I’ve been finding myself answering the same types of questions on email over and over so I thought it might be more productive and interesting to answer them in a single wrap up post for all to see. Here are a few questions that I received this week.

Help With Product Sourcing

I will like to start my online store, and we has been having almost the same situation that you share on your website. We have 3 kids and my wife isn’t working.
I look to on alibaba and dhgate website because they have the best prices I ever see in my life, but most of the product they sells are replicas, fakes, copies and iligal. This is giving me a hard time to choose a good product to sell without broke any law.
Did you have any advice? My wife and I will like to sale woman cloght, shoes, bags and accessories.

Thank you for your website.

Javier

Hi Javier,
Both Alibaba and DHGate are excellent resources but they are pretty intimidating to use in my opinion. I haven’t checked either of those sites for quite some time but I don’t remember ever finding name brand stuff on there. In fact if you do see designer labels, I would be very suspicious.

Are you trying to sell name brand items or are you trying to sell generic clothing and shoes? If it’s the latter and you still want the prices found on Alibaba or DHGate, I would highly recommend going to the China Import/Export Fairs that take place in China or Hong Kong multiple times a year. Many manufacturers of clothing, handbags and accessories will allow you to place your own brand name labels on the items that they make.

Another option is to pay for a service like Worldwide Brands to help you sort out and contact a wide variety of domestic and international vendors. Sites like Alibaba and DHGate can help you find suppliers but contacting and sorting them all out can be a major pain.

Help With Testing Out A Business Idea

How To Determine If Your Online Business Idea Even Has A Chance.

I have been going through the steps on this link, but I am stuck at the part about keywords. I don’t understand how to find the clickthrough rate using the Google Keyword Tool. Could you help me?

The information on this blog is just what I have been looking for. Thank you for putting so much time into it!

There is no real way to determine the actual clickthrough rate of a particular keyword that you will be targeting for your own website because every website is different. The best thing that you can do is make an educated guess.

1. Find out how many people perform searches for a certain keyword you are targeting
2. Make an assumption about the click through rate. If you are unsure, use any number between 1-3%
3. Make an assumption about your conversion rate. If you are unsure, use 1%.
4. Make an assumption about the profit you will make per customer
5. Multiply all of those numbers together and you will have an approximate profit per day.

Based on this number, you can tell whether you can make some meaningful money from your business idea based on search traffic alone.

Questions?

I’m going to be testing out this format of answering questions for a little while. If you have any questions about opening or running an online business, feel free to shoot me an email and I will try to answer them.

Small Business Blogging 101

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

If you are looking for a quick overview of blogging for small business, thinking about starting a blog, or already have a blog and need some tips for getting more from it, you might enjoy the following presentation I did as part of a series of webinars with email marketing service provider Vertical Response.

In this session I cover:
• Getting started
• Design resources
• Best practices
• Plugins and addons
• Promoting and amplifying

Hope it gives you some new ideas. (FYI you can click on the little TV like icon to view in full screen.)

Lots of disclosure here too: Vertical Response is a partner of the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network and the young lady conducting the interview is none other than my daughter Jenna Jantsch!

Just this past Tuesday night, I attended Vancouver’s Search Engine Marketing Meetup and Raquel Hirsh from Wider Funnel presented “The Six Landing Page Success Factors” (also known as landing page optimization). Landing Page optimization has been popular for the last 2 years or so for web savvy marketers, but becoming more of a “buzz word” [...]

Generating Leads with Slides

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This week, one of my favorite content sharing sites introduced a new way to generate leads.

I’ve long been a fan of the social media sharing site Slideshare. Slideshare allows you to upload presentations, much like YouTube videos, and then have them converted to flash movies that can be viewed on line and embedded into web and blog pages.

The site has grown significantly over the last few years and is also a great place to get some really good and really bad examples of PowerPoint use. Presentation owners can enable all manner of viewing, sharing, and downloading or choose to keep the files for private viewing only.

Slideshare has added a new feature, called LeadShare, that looks very worthy of some testing. Now when you upload your slides you can set-up a LeadShare campaign that allows you to embed a form in your presentations and capture leads of viewers. These LeadShare campaigns can be embedded on other sites too. You have a lot of control over the form and even when in your presentation your prospective lead sees the form.

The “white paper as lead” approach that employs a similar capture method has been around for a long time and companies that engage white paper lead generation organizations can pay as much as $100 per lead. The LeadShare system, giving you access to over 2 million visitors a day, can generate leads for as little as $1 a lead.

The jury is still out as to whether this format will prove effective at generating leads, but I think it’s something you could test very easily.

This is the second part in my series on creating positive change in your life. If you missed the first part, please read it before reading this. You can find part one here – Is It Really Possible To Create The Change You Want In Your Life?.

Next up we begin a look at what I’ve learned and become aware of on my own journey to create what I want in my life. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ve broken this section into two articles, starting with a look at three very vital concepts.

If you haven’t manifested your own desires and want to change your life, take on board what I have to say here, and in the articles that complete this series. I promise it will help you in many ways…

Here Is What I Know So Far

I’ve proactively changed many aspects of my life for the better, especially in the past five years. The key word here is “proactively”, which could be interchanged with the word consciously, or intentionally. The point being that I decided I wanted something and then went to work to create the change necessary to have what I wanted. It wasn’t just hoping, dreaming, or thinking about the change, it was all of those things AND focused action designed to take me there.

The end outcome of achieving what I set out to is usually different to what I expected, and of course as per the universal rules I talked about in the first article in this series, the process, the journey of creating the change turned out to be more valuable than actually arriving at the outcome.

Although we are motivated by changing certain physical circumstances we exist in, often it’s the internal shift, the growth we go through on a personal level, that turns out to be the most valuable outcome. The physical benefits are like having the cake, while the real change is learning how to cook, something you can take with you long after you finish eating the cake.

