, but it was thanks to the drummer's cymbals and the cracking piccolo snare drums, those really high-cracking ones, but I think the neck's a bit out of whack as well, especially now working on a computer with a few vertebras out of alignment, probably. But yes, all good, mate. It was a lot of fun, and it was a great outlet. It's certainly just like any other business. The music business, 13 years in any industry, you learn a lot and here's what I always tell students as well. You'll be amazed–anyone can do a webinar, because everyone's got experience. Everyone's worked in a specific field for a number of years, they've done a certain job for a number of years, and they've got experience. A lot of people, they take that for granted. I could easily teach music industry stuff to people, but it's just my passion is helping people make money and helping people create wealth, and doing the same for myself as well, automating things. I've just moved on from that, but it was a great adventure. I learned all of my business stuff from being in the music business, the good, the bad, and the ugly and all of that. It was really, really an awesome time. Greg: Luckily now you've got a few more coins in your pocket than the early days of the music, as you're a full-time Internet marketer. How did you get started online, Steven? Steven: Basically, when I came back from Los Angeles, after the music business sort of collapsed, thanks to the demise of record companies and Napster and all of that stuff, Internet downloads, and basically the band fell apart. We couldn't get a deal, and we lasted about two years over there, living on 10 bucks a week at the $0.99 store in LA, and we wanted to kill each other.

CJ Hudson and Melissa Noon are social media strategists with a large track record of success. Both CJ and Melissa are ex-Facebook employees, with CJ being Facebook Australia's first hire. CJ and Melissa are strong in all areas of social, with CJ focusing on strategic aspects and Melissa very strong in the tactical space. Having recently left Facebook, they now run Stencil, a social research, content, media, and strategy agency. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, CJ and Melissa. CJ: Hi, thank you. Melissa: Hi. CJ: We're excited to be here. Greg: Excellent, excellent. I first saw you speak at an event, and straight away sort of resonated with your message. It was obvious that you guys knew what you were talking about in the social space, and then we've met several times since then. Thanks for joining us. It's great. CJ: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to enjoy this next 45 minutes to an hour I hope. Greg: Well, let's dive straight in. So you're obviously both very strong marketers, especially in the social space as ex-Facebook team members, which is something that I think a lot of people would be interested in. Do you mind sharing sort of both what you did within the organization? CJ: Sure. I'll go first, if you don't mind, because I was the first guy that said. I was very fortunate, Greg, to be invited to be the first person working for Facebook in Australia and New Zealand. Previously, I was selling big, ugly adverts on top of the AFL website, which was a great job on its own, but I was making a fundamental shift from selling disruptive advertising for companies out there to a brand new way of thinking, that people coming to Facebook to discover information and how I could work with brands that help them leverage what people are really doing in the world versus what they've been forced to consume. So that was a really, really good experience for me. And I had to spend probably the first three to four months, quite honestly, learning what Facebook was about and all of the tools that sit behind it and why things change on a daily basis and understand the culture. Then once I was able to do that, then I was able to go and actually learn about businesses and help them strategize to leverage what we call the social graph and not necessarily a website called Facebook. Greg: Okay. Cool. What about yourself, Melissa? Melissa: My area at Facebook was definitely a lot more of the sort of product and implementation, so once sort of say a person in CJ's role had done that strategic work, sold the ideas into the client, that would sort of come over to the account management team and we'd really take that idea and implement it. Another really sort of interesting role that I had was in – I was a member of the product council. I was the APAC representative of the product council, which is basically the team at Facebook that implements and comes up with the ideas for any new product that is launched across Facebook, and really I guess sort of date dives into how that particular product will benefit advertisers. So it involved doing research on what brands actually want, what kind of product that would work for them, and a really great example of that is check-in deals. So that was sort of the original iteration of the office product. We sort of talked about that, what was good and bad about check-in deals, and sort of helped release the evolved version of that product. CJ: Greg, just in case you didn't know what a check-in deal was, because it's over a year old and people forget, a good scenario is so many people were checking in every day that you'd walk into a cafe that you absolutely love and you’d naturally go to check in there. So why would you not give an opportunity for the consumer to have a better experience by checking in and maybe get say a free muffin with a coffee? And so that was the actual thinking behind the launch for that product.

