You may not give a hoot about my origins or life story, but just in case you find my writing compelling, are looking for somebody to stalk, or are considering getting me to write for you I'll give you some background.
I've never worked in the corporate world or had to wear a tie to work. I started learning how to market and create copy in the rough-and-tumble of real life, often with little capital.
I've had successes and failures - and I always looked for the lessons when things didn't go well. Every now-and-then I start get a bloated ego and usually some sort of curve ball knocks me off my high horse. Karma? I get egg on my face and make some dumb choices like any other entrepreneur - but I get up every time and look at what I could do better.
In a lot of cases we fail because we get cocky or arrogant. Even Donald Trump admits that when he was worse-than-broke in the 1990s it was because he got sloppy - got so seized-up with his own ego that he lost touch with the fundamentals.
About Me and What I’m Doing These Days:
I want you to know that I’m the real deal and I walk the walk as far as online marketing goes. I'm always learning new stuff. For me success isn't an excuse to rest on my laurels, it's an inspiration to reach higher.
- Demand for my consulting and writing skills are on the rise. I’m not that well-known yet because I mostly promote my own stuff and seldom write copy for others.
- I play Flamenco guitar. That’s a serious lifetime skill - there is no limit to how good you or I could get at something like that. I can play proficiently in some other styles too, but I really
like the challenges and the intense sound and rhythmic drive of Flamenco.
- I’m learning Drupal - a sophisticated web-development system. I’m still a beginner at Drupal, but everyone has to start at the beginning with every skill.
- I’ve been practicing yoga since 1993 - Chinese internal martial arts since 2005. Not always concurrently. All these disciplines are lifetime ones - they are process oriented.
- I can play percussion, keyboards, accordion. I can read music but I prefer to improvise and play by ear. I’ve developed the ability with 1000s of hours of practice - no short cuts or unusual gift, just practice.
- I’m learning digital musical composition with synthesizers and desktop music production environments. In all my years of playing music I’ve never recorded much of anything so much of this is totally new to me. I’m pretty green at it but it’s exciting and boy is there a lot to learn.
- I’m doing the electronic music to compose original tracks for my girlfriend’s belly-dancing video course we are working on. If that goes well the video stuff will lead to more videos, CDs of belly dance music, weekend intensives all over the country, week-long retreats in exotic places, and so on. Big plans right? Great fun too and I’ll be using all my marketing expertise to make sure it works out.
- I have several information products at various stages of completion. I also want to turn some of my writing into a real published book soon. From there my intention is to be a seminar speaker. That can be really lucrative, but more importantly I think it will be FUN! I know it will be scary for me even to get up on stage and do it, but you know what? The potential rewards of it outweigh my fears of humiliating myself. See? I’m human.
- When I have the time I hand-build classical and Flamenco guitars. I’ve built steel-strings too, but I really love the nylon string instruments. I really want to built a hurdy-gurdy someday - a mechanical violin that sounds kind of like a bagpipe.
THE CRAFT OF MAKING MONEY
For better of for worse I went to College and got a B.A. in English Lit. Slow pitch for me - my dad was a professor of English and while I don't love 19th century Literature by any stretch I found it not too difficult to cruise through school with a procession of graceful "snowjobs" substituting for a meaningful experience of real literature. I had fun but acquired a distaste for long, boring old novels. I don't think I read more than a couple of books of pulp fiction in the 5 years after leaving school.
I started out working wood for a living. I was pretty bad at it at first but I was passionate to learn how to build things people would actually pay for. I read everything I could find that seemed relevant... books, magazines. This was in the days before the internet so I read most of the woodworking and guitar building books at the public library.
It wasn’t until I had been working with wood for several years that I started to feel like I understood furniture making. It’s a complex craft - if I showed me some of the things I have built you might make the mistake of calling me a master craftsman - my skills are pretty advanced.
The point is that these skills took a lot of reading and practice to develop... and I still make mistakes when I work with wood. It took me a long time of hunting and sorting to get the tools together to do a wide range of work. I bought and sold a lot of saws and hand-tools and things. In fact it was through buying and selling hand tools that I first got involved in Ebay Auctions in 1999.
That was 9 years ago. That’s how long I have been on the internet... watching it grow. Aside from buying and selling tools on Craigslist and Ebay I didn’t really think that making money on the internet was something that was easy to do or that I was very interested in until about 2006.
I watched the Dot-Com “boom and bust" and I knew that just about the only people making money consistently on the internet in the early days were the pornography people. Living in Los Angeles I have some contact with people in that industry and it just wasn’t something that I wanted to get involved with. It's just, well, sleazy and my mother would never approve.
In late 2006 I was feeling burnt out by my woodworking business...
REWIND...
Let's get back first to 2003 when I first started doing Direct Response marketing. I was still interested in being a “wood artisan” back then and I took a correspondence course in using direct mail marketing methods to build my woodworking business.