Although many of the stories I’m about to tell you relate to a personal milestone, event or challenge from my life, the cornerstone of the story is the lesson learned as a result. Luckily for us, I’ve been chronicling many of these lessons by revealing the stories here on this blog, so together we can go on a trip through the last ten years of my life and extract some of the most important and powerful revelations as they apply to creating positive change.

I’ve included a link to the original articles that recount in more detail the situations and the key learnings. I strongly recommend you read these articles too, as they will greatly reinforce the messages of this article series.

This is some of the most powerful content in this blog in terms of helping you change your mindset, increase your own self awareness and achieve what you want. I say this in confidence because they are the benefits I gained by living these experiences.

Here we go…

1. Personal Congruency (Confidence through training)

Source: Personal Congruency… At 21? How To Be Confident At Any Age

Way back during the first year of this blog I talked about my trip to Seattle to play in the 1998 Magic world championships (a card game that has a competitive tournament series, sort of like poker, but geekier). During this trip I was able to meet some of the stars of the game, and play against the best of the best. The result of this once-in-a-lifetime experience was a change to how I perceive people who are considered famous and a deeper understanding of how they got there.

People who are exceptionally good at something get there because they repeated processes over and over again in preparation for an experience, or in an attempt to qualify for the experience. They then had the experience, which helped them become more confident heading into the next similar experience. This is why in professional sports or competition of any kind it’s usually a huge advantage to have “been there before” as you’re not intimidated by what you don’t know.

This opens up the idea that expertise and success comes to people who choose to go after it. Yes talent, gifts and luck play a part, but the greater your “courage of conviction”, the more likely you will be successful. If you build the tools to create the courage through hard work, then you are more likely to succeed, even if you have never had the success you are striving for before.

It’s worth reading this article because I wrote it when I was 26. I’m 30 now and a lot happened during those years. I wrote that article having had minor financial success in my life at the time, but feeling confident about where I was heading because the positive signs were becoming very consistent and I truly began to believe I could have what I wanted, at least financially, because of what I was doing. I was starting to become proof of the concept I was writing about. I was starting a process of change, just as I was starting to build this blog.

2. You Control Your Perception (Interpretation is half the battle)

Source: The Key To Happiness

I read a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. It’s a really interesting book, and one of the most enlightening ideas I took away from it was this -

Optimistic people do not see reality. Instead they contort their interpretation of what they are experiencing to see it as positive, regardless of what is really happening.

Pessimistic people have a much firmer grasp of reality and as such often see the negativity in what is happening to them and other people around them.

Optimists are essentially fooling themselves so they feel better. They manufacture hope and as a result live longer, happier lives. Pessimists see a form of truth, which you might say is more accurate than the optimists, but they consequently suffer more.

So do you want to be the happy fool or the sad realist?

When I was in my early twenties clearly my mind had decided that it preferred to see the negative in what was going on around it. It became so good at this, that the body it had control of started to malfunction.

My mind created so much fear that I started to get panic attacks. Even when there wasn’t a large predatory animal trying to hunt me down, which is a more typical reason for my body to react the way it did, as if it was preparing to fight or run away from the danger, I was feeling these sensations. It was horrible.

I created danger and fear when it wasn’t there and it was because I had learned how to think about things the wrong way. I distorted my interpretation of reality to the point where I suffered physical pain. I call that a form of insanity, but I did find a way out…

As a result of this experience I became a very, very good listener, and this has nothing to do with listening to other people. I started listening to, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I started to observe my own thoughts, and wow, were they broken.

Back when I wrote the key to happiness I was at a stage where I observed my thought process for the sake of becoming a better thinker. You can call this cognitive behavior therapy if you like, but it’s not that complicated, all you really have to do is “watch” how you talk to yourself. Once you do this you start to realize, at least this is the case for many people, that you really don’t like yourself very much. You spend your entire day being insecure about pretty much everything.

My god was this a turning point for me! I couldn’t believe how mean I was. I thought I was a good person before this, in fact I thought I was so nice that I deserved better in my life, but I was wrong. I was an absolute bastard to the person that mattered most – myself. I spent nearly every waking moment judging myself, and the world around me, and 90% of the time I was negative.

From the seeds of your worst moments, come your greatest strengths. Becoming aware of my own internal dialogue was a massive gift and has positively influenced my life since then. The awareness born from actively listening to how I talked to myself, and then making a very conscious choice to change how I interpret the world around me and thus how I talk about experience to myself, gave me the toolset I need to, well, be happy.

I can’t really put it any better than I did at the end of the article, so I’ll repeat it here…

Happiness is ultimately not in anyone else’s hands or controlled by any external element at all. It’s purely a choice you can make. As often as I can I choose to be happy. It’s not always as easy as that but by undertaking to change the way you think and create an ongoing positive dialogue with yourself you are both working towards the same goals – that’s you and your little voice – both aiming for happiness.

Once you gain the power by becoming self aware of your own voice inside your head and how you perceive the world around you, half the battle is won. You are in control and that will always be the case no matter what happens to you or your environment.

Creating positive change in your life begins with how you interpret life itself. If you want things to change for the better, the first step is to make the choice to see the world in a way that is beneficial, on the inside. The outside world is always open to interpretation, and you will never know the real truth, so why not create perceptions that help you?

The key take away from this article is self awareness is the first step towards creating the change you want, in fact, it is all you ever need if you really drill down to it. You are the master of your own universe.

3. Work Ethic (Do it even when you don’t feel like it)

Source: How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

This is still one of the most popular articles on this blog with almost 250 comments as I type this, I wrote the article because it is clear people need encouragement. Heck, I need encouragement too, so I wrote this just as much for myself as I did for you.

