Today’s special guest is a very well known online marketer, Alex Mandossian. Go to marketingonline.com/event to find out more. Alex has been marketing online since the early days of the intenet back in the 90‘s, he has a lot to share about online marketing and internet business and in this episode he shares...

• The 3 reasons people fail in online marketing
• Why sloppy success is better than perfect mediocrity
• The secret for getting passionate about your business
• The 3 ways to increase engagement with your prospects and customers
• E=MC3 equation for marketing messages that make money
• And much more
  

Today’s special guest is speaker trainer, Joleene Moody, go to joleenespeaks.com to find out more. Joleene teaches people how to get booked as a speaker and sell from stage which is something I think is very important for online entrepreneurs is to be seen as an authority figure who gets invited to speak in the real world. In this interview Joleene shares...

• 3 ways to get booked as a speaker
• A really simple way of putting on your own speaking events
• The Box of confidence method to get booked at a specific event you really want to speak at
• The 50/50 rule for selling from stage or from a live online event
• How to follow up with and sell to the prospects you acquire from speaking events
• And much more!
  

If you want to grow your business and reputation through speaking events both online and offline then this episode is for you.

Today I have a very special guest on the line his name is Ryan Levesque and he’s famous for pioneering Survey Funnels go to surveyfunnelformula.com to find out more.

In today’s call Ryan will be sharing his survey funnel formula which has helped him to generate 2.8 million leads and acquire 175,000 in the last 23 months including...

• Why you need to be dumb to succeed in marketing
• The 3 biggest mistakes people make in their marketing funnels
• 3 types of survey funnels that you can use - The Micro commitment bucket survey, The do you hate me survey, The pivot survey (when Ryan uses these 3 surveys in his funnel he increases revenue by 50%)
• The length of a funnel should we be going for same visit sales or is it better to take time to nurture prospects?
  

Today’s special guest is a top internet marketer, Gary George, go to blazinmultimedia.com to find out more.

We’ll be discussing a variety of topics, Gary will be sharing...

• How to come up with the right online marketing strategy
• His top 2 lead generation methods that are working really well right now
  
• Why having a mobile app is a huge marketing opportunity in fact Gary says he’s not been so excited about any new marketing technology since early days of Google adwords
• The 3 most important elements of app store optimization
  
• 2 other ways to promote and get lots of downloads for your mobile apps
  
• All that and more coming up

Today’s special guest is very well known online marketer, Terry Dean. Go to mymarketingcoach.com to find out more. Terry has been marketing online since 1996, the old days of online marketing and he’s mentored many people to online success, in this interview we discuss the corner stones of building a profitable online business...

• The eliminate, automate and delegate technique so that you can earn more, work less and and enjoy your life
  
• 3 Survey questions to help you understand exactly what your audience wants
• 5 steps that will make any website convert better in 15 minutes or less
• Terry’s favourite traffic source right now
• The the 3 c’s of monetizing email and why Terry gets worried if he doesn’t get any complaints after sending an email to his list
• All that and much more!
  

Today’s special guest is a top copywriter his name is Chris Haddad. Chris is a well known copywriter who actually retired from copywriting and no longer teaches copy, he just writes it for himself and makes income from the amazing sales letters he writes, and this is some fake scarcity play, you’ll see at the end of the call, I try very hard to get him to give me a website and he couldn’t give me one. His copywriting skills genuinely aren’t for sale, so I’m really lucky to have landed this interview with him. For the last few years Chris has been using his copywriting skills to make money selling products in the dating and relationship industry and in this interview Chris shares with us what marketers and copywriter should know when marketing to this niche. So if you work in this niche or plan to, or if you’re clients or potential clients are in this niche and you help them with their marketing then make sure you stay tuned

Brad geddes is the author of the book Advanced Google Adwords, go to certifiedknowledge.org to find out more.

In this episode we will be discussing exactly that, advanced google adwords, we’ll covering, search theory, quality score, keyword research, ad extensions, writing ads, advanced targeting options, landing pages, remarketing and everything in between, so if you use adwords as part of your marketing or you plan on using it, you won’t want to miss this episode!

Sam Bennett is the author of Get it Done. Go to theorganizedartistcompany.com to find out more.

In today’s episode, Sam will be discussing strategies from her book so that we can be super productive in our businesses including…

• Why do we put things off and often don’t get our most important projects done
• The easy, practical steps you can take to make sure you do complete your main projects
  
• Why you should have an idea catcher
• Why a could do list is better than a to do list
• How to pick the most important project to you right now
• And much more
  

Steve Wilkinghoff is the author of “Found Money: Simple strategies for uncovering the hidden profit and cash flow in your business”. Go to stevewilkinghoff.com to find out more. Steve started out as an accountant before becoming entrepreneurial and so he understands the numbers and financial side of a business in a way that most business owners do not, the majority of business owners when they look at their finiancial statement they don’t know how to make sense of them and how they can translate that information into actionable changes that they need to make within their business to make it grow. Understanding how your business actually makes money so that you can make more of it. Maybe you’ve struggled with this? I know I have which is why I wanted to get Steve on the show today.

We’re going to be discussing these topics including...

• Why it’s critical to get absolutely clear as to the reason your business exists in the first place
  
• Why you must clearly define goals so that your business can support your dream lifestyle
  
• The 3 things a business has to do to make money for its owner
• A quick, easy way to immediately increase cashflow
  
• How to get out of what Steve calls a death spiral, the situation where the business is really struggling financially and heading for failure, Steve’s going to share how to identify where you’re going wrong so that you can fix the problem

Today’s special guest is Barry Schwartz, go to rustybrick.com to find out more.

Barry has a lot of experience in SEO, he’s a contributor over at both search engine roundtable and search engine land and in this interview we are discussing the state of search engine optimization in 2014. SEO is a moving target, what worked a year ago, could get you penalized now so in this episode Barry will be sharing latest tips to stay in googles good books and make sure we can don’t find ourselves in any trouble with so that they continue to send us lots and lots of search traffic!

Brad Smart who is the author of Topgrading. Go to topgrading.com to find out more.Topgrading is widely considered to be the most effective methodology for hiring the best talent to work for your company and is used by fortune 500’s, small businesses and non profits alike and in this episode Brad shares how we can use the Topgrading interview process to hire only the very best people the people he calls A-players, and to get the very best out of them and to keep them doing their best work for you for long term.

NOTE: There is an echo in the middle third of the interview which reduces the quality of the audio. You can still hear what is being said but I would highly recommend reading the transcipt on my blog so that you don't miss anything.

Today’s special guest is Chris Savage and he is a co-founder of Wistia. Got to wistia.com to find out more. Wistia is the video hosting platform built specifically for marketers and business people, many of the world’s best marketers swear by it, and today Chris is going to be sharing exactly how we can use Wistia to get far better results with our video marketing.

Steven Kotler is the author several books including The Rise of Superman:Decoding the science of ultimate human performance. In this book Steven explores the concept of Flow, the state we are in when we perform at our absolute best, and in this interview Steven discusses how we as entrepreneurs can get into flow so that we can perform at our maximum level.

John Buscall is the owner of jontusmedia.com, a digital marketing agency with a special talent for creativity and strategy. In this interview John shares...

• Why marketing is a commitment not a campaign
• How to come up with creative marketing ideas that really stand out
• Why you don’t always need to have a totally original ideas when getting creative
• How to inject creativity into your brand and into your online content
• How to figure out what your online marketing strategy should be
• 2 of his favorite online marketing tools
• And much more
  

Izabela Russell works with some of the worlds top podcasters to help their podcasts sound great, in this episode Izabela shares...

• Why podcasting is a great way of getting new clients
  
• How to make great intro’s, outro’s, jingles, promo’s
  
• How to prepare your own voice so that it sounds great when recording
• And more!
  

Jules watkins is th guy behind the video hero brand. He teaches business owners how to create amazing looking video that sells. In this episode Jules shares...

• 3 tips for getting great quality iphone videos
• A cool iphone accessory that will make your videos look super professional
• The easiest tools for editing your videos
  
• How to devise a video strategy so that you can build your list or sell
  
• And much more.

Gauher Chaudhry is one of the pioneers of traffic driving. In fact he so influencial, he coined the term PPV (any traffic freaks will know that's kind of a big deal!) In this episode Gauher shares some of his best traffic advice and give us 6 ways that we can get targeted traffic... PPC, media buys, PPV, PPT, native ads and mobile traffic.

Ilan & Guy Ferdman are the co-founders of Satori Prime and the Performance Enhancing Podcast. They help people to reach business success by teaching a blend of personal development as well as practical business and marketing strategies. In this episode they share how we can become a high performer and attain mastery in our field.

Steve Gordon is the author of the new book “Unstoppable Referrals”. Go to unstoppableceo.net to find out more.

In this interview we are discussing how you can get more way more referrals including...

• How Steve grew his business 10x using referrals
• Why studies unanimously agree that referrals are the best way to get new business
• Why business owners find it uncomfortable to ask for referrals and how to easily overcome it
• How to make it easy for your happy clients to refer people to you
• The “reverse prospecting” technique to get inside the network of your clients or contacts
• The “Johnny Carson” method which will make your prospects actually look forward to your follow up messages
  
• And much more!

Mindy McHorse who is an awesome copywriter. Go to MTM copywriting to find out more about her.

In this episode we will be discussing the copywriting process and how to improve our copywriting. Mindy will be sharing…

• 2 ways to overcome writers block
  
• An easy method for adopting the perfect tone or voice in your writing
  
• 2 tips for editing so that you can make every single word of your copy count
• 9 top copywriters/copywriting organizations that you should be learning copywriting from
• All this and much more!
  