Mark Anastasi is the author of The Laptop Millionaire, and is an online business and lifestyle creation expert. Mark is an accomplished speaker and educator, with a mission to help business owners and entrepreneurs become financially free using the Internet. He has a large track record of success, with over $2.5 million dollars of eBook and information product sales online.   Mark, for those who haven’t come across you before, would you mind telling us a little bit about how you got started online, and your early experiences with Click Bank? Mark: Back in 2003 I was completely broke. I had moved from Greece to England to get a job. I couldn’t find anything good, so I wound up working as a security guard for two years, and doing a bit of telesales. I was so abysmally bad at my job in telesales, that they fired me in 2003. By that stage, I was about £7,000 in debt. I had been kicked out of the place that I was living, because I hadn’t paid rent in a while. I ended up being homeless for about five months on the streets of London. I was squatting in an abandoned building in London with about 20 or so homeless people. I realized that I had to do something pretty drastic to get out of the situation I was in. But then I heard about this seminar. It was a personal development seminar by the Tony Robbins Company close to where I was living in Earl’s Court, in London. I put together the £300 with credit cards and I paid for a ticket. I went to that seminar for myself thinking “You know, I’ve got nothing to lose. I might as well try this. It sounds like an interesting seminar, maybe it can help me.” I went there, and it just blew my mind. They talked about goal setting, they talked about achieving your goals. They talked about how to identify and eliminate your limiting beliefs. The gentleman sitting next to me at that seminar, his name was Francis, told me during the seminar that he made over a million dollars a year selling eBooks on the Internet. I remember thinking to myself while he was saying that, “this guy is successful, maybe he can give me a job.” I wasn’t thinking entrepreneurially at all. All I’d known growing up was get a good education, get a degree, so you can get a good job. And here I was, with no job, no money, in debt, and not even a place to live. Anyway, I went back to the place I was staying, and I started writing down my goals. I identified my limiting beliefs about money. I did these exercises in neuro-linguistic programming, mental exercise, wrote down things to blast through the 44 limiting beliefs I had about money and success. I identified that my big goal was to make £2,000 a month. And so I wrote down 100 reasons why I had to do that. To this day, that’s probably one of the best, if not the best, exercise I can recommend to anybody. I wrote down 100 reasons why I must make £2,000 a month. Then I brainstormed 100 ways how. The 96th way was eBooks. So I went to a payphone, and I called Francis up, and I said, “Hey Francis, you remember me?” I reminded him of who I was. And I called him and said, “Listen, Francis, here’s my situation.” I told him my living circumstances. And he said, “Oh, you’re calling because you want money or a job. Is that why?” And I was like, “No, I read this book by Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and he says, ‘Work to learn, don’t just work to earn.’” In other words, if you need a job, fine, but get a job where you can learn something that will benefit you for the rest of your life.  I said, “I’ll work for you for free, if you’ll just share with me how you’re making money online.” He sort of laughed at that. Greg: Wow, that’s very clever from your point of view, given that you were at such a low point in your life at that stage, that’s amazing vision you had to see that. That’s excellent. Mark: I was being very excited in my conversation with him. In any case, he laughed, and said that nobody had ever asked him to mentor them,

Andrew and Daryl Grant are Internet marketers and educators with a long history of success online. Coming from a business consulting background, Andrew and Daryl turned to the Internet and were able to create a passive income stream to leave their consulting business behind after making $250,000 in sales in their first 12 months online.   Greg: This has now grown to be a multi-million dollar business, and has positioned them to enjoy two to three months’ international travel a year with their family. From coaching so many students, what are the traits that you’ve seen consistently in your students who are successful online?   Daryl: That’s really interesting, and it happens time and again. We can give exactly the same message to two different people and they get completely different results. A lot of it comes down to mindset, and we’ll cover more of that in a moment. In terms of what the successful people do, for me it comes down to just a few things. First up, they follow a proven system. They don’t try and reinvent the wheel, they don’t try and take something and go, “Oh, I can make it cleverer.” They just follow the bouncing ball. The other problem that people sometimes come up with is they learn from a number of different mentors, and they try and cobble together a few different things. They end up creating what we call a Frankenstein business, which is a little bit of everything and none of it works. Whoever’s system you’re following, make sure you follow it through. That’s probably the biggest factor in creating success. The second one is where the focus is. The most successful people focus 90% on their marketing, 10% on their product. Most people don’t have the courage to do that, they actually spend a lot more time fiddling around, trying to get the product absolutely right, or spending months and months building the perfect product, forgetting about the fact that that’s only a tiny part of the job. The key to success is actually getting out there and marketing it. The next success factor is avoiding the ‘BSOs’. Bright Shiny Objects are plentiful online. Internet marketers are particularly good at selling Bright Shiny Objects too. It’s about applying the 80/20 principle, knowing that 20% of what you do will get you 80% of the results. Also being able to recognize what is a Bright Shiny Object and what is something that is going to make you successful. Bright Shiny Objects tend to be the next cool marketing strategy that’s come along that someone’s trying to flog you. If you spend all your time just chasing the next promotion, then you’re never really going to create a stable business. A stable business is built on a solid ‘want’ that people are passionate about, that they’re prepared to pay money for, and where you have a unique solution.   