Your mind is your strongest asset and your weakest link, and can be a very clever saboteur. It has a huge influence on your emotional state, and your emotions are the fuel that feed your creativity, or stifle it.

If there was a lesson that every blogger, entrepreneur and athlete knows well, it’s the importance of consistence and persistence. I wrote about this in some depth in my very first free report – How To Start An Internet Business – and it’s safe to take this on board as fact.

To be successful you’re going to have to work hard, over a long period of time and there will be stages, many of them, where you just don’t feel like it. If you want to change, learning how to work through periods of lack of motivation, depression, feelings of loss, confusion, or any state brought upon by negative thought patterns, requires that you learn two things -

1. Your thoughts are choices of perception that you are in control of entirely (the previous section discussed this)
2. You can choose to just do it (credit to Nike) regardless of how you feel

As you probably know from experience, sometimes even when you are aware of your inner voice, and even despite telling yourself all kinds of positive and good things, you still feel like crap. The reason for this is you don’t believe in what you are saying to yourself, which is often very hard when you’re still on the journey to change, because your physical reality hasn’t become what you want it to…yet.

A true master of self awareness chooses their emotional state because they are in complete control of their internal configuration and have need for nothing in the external world (like totally zen). For most of us, the outside world has, and will have for our entire lives, a huge influence over us because we want something from it. As long as you have a sense of attachment to anything, and this is especially true for attachments to people, you’re going to suffer (go Buddhism!).

This happens to me too, and although I can say it’s not as pervasive as it once was, I still feel lousy sometimes when I’m not getting what I think I want, when I want it. This is especially the case when you are working to change something that requires you have an experience you have never had before, or where you have attempted to have the experience, yet failed, perhaps multiple times, reinforcing the belief that you will never attain your goal.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, one of the things you are attempting to do now is make money online, and you’re not there yet, so you’re forced to do things to make money that you don’t like (e.g. a job), and you feel bad about it. This is a classic situation where you need to push through and keep going, even in the face of emotional adversity, and as I outlined in the article, often simply making the decision to act even when you don’t feel like it, will pull you out of the negative mood.

The important point here is that you need to realize your process to come to a change is going to involve feeling all kinds of emotions, many of which will not help you change in the direction you want to. The greater the change you desire, the longer the journey, and the more you are going to experience along the way. It’s your job to pilot the ship forward no matter what the conditions, with the belief that your destination is always moving closer, even when you feel like you are going backwards, and you are never certain of when you will arrive.

Coming Up: Taking It To The Next Level

I’ve introduced you to three principle concepts required to realize positive change in your life -

1. Confidence through training helps you create a foundation for growth
2. Self awareness – You choose your perception of reality
3. Working regardless of inner or outer conditions is the path to what you want

You can no doubt see how all three of these concepts are very interrelated and impact each other. As you continue through this series you’re going to see that all these concepts are governed by universal laws, and in the end there is only one variable that really matters when it comes to making change. That variable is you.

Coming up next we’re going to look even deeper at how you are the greatest agent for change there is today. Although your focus right now might be to change aspects of your own life, by the end of this article series you’re going to see how important it is that you go through this process, because if you can truly grasp this, you will see that you’re also the key to changing absolutely everything that you perceive as wrong on this planet.

But let’s not get too deep just yet. First we need to understand what’s governing the process of change, how your own behavior dictates results, what drives your behaviors and how simple it really is to change behavior if you just tie it all into the right mindset.

Yaro Starak
Blogging To Awareness

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Do you want to learn to blog in a way that goes beyond just conveying information and helps people to take action on what you’ve written?

Last night as I was watching the new Australian version of The Apprentice I saw a very short segment featuring public speaker Brett Rutledge. The winners of a task were rewarded with a session with Brett to talk about communication and public speaking. The show only showed 30 seconds of Brett but in that very short snippet he said something that resonated with me.

He was talking about principles of communication in leadership – but I think it applies pretty well to bloggers. I’m paraphrasing here but what he said boiled down to this:

To communicate to me clearly you need to do three things:

1. Give me a Message
2. Make me Care
3. Give me a Way to Remember it

I suspect there’s a lot of truth in that for leaders communicating in the business setting – but it rings true for me as a blogger wanting communicate effectively each day through my blog.

Lets explore each in turn briefly (this is of course my interpretation for bloggers on what Brett was getting at with his points).

Give them a Message

I suspect many bloggers work pretty hard on principle #1 – we craft our posts carefully and work hard on communicating clearly – but perhaps the other two elements are things that could lift posts to the next level in terms of getting people to actually take action on the things we write about.

Giving a message of course means we ourselves need to know what we’re trying to convey and what action we want readers to take at the end of posts. If we don’t know what we want people to do it’s pretty hard to get action.

It’s also about communicating clearly and giving people a call to the action we want them to take.

Make them Care

• When someone cares about what you’re writing – they have much more motivation to take action on it.
• When someone cares they’re more likely to tell someone else about it.
• When someone cares they’re more likely to respond to you with a comment.

Communicate something to someone who doesn’t care and you might as well not be communicating!

How do you make them care? I think it partly comes down to showing people how what you are sharing with people applies to them, how it will make some aspect of their life better, inspiring them with a picture of how things will be once they’ve done something – it’s about getting people in touch with their feelings, fears, motivations, values and desires and tying them to what you’re communicating to them.

Give them a Way to Remember It

Have you ever read or heard something that inspired you to go away and take some course of action…. only to promptly forget to do it? I do it all the time. Sometimes I don’t take action because I change my mind, sometimes it is because I get busy and sometimes I just forget to do it (I’m thinking to myself ‘I’m sure there was something else I had to do today).