Bryan Eisenberg is the author of several marketing books including "Waiting for your cat to bark", "Call to action", Always be testing" and "Persuasive online copywriting". In this episode Bryan shares with us his famous concept of persuasion architecture and how we can increase our online sales by using it.

Travis Ketchum is the creator of Contest Domination, my personal favourite contest platform. In this episode Travis shares how we can put our list building on steroids by using contests!

Ian Brodie is the author of "Email Persuasion". In this episode Ian shares with us how to win clients through email marketing.

John Jonas is the creator of onlinejobs.ph the worlds biggest marketplace for outsourcing to the Philippines. In this episode John shares how we can get lots of work done for an amazing price by using this method so that you can work on the business whilst someone else works in the business.

Jessica Rhodes is the creator of interviewconnections.com the service which helps people to find great guests for their podcast or to be featured as an expert on other peoples podcasts. In this interview Jessica shares how we can build an audience though podcast interviews.

Larry Winget is known as the pitbull of self development. He is the author of many books including... You're broke because you want to be, Grow a Pair, Shut up, stop whining and get a life, It's called work for a reason and many more. In this interview Larry gives some no nonsense advice to how we can can improve our business, finances and life.

Sally Hogshead is the author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation & the brand new follow up book How the World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination. In this interview Sally shares the 7 fascination triggers and also how we can discover which of those 7 triggers is strongest in ourselves so that we can use it to our advantage when marketing and communicating.

You can find out how you are most fascinating by taking this personality assessment... http://howtofascinate.com/you and use the code JBushnell. The test is usually$37 but you can take this test for free by using this code until the 25th of July.

Brian Kurtz is the Executive VP at BoardRoom Inc. His direct response career has spanned over 33 years during that time he is responsible for having sent over 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail that generated hundreds of millions of dollars. In this interview Brian shares how we can use direct mail and online marketing together to get new customers and sales and also tells us about his upcoming event "The Titans of Direct Response", where Brian has gathered together perhaps the best line up of direct response marketers ever assembled under the same roof.

Tommie Powers is known as the traffic and conversion scientist. He is also the creator of Video Ads Academy, the ulitmate guide to driving traffic with video. In this interview Tommie shares how we can get cheap, targeted clicks using YouTube ads.

Dr. Kevin Hogan is one the worlds leading teachers of influence & persuasion. He says that the difference between the impotent conversationalist and the motivating communicator is the ability to persuade people to participate in win-win relationships.

Kevin Hogan is the author of several best selling books including… The Psychology of Persuasion:How To Persuade Others To Your Way Of Thinking ,The Science of Influence: How to Get Anyone to Say “Yes” in 8 Minutes or Less!,  Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game & The Secret Language of Business: How to Read Anyone in 3 Seconds or Less

In this interview I ask Kevin all about how we can understand what motivates other people & how to influence them accordingly. You will learn cutting-edge skills in this interview that will change the way you communicate forever, including…

* How you can persuade people based on what drives them as an individual

* How to read people really quickly (You can almost read their mind meaning you know how they might  respond in any given situation)

* The 16 core human drivers & desires that shape all human behavior

* How to subtly influence people using a technique called “Covert hypnosis”

* Exactly how to persuade or sell in a face to face situation, on the phone & in print

* How to tell what someone is really thinking by watching their body language

* How to persuade others by using our non-verbal communication like body language or tone of voice

* Why your appearance is essential to persuading others

* An easy method to build instant liking & rapport

* Why you should be using metaphors & stories for influence

* A technique to stop getting resistance from other people

Danny Iny is the CEO of firepole marketing, the author of "Engagement from Scratch" and "Naked Marketing". He also runs the podcast "Connect, Engage, Inspire". In this interview Danny shares how to build an online audience and how to keep them engaged...

Neville Medhora is a master of controversial/fun copywriting and marketing. Using educational copy he is able to keep readers riveted all the way through his emails and sales letters.

In this interview I ask Neville how we can find our own voice and style of marketing  that keeps our readers glued to our marketing pieces...

Lon Safko is a Social Media Strategist who speaks and consults with Fortune 2000 companies across America. He is the author of the books "The Social Media Bible" and "The Fusion Marketing Bible".

When I read Lon's first book "The social media marketing bible" I knew I had to share his information with you because there really isn't anything this guy doesn't know about using social media for business.

In this interview Lon reveals...

* What Social Media actually is (This answer may surprise you, it's not just about Facebook and Twitter, it's far bigger than that)

* Why small businesses should be really excited about Social Media

* The 5 steps to Social Media success

* The 3 types of social media which are essential to be using and will contribute to 90% of your social media success

* How you can see an 400% increase in conversions by using Fusion Marketing

* A story about how one video with 5 million views in 24 hours, can bring even the biggest companies to their knees

* The life cycle of a Social Networking user

* 2 reasons why you have to be blogging

* Why you should use live casting, vlogging and Google hangouts to connect with people on a deeper level

* Why Facebook kicked MySpace's butt

* Why Pinterest grew so fast

* The future of Google Plus?

* And more. Just click the play button below to listen in. If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends!

Click Here to Visit Lon's website

Shawn Collins is the founder of the world's biggest affiliate marketing event "Affiliate Summit". In this interview he gives us tips for succeeding with affiliate marketing from the perspective of an affiliate and that of someone running an affiliate program.

Carol Dodsley is an expert on using Google Hangouts and Google Plus for business and marketing. In this episode she shares with us how we can succeed with Google Hangouts.

Jasmine Platt helps business owners to create miracles in their business such as making more money, getting more ideal clients, getting discovered and do it all doing something they love to do. In this interview Jasmine shares how we can breakthrough the limiting beliefs around money that may be holding us back in so that we can experience massive business growth.

Jason Strachan is one of the UK's most in demand copywriters, he specializes in copywriting to the personal development space and in this interview he shares how we can succeed when marketing to this hyper competitive industry.

John Jantsch is the author of Duct tape marketing, duct tape selling, the referral engine and the commitment engine. In this episode John shares how small businesses can get themselves out there, generate leads, sell more, get more referrals and build strong, lotal customer bases.

Perry Marshall - 80/20 Sales, Marketing & Business Growth. The Online Marketing Show Episode 147

Perry Marshall is one of the world's most sought-after marketing consultants and is the author of several marketing books including... 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords and Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

In this interview Perry shares how we can use the 80/20 principle to earn more money by doing less. It's not about doing more things, it's about doing the right things. The 20% of things that truly matter and discarding the other 80%. Perry reveals...

• How to design a business that fits you
• Where to find the unexploited leverage points in your business to make exponentially more money with no or even less extra effort
• The “Rack the shotgun” method to qualify your clients
• The 5 powers disqualifiers that you should ask before even attempting to sell to anyone (or even advertising to them)
• How to identify your $1,000 an hour work (and completely stop doing the $10 an hour jobs)
• How to apply 80/20 to your Google adwords and Facebook ads
• The power triangle which will help you to solve any marketing problem you ever have

You can either listen to the interview or read the full transcript below...

Click here to Subscribe to this The Online Marketing Show on iTunes

Joseph Bushnell: Hello! Welcome to the online marketing show. This is Joey Bushnell. Today’s special guest really needs no introduction at all. He’s the author and creator of many marketing books and products. His name is Perry Marshall. Go to sell8020.com to find out more. Perry, thank you so much for being on the show.

Perry Marshall: Well, thank you for reaching out and getting hold of us and scheduling this. You know, I really appreciate that you are trying to scout out the best marketing that you can find and you know hopefully we won’t disappoint you today. Appreciate it.

Joseph Bushnell: Perry, how did you get into marketing?

Perry Marshall: Well, I was recruited into the world of multi-level marketing when I was in college and it happened because I had suddenly gotten fired from 3 jobs in a row. I played this prank and somebody didn’t think it was very funny and I got fired and I had to call my father-in-law because I had just been married for a year and I'm like “Hey Ron, you wouldn’t believe what just happened...”. And I felt really ashamed of myself.

I took this other job and that didn’t work out. I was just really feeling like a total misfit and I can honestly say up to that point, I had defined success equals never flunking your class and never getting fired from a job. And, actually, the whole thing of getting fired from my job and looking for new jobs, it really messed up my summer school class I was taking, you know summer school goes really fast and if you get a week behind, you are toast, right? And I fell behind on that class and I had to dropout of the class and re-take it again which for all practical purposes, I was failing that too. I was really feeling like crap.

So then my friend recruits me into Amway. Now, I’ve talked about that in other places and I’m not going on about it. I don’t recommend that people would go become Amway distributors by any means but that was my crash course in “Hey, welcome to the world of living by your wits and getting paid for what you produced and not having a security blanket and all that”. And it was a rude awakening!

You know what you have to do in a business like that, it’s really ugly. But I learned how to do it. I never made very much money at it. In fact, I spent a lot more money than I ever made. Once I kind of had the taste of freedom, even if freedom was just having the ability to get rewarded for what you do instead of working for the man. Like, I could never be permanently happy just punching the clock.

And then, a few years later I got fired again, actually I just got laid off but my wife was 3 months pregnant and I had been working in an engineering job and I couldn’t find an engineering job so I went into sales. That was the introduction to the real sales and marketing.

Well, that was 2 years of bologna sandwiches and ramen soup. Seriously, it was a major struggle. We spiraled into debt. I got this base plus commission sales job and rarely did my commission go high enough to where I was actually getting an extra commission check so we didn’t really make enough money for us to live on, on just the base. My wife, she’s quit her job to be a full time mom which I absolutely want her to do. I didn’t want to do the day care thing. It was just gut-wrenching, it’s a hard phase of life and I think frankly a lot of people in they’re like late 20’s, early 30’s, that’s the world they live in. You’re driving a 15 year old car that burns oil and your wife hasn’t had any new clothes in like 3 years and you got the baby and the diapers and all this kind of stuff.