Andrew: When I first started doing this I used to think mindset was an important part of it. As I’ve become more successful in what we’re doing, and as I talk to other successful people both online and offline, I’m more and more of the belief that mindset is about 80 to 90% of the game, it really is. I don’t underestimate strategies and tactics or the actual doing of the stuff, but unless you bring the right mindset to your efforts - you can have the best efforts in the world, but the mindset is like the magic sauce that makes it all happen.     Greg: You teach a concept which is ‘fail like a champion’. Why do you believe it’s important that entrepreneurs fail sometimes along the way? Andrew/Daryl:      The ‘fail like a champion’ is that you have to understand that in whatever it is that you’re doing, particularly online, that you will do stuff which will not work. You will try a marketing campaign, you’ll try some ads, you’ll do an opt-in page or whatever it might be, headline, and it will not work. You won’t get it right 100% of the time. In fact, you’ll probably get it wrong more than you get it right.

Craig Ford is an import and export market expert with a long history of success. Craig has spent virtually his entire working life in different companies related to importing and exporting of goods. Prior to setting up his import education platform, My Import Label, Craig and his team recorded over $20 million in export sales. Craig has extensive experience in importing from China, India, Vietnam, Malaysia and a whole bunch of other regions, as well as expertise in private labeling products.   Greg: Craig, really, it is quite a unique skill set you have there, and certainly an area of huge demand with the rising rise of e-commerce at the moment and also eBay as well. My understanding is that you first got started importing when you were backpacking around the world. How did that come about? Craig: I did the usual Aussie thing, which is put on a backpack and head away for a couple of years. Australia is a long way from anywhere and when you're backpacking you tend to get off the beaten track a bit. When you're travelling you tend to find lots of interesting products that you think, “I haven't seen that before. I wonder how that would go with selling it back home?” I was already used to selling in Australia through weekend markets, so it was pretty easy for me to grab new products and send them back or bring them back with me and test them out. It was all about finding unique stuff that no one else has got ideally, and then making sure that there’s some residual value and a good margin on it.   Greg: The first question for many Internet Marketers and upcoming Internet Retailers once they've chosen their product and market niche would be where online can they find genuine suppliers who are legitimate manufacturers rather than just product distributors? Craig: In the last three years, Alibaba has come of age and there are a couple of other sites like Alibaba. It's easy to find suppliers, finding them is actually not the issue. The issue is being able to sort through the genuine manufacturers from the tons of trading companies, sales agents, wholesalers and other brokers that are out there. Unfortunately, Alibaba has taken a bit of a back step there. Once upon a time, you could do an advanced search and filter those guys out. It's not as easy to do that anymore. So it does require a little bit of skill to be able to weed out those guys. Certainly one thing we encourage our clients to do is just to take the information that's posted online at face value, much like you would do if you were on a dating website. When you see a profile of someone or a supplier you might like, by all means have a chat with them and see what they're offering. But it's quite another thing to place a commercial order just on the information posted online. So we encourage our marketers to go through a whole lot more steps before they go and place that order.                           Greg: Craig, from your experience, is there a definite right way and a wrong way to approach a supplier professionally so as to not come across as an amateur importer?   Craig: There is a low level of trust initially, so you've got to go to another level to show to the supplier that you are serious. There’s a few basic things you can do such as: Contact them with your own domain name rather than a hotmail or a Gmail type free email account.  Already have an online presence setup so that they can look you up and make sure that you are an actual business. Include a positioning sales blurb in your initial inquiries about who you sell to and the volumes you are currently doing and where the business is headed. Just let them know, ” I'm a major retailer in XYZ Country, I sell to all of these markets at the moment, I'll be expanding into these markets” etc. The key is to get them to see you as the real deal, but also look beyond the initial discussion and look at the long-term opportunity for you.