It’s one thing to communicate clearly what you want and to get someone to care about it – but a whole other thing to get them to actually take the action. A big part of closing the deal is to give them a way to remember what it is you want them to do.

I’d love to hear Brett (or others) talk more about how he helps people to remember what you say – but I find that I have most success in ‘closing the deal with people when I give them something simple, achievable and immediate to do.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Principles of Effective Communication

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Every entrepreneur takes their own unique path and it’s always interesting to hear things from a different perspective . In this guest post by Jack Busch, Jack tells his story of how he became self-employed. Jack is a freelance writer and blogger specializing in debt loans, personal finance and credit cards and maintains an excellent blog over at MasterYourCard.com.

When I first discovered MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, I was thrilled. For years, my wife and I have been discussing ways to gain financial independence so we could spend less time at our jobs, which we didn’t necessarily hate, but simply demanded too much of our time and energy. The best plan that we came up with was to buy a Powerball ticket every Wednesday and Saturday and cross our fingers. With somewhat disappointing returns, we’ve ramped up our efforts and have taken to crossing our toes, too. Still no luck.

Fast forward a couple of months, and now I’ve somewhat stumbled into gainful self-employment. Now, we’re working on transforming my wife into a professional shut-in, too.

I enjoy this resource that Steve has created because it gives a clear, concrete method for achieving what many of us who are planning on having children desperately want: to be able to stay at home with the kids without sacrificing income. Interestingly, as was pointed out earlier on the blog, one reader commented that he found the small business startup guide entirely too daunting, which compelled him to give up. This struck me for several reasons. Admittedly, I, too, found the guide a bit intimidating. But that’s because my journey to working at home was starkly different – and perhaps a bit easier.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I fully intend to apply a more methodical approach while attempting to liberate my spouse from the 9 to 5, simply because I think her situation merits it more. But I’d like to offer my story as a bit of contrast to the diligent checklist approach. It’s something I’ll call, an organic transition to self-employment.

I call it organic because I didn’t implement any conscious system or follow any certain steps to get to where I am today (I’m a full time freelance writer). It feels more like I willed myself into self-employment rather than getting there by brute force. For me, saying goodbye to the commute and the suffocating 9 to 5 work schedule has always been somewhat of a dream that I kept in the back of my mind. It was this – and the following five essentials – that I believe eventually made me my own boss.

Friends (and Spouses) with Benefits

When you’re undergoing a risky venture such as self-employment, you’re going to need some support – fiscally, emotionally and logistically. I’m lucky enough to get all of that from my spouse. Thanks to my full time job having pretty crumby benefits in the first place, I had already switched over to her medical insurance. Also, with her steady salary, we could keep paying the bills if I got off to a slow start.

For most of us, these two factors are probably the most comforting safeguards. But don’t downplay the value of emotional support. It’s good to have a co-pilot when you’re flying solo. And without a water cooler and the collective ire of your coworkers to help you process ideas, work out problems and vent your frustrations, you’ll definitely need an open ear and an open mind to keep you sane.

If you aren’t married or have some other kind of domestic support, it’s highly advisable to find a mentor or a group of friends with similar entrepreneurial aspirations.

A Little Bit of Experience

The hardest thing to do when striving to be self-employed is to figure out what exactly you’ll do to make money. The experts always give the exact same answer to this question: “Do what you love.” That advice is all well and good – but ultimately, it’s the same thing your high school counselor told you when giving you career advice. I followed that advice and did what I loved all throughout college (slept late, played video games, drank beer and ate pizza) and, unsurprisingly, landed myself a career that didn’t quite meet my expectations.

Instead, I would give this advice: don’t start from scratch. The easiest way to become gainfully self-employed is to take something that makes you a little bit of money and ramp it up so it makes you a lot of money. This may not be what you consider to be your “true calling” – meaning, you’re not going to take your job and shove it and then go become a painter or a dancer or a chef, because, unless you already have a bit of success in those fields, you’ll have to go back to school, get experience and get noticed again all from square one. Essentially, you’re not transitioning to a new career, you’re just starting over.

The danger of starting anew is that you’ll either find the task entirely too intimidating and give up before you start or you’ll simply end up having to make the same types of compromises that wound you up in the cubicle in the first place. By choosing something that already makes you money, all you have to do is figure out how to make the venture bigger and better.

In my case, I was lucky enough to land a gig in college writing web content. At the time, it was the perfect job. Before getting this gig, I was washing dishes in the cafeteria. After tipping over one too many towers of freshly washed glasses and making a paltry $7.50 an hour, I decided that there had to be some better way to spend my time in which my poor coordination wouldn’t pose a danger to my pride or any innocent bystanders. Through some thrice-removed personal connections, I ended up landing a position as a contractor for an SEO firm, where I wrote just a few articles per week, which wasn’t a lot of money, but it kept the pizzas and textbooks coming.

I did that all throughout college, which made it, in essence, my very first real job. And, not-so-coincidentally, it’s the same job I do today. After working for a couple years in the office and finding it unfulfilling, I decided that I wanted more control over my time and income. Copywriting on the web seemed like the obvious answer. I just needed to figure out a way to go from making a few hundred bucks a week to matching my current salary.

For you, your starter gig could be anything. Think of all the things that anyone has ever given you money for – these things are the valuable skills or products that you have to offer the world. You could learn how to market a craft through an online store (if so, you’ve really, really come to the right place), become a personal trainer, start a dog grooming and boarding business, sell things on eBay, build websites, design t-shirts, trick out cars, file income taxes, mow lawns. Chances are, you aren’t a one trick pony capable only of manning a cubicle. Find out what you already have to offer and slowly start building it into your main stream of income.