I worked in this job for 2 years and you know the job just wasn’t exactly the right fit. There were a lot of things about it that were pretty good actually but I couldn’t sell anything to save my life. And I'm like “What is wrong with me?”, “why can’t I do this?”. And there was just so much stuff I didn’t know.

The other thing I learned is just because people are good at stuff, doesn’t mean they know how to teach you. My bosses at this company, they were really smart and they made a lot of money. They were very good at sales. The sum combination of I didn’t know what questions to ask, maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to ask them the questions and they're like… “We don’t know how to fix Perry! I don’t know, he tries really hard and we like him, and he’s really earnest, there’s no lack of work ethic but why can’t he sell anything?”. And that’s how I got into sales and marketing!

Joseph Bushnell: So at some point along the way, Perry, you did get good at this. You now teach this to other people, you consult, you have products, you’ve written books on the subject and that’s where you are today.

Perry Marshall: Yeah and so here’s what happened that turned things around. So, things were getting really desperate and I was actually getting close to being fired. And I wandered into this seminar, at a big coliseum and one of the speakers was Dan Kennedy. And I remember seeing the description of his presentation and thinking “Now that looks pretty interesting” because it was about cold calling, or not having to cold call, it was about accountable response driven advertising and stuff like that. And so he definitely had my attention and then he goes into this talk and explains this whole thing about marketing and he says “Cold calling is the lowest form of grunt work invented by human beings, you should never do this unless you just absolutely have nothing else to do but like there’s 98% of the time there’s other things you can do”.

I had a credit card that wasn’t completely maxed out and I bought his thing. I went home and told my boss about it the next day, he looks at like I’m from Mars like “Dude get to work, somebody just sold you swamp land in Florida”. That was kind of the reaction. Well, I got fired from that job. Meanwhile, I’m in turmoil! What am I going to do? I am losing money, I’m not making enough, the credit cards are gonna completely max out pretty soon and I’m going to really be in trouble and I have to find a job. How am I going to find a job when the last 2 years of my sales job is really poor, like I kind of have to do smoke and mirrors to make it look like I ever managed to accomplish anything. It’s just awful.

So I take home this notebook of tapes and it’s like this badly photocopied thing, in fact the product that Dan sold looks so terrible I wondered if it was a scam. But I finally decided it wasn’t and I’m studying this and I started to reorient my thinking. And one of the things was, so direct marketing is selling in print. That’s one definition. That’s what copywriting is.

I started studying… "Here is how you put together a sales letter, here is how you put together a sales pitch. You need the right audience. You need a headline. You need an opening paragraph. You need to really agitate their itch so that they're conscious of the pain that you’re product sells. You need to have an offer. You need to make a guarantee. You need to justify the price". And there’s all this stuff I hadn’t been doing.

I had been going around selling this equipment, showing people interesting stuff and I was almost doing great but not quite, and all of a sudden, I can see a sales pitch on a piece of paper and it’s this linear logical process and all of a sudden I started to understand it.

I also started learning about mailing lists and all this kind of stuff and I begin, I just begin to finally understand... Who buys? What makes them buy? What are you trying to sell them? And why do they buy?

There’s another thing though that is really a big deal, especially with Amway stuff, I had been trying to be somebody I was not. Have you ever spent years of your life trying to be someone you’re not?

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah. I think everyone has at some point.

Perry Marshall: Great, I want to be like him! I want to be like her! I want to be one of them! Right? It’s like, "Yeah but you’re jamming a square peg in a round hole" and I was trying to be a classic sales guy because it’s the only thing I can see that I thought seemed to make sense. Then I started to understand “You know, you can use your writing skills, you can use your engineering degree, you can put all these stuff together in a way, for the right people, it’s actually a perfect fit”.

I guess here’s the point that I’m driving at... is that we all go through life and we go around and we try all this different stuff, OK. It’s like well, I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be an accountant. I’m going to be an engineer. I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to be this, I’m going to be that. And we try out all these things and most of the time they don’t quite fit.

Maybe what a lot of people do is they finally, they get something that fits about 75% and then they just put up with it for the rest of their life. And what I am suggesting that you can do is that you can design a world that perfectly fits you or at least fits you about 93%-98% so that you’re mostly doing things you love to do, things you’re good at, things people appreciate you for. You’re delivering the highest value to people you enjoy working with and you can feel good about and feel proud about it.

I remember one time, we went to this meeting and I was with my boss at the sales company and I introduce “Hi, I’m Perry, I'm an electrical Engineer”. And he goes “Perry is a sales guy. He’s not an electrical engineer. Sometimes he just forgets who he is”. Oh thank you very much. I really appreciate that! I was trying, when I said that, I was trying to be useful to somebody but because I knew something, and not just because I was a sales guy who knew how to knock on doors. You know that feeling?

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah.

Perry Marshall: I might as well be selling vacuum cleaners. No, I want to solve a problem. I remember having a conversation with my boss, “You know Perry, could you stop trying to solve problems and just sell something?”

Well, you know what, if you can put things together right, you will solve problems and you will sell something and you get paid really good money to do it.

So, and I did figure that out and my whole introduction to marketing and understanding what marketing really is, I think that marketing really is the art and science of helping people who need each other, find each other. That’s what I think marketing really is.

And, so, I did start to figure that out and little by little by little, I started creating a world that worked for me. And you can do that and the people listening today can do that and I hope I can give some people hope. Because if you’re just like how I was, it’s like how long is it before the credit cards max out. It’s terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not necessarily a train!

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah. So let’s talk about some of these things Perry, that ideal life that you just described sounds amazing. I’m sure that everyone listening to this would love to get there themselves. And like you said if we know how to do marketing, if we know how to grow a business, that is a vehicle that can help us to get there.

So let’s talk about some of the concepts in your books that you’ve written that can help us to do that. Last year, you released a book called 80/20 Sales & Marketing. What is the big idea behind that book?

Perry Marshall: Well, you know, that is really the book that I wished I had 20 years ago. That book would have saved me like 5 or 10 years. And, so, to try to give you an idea, I thought I understood 80/20. Most people think they understand 80/20.

I remember like 15 years ago, in a later sales job that was working pretty well, I heard about 80/20 so I printed this report and I got out my calculator and sure enough,I'm like "That’s pretty crazy! 20% of our customers is 80% of our money". It was great. It was like OK, so, yeah, that’s good and you should work hard and you should pay your taxes, you should brush your teeth and great. I didn’t see anything else really beyond that.

Well, the real epiphany didn’t come until later, I read Richard Koch's classic book The 80/20 Principle and all of a sudden, a comment that he made, made it snap in place. And I realized that 80/20 is everywhere. I mean it is everywhere. And it is a repeating micro-macro pattern. So, here’s what I mean by that...

If you hire 10 sales people, what you’re going to find out is 80% of your sales come from 2 of them and the other 20% of your sales come from the 8. Which means that the 2, man for man, are 16 times better at selling than the 8. Now, first of all, there’s nothing you can do to quote/unquote "fix" this. What an academically-minded person wants to do is figure out how to make them all equal. They’ll never do it. There is nothing wrong. The universe is working exactly how it’s supposed to work. The 2 are supposed to be selling for you, and the other 8 aren’t. That’s the truth. Let the universe tell you what it wants to tell you and that’s what it’s telling you.

But, let’s carry it forward when let’s say that you hire 1,000 people, well you know 800 of them aren’t going to be very good and 200 of them are. Well, if you just look at the 200, if you fire the bottom 800, and you just look at the 200 you got left and they’re all pretty good, 80/20 is still true. 40 will outsell the 200 by a wide margin. And then if we fire the bottom 160 and we only got the 40 left, 80/20 will still be true and the top 8 will sell more than the bottom 32 combined and when we look at our 8, the top 1 or 2 will outsell the bottom 6 or 7. And this just keeps going and going.

What does this mean? This means that you can get an extreme level of productivity from 1 person or 10 people. Extreme.

What do you do? You take the resources away from the stuff that is not working and you pour more in. So what do you do? You take your top 5, if you got a 1000 sales people or you got 200 sales people, you take your top 5, they all get a personal assistant, they all get a masseuse, they all get somebody to do their travel schedule. Give them a chauffeur if you have to, I don’t really care. Just get them to the appointment.

Well, this repeating 80/20 inside, every 80/20, there’s another one and another one and it keeps repeating until your down to 1 person, there’s a name for that, it’s called fractal. 80/20 is fractal. So it’s true of 7 billion people in the world, it’s also true of the 10 richest people in the world.

Now, when I recognized this, I am a little geeky and I am an engineer but when I saw this, I was like “Oh my goodness”. This is the mathematics of attraction.

Work and results are unequal. This is the math that tells you how unequal they are. If you can see it, if you can figure out where those little leverage points are, then you don’t have to bust your ass anymore. You can actually be sort of lazy and in fact you should be, and you should start saying no to things.

Let me tell you a story. My friend John Paul Mendocha is, he’s on my sales team and he helps us with a lot of stuff. When he was 17 years old, he dropped out of high school, hitched hiked to Las Vegas and became a professional gambler. Imagine a 17 year old kid living by his wits in Vegas, playing poker for a living.

Well, John, within a few weeks he’s like "dang, maybe I need a mentor". He finds somebody. He finds this guy that runs a little gambling ring and his name was Rob and they talk for a while and Rob was like “for a percentage of your winnings, I’ll take you under my wing, I’ll teach you what I know”. So they shake on it. Jump on the jeep John, we’re going for a ride.

