But a lot of our traffic is repeat traffic too, from the members themselves who come back to download a product or they come back to read a new article or maybe to read our blog or do something... so a lot of it is repeat, which is good, that means you have loyal members - the more loyal your customers and members are, the more likely they are to buy again from you.
The hardest thing you can do in business is to make that first sale. Once you have made that first sale it is so much easier to make a second, a third, a tenth, whatever... sale from that customer because they trust you. As long as they like your product of course, if they hate your product then they are gone. As long as they like your service and your product and they like what you are doing and they keep coming back to your site, that's the key.
That's why we focus on membership sites because it helps to build a database of loyal people, people who will buy from you again and again. Now, we give and give and give to these people but eventually it comes back.
We just have a lot of benefits where we really try and help the members out who are active, the ones who are interactive with us, we reward them by giving them exposure, traffic, things like that. People can even submit their own product there.
So let's say, going back to that free report I was talking about, you can go to SureFireWealth and submit your free report to all of our free members that would be listed on our site. And all of our 70,000+ members could possibly see that and go download it, that's instant traffic.
So, we really do a lot of things that other sites don't do to help our members, to help our people, reward them for joining our site. And in return, we send emails to them, we send direct mailings a couple of times a week with recommendations that we care for you to look over, and we review, and we send them articles and new content; but we do a mix. We do a mix of giving them downloads, so they can go get free books or software, if they are a paid member they will get even more. We try to find a balance where we give a lot more than we take. So that's what that site is about.
And there is so much content to try and help people. In my opinion, it's one of the best sites for anyone interested in Internet Marketing as their online business, to utilize in their tool belt. Once you are a member you can go back to it any time and find whatever you are looking for. We have a built in search engine in our site so you can instantly find any product listed on our site by the title, the author name or the Keyword, which really makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for.
So if you are looking for new software on how to submit articles you just type in 'article software' or something and see what comes up. There are a lot of things that we help people with, not only as far as getting traffic to our site, exposure, things like that, but they can sure learn a lot because there are so many books, so many videos and audio and things.
If people take the time to actually do some research, try to research their topic and learn whatever they need to learn about; maybe they want to learn more about SEO, they can go and find some books on SEO and read them; maybe they want to learn more about article marketing, publishing... whatever they want to learn about SureFireWealth.com is a great tool to use to help anybody get started, or even people who are advanced marketers. It's a real resource that we have been building on and will continue to build on for people.
But, as we have spoken about this before, what you did is a very step-by-step, duplicatable process, but I wonder if you could just detail the steps you took that made that possible and what people can learn and take away from that, if they are interested in doing something like that themselves?
It was about a two-year process. Kind of a long story but I will try and make it as short as I can. But, basically I had met Simon Hodgkinson in 2005 when I was getting started online as a publisher. We kind of complimented each other with our businesses and got talking and we released Marketing Main Event 1 which was at MarketingMainEvent.com in the fall of 2005.
And what we did was try and make it a site where you would just pay one fee and you would get access to all these great products that were brand new, and all these great membership sites that you have to pay elsewhere for. And what I did is... I worked for a couple of months with my JV partners getting them to add some great offers inside the member area, so all the Marketing Main Event members got free paid passes to all these other membership sites.
It wasn't anything fake; these are real passes that these people went overboard to create especially for our customers. The benefit for our customers was they paid $297 as a one-time fee and they got access to over $1,000 of membership sites and another couple of thousand dollars worth of products that were all brand new.
So basically it was a no-brainer - 'Hey, I can go buy each one, one by one, and spend five grand, or I can become a member of MarketingMainEvent.com and spend $300. Let's see... which one should I do?'
So that's basically what the process was. So we put it together, took a lot of time, took a lot of effort, but we put it together and that project did... I think it was $150,000 to $160,000 in sales in about ten days.
And for me and Simon that was fantastic, because if you remember I had just got started online with my own business and he too, only about a year or two before that. So for us that was just fantastic, we had never done anything like that in our lives before, in a week. In ten days we each walked away with basically what a lot of people made in a year.
So that was a real turning point, but it was also something that we couldn't do the same again, because if we did the exact same thing again people would just go "No big deal, this has been done before". At the time nobody had done what we did. We were different; we did something different.
So think what you can do that's different... be different from anybody else. Do something that's just amazing and something that's just a no-brainer... and we got lots of partners to promote it because they all made 50% commission. We paid our partners $150 a sale and we also had a sales contest for our partners where the winner got I think it was $5,000, so that added competition.
Basically we let our JV partners take over and they promoted the heck out of it and we got tons of traffic, tons of sales, we paid out a lot of commissions but as I said we each walked away with a good sum of money. And it was a very successful event, our customers were very happy and then what we did was we built on that with Marketing Main Event 2...