Scalability

This, I would say, was the single most important aspect that contributed to my eventual full time self-employment. The biggest roadblock to building a side business to replace your day job is that you are only one person. In the beginning, when your side venture is just a fledgling and requires very little time and attention, it’s pretty simple to wake up an hour or two early each morning, answer some business related emails during lunch and maybe log on once more before going to bed. (After all, it’s extremely bad form to work another job while punched in at your 9 to 5.)

But as your business starts gaining traction, it becomes increasingly more important that you spend a considerable amount of time speaking with prospective clients on the phone or face-to-face during business hours or rush a test project through with flying colors. All the while, you want to continue giving your existing clients the same level of service you did when they were your one and only.

So, you have a couple options: Start slacking on your 9 to 5; burn the candle at both ends until you’re burnt out, friendless and permanently consigned to the doghouse by your spouse; let your thriving side venture languish; or get some expendable help.

For me, I had two extremely valuable agents of scalability: an income stream that allowed me to do as little or as much work as I wanted without getting fired and, more importantly, subcontractors.

Demand Studios

Regarding the variable income stream, I’m not too embarrassed to admit that this was Demand Studios. Much maligned by certain segments of the freelancing community, Demand Studios is the quintessential content mill, churning out hundreds of thousands of passable quality articles a day and paying out a flat rate to writers. Say what you will, but the system is brilliant, both from a publisher’s and a freelancer’s standpoint. Writers can basically shop for topics and toss them into their queue and have one week to pound them out. For a freelancer, the topics are hit and miss – you could get paid $15 to write “About Boiled Eggs” in 15 minutes (a dollar a minute!) but you could also spend two hours sifting through the U.S. Trademarks and Patent Office database trying to figure out who the hell invented the first Ziploc bag (pro tip: most of the info on this topic that’s already available on the web is bunk).

Demand Studios isn’t exactly resume material – but its value as a backup plan is obvious. Once I landed an account at Demand, I had a reliable (though sometimes mind numbing) source of income I could fall back on if times were tough, but, more importantly, I could completely ignore it when I didn’t need it. It’s like the freelancer equivalent of a booty call.

Subcontractors

The issue of subcontractors is a bit controversial – especially in my line of business. On the one hand, if I “buy” the rights to some text from another writer, I am legally free to put my name on it and sell it to another client as my own. (Kind of like when Edison bought the rights to tell everyone he invented the Vitascope.) But on the other hand, when I sell myself to a client on my own skills and my own samples, they have a right to expect that they’ll get copy that has been produced by me. If you decide to go the subcontractor route, it’s good form to be upfront about outsourcing your work, or, at the very least, make sure that the subcontractor is on par with your style and quality.

Anyway, while I was working a fulltime job and seeking out new clients, I hired about five subcontractors to handle my overflow and take on some of the more repetitive work. I didn’t profit from this, but it did solve one important problem: with a full time job, I didn’t have time to handle the fruits of my marketing efforts. Subcontractors helped immensely with this. After all, the biggest demand on your time as you are building a client base is making initial contact, banging out the details of the contract, delivering a sample and working out any tweaks or adjustments to meet the client’s needs. Once all that is done, it’s just rinse and repeat – something that a hired gun can easily achieve by referencing your example.

When I did finally take the leap and say goodbye to my salaried job, I simply scaled down from five subcontractors to just one or two. And because the subcontractors were mostly college students and retirees looking to make a few bucks here and there, rather than support a family on the money, there really wasn’t any love lost when I cut them loose (or, more accurately, stopped sending them assignments).
Your methods may be different. But in order to make a smooth and easy transition from working full time for The Man to working towards self sufficiency, it’s best to have a way to keep business on the backburner until you’re ready to get cooking.

The Marketing Machine

Before I started my business, I read this horrendously outdated book entitled “How to Start a Copywriting Business.” While the material regarding the Internet was less than insightful (Thankfully, the book has since been updated, but in my edition, the author was balking at the hundreds of dollars it cost to get a domain name), the author mentioned the prudence of building a “lead generation” machine. He basically described it as a process that yields a predictable amount of leads each time – even if that percentage is very low. For example, if you sent out 500 direct mailings with only a 1% success rate of getting a bite, then you would still be getting five leads each time you did this. So, in theory, if you “pulled the lever” once a week, you’d easily have 260 leads by the end of the year – not bad.

For me, my marketing machine was the Internet – job boards, Craigslist, old contacts, etc. I made it a habit to apply for every single gig I saw during my lunch break. It was tedious to write so many cover letters, but it paid off in the end. About 71% of the leads proved to be scams or unresponsive, but the remaining portion that ended up being lucrative relationships more than compensated the effort. I even forced myself to look for jobs even when I didn’t need the work – even now, months and months later, I’ll get an email response to a query saying, “Hey, can you still do some work?”

Just like long hauls on the highway, it’s better to top off the tank when you’ve got the chance than to find yourself frantically searching for a gas station when you’re running on fumes.

Good Timing

I was ready to walk away from my job over a year before I actually did. In fact, I was just about to do so, and then all hell break loose on the U.S. economy. The company I worked for was directly tied to the finance industry and it got hit hard – the floor dropped out like the Tower of Terror and business plummeted immediately. Layoffs were inevitable and I was lucky to survive. As empty desks began dotting our office, I began considering resigning in order to spare some of my coworkers – but for some reason, I didn’t, which proved to be a lucky whim. Thankfully, the paucity of business was short-lived, and the orders started filtering in at the same rate as before the fallout, but now with a fraction of the staff.

After the dust settled, I re-evaluated my situation and decided I still wanted to walk way. But by then, the stakes were different. Rather than eagerly letting me go as part of sweeping downsizing, I was walking away when the company needed experienced workers the most. Because of this, we worked out a deal: I would cease being an employee but would occasionally be available to do work on a contract basis.