So they’re going for a ride, John goes “Rob, how do I win more poker games?” And Rob goes “You have to play games you can win. You have to play people that are dumber than you. And those people are called marks." He says you always play with marks, you don’t play with other professional gamblers. And John goes “OK so how do I find the marks?”. And he goes “Here, I’ll show you”.

He pulls into a parking lot and they walk into a strip club and there’s girls dancing and there’s rock and roll and there’s people drinking and everything and Rob sits down at a table and Rob pulls a sawed-off shotgun out of his jacket and he puts it under the table and he opens the chamber and then he racks it so it goes “chi-chi”. And there’s a few people look around and like “What was that?” and the owner comes over and he goes “Hey, everything OK over here?” “Everything’s just fine, just teaching the lad a lesson. Don’t worry.” And then Rob says to John “John, did you see the people that turned around when I made that noise?” And he goes “Yeah.” And he goes “Those people are not marks. Do not play poker with them. You play with everybody else”.

Now in my little world, we call it planet Perry, we have this term, rack the shotgun. Racking shotgun is when you make a noise or you do something and there’s 50 people in the club and 10 turn their heads and 40 don’t. You just did 80/20. Now, every time you send an e-mail, you’re racking the shotgun. How many people opened it? How many people didn’t? Rack the shotgun. How many people clicked on the link? How many people didn’t? Rack the shotgun. How many people went to the webpage and did what you asked them to do? How many didn’t? Rack the shotgun. How many gave you money? How many didn’t? Rack the shotgun.

Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Sales is an elimination process. It is a disqualification process. It is not a convince people process. It’s not a go talk to anybody who can fog a mirror and try to sell them something.

That’s what I learned in Amway. They literally told you that if they can fog a mirror, you should show them the plan. That is the worst advice. You know what that is designed to do? That is how you sell people tapes and books. Anybody who can fog a mirror can buy a tape or book. They tell you anybody could fog a mirror can do Amway, I promise you that's not true. There’s like a thousand people that could do it. Most of them, they can’t do it to save their life. Why can’t they? I don’t even want to get into it. It’s not what they tell you, good advice.

So John actually came up with a list and he calls it the five power disqualifiers. And here’s what they are...

Do they have the money? If the person doesn’t have the money, stop trying to sell stuff because they aren’t going to buy. End of story. Every time a sale has ever been made in the history of the earth, the person had the money.

Number 2, do they have a bleeding neck? In other words, do they have an itch that they got to scratch. "I've got to scratch this itch". If they don’t have a bleeding neck, they’re not giving you the money. Every time a sale’s been made in the history of the world, somebody at some level, they had a bleeding neck.

Number 3, do they buy into your unique selling proposition? Do they like your USP? What do you sell? What’s your value proposition? Always true, every time someone buys something or someone sells something.

Number 4, do they have the ability to say “Yes”? Now this is another one that was killing me when I was a new sales guy. I would go present to all these people, they had the ability to say no, they did not have the ability to say yes. Complete waste of time. And what they tell you is that I’m going to think it over and you’re sitting around and you’re counting your "think it overs" and somebody needs to come in and bop you on the head and say “Dude, you’re "think it overs" are never going to materialize. They’re gone. Forget them. Goodbye. Good riddance. Go do something that actually works”.

Then the last one is if fits their overall plans? Does it fit what they're doing in their life? Does it fit? Does it not?

If you approach sales like, I’m going to not even try to advertise to people unless they fit these criteria and I’m certainly not going to go see them or not going to call them on the phone and spend time with them until I disqualified the 90% or the 98% that I should never be talking to in the first place and only dealing with the right people. That’s who I’m going to sell to.

What you’ll find is that you can probably spend 10 hours a week selling and making a perfectly good living if you do all that. So that’s in the 80/20 book and when I started seeing how this was everywhere, it was like everything you do in marketing is because of 80/20. The way you write a headline is because of 80/20. Where you put the headline is because of 80/20. Buying Google ads, what’s in Google ads, what is says and what happens next is all because of 80/20. 5% of your web pages make 95% of your money. 5% makes 95%. So you know what? You don’t have to go fix your whole website and all 10,000 pages. You can solve your problem by fixing 5% of your webpages which might be 1 page or maybe 2 or 5 or 10 and it’s all fixed. People just waste so much time so I’ve been talking a lot, back to you!

Joseph Bushnell: I’m actually thinking of all the ways that it is everywhere as well Perry, I mean I’m thinking 20% of all the people competing in any given marketplace are getting all the money and all the rest of the people are fighting over the crumbs. 20% of your customers are giving you their money and are funding you and you're getting 80% of your profits from them, whereas the other 80% of customers are probably not worth as much to you, I mean it’s just fascinating to see how this is everywhere. So your advice would be to just eliminate the dross and narrow in on the good stuff?

Perry Marshall: Well, yes. First you have to be aware, the more educated people are, the more likely they are to treat everything and everybody the same and it is a huge mistake to do that because everything is not the same so 80% of your products only generate 20% of your sales. And probably your product development team is fitting all this time and money, essentially polishing turds! When they should focus on the 20%, a lot of companies can make a lot more money just by dropping the bottom 20% of their product lines that waste 80% of the resources that doesn’t actually make money.

And 80/20 applies to just about every number that you ever measure in any business. It’s just scary. I’ve got an appendix in the 80/20 book and it’s for the numbers people in the crowd and it graphs out 80/20 and it shows you, well you know, whether you are looking at the population of cities in America or the donations to a Church on a Sunday morning or the revenues of all the companies in the Fortune 500 or the output of dairy farms in Wisconsin, like it’s all 80/20. And like, once you see this, you can’t "un-see" it.

What I consider success is when people read this book and they’re like, ‘Oh my word I never saw this before and now I’m seeing it everywhere!’ I’m like, ‘OK you are the person I was trying to target when I wrote this book because you get it,’ and people are like, ‘Oh my goodness, you know I just applied 80/20 in my Google Adwords campaigns and I fixed these 3 ads and my click through rate went up 60%, oh my word, like, I told myself myself I had to do all this work".

Ari Galper, some people might know who he is, he just sent me an email this morning, he said ‘Perry you’re not going to believe this. Well actually you will, I’ve been ruthlessly applying 80/20 in the last 6 weeks and I just ran my star principle score it moved from a score of 115 and now it’s a 155,’ (I can explain that later if you want me to). And for the first time ever we generated $100,000 paid in full in one week last week. This is raising my consciousness to realize I could be generating $400,000 a month with more 80/20. So keep drilling this into our heads!".

And yeah, it never stops and it keeps going and going and going so it’s kind of like this well that never runs dry.

Joseph Bushnell: You also teach how to apply this 80/20 concept to how we spend our time and the things that we actually do within our own business. I’ve heard you call this our $1,000 an hour work, where instead of chasing our tails all the time and running around doing all of the $10 an hour jobs, we should be focusing on just the $1,000 an hour jobs. So how do we identify what our $1,000 an hour work is?

Perry Marshall: OK, 80/20 is a law of nature so it’s everywhere. So there’s some people sort of doubt me about this at first and so that’s OK so just follow me along.... So let's say that you got a receptionist or secretary and let’s say they make $15 an hour or pounds or whatever currency you want. What I insist is that even the person who makes $15 an hour actually makes $1,000 an hour at least one minute of every day. You may be thinking "Well how is that? How does a receptionist make $1,000 an hour?"

So let’s say that the phone rings and she picks it up and somebody is really angry and the person that the angry person wants to talk to is on the phone and they can’t talk and the customer is tempted to slam down the phone and like just and leave in huff and just never do business with you again.

Let’s say that she listens patiently and carefully to the customer instead of doing her nails, instead of updating her Pinterest, or instead of doing, you know, making photocopies or whatever else she might’ve been doing. Let’s say does a really good job with the angry customer and she calms him down and then, let’s say, that she makes sure, because she double checks that the other guy calls the guy back within an hour.

Now, let’s say that took 5 minutes and let’s say she saved a $10,000 account. Is that a $1,000 an hour for 5 minutes? I mean, times 5 minutes is only 80 bucks, I dunno, if she makes 500 bucks, I dunno, I can’t do math in my head, but you see what I’m saying, right?

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah

Perry Marshall: Everyday there are these short little bursts of very high leverage activity where, you know, I don’t care what you do there’s 15 minutes of your day or maybe 30 minutes of your day that is more valuable than all the other 8 hours put together. But you don’t know it until somebody points this out.

OK, so what about those of us who like aren’t receptionists but were actually founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional sales people? You know, if you’re a professional sales person, half of your income came from less than than 5 days of what you did last year. And when I tell this to sales people they'll think about it and ‘Yeah, that’s actually about right,’ like OK so, why aren’t you doing more of that?

Joseph Bushnell: “Yeah very true, so what’s the answer to that? Why do people find it difficult not to do that, to let go of the smaller stuff, the less valuable stuff?

Perry Marshall: “Well, I think we are all conditioned for various reasons to just be busy. I think a lot of us are actually kind of uncomfortable on our skin, we don’t really know what we want to do, we’ve never given ourselves permission to do what we want to do. And it’s actually, the only people that are really doing what they want to do in life are the eccentric ones.

If you go find a person and they went to Oxford and they got the right degree and they got all the right credentials and they climb the corporate ladder and they did everything they’re supposed to do. If you just ask these people, like, “Are you really doing what you really dreamed of doing today?” they look at you like you’re from Mars, like, ‘Boy, I didn’t want to be a legal secretary I mean, I really wanted to be a ballerina but who could do that? So I’m doing this,’ and then they just kind of resign themselves and they start sleepwalking through life.

