Summary: 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,