It was a win-win situation: I had freed myself from the obligation to be in the office from 9 to 5 (and oftentimes, beyond) and they weren’t forced to scramble to hire and train someone new to replace me just yet. Plus, I had essentially just landed my biggest client to date. And there I was: I took my subcontracted work off the backburner, I kept working for my old company and I continued hunting down new clients. I was self-employed.

Your day job may be different, but chances are, if you are a valued employee, you will be able to work something out. Because I had all the other irons in the fire, I had the confidence to approach my supervisor with an alternative to outright resignation. There were a couple different options on the table, which would’ve helped me grow my business while easing back on my responsibilities to my old employer, such as working part time, working four day work weeks or working remotely full time that may work better for you. I would encourage you to stay on good terms with your employer, even though you plan on jumping ship, as it will make negotiations much more cordial and productive, and most importantly, most beneficial for all parties.

I hope my personal take on becoming self-employed was helpful. I won’t say that I didn’t have to work a bit to get here, but looking back, I can’t really identify a time where I was diligently applying any sort of plan or breaking my neck to make it all happen. True, my road to self-employment is heavily paved with luck, but still, I think what carried me here was the will to make it work, more than a conscious plan. I love what Steve’s blog has to offer and I think it should be required reading for anyone looking to strike out alone. But hopefully, my story will show you that self-employment isn’t as hard as it seems.

I would like to start out by saying this post is a joke…. If I have ever talked to you and one of these happened it was purely a coincidence

We have all been there. You’re at a social event – a conference, a party wherever. You need to bail out of the conversation you’re having with someone. Maybe they’re boring, maybe they are trying to pitch you some retarded idea, maybe they have bad breath… you need to bail, here are my tips.

Two Eyed Blink Pretty much anyone in the industry that knows me knows about the two eyed blink. If I am talking to someone and look at them and blink with both of my eyes it means come get me the hell out of this conversation.

Wanna Grab Some Coffee Most of my team knows if I am talking to someone and look at them and ask if they want to grab some coffee it means get me the hell out of this conversation.

Bathroom Check If you’re solo and in a pinch you can just simply interrupt the person and say “Hey do you know where the bathroom is? I was just on my way. I will catch up with you later”

I Gotta Thing Much like the bathroom check this is a good solo technique as well. Be polite and say – “Hey it was a pleasure talking with you. I gotta thing in 5 minutes lets catch up.”

Well those are my tips. I cant wait to hear yours!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

How To Ditch Annoying People At Social Events

How My Partnership With Gideon Shalwick Generated A Quarter Of A Million Dollars In Under 12 Months

When I first started this blog the Internet was younger and many of the current big success story online companies had only recently risen to dominance.

I was fascinated with the background history behind the companies that featured heavily during the dot-com boom, some of which survived post the bust like eBay, Paypal and Amazon.com, and others that had fallen far from their glory days, like Napster.

I read biographical books that covered the people behind these companies and enjoyed hearing how the initial concepts were sparked and what path led from idea to multi-million, sometimes even multi-billion dollar companies.

You can read reviews of some of the books in the archives of this blog, including the PayPal Wars, the The Perfect Store – Inside eBay, Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money and All the Rave – The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster.

Two People Are Better Than One

I can’t remember where I read it first, but somewhere I recall hearing that many really successful companies, both offline and online, were started as partnerships. Two people, for all kinds of reasons, are able to achieve more than an individual.

The stories behind some of the big Internet success stories reinforces this idea, as is the case with Google, Microsoft and Apple. There are two founders who drive the vision behind the company, taking it to good performer and beyond to where most companies never go, to industry leader and even cultural phenomenon.

On a smaller scale, many of the people I interview in my podcasts on this blog often are part of a two-person partnership of some kind. One person may be in the limelight more than the other, but behind the scenes, there are two, who complement and motivate each other to get things done.

Up until 2007 I was a solo-entrepreneur, and I liked it that way. I read this fact about partnerships resulting in big success stories online as interesting, but it wasn’t compelling enough for me to run and find a partner. I had no interest in sharing my profits, or needing to negotiate with someone else to decide what to do. I enjoyed my independence as the only captain steering my ship.

Of course there are success stories of individuals creating massive companies too, so I wasn’t concerned that my desire to work alone might hurt my potential for success.

Despite my lack of intention, I have managed to find myself in a successful partnership that will very likely dominate the direction of my business for years to come. It’s worthwhile explaining how this happened, and what it has done for my business, so you can decide whether a partnership could benefit you too.

Random Strangers

One of the wonderful things about life is that you never know what’s coming up next. The only constant is change. This can be a terribly frightening idea if you become attached to something for fear of loss (relationships, objects, places, people, life itself), but also wonderfully liberating because it means whatever you don’t like about your life now will change, it’s a guarantee.

In some circumstances what appears as the randomness of change means you are completely oblivious to what comes next on a conscious level, so when it arrives, it’s a surprise. This idea can make you live in a permanent state of excitement or of course fear, depending how you look at life.

I had no idea that in 2007 I’d attend a typical pitch-fest Internet marketing event, which for all intents and purposes wasn’t anything special, except I met my future business partner there, Gideon Shalwick.

Many people have asked how Gideon and I met, so here’s the story in brief…

Gideon was at the Internet marketing event, walking up to the speakers and asking to do video interviews with them for his Internet Marketing Wizards project.

At the time Gideon was still looking for a break-out project, having written and published a book, and was spending a lot of time with online video.

Gideon came up to me and asked whether I was interested in being featured in one of his videos and I said yes. Since Gideon lived in Brisbane too, we agreed to do it at a later date so he could fit in interviews with those marketers who were only visiting Brisbane for the weekend.