OK, if you have an awareness like, you know what, look, if you do $1,000 an hour work for 2 hours a day then you don’t have to do anything else all day! And it is possible to do this! OK? Richard Koch, the guy who wrote The Original 80/20 Principle book, he’s worth a quarter of a billion dollars and he works an hour a day! OK? And I would contend that if he worked more he would actually make less. And he’s very disciplined about being lazy. And so yeah, his books are great.

There’s this chapter, I think it’s on page 119 of my book , I lay out, here’s examples of $10 an hour work and it’s like, running errands, changing light bulbs and making photocopies, you know. And there’s $100 an hour work and that stuff’s like, solving customers’ problems, things like that. And there’s a $1,000 an hour work, which is doing something really strategic, negotiating a contract, or rescuing an angry customer and flipping them around so they’re not angry at you, that is $1,000 an hour work and you have to become aware of it first. And some people are just, they’re not self-aware. So, you know, if I can create more self-awareness and it helps some people not suffer the way I had suffered then I guess that was a good book to write.

Joseph Bushnell: “Absolutely. So the $10 an hour work that does still need to get done, are we hiring people for that?”

Perry Marshall: Yes. Yeah, I mean, it has to get done. But not at all of it does, I mean a lot of us do stuff that we really shouldn’t be doing. But the thing is, there’s always somebody available to do it. Like look, what’s the unemployment rate? And not only that, there’s people who like to do that! They like it! Like, I would never like to be an accountant but my accountant likes to be an accountant.”

Joseph Bushnell: “You’ve also written a few other books, two of them are Ultimate Guide to Google AdWordsand Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, how does the 80/20 principle apply in this arena?”

Perry Marshall: Well first off, my life as a sales person completely turned around when I started having lead generation bringing me customers so that I didn’t have to go pick up the phone and chase people around, OK. The customers started coming to me and that was such a relief. It was so much better, I mean,I can’t even tell it.

Well, if you’re going to generate leads, you have get traffic and where are you going to get traffic? Well, when Google started selling ads it was like the greatest invention for marketers in that last 50 years,I kid you not. It’s just amazing. And now it’s like, you can bid on a keyword and have your ad in front of people and so it has been around for a long time.

It was new when I first discovered 80/20 and I was experimenting with Google and I was doing all this stuff and one day I realized "Oh my word, everything in Google Adwords is 80/20" OK, which keywords get the traffic? How do you organize the campaigns? Which ads wins? Which ads lose? You know, the kind of changes you make, its all 80/20 and so, really, what I did to become the world’s bestselling author on the subject of Google advertising was I applied 80/20 ruthlessly.

In my book that's really what I’m teaching you whether you recognize it or not. Now, some of the chapters actually tried to explain it but pretty much everything is 80/20, the same thing with Facebook. So 5% of the keywords generate 95% of the traffic, in Facebook 80% of the traffic you could buy is a complete waste, maybe 90% and it’s all about focusing, targeting, where are the leverage points? Where are the customers who actually buy stuff? And in the last few years, maybe in the last year, in particular, Facebook has gone from being a dog to being the hottest thing on the internet for marketers because Facebook ads really do work.

Joseph Bushnell: Something else from your 80/20 Sales and Marketing book you have a concept called The Power Triangle, could you tell us a little bit of about that?

Perry Marshall: Yes, so my marketing manager Jack Born came up with that, I think it’s just like one of the most brilliant things and it’s a little triangle and it looks like this...

On the lower left, T is for traffic, on the top corner C is for conversion, and on the lower right corner, E is for economics, and then there’s a triangle inside the triangle which makes it the triangle in the middle and the middle triangle is 80/20 and the power triangle is everything you need to know about marketing: traffic, conversion, economics and 80/20.

OK so, if you are not selling enough, you either don’t have enough traffic, you're not converting the traffic you have or you are getting the conversions but the economics of what you're selling are not right, like you're not selling it for enough money or its not perceived as worth enough or whatever. Any problem you have is one of those three things and 80/20 applies to all of them,OK?

So then there's a bunch of 80/20's of where the good traffic is and where you're going to waste your money. There’s a bunch of 80/20's about here's the few things that make a person buy and here's all the other things, the many things that would screw it up. You know there’s the economics and which products you sell and how much money you get from them. So if, you know, if you recognize in any situation, is it traffic? Is it conversion? Is it economics? And where are the 80/20's of all three of these things, you can solve almost any problem.

Joseph Bushnell: And my final question, Perry, is how can we locate invisible profits centers within our business? Again this is something that you taught in 80/20 Sales and Marketing.

Perry Marshall: So there is always a top 20% that’s not being fully exploited for what is worth because you could take your top 20%, of your customers, let’s say, that your 100 best customers gave you $10,000, OK? So that’s $1,000,000. Well 80/20 says that 20% of them will spend 4 times the money so that means 20 of them will spend $40,000 but it also says 20% of them will spend 4 times the money so 4 of them will spend $160,000 which means that one of them will spend $500,000, so if you’re only getting a million, you should’ve been getting 2 or 3 million.

Almost every customer list I’ve ever seen, there is unexploited appetite for more, and a part of the minority of those customers. Most businesses drastically underestimate how much money they could actually get from a group of people and it’s usually in the high end. Now sometimes it’s on the low end, it could go both directions but usually it's in the high end. Until you at least get out a piece of paper and a pencil and kind of start sketching it out going, 'Oh, OK!?'.

You ever wore blue blocker sunglasses that makes everything kind of blue and all of a sudden you notice things that you never notice with just regular?

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah.

Perry Marshall: That’s what 80/20’s like.

If you completely understand 80/20 and you kind of immerse yourself in it for a while, all of a sudden you’ll see it everywhere. You’ll drive your wife or your spouse crazy because you’ll be talking about it all the time, it will be like you're new obsession like ‘Oh my goodness I just saw the 80/20 of the freeway traffic,’ and she’s like ‘Oh please, yeah I know, I know, 80% traffic goes on 20% of the roads and that expressway is like a top 20%, I know,’ and if that starts to happen, you know you're on the right track!

Joseph Bushnell: Perry if we’ve listened to this and we’ve really enjoyed it and we're really serious about applying 80/20 to our business and getting the results and the lifestyle that it can give us, where can we go?

Perry Marshall: So you could go to Amazon and you could buy the book for (well I don't how much it is in the UK) but there’s a better deal that we have...

You can go to sell8020.com and you can buy the book for a penny plus shipping, and you can get in the US, it’ll cost you $7 or in the UK or elsewhere in the world it’ll cost you $14. But here's why we do that, here's why we sell the book direct. And by the way, we are taping dollar bills to every book to do this.

But the reason why is, I have found that people who actually read books are very good customers. They’re good coaching students, they're good clients, so I’m acquiring clients. And if you go there what you’re going to find is an 80/20 sales funnel, which if you want to understand marketing you should study what we do because we rack the shotgun. We treat people who respond differently than we treat people who don’t. OK? You’ll see a lot of things and so you can learn as much by watching what I do as from listening to what I say or reading the book and stuff like that, if you do both it will really sink in so I want to encourage you to do that. Again it’s sell8020.com or you could go to perrymarshall.com and you’ll see the offer right there on the page and I would just encourage you, if this sounded intriguing then go down the rabbit hole and see how deep it really goes!

Joseph Bushnell: Excellent! That’s the end of today's episode. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed it, please go and leave a review on iTunes, and I also highly recommend going and getting your penny plus shipping copy of Perry’s book. It’s an incredible book, and last of all, a huge thank you to you Perry for coming on the show.

Perry Marshall: Well, thank you and you ask great questions and I really appreciate you spending the time and blessings to everybody that listened today.

Mike Faith is the founder of Headsets.com, a $30 million per year company built upon the principles of fun and outstanding customer service. In this interview Mike shares how he grew his company using some wacky Marketing & PR stunts, one of them to tune of $6 million. Mike is also a huge advocate of customer service and he tells us why good customer service is an asset, not a cost.

Gideon Shalwick is an expert in online video marketing and founder of splasheo. In this interview he shares how we can dominate our niche by using online video marketing.

Rob Brown is one of the world’s leading authorities on personal marketing, networking strategies, executive presence,referrals and reputations. He is the head of the global networking council & the author of the best selling book “How to build your reputation”

In this interview I grill Rob for his very best networking tips. He reveals…

* The networking strategies he used to multiply his income by a factor of 15 in just 13 months!

* The 6 best places to find people to network with

* Where to find your ideal prospect & target exactly who you want to meet

* The secret to never getting nervous & being full of confidence when meeting new people

* How to make a great first impression

* The “Early touch of the ball” method that will get you fired up for a networking event

* The “3 to 1″ technique which will help you quickly identify if the person you are talking to is a potential client

* How to ask better questions & tell intriguing stories to make yourself unforgettable

* 2 questions you can ask to really get people to open up about themselves

* The 4 P’s of opportunity

* How to end the initial conversation so you have a second meeting

* Tips for following up & landing some business

* Why the “Law of recency” means you need to use “keep in touch marketing” or your competitors will get all the business

* 8 common networking blunders

* Why introverts can often be the best networkers

* How online networking has changed traditional face to face networking into a blended networking strategy

Kevin Wilke is the founder of Nitro Marketing, a training company which teaches people how to start their very own extremely profitable local marketing business.

Local marketing is in huge demand right now. Small to medium sized businesses all over the world are desperate for more leads and sales. Many of those local business owners know the huge potential of the internet in bringing them more trade but lack the knowledge and skills to tap into the online goldmine.