Phil Leahy is an online entrepreneur with a long history of success. In 2002 Phil started selling products on eBay and within 5 years had become the largest seller on the eBay.com.au platform measured across all categories with over 350,000 transactions. In 2007 and 2008 Phil was awarded Australia's #1 eBay Seller award for the most sales in all categories. During 2003 he established his own website offering products to Australian and international consumers. In 2008, Phil sold the business to dealsdirect.com.au and shifted his attention towards his marketing agency, Online Marketing Experts and also the PeSA Internet Conference. Phil is the president of the eBay Sellers' Alliance in Australasia.   Greg:  That was quite a good track record of success you've got there. Have you always been entrepreneurial? Phil:    I guess you could call me a serial entrepreneur. I started off in the rag trade when I was a kid and by the age of 21 I had a few shops and was manufacturing for another 300. I’ve moved into a lot of different industries - from the rag trade, to the fitness business, to night clubs, to radio, record companies, and then into selling online.   Greg: With eBay obviously that's one area that you are really strong. You started your eBay business back in 2002. How did that first come about? Phil:    Bankruptcy actually. I had a radio station and we were trying to get a full time license in Melbourne with Kiss FM and we owned a bunch of Narrowcast stations in Sydney and Brisbane and we fought for a number of years to try to make those successful. We had over 200 DJ's on there a week doing electronic dance music. Unfortunately we weren't successful. My partner and I lost a bit of money. I ended up on eBay because a friend told me about it and said to me “You should be selling some of your old Sony music signed collectibles on there”. My first sale on eBay was a signed copy of a Silverchair album which I sold for $100. Someone actually sent me $100 US in the mail. When the exchange rate was at 60 cents and I thought 'Well there might be something in this.'   Greg:  So then you started selling more and more stuff and then just ramped it up until you were doing it professionally? Phil:    Yes I had some DVD stock so I started putting DVDs up on eBay and they started flying out the door, and then I started scaling it up from there. By the time we sold the business we were doing around 50,000 auctions a week on eBay across eBay Australia, eBay UK and eBay America.   Greg: You were able to ramp it a lot bigger than most. What competitive advantages did you bring to the market? Phil:    I guess we were pretty good across the board. We presented ourselves well against our competitors online. Our templates were looking really good. Our descriptions were great. Then it was about process. Finding tools in the marketplace which could help me automate the business was critical. Buying right from the suppliers is very important to try to get the best price. There is a number of different moving parts in the business. You have to be good at marketing; you have to be good at communicating with your customer. But ultimately you have to be great at delivering a fantastic experience. If they buy it off you that day you make sure you get that order out the door that day. Having a firm commitment to deliver the best service to the customer makes all the difference with online.   Greg:  Yes, especially with eBay. The reputation that you build is so visible, which I think is a great thing. It keeps people honest. Phil:    It really is the cornerstone of the success of eBay. Some years back we were looking for changes to the feedback system.  We were lobbying with eBay in America and this helped produce the detailed seller rating system which we enjoy today. It helps eBay distinguish their best partners with performance. Before that it was just negative or neutral or positive feedback.