Two weeks later I found myself in Gideon’s downtown apartment, sitting on chairs in front of his green screen, recording an interview. You can watch the video here if you’re interested -

Introducing Yaro Starak (You will have to dig around Blip for the rest of the parts of the interview.)

After I saw the quality and effort Gideon put into his video work I realized here was a guy with passion and an action-taker, two rare qualities.

A few months before this I was approached by the owner of the domain name BecomeABlogger.com to ask if I was interested in buying it. I said no.

I had enough projects going on at the time and I had made the mistake of doing too many things at once previously, so I tended to have a knee-jerk “no thanks” response to anything that looked like it might balloon into a new project.

A few months later I had a change of heart after having an idea about how to use the domain name as an introductory site for new bloggers. I didn’t have much video content at the time, so I decided it would be worthwhile having a site with beginner training videos on how to start blogging with WordPress, which I could send people to. I wouldn’t charge money for the videos, instead I’d use the site as a lead generator.

I bought the domain name but didn’t start the project up immediately. When Gideon appeared he seemed like a good fit as I needed someone with solid video and teaching skills.

I approached Gideon about taking the job on as a contract project and he said yes. It probably wasn’t the most fun work for Gideon, and I can be a terribly annoying person to develop for as I get picky with the little details, but eventually we finished up the site and made ten videos available for free. We were both happy and proud of the results.

When Gideon and I first talked about the project we discussed possibly expanding it, even as much as creating an entire membership site around the concept, if the first ten videos were well received.

It turned out that yes, basic video training for bloggers was something people really wanted, and Gideon’s teaching style was well received. I had access to an audience and Gideon had the skills to produce great video content, so we decided to follow my membership site model and set up a new video training program.

The rest, as they say, is history…

Become A Blogger Premium went on to become my most successful training course to date, with close to 2,000 students taking the course in the last 12 months.

Gideon and I created a new business together that grossed over a quarter of a million dollars in less than a year. We’ve helped thousands of people start successful blogs and Gideon and his wife are now in a much better financial situation too, which is something I get tremendous satisfaction from.

Incidentally, if you are at all interested in the more finite details about how we set-up and launched Become A Blogger Premium there is a special series of videos inside Membership Site Mastermind from Gideon and myself about the BAB Program, as well as my complete overview of how my membership site system works and how you can apply it to launch your own product.

If releasing your own information product interests you, you can begin now by studying my free report, The Membership Site Masterplan, and stay tuned for when I open the Membership Site Mastermind course to new students again.

How Partnerships Make A Difference

Now that I’ve actually experienced an active and successful partnership, I’m in a position to understand why they work and why you would consider entering into one.

Here are some key benefits I’ve gained thanks to working with Gideon:

• When Gideon and I partnered I had just finished creating two courses all by myself and I wasn’t in a situation were I wanted to create content for another program. I was tired. Gideon brought a skill-set I didn’t have – video creation – and was willing to spend some time creating content to teach others, if the project was something he was excited about.
• Gideon has motivation and skills, but he lacked a platform to access people. I had a platform through my blog, email list and contacts. It was a natural fit to work together as we could reach a lot of people and deliver a quality product, but only do this together.

  This only worked because I clearly saw the talent Gideon possessed and he had proven himself in a contract project we did together. The contract project was critical because it demonstrated to me Gideon’s character and skills, but also the marketability of the product we were planning on creating. We were able to experience the demand for what we were creating, so we weren’t playing a guessing game when it came time decide whether to release a product.

• Accountability is a huge aspect of getting things done and there’s nothing more motivating than becoming responsible to somebody else besides yourself. I’m quite self-motivated – I couldn’t have done what I’ve done without being so – but having someone else whom you are accountable to makes deadlines even more important because you don’t just let yourself down if you don’t perform.
• We made friends. This is probably the most important aspect. We got to know each other as people first without any thoughts of working together on a business project, and making a new friend is always a good thing.

Put Friendship First

Any form of partnership is based on the ability of the people in the partnership to work together as human beings. If you don’t “gel” then it doesn’t matter how complementary your skills are, or how great the opportunity is, it won’t work.

Gideon and I are well suited in many ways. We are both down to earth, so much so that when we started nutting out the details for our partnership we decided to just play it by ear and see what happened before getting any formal contracts done.

We put the friendship first, and we have always done so because that’s more valuable than anything else. Fighting over profit distribution, or who does what when, to the point of damaging a relationship is not worth it. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing of course, but it has never come close to a situation where we would risk our friendship.

The key to making the relationship aspect of your partnership work is to have a well constructed value system, that all parties share to some extent. If you value the relationships with people before the material benefits you earn from the partnership, then you will do well.

It’s Not Always Smooth Sailing

If there’s one area where most partnerships have problems, it’s communication.

If you don’t communicate where you are coming from or how you are feeling or what your expectations are, when things don’t quite line up how you expect them to, that’s when agitation begins. With enough agitation, the entire partnership can begin to deteriorate.

Gideon and I faced a unique challenge when we started because we were both bringing very different things into the arrangement, variables that are difficult to measure and thus cross reference.

I came to the table with an established brand, channels of communication to reach customers and contacts with some very important people in the industry. These variables are often the hardest to create and are make-or-break in terms of business success, since if you can’t reach people it doesn’t matter how good your product is, you won’t have customers.

Much of my contribution was based on leveraging work I had already done over previous years to create my preeminence, while from Gideon’s point of view he showed up and agreed to do a lot of work in terms of product creation.

Gideon created the bulk of the content within the product we created. He wrote the largest chunk of the resources and marketing materials we used to promote the product and continues to deal with customer service and ongoing promotion.