That problem for local business owners has presented a massive opportunity to online marketers, who can team up with local businesses to help them dominate the local online presence for their industry. In this interview Kevin reveals…

* Why local marketing is in big demand since the 2008 recession

* How you can charge premium prices of between $1,000 – $5,000 per month for just one local marketing client!

* How to find the right type of client who can realistically pay those kinds of fees

* 6 types of online marketing you can do on your clients behalf so they dominate online local search

* How to pitch your services to these local business owners so it’s a simple, no-brainer proposition for them

* How to give your prospect confidence in your service by showing them results in advance (before they pay you a single penny)

* How to get a clients long term commitment without having to resort to legal contracts

* 5 ways to do warm approaches when prospecting for new customers

* How to use outsourcing to make sure this business doesn’t take up all your time

Shawn LeBrun has been doing health and fitness marketing and copywriting for over 11 years. He has helped fellow personal trainers sell over 10.5 million dollars worth of their fitness products and services. He helps personal trainers attract more clients, increase their training profits, and reduce their hours... turning their personal training company into a booming business just simply by improving the copy on their site.

The health and fitness market is an evergreen market in the online space. It will always be so because people who are over weight or need to be more healthy will turn to the internet for solutions and answers. Having said that, with huge demand comes huge competition. To compete in this gladiator like arena,  your sales page has to do it's job. In this interview I ask Shawn how to write a sales letter to the health and fitness market that pulls in millions of dollars. Shawn reveals...

* How he sold over $2 million worth of just one of his fitness ebooks!

* What the real pain points & emotional hot buttons of the weight loss/fitness market are

* The most important part of a sales letter in the health niche (up to 90% of the success rests on this)

* The best headline Shawn ever wrote to the health market that tripled his conversion rates

* Why your proof elements in this industry must be visual to be believable

* Layout, design, graphics & color tips to use when marketing to this niche

* How to stay out of trouble and cover yourself legally by using disclaimers

* Why you should be using video in your health and fitness marketing materials

Michele Scism is a leading authority on social media and online marketing and the Founder of both DecisiveMinds.com and The Global Social Media Managers Association. Her clients call her “The Results Lady” because as a business strategist she uses her signature “Take Action Get Profits” system to help entrepreneurs turn their passion into expert status and then profits. Michele’s knowledge in the areas of online marketing and social media marketing have been recognized during recent interviews on several web TV shows, including being interviewed by Kristi Frank from Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, as well as multiple Talk Radio shows and tele-classes. Whether you want freedom and flexibility, more time to be with your family, more money, more blog traffic or the feeling of satisfaction you get from creating a successful business, Michele is there with her expert business knowledge, strategies and accountability skills to help you get the results of your dreams.

In this interview I ask Michele how she is able to get so much blog traffic & she reveals…

* How Michele used social media & blogging to build a 6 figure business in less than two years

* The most fatal mistake bloggers make

* The best ways to monetize your blog

* How to easily add an opt-in box to your blog sidebar so you can gather leads

* 3 blogging secrets to double your blog traffic & visibility

* How to sync your blog to automatically update your social media accounts so you don’t waste loads of time promoting

* How to drive traffic to your blog  just by engaging with others in your community

* An easy way siphon traffic from other peoples blogs

* How to encourage others to share your blog post

* How Michele doubled her blog traffic by participating in blog contests

* How to get other people to write your posts for you & then have them promote it to their own audience!

* How regularly you should be posting new blog posts

* A super stealth method to get into the inbox of people who aren’t even on your list without spamming (Trust me this one method alone will make it worth your time to listen to this interview)

David is a very talented copywriter and email marketing expert. He has generated over 25 million dollars for his clients and supported the growth of their business using email lists and collecting opt-in emails for his clients. He has also worked with some very high profile people and companies including; Stomper Net, Brendan Burchard, David wolfe and Loral Langemeier and many other top experts in the industry.

Alan Forrest Smith has spent over 27 years studying business from the front lines & has used story selling in some form or another from a very young age. At the age of 10, Alan started his first business painting old bikes for friends on the housing estate where he lived. By the age of 11 he had bought an old sewing machine and created his second business tailoring trousers for prison wardens and school friends. By 15, Alan had started another money making scheme cutting hair and charging his friends and family for the service. At the age of 16, Alan got his first full-time job as a Landscape Gardener. By the age of 20, Alan then became a hairdresser and by 1989 Alan opened his first hairdressing salon.

This is where Alan’s marketing & story selling skills were discovered and honed enabling him to take his salon from new start-up to number one in a town of 35 salons in less than 18 months using low cost- high return very clever marketing strategies.

Around the year 1999 a handful of salon clients began to ask  Alan who was creating his marketing materials. This was Alan’s first opening into creating marketing materials for others willing to actually pay him for the service.

His first marketing client campaign brought a result of 47% response rate from a direct mailer which led to sales of over £800,000 within a 12 month period. The client had previously lost tens of thousands in trying and having a go at marketing. Alan cut costs, created ultra effective direct marketing campaign that resulted in sales and made his first marketing client very happy.

This led to more and more clients asking Alan for his newly discovered marketing services.

By 2004 word had spread via the web, this led to Alan training others in places as far as Australia, New Zealand, USA and many other locations all over the Earth. By 2010 Alan has spoken to well over 25,000 people all over the World and held his own weekend marketing intensives annually to huge acclaim.

Alan is a master of weaving stories into copywriting & marketing materials that the reader can relate to & then buy because of the story. In this interview I ask Alan how we can also use story selling to sell more of our own products or services. Alan reveals…

* How he was able to use story copy to sell millions of dollars worth of products & services for his clients

* Why stories work better than anything else in copywriting

* How stories are built into the human psyche from a very young age making us more likely to listen & buy when we hear one

* The fascinating story behind a sales letter that consistently pulled £250,000 per month for a TV crew company

* What reading bedtime stories to his children taught Alan about story selling

* How to make your sure your copy gets read the entire way through, from start to finish

* 3 ways to keep your story believable

* What to do if you don’t think you have a compelling story to tell

* How we can use questions to lead people seamlessly through the story all the way to your offer

Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business which made Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List for the US, Japan, UK, Canada, Portugal, Italy, China, Korea and Germany. He is also the author of Digital Leader: 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence and What Happens in Vegas, Stays on Youtube.

Erik produced “Social Media Revolution” which is the most watched social media video in the world. 

Erik is in high demand as a speaker and has given keynotes/advised companies such as Facebook, Starbucks, M&M/Mars, Montblanc, TEDx, Polo, Nokia, Google, and more

In this interview I ask Erik for tips on how we gain the edge in business, in this new digital age. Erik reveals…

* How the social media revolution has permanently changed our lives and our businesses

* The 4 steps to selling on social media

* The critical part most companies get wrong when it comes to social media marketing

* How to carry out market research and competitive research on social media

* Why you should consider using a weekly listening report

* Why you have no choice but to make your business very transparent (your customers can now hold you accountable in a very public forum!)

* How one social media user brought a major airline company to its knees after they gave him poor customer service

* Why you should aim to get people participating with your company online

* How to use big data to spot trends and turn it into actionable data

* Why social media equals braggadocian behavior and how you can capitalize

Yaro Starak is recognised worldwide as a leading authority on Blogging & Membership sites. During this interview he reveals how you can create a semi-passive income by building a membership site or even multiple websites of your own! Take your passion & turn it into massive profits!

Don’t forget to checkout Yaro’s blog because it’s one of the best on the internet www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

If you would like more information from Yaro about Membership sites go to www.membershipsitemastermind.com

Jan Zimmerman is the author of Web Marketing for Dummies and co-author of Social Media Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, as well as Marketing on the Internet and a range of other books too.

She is the owner of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which provides marketing consulting, web site management, content development, social media marketing and strategic web promotion to businesses of all sizes and types since 1998.

In this interview I question Jan on how we can grow our business using social media marketing and web marketing as outlined in her books. Jan reveals...

* The number one reason every business must be using social media for marketing

* The 3 step plan to form a social media strategy that is cost and time effective

* Why you should prioritize what social media you use rather than try to use them all (and 3 tips on how to decide which social networks are right for your type of business)

* The rule of thumb on how many hours you should be spending on each social media channel per week to get the best ROI

* The story of a man who runs his entire business using Twitter alone?

* A really cool social media analytic tool which is free

* 3 social media dashboards which will save you time

* 6 non-social media essentials for your overall web marketing plan

* The easiest way to determine if your paid online advertising is working

* How to track if inbound phone inquiries or visitors to your store were the result of your web marketing

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of seven books published in more than 30 languages.

David’s book “The new rules of Marketing & PR” opened people’s eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in more than 25 different languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules is now a modern business classic.

He is a recovering VP of marketing for two publicly traded technology companies. Today, besides speaking and writing, he is an advisor to marketing technology companies and nonprofits.

In this interview I ask David how the marketing game has changed & exactly what the “New rules” of marketing & PR are. He reveals…

* Why David got sacked from his job because he didn’t want to market the old way any more

* How to create content that will appeal to the people who want to buy your stuff

* The 3 ways businesses can generate attention using the old methods of marketing (They do still work!)

* How you can use the new rules of marketing to get massive visibility on the web

* Why you must think like a journalist to succeed online

* The 3 step process to making sales online

* Why people are more inclined to buy if educate them first

* Why one way interruption marketing is dead

* 2 big reasons your website needs to be mobile ready

* 3 mobile marketing strategies for small businesses

* The “Newsjacking” method to drive huge traffic by simply piggy backing off breaking news stories!

* How Richard Branson’s mother & Kate Winslet helped the London fire brigade to get mentioned over 2,000 times in the media

Glenn Livingston is the marketing psychologist many companies brought in to crawl deep inside their prospects’ minds to uncover exactly what they were desperate to buy, to improve profits on existing product lines, AND to minimize advertising risk in new market.