Simon and I went into a lot of depth on this - if you go to a site called the Secret Audio Sessions... Simon and I revealed a lot things we did to make that project a success. And also another product that was called MarketingExplosion.com, which me and Simon put out, where we went into great depth about how we did the Marketing Main Event series.
But anyway, we started with one then we went into number two, that was even bigger than the first one. We charged more for it too, we charged like $697 for Marketing Main Event 2 which was one year later, it was also in November but that was in 2006. And same thing, we had lots of JV partners involved promoting it, 50% commission payout, we had a sales content, where we paid out either five or ten thousand dollars to the number one sales guy.
It was a big event and we did a lot of build up, we did a pre-launch, we built up a lot of buzz. Our goal was to break a million on that one, but we didn't quite do it, we were close but we didn't quite break the million. But nevertheless we were very happy; we each walked away with a lot more than we had done on the previous event.
Remember these are projects that we did on the side of our business, Simon had his own business going; I had my own business going - plus there was me and him working on these projects. It was a lot of fun. And then we said we are going to do number three and this is going to be the last one for now because: 1) anything that comes in a set of three is good luck; 2) we didn't want to make this the ongoing thing forever as people would get bored of it. Also I don't know how we would top what we did for Marketing Main Event 3, as it was just a fantastic offer.
Louis you were involved with that too. It was a real ride. It was a two-year process and basically what we did -- the main product of Marketing Main Event 3 was our core software, our in-house software that we developed. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing for our own site and we released that in Marketing Main Event 3 so that people could go and build their own membership sites just like we do - a lot quicker, faster and cheaper than ever before.
And we also had a ton of other products in there as well, just so many things in there it's just phenomenal. Again, we charged about $1,000 for that, and we paid out 50% commission, and all the partners promoted the heck out of it, the same thing as we did previously... we just had a huge pre-launch, a huge buzz, that's all we focused on for a couple of months.
And the results were great, we broke the million dollar mark in sales... we almost hit two million dollars in sales, and it was fantastic. But anyone who thinks it was easy, it was not, there was a lot of work. It was two years of build up, literally thousands and thousands of hours into that project between me and Simon and our partners and our team.
And we invested a lot of money into it ourselves but the ROI was great and as a result after Marketing Main Event 3 Simon and I established a company called MemberSpeed Inc and we released the software under MemberSpeed.com and kept improving on it and we also released a lot of other sites under that company and we are still releasing sites.
Now, I have SureFireWealth Inc, which I focus on myself but I also need to focus on MemberSpeed Inc. - growing that company as well. It's a never-ending process, there's a lot of time involved and it's a lot of fun too.
LA - That's great. As we start wrapping this up, one thing I would like to do if possible is to take a lot of what you've said and give the people listening as much of a step-by-step plan for initially taking what they are listening to now and actually making money with self-publishing online within 90 days, if possible.
And even if they are interested - taking that a lot further, taking what is detailed here and growing it into a seven-figure a year business, or even more, in as short a time as possible. What would be your advice to create quick cash with self-publishing within 90 days and also - if they chose to, grow that into a seven-figure a year business as quickly as possible and in a duplicatable way?
JG - Two words... Think big. You've got to get your head on straight. You've got to get your mind focused. You've got to have the right mindset. I don't care if you have every tool available to you, every partner available to you, you have every single thing available at your fingertips - if you don't have the right mindset you are not going to make it, or it's not going to be as big as you hope it would be.
You have got to have the mindset for this. You have got to stop thinking "I can't do this" or "This is too hard". Stop complaining, you need to think positive... "Yes I can do this"... "Anything is possible".
Don't make small goals. Yes, make small short-term goals, but your long-term goals should be big - think big. Instead of thinking "I want $50,000 a year" why not think "I want $20 million a year and I'm going to be doing whatever I want, and financially free in five years".
That could be your long-term goal. Your short-term goal could be "In the next six months I'm going to make $50,000" or something like that. And write it down. I highly recommend going to a new site that we have coming up pretty soon... MindmapToRiches.com - and we are going to teach everybody how to do that.
I also recommend reading a lot of things such as Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller... all these kind of things to help you with your mindset. Once you have your mindset down and you are thinking big, you are thinking positively, you are not complaining, every day is good in your head... because you make your environment. Your environment is basically a reflection of yourself.
You can take, for example, any day of the week and you can say "Today just sucks. It's cloudy out, it's cold, I've got to put gas in the car, I've got to go shopping later and get some food. I've got to waste my time, go do this, run all these errands. I can't get anything done. My site was down for a couple of hours, this has screwed up, my project has not gone according to plan..."
You know what I mean? You get into the complaining mentality, the negative mentality, and guess what? You are only going to emphasis that, it's only going to come back at you worse. Once you start thinking like that it's going to manifest itself and every day is going to be terrible.