The challenge with this arrangement is it is very difficult to quantify and qualify what each person contributes to a partnership. It’s impossible to place a “value” on each of our contributions and then attempt to reach a point where we both are adding 50% value each, to justify the 50% value of the company we both own.

The key, and this ties back into the communication aspect, is to make sure that both parties feel comfortable with the contributions each party is making. Emotions are way more important than quantifiable measurement of inputs.

This is something that needs to be constantly evaluated and discussed, which is why Gideon and I have to be very careful as we take on more projects, so we ensure we both know what our roles are and are happy about what we each agree to do.

Gideon was content to do more “labor” work initially because I brought distribution, but I can’t expect to leverage my past efforts while Gideon works hard in the present forever.

Now that we’ve finished creating all the content for the course and most of our system is automated, we have much less work to do. Gideon and I are both in a situation where we can leverage previous effort, and enjoy the fruits of a well structured information product business model.

Why Would You Look For A Partnership?

Although I don’t think it’s necessary to deliberately seek out a partnership, there are some situations where you may consider it a good strategy, either as a means to form a new enterprise, or take your existing business forward.

Here are some situations where a partnership is valuable –

• If you lack critical skills and don’t have a means to hire or contract the work. Be careful with this, don’t partner with someone just because you need a good designer, or web developer, or any job that can be outsourced on a project basis, or supplied by an employee. You should only bring on a partner when there’s a clear synergy between you and them, where your partnership creates something greater than the sum of the parts.
• If you’re currently not established in an industry and you don’t want to go through the hard slog to slowly build up your preeminence over time, then finding a partner who is already preeminent and has distribution is definitely the quickest path to success.
• When a person approaches you and they so clearly possess talent that you can leverage based on your own talent or situation, it’s simply a case of divine intention that you work together. Sometimes it’s just meant to be, and you will know this very likely based on the relationship you have with the person and how they make you feel more than anything else.
• If you’re already established yourself, one of the greatest sources of leverage you will ever find are people who have a great idea, or own the rights to a great product or technology that could be applied to your industry. If you have systems, resources and distribution, you can leverage your assets to create more wealth. Just be certain you’re not doing it just for the money, you have to believe in the concept too.

Partnerships are relationships, so you don’t want to enter them lightly. Make sure you know what you are getting into, think about where you are heading, what you personally want to contribute, what type of person you are considering working with, whether you really need them as partners and always, always communicate clearly for best results.

Gideon and I are planning some big things in 2010, so if you’re interested in working closer with both of us, stay tuned, we’ll have some very unique opportunities coming soon.

Yaro Starak
Partner

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Most customers call us for 3 reasons. One, they call because they aren’t comfortable purchasing anything online and prefer to buy over the phone. Two, they call because they have specific questions about our products. And finally, they call because they want our “expert” opinion on what to order. This particular mother of the bride wanted my input on handkerchiefs for her daughter and future son in law.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t like giving advice about wedding paraphernalia. Weddings are a touchy subject and most of the time, it’s difficult to gather enough information about your client’s taste to make an accurate recommendation. But sometimes you have to provide your opinion in order to complete a sale. Read on to find out what my opinion was truly worth.

Me: Hello. What can I do for you today?

Customer: Thank goodness, I got you on the phone. I’m thinking about ordering some handkerchiefs and I need your artistic opinion. I really have no idea what to buy.

Me: Sure, I’ll do my best.

Customer: I was thinking about ordering some monogrammed handkerchiefs for the bride and the groom.

Me: Ok. What sort of questions do you have?

Customer: I’m choosing between a handkerchief with a large scallop lace border and one with a small scallop lace border. Which one would you prefer for the bride?
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Me: Yikes. That really depends on the taste of the bride. Does she like big lace or would she prefer something more low key and more conservative.

Customer: Her personality is a bit more on the conservative side. I'm not sure if she would want the lace to stand out too much.

Me: Well if she wants the hankie to be a bit more low key, then I would definitely get the small scalloped hankie. The lace is very thin, elegant and simple.

Customer: Oh really? But the large scallop lace is so pretty. Do a lot of customers purchase that one? Is it popular?

Me: Yes, that style is very popular.

Customer: Do you think it will be too lacey for the bride?

Me: Well ma'am, the lace is rather large. If the bride is looking for something more conservative, then the small scalloped would be...

Customer: I think I'll go with the large scallop.

Me: Ah Ok...Anything else I can help you with?

Customer: Actually yes. For the mens handkerchief, would you prefer having a monogram in dark blue thread or black thread?

Me: Once again that depends on the wedding colors.

Customer: Well their tuxes are black with a dark blue tie. What do you think?

Me: Either color would work I think.

Customer: Just give me your honest opinion. What would you personally go with as a man?

Me: Well, I'm kind of partial to the dark blue thread. I like the blue over the black because it would probably stand out a bit more from the color of the ....

Customer: Do you think black is too morbid? I mean is black only for funerals?

Me: No, some people get black thread but as I was saying the blue thread would probably stand...

Customer: Oh really? Black isn't too morbid then? I was worried that black would be too negative for a wedding.

Me: Well actually...

Customer:Ok yeah, I think I'm going to go with the black then.

Me: Ok. Sure. Anything else I can help you with?

Customer: Nope. That's it. I just want to thank you so much for giving me your advice on what to buy. I don't know what I would have done without you. I'm so glad to have talked with you on the phone.

Me: Uh...sure anytime.

Did I actually give her any advice? She knew what she wanted to buy long before calling me up on the phone. Alas, I guess some customers just want someone to listen to and not to actually provide advice.

It kind of reminds me of the book "Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus" and some of the interactions I've had with my wife. Guys just want to give advice and women just want someone to listen to whatever they have to say. But if the customer is openly asking for advice, then shouldn't I provide it? Alas, maybe I need to read that book again.