Glenn’s marketing consulting companies have serviced literally dozens of  Fortune 500 companies like AT&T, American Express, Astra Zeneca, Bausch & Lomb, Burger King, Chase Bank, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Grey Advertising, Hallmark, Hunt Wesson, J & J Whirlpool, Exxon, Flagship Banks, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Gore,J Walter Thompson, Kodak, Kraft, Lipton, M & M Mars, Master Card, Merck, Panasonic, ovartis, Ortho McNeil, P & G, Pfizer, Pharmacia, Pillsbury, Roche, Sara Lee, Unilever, Warner Lambert, Nextel, JJill, and many more.

In this interview Glenn tells us how we can make our website visitors become hyper responsive buyers.

John Lee Dumas is the founder and host of “Entrepreneur on Fire” a top ranked podcast named “best in iTunes 2013”. John interviews today’s most inspiring and successful entrepreneurs 7 days a week and has been featured in both Time and Inc magazine. He is the founder of “Podcasters Paradise” a community where podcasters can create, grow and monetize their podcast. “Entrepreneur on Fire” generates over 450,000 unique downloads a month with past guests such as Seth Godin, Tim Ferris, Barbara Corcoran, Gary Vaynerchuck and Guy Kawasaki. Recaps of the 500 plus episodes and much more can be found over at eofire.com. John is currently generating over $100,000 each month because of his podcast and in this episode he shares with us how does it.

Viv Craske is the owner over at Digital Marketing Blueprint – a Facebook Marketing agency specializing in helping Digital and technology companies , B2B Professional services, Internet marketers and Personality brands with Facebook marketing strategies, advertising, branding, list building and engagement.

He helps cutting edge companies on the interface of technology and helps people build a community of addicted fans from Facebook that are changing their businesses & increasing their profits.

In this interview I ask Viv how to really make money using Facebook, Viv reveals…

* Why traditional marketing methods & print publications just aren’t as effective since the rise of social media

* Why Viv believes Facebook is currently the best social network to make money with & will be for a long time to come

* Why 80% of all time spent on Facebook marketing strategies is wasted & doesn’t bring returns

* How to use Facebook to grow your email marketing list

* Why Viv believes you don’t even need a website anymore because of Facebook

* How to cut the costs of your Facebook adverts by almost half

* Why Viv thinks you shouldn’t go for the “Like” (And what you should be doing instead)

* The 6 steps of a Facebook marketing funnel

* How to find super targeted prospects using Facebook

* 7 ways to get free traffic to your Facebook page

* The 1 big difference between those who succeed & fail with Facebook marketing

Brad Gosse has over 15 years experience of marketing online in many different niches. He is the author of the popular new book “Chronic Marketer: Confessions Of A Half-Baked (But Highly Paid) Internet Marketer”. He is also the creator of many top selling info products in this interview we are talking all about how you can create info products & then sell them by the bucket load.

Info products come in all different shapes & sizes. You just take your knowledge & package it a way that others can learn & benefit from. They include books, ebooks, podcasts or video training which can sell for hundreds of dollars. Then there is the stuff you can charge thousands of dollars for like done for you services & high end consultancy. If you would like to know how to make a lot of money simply by selling what you already know then you have to listen to this interview.

In this Interview Brad reveals…

* How to add far more increased value to your info products so people will happily pay you more for them

* Why there will always be huge need for you to create info products regardless of how much info is already out there on the internet for free

* How to create info products easily & quickly

* How to sell low priced products online in large quantities

* 3 places you can get cheap targeted traffic to sell your products

* The formula to using webinars to sell your info products (And the best type of product to sell on webinars)

* How Brad sells high ticket items of up to $30,000

* The exact process to turn your self published book in an amazon bestseller

* A sneaky trick to make your book go viral on FaceBook

Joanna Wiebe is a great copywriter who blogs over at copyhackers.com. She is the author of several copywriting and conversion eBooks and courses too.

Daven Michaels is the COO of 123 employee, an outsourcing centre over in the Philippines that has over 350 virtual agents & they are currently building another centre which will which bring their entire number of virtual assistants to over 700! He speaks all over the World on the topic of outsourcing overseas & is the Author of the book ‘Outsource This’ “Your Complete Resource to the World of Global Outsourcing”.

He has become an advocate for the Small Business owner by helping them be able to claim back their valuable time & help them cut down on costs

In this Interview I ask him my most burning questions about outsourcing & raise a few objections too. Listen to the interview to see how he responded & why he believes outsourcing is the best thing you can possibly do to take your business to the next level.

Here is the link to the free bonuses which Daven talked about at the end of the call, where you can grab his 5 Part List Building Video Series, the Outsource This Audio CD & The Outsourcing Blueprint

get123uk.com

Ryan Holiday is a marketing, media, PR and advertsing expert and the author of 3 books... Trust me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Growth Hacker Marketing and The Obstacle is the Way.

Matthew Peters is the creator of the “SmartPhone Video Producer” and "Expert Video Empire" programs.

He helps people to record pro looking video using nothing but their iPhone or Android phone. In this interview he reveals…

* The must have iPhone apps & tools to create amazing looking videos

* The equipment you need to create your own film studio at home

* How to save hours of time editing & uploading your videos

* How to get crystal clear sound quality

* How to present so your video flows perfectly without having to shell out for an expensive teleprompter

* And much more.

Don Mahoney is one of the co-founders of AWAI, the worlds leading copywriting training company. In this interview Don tells us what it takes to be a successful copywriter.

Carrie Wilkerson is the author of the barefoot executive.

In this episode I share some of my favourite nuggets of wisdom from our guests during the first 100 episodes. Enjoy!

John cheekily refers to himself as “the most ripped-off writer on the Web”, and no one on the inside of the online business world disagrees.  Other marketers also call John Carlton “the most respected writing teacher alive”. Some of the best ever internet marketers such as… Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, Rich Schefren and Mike Filsaime say that John is their primary copywriting mentor. They learn and swipe from him because his marketing works.

In this interview John gives tips on how to write great copy as well as advice for rookie copywriters looking to get into the business.

Sanyika Calloway Boyce helps people to get on TV so they can get massive awareness and exposure for their business as well as increased credibility and authority.

Drayton Bird has been named by the chartered institute of marketing as one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing. Other names included Philip Kotler, Tom Peters and Theodore Levitt.

Drayton is best-known as a direct marketing expert but has also worked in Advertising, Public Relations, Research and Telemarketing, Franchising and Experiential Marketing.

Advertising legend David Ogilvy said he “knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world” and that his speeches are “both educational and hilariously funny.”

Since he entered advertising in 1958, Drayton Bird has worked in 51 countries with many great brands. These include American Express, for whom he created a special marketing course for senior executives, British Airways, Cisco, Deutsche Post, Ford, Hargreaves Lansdown, IBM, McKinsey, Microsoft, Nestle, The Prudential, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Virgin and Visa.

His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has written 4 other marketing books, including How to write a sales letter that sells, now in its 3^rd edition, and well over 1,000 columns for publications around the world.

Drayton says a good copywriter has a license to print money, so in this interview I ask him for tips on how to write great copy & succeed in direct marketing. He reveals…

* How branding differs from direct marketing

* Why even smalls businesses should build a brand

* Where to find mailing lists to rent

* Why you must have your own database or go broke

* How often we should be communicating with our database

* How long your copy should be

* The key to getting people reading & responding to your offer

* Why writing adverts in an editorial style can increase sales by up to 125%

* The style of copy that works better than anything else

* The reason why most people fail at marketing

* Why you need to give people the time & money to get results

Patrick Powers is one of Europe’s most prolific authors and trainers on the subjects of marketing, entrepreneurship and success. He is the author of Turn Your Contacts into Cash and Only Suckers Settle for Less than Rich. He runs the Entrepreneurs in London meet up group, the largest of it's kind in Europe. In this interview Patrick gives some fantastic advice for new entrepreneurs.

Tina Forsyth is a business leverage expert, the author of The Entrepreneurs Trap and creator of the Automate Your Growth Formula. Tina helps entrepreneurs to leverage revenue streams, establish key systems and build virtual teams to help your business thrive and that's the topic of this episode. Get Tina's free gift "How to cut your to-do-list in half" here http://www.automateyourgrowth.com/bushnell

According to the average number of Google searches, Michael Port is the 5th most popular business coach in the world. This is because his mission is to rally you to think bigger about who you are & what you offer the world. He is the guy you call when you are tired of thinking small!

Michael is the author of 4 books – Book Yourself Solid, Beyond Booked Solid, The Contrarian Effect and The Think Big Manifesto.

In this interview I ask Michael about his first book, Book yourself solid. This is the first of his books that I read & it made a huge difference in my business. I wanted to share this with my readers so they too can know how to “Get booked Solid” & in this interview Michael tells us how.

You can find out more about Michael over at his website http://www.michaelport.com I highly recommend that you check it out, Michael is very generous with the info he gives & there is a boatload of useful content on his website.

Viveka Von Rosen is a top expert on the subject of LinkedIn. She has well over 11,000 contacts on her personal LinkedIn account, which in terms of LinkedIn is just huge! She trains others on how to get a big, responsive LinkedIn network too. Listen to this interview where she reveals some of her best strategies for using LinkedIn to grow your  business!

Dale Beaumont is widely known as the “Go-to-Guy” for those that want to “build profile” quickly & earn more money. With a self evident track-record of personal success, Dale is now a sought-after speaker & he teaches others how to quickly become a mini-celebrity in their niche.