But on the other hand if you think, "Hey, wow it's a great day. I'm happy I woke up today... I'm alive... I'm not in a wheelchair... I have all my limbs... I have food in the fridge... I can eat... today is partly cloudy but the sun is coming out... it's not too cold, it's pretty nice today, and I have the freedom where I can go do these errands today while other people are sitting at their desk, I don't have to do that. Hey wow... I had a few problems on this project but I know it's going to be fixed and it's going to be great in a couple weeks."
You know you've got to really think like that because it's not easy, having your own business it's not easy; to me it is, I think "Yeah it's easy... it's great" but a lot people don't think it's easy - "I can never do that".
But you have got to think right. Once you get your thinking down, you have just got to go do it. You have to take action. Don't be afraid to do something. Too many people, they over analyze it, it's called analysis paralysis or something like that. It's where you analyze it so in depth that you never release your product because there is always something that is not perfect.
So if you want to release that product in 90 days and every day is like "I can't release it yet because there are a couple of spelling mistakes on my sales page" or "I didn't have this link quite right" or "I forgot to update my fax". Just release the damn thing. Get it out there. Get your product out there.
Microsoft does it. They just release and go from there. I'm not saying be like Microsoft but what I'm saying is just release your product and don't overanalyze it. Nothing is ever perfect. Just get it out there and then continue to improve on it is all you can do. There is always room for improvement. That's it. You will never, ever, ever have the perfect product, there is no such thing because there is always a way to improve it, right?
So just get it out there. So get the mindset, take action and just release the damn product basically is what I'm saying. Follow the things that I've kind of said, as far as you want to -- focus on list building, if you don't have enough money just have a blog or something. Do something like that - there are a lot of free ways to get traffic that I've already mentioned.
A really great way to explode your business is to have your own affiliate program; that is something that I highly recommend. Having an affiliate program really gives you leverage, now instead of just you making sales you have other people making sales for you. It's a great way to really grow your business as long as you have a good offer that converts.
So I guess those things are very central and you never want to lose focus. Once you release that product, okay "What's next?", you have always got to be thinking "What's next?"
You can't get into the mold of "Okay I'm good". I did that once or twice and I regretted it ever since. For example coming off Marketing Main Event 3 I was on top of the world in my head and I just kind of let things slide for about the next month, but they started catching up with me and I had a lot of catching up to do a couple of months later.
Once you have got a product out the door, you have gotten that thing going, keep thinking what's next? Whether it's improving your product, improving your customer service, or working on your next product - you know, do something. The best thing you can do is have multiple products, once you get that first product out there don't just rely on that one product forever as your sole source of income.
Think about how to expand that product, either by having complimentary follow-up products or side products, or something totally different in another niche. Whatever you are doing start thinking about expanding your product line, it is something that really works.
For example, a really big publishing company called Agora, they own EarlyToRise.com. One thing I read - I think it was Michael Masterson, in one of his books, he said when he entered a publishing house they were not doing very well, and the one thing that really changed and just exploded their income from like three million dollars a year to thirty million dollars a year in sales was by releasing multiple products.
They kept adding more products to their product line... they kept adding product after product after product, and they would sell those products to their mailing list. And they do it every day, and that's how they are doing millions and millions and millions every year, so really expand your product line is what you need to do.
Once you get to the point where you have enough income coming in you want to make sure you invest a good part of that back in your business, and eventually you want to remove yourself from that business. That is my long-term goal, to remove myself, to take myself out.
I want my business, my company, to some day be able to run itself. I want to have the people in place to run it and keep that going so when I am long gone a hundred years from now that company is still going and still helping people out. So that's my long-term goal.
I also want to give back - I think giving back is very, very important - it's a must. If you have a business and you are an entrepreneur, if you are a true entrepreneur, you will give back to charity somehow, either with money or time. And a lot of books talk about giving 10% back to charity, anything you can give whether it's 1% or 5%, or if you want to be generous and give 20% or 30%, give back, help others. It's so important. It will come back to you.
You are creating good karma for yourself, for your business, it's just going to help you out. Remember you can't take anything with you when you are in the box, when your life is done and over you cannot take anything with you but your soul. So you need to make sure you are happy with what you are doing.
Don't ever cheat people; don't ever do anything illegal; don't scam people for a quick buck. Be honest and provide good services and give back. It's very important to give back to charity. It's sad a lot of people don't - even if they have made millions - they just keep it all themselves and spend it very selfishly on themselves.
But someday those people will wake up when they are bankrupt, and they have nothing, and nobody cares about them. But the people who are generous, they start foundations, another one of our goals is to start a foundation to really help out the environment, to help out people, do things to really make the world a better place.
And that is what it is all about. As an entrepreneur you are creating jobs, you are creating products to help people, and you are helping society by giving back. And that is the true spirit of an entrepreneur.
Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 1
Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 2
Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 3
Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 4
Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 5
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