I had some success with that. I would send out lead-generation postcards to Architects and Interior Designers and if they were interested in learning more they would call my 800 number, leave their mailing address and I would send them a 12-page sales-letter.
I got some good results with the mail. I got some clients. It was a darn-good letter but as a solo guy with a poor workspace I struggled to deliver on the promises I made in the letter. After a couple of years of that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I felt like I was treading water
The problem was not the marketing method, it was with my business model. As a one-man show I had low-overhead expenses and I was my own boss. I also had to do a lot of hard physical labor just to keep things going.
I knew that hiring employees was a route to making more money with woodworking, but it would also mean a lot more work and bigger overhead costs. To keep good employees in that industry you have to keep work flowing in - which can mean taking on jobs where you actually lose money sometimes - which seemed like a lame way to build a profit-turning and fun business.
Even with no formal business training I had the idea that I should be making maximum dollars for my actual time spent working my business. That’s not too hard to figure, but how many of us actually set up our businesses and careers that way?
Not too many. That’s part of why most people don’t get wealthy. Their income-producing system is inefficient or a result of dumb thinking.
In 2005 a friend invited me to the T. Harv Eker’s Millionaire Mind Intensive. It’s a three-day seminar that this guy puts on all over North America. That seminar changed my thinking permanently.
The Greatest Success Tool Is Between Your Wiggly Little Ears
I started looking at my business much more critically after that seminar. I realized that to have the lifestyle and freedom I wanted with my business I would have to take on managing employees and a whole bunch of other responsibilities. With my new found brain I could be truly ambivalent about going that way. I wanted a simple business where I could make great money and not be tired and dirty at the end of every day.
Woodworking just didn’t fit the bill. Neither did guitar building, a craft I had studied and pursued a little.
Here’s why hand-building guitars or furniture doesn’t work too well as a model for getting a lot of free time - these businesses are only “scalable” if you take on employees to increase production. It can be done, but as with all things, you pay a price to do it.
That’s the way it is with any manufacturing business.
After that first seminar I did a lot of soul-searching. I honestly assessed the kind of life I wanted to have. To you the life of the hard-working wood craftsman may seem to have a rough-hewn glamour - a sort of “I wish I could do that,” appeal... It’s a tough business and the hours are long and people sometimes decline to pay you what is due when the job is done - especially contractors, some of whom underbid jobs and make their money by screwing their subcontractors regularly.
About a year later I attended a second T. Harv Eker seminar called Guerilla Business School. Again an Eker intensive changed my mind and my life. I was sick the whole time. I mean miserably ill. I'm a complete wimp about flus and since I didn't have a girlfriend at the time it ws all on me to drag myself to the seminar. I had paid for it, there were no refunds available for wimps and I wanted to improve my situation. That seminar created a big shift in my mind-set - the way I looked at business and income and at getting what I want out of life.
The result was that I was even more dis-satisfied with my life and my business. Woodworking just wasn’t much fun anymore - or rather doing the business of woodworking wasn’t much fun.
It was when I got tired of pursuing my dream of a career as a wood artisan that things started to get clearer for me. A lot of books and gurus preach that to be successful and happy you have to get clear on what you want - and there is a lot of truth to that. More powerful sometimes that deciding what you want is deciding what you DON’T want.
This isn’t about negativity. I just didn’t want the kind of business that my woodworking skills qualified me for. I didn’t want to have employees or a big factory or the long hours or all the other stuff that goes along with that kind of manufacturing. I didn’t like packing up my van and driving to houses to install cabinets.
A New Hope
What I did want - A business that was structured around something I didn’t have to build, didn’t take up a lot of space, where my income wasn’t strictly a reflection of my hours.
I wanted what we call “leverage” in business. Leverage is having other people or even machines actually do the work for you. Leverage is running advertising that reaches more people in one day than you could reach in a year of making calls.
I’m not afraid of the phone. Its an essential business building tool and you would be hard pressed to find a successful person who wasn’t pretty good at selling their services on the phone - no matter what line of business that person is in.
In 2006 I got started with doing business on the internet. I was on the phone a lot too. I would run PayPerClick ads to generate leads and then follow-up on the phone. I was really bad at phone sales. I had no experience with pure sales before that. Selling a third party thing like insurance or internet training programs is way different from selling your skills as a wood artisan.
I tried a lot of things that didn’t work. I spent money I probably shouldn’t have on things that seemed to promise to do it all for me - but were really just hype-jobs target marketed at rank-beginners like I was then.
My Sincere Advice To You
My journey to success as an online marketer took a lot of study and work. I had to sort through a lot of junk. Maybe yours will be easier. Count on it being a challenge for you and then when things work it you will be surprised.
If you are going to do this - do it full out. Do it with total commitment. You have a chance to create an amazing life for yourself but you'll have to work much harder than you are expecting. Don't be fooled by the scraggly surfer-magicians who talk a good patter about how cool it is to rake in the dough lazily. It takes a toughness of the mind to push through to victory with a business. It's worth it - but you need health and endurance because it's a path that requires energy and consistency.