Dale is also the author of 16 best-selling books, which have collectively sold over 250,000 copies. Incredibly, 11 of those books were published in just one year, a feat that earned him the title ‘Australia’s Most Prolific Author’. In this Interview I ask Dale how we too can get published so that we can earn credibility & be perceived as an expert in our field.

Go check out Dale’s free CD & Report “The 7 Different ways to get published” at – getpublishedsecrets.com

Paul Lemberg helps business owners become wealthy. No joke, he’s done it hundreds of times: his private clients have collectively pocketed a whopping $360 million in profits. He’s also worked with Fortune 500’s like Cisco, Goldman Sachs and IBM, but his real love is showing entrepreneurs how to multiply their sales and profits and do it easier and faster than ever before.

He’s been at it for a long time. Paul started his first software company with a partner and $3,000 of credit card debt, selling it three years later for millions. He then launched a second company, which ultimately sold to a large international bank.

After a few years as a market strategist for giants like AT&T, HP and Dell, he found his true passion working directly with business owners creating wealth. There wasn’t a name for what he was doing so he coined the term “business coaching” to describe it.

Paul is the author of the business best seller, “Be Unreasonable,” and has created a series of powerful business growth training courses.  His latest programs are “Blueprints to Profits” and the brand-new “Getting Started in Business.”

In this Interview I ask ask Paul how we can grow our businesses faster & more consistently than we currently are. His content is rock solid, so grab some paper & a pen, some of the gems in this audio could really help you take your business to the next level. Enjoy

Tom Trush is a direct-response copywriter, marketing strategist and founder of Write Way Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona.  Tom Trush has helped business owners in 126 industries develop marketing materials that attract attention and create customers.

Tom is also the author of “The Reluctant Writer’s Guide to Creating Powerful Marketing Materials: 61 Easy Ideas to Attract Prospects and Get More Customers” and “The ‘You’ Effect: How to Transform Ego-Based Marketing Into Captivating Messages That Create Customers.”

In addition to working with clients across the globe, Tom shares his educational approach to marketing at seminars and workshops, as well as in his own information products. He firmly believes you can’t go wrong in your marketing when you show compassion and a desire for helping people.

In this interview Tom reveals…

* How to avoid “Ego-based Marketing” which will kill any chance you have of making  a sale

* How to sell without pitching!

* The “Genie in a bottle” method to create attention grabbing headlines on demand

* The copywriting formula for gathering leads & email addresses on your website

* Why it’s easier to make sales without any face to face interaction

* How the “Little guy” can compete with the big companies that have huge budgets

* Two magic words that will increase your conversions instantly

* How write persuasive emails that get opened, clicked & responded to

*An easy trick to get your list to spread the word so their friends sign up to your list too

* Why you should be using snail mail to build your list too

Dave Dee is one of the world’s leading information publishers and also works at GKIC. In this interview he discusses his unique launch model which has earned his clients hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mo Mastafa is an internet marketing consultant from Cardiff, Wales and the author of the book "Getting found Fast". He specializes in SEO and helps business owners and web masters to get to the top of Google.

In this interview Mo reveals step by step how we can can climb the rankings and make our way to the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine for our chosen keywords so that we can get huge amounts of qualified traffic

Click the play button below to listen to the "How to get to the top of Google" interview...

Click here to get your hands on Mo's Free SEO report "The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes"

Below is a little taste of what was covered in our "How to get to the top of Google" interview. For the full interview, click the play button above right now...

Q. What is SEO and why is so important?

A. SEO is the process of optimising your pages to help them get found in the major search engines, it's how to get to the top of Google, Yahoo & Bing.

SEO also involves things that take place off your website, such as building quality backlinks that will further push your web pages up in the rankings and allow you to get free search engine traffic.

Q. How do we go about finding the right keywords to use?

A. This process is known as keyword research.

To get to the top of Google, you have to decide which keywords you want to get to the top of Google for, right? There are a range of tools that you can use to help find great keywords for your website. One such tool is the Google Keyword Tool. It’s a free tool and it’ll show you exactly how many people search for a particular keyword to do with your business each month.

A more advanced SEO tool that you can use is Market Samurai.

This is a paid tool that will let you see a lot more data relating to your keywords, such as how many competitors they have. This is really important because one of the biggest reasons businesses fail to get traffic from the search engines is that they optimise their web sites for keywords that are just too competitive.

Market Samurai will also allow you to track your rankings in the search results, which is another reason why you may want to invest in a paid SEO tool.

Q. How do we optimise our web pages for a particular keyword?

There are many places that search engines will look, when they try to figure out what keyword you are trying to rank for. One of the most important places to put your keyword is your page title. This is what shows up in the search engine results and is also the part that shows up at the top of your website browser window.

Another great place to put your keyword is in your page URL. For example, if you are looking to rank for the keyword “internet marketing consultant”, you may want to name your page www.yourwebsite.com/internet-marketing-consultant.html

Also try to use LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing).  LSI basically means keywords that relate to your main keyword, such as “internet marketing expert” or “online mentor”.

A great way to find LSI keywords is to do a search in Google for your main keyword, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for “related keywords”. You’ll find them there.

Using LSI keywords as part of your page content will also allow you to get to the top of Google for keywords besides your main keyword meaning even more traffic. And you’ll be able to see this happening when you look at your Google Analytics stats.

Also, getting other people to put your keyword in the link text (aka anchor text) back to your website can improve your rankings.

Q. What are long tail keywords?

Most people think long tail means the length of the keyword phrase, when in reality it has a lot more to do with the volume of searches a keyword gets.

Basically, long tail keywords are keywords that get very low search volumes, but they are often a lot easier to rank for in the search engines simply because there aren’t as many people trying to optimise their websites for them.

If you want to learn more about the long tail, I recommend you read the book “The long Tail” by Chris Anderson.

Q. How do we optimise our website without needing technical skills?

There are many ways to optimise your website.

If you’ve had your website built by a third party, you can usually ask your web designer to do the SEO changes for you. Alternatively you can outsource it to a web developer or programmer on websites like elance.com or freelancer.com.

If you have a CMS (Content Management System) built into your website, you should be able to optimise your web pages yourself, simply by filling in the SEO related tabs.

And if you happen to be using a Wordpress.org blog, there are many great free plug-ins that you can use to help you get to the top of Google by optimising your pages, such as the “All in One SEO” plug-in or the “Yoast SEO” plug-in.

What else Do We Discuss?

There’s lots more that we discuss in our content packed "How to get to the top of Google" interview...

We also talk about importance of backlinks and whether quality or quantity is more important.

We also discuss a ton of different ways for you to get backlinks from different websites, and even how to get others to build backlinks for you!

You’ll also learn the difference of nofollow & dofollow backlinks, what they mean and how they work. Mo Mastafa will also give you a simplified definition of what PageRank is and how to go about getting backlinks from high PageRank websites. He also shares a simple, but clever little backlink strategy to get links from websites that will likely have high PageRank in the future!

He also gives his take on bounce rates and how they affect your website... especially your conversions rates. Finally we give our take on what Google thinks about “the bounce” and some simple ways to lower your bounce rates and increase conversions!

There’s over 30 minutes of SEO goodness packed into this interview, so to hear the full interview and learn lots of cools SEO strategies to help boost your search engine rankings fast, I recommend you listen to the interview now by pressing the play button.

Ben Settle is one of the most famous copywriters in world. He is considered one of the best in the world right now, if you don’t believe me then just check out his testimonials page on his website, the copywriting elite rate him very highly.

In this interview he reveals…

*Why copywriting is even more important to online business owners than to full time freelance copywriters

*How to quickly get your reader to identify that your message is for them & actually welcome your sales pitch

*He deconstructs his two best headlines which converted like crazy & why they worked so well

* How to uncover your products/services unique selling proposition even if you feel it doesn’t have one

* How to avoid sounding hypey in your copy & build rapport fast

* The 3 biggest mistakes all copywriting novices make & how to avoid them

* His 3 top tips on how you can improve your copy as of now

Kate Buck Jr is the Founder and CEO of KJB Online, a social media management and consulting agency in Austin, Texas. Kate has worked with some of the top names in Digital Marketing as well as consulted with dozens of entrepreneurs, businesses and non-profits. She is the creator of the Let's Get Social in which more than 10,000 social media managers have participated including myself!

Many of Kate’s student are earning $4,000-$5,000 per month or more with their Social Media Management businesses. In this interview I grill Kate on how to get started as a Social Media Manager. Kate reveals…

* How she got her very first client

* Why Social Media Management is one of the most in demand businesses right now

* What specific tasks people will pay a Social Media Manager to take care of

* How to position yourself so that clients are coming to you instead of having to chase them

* The most important piece of proof for any Social Media Manager

* 2 super easy ways to get your first client

* The best place to find new clients without having to spend any money for expensive marketing methods

* 3 ways to build credibility and a reputation as one of the best social media managers around

* How to delight your customers so that they send new business your way!

* How to grow and scale the business as you get lot’s of work in

* How to project manage yourself or your team to make sure all the work gets done

* What kind of money it’s possible for a social media manager to make

* Why Social media management makes for the perfect part time job

Geoff Ronning is a co-creator of Stealth Seminar, one of the most popular automated webinar tools. In this interview Geoff weighs up the pro's and con's of both live and automated webinars as well as hybrid webinars. He also shares how stealth seminar can help us to automate our business and make more profits.

Donnie Bryant is a copywriter who helps his clients produce edgy marketing messages, direct response and editorial copy that generates measurable, profitable results.

In this interview I ask Donnie why businesses are failing with their marketing efforts & how they can do it better. Donnie reveals…

* The 4 ways businesses are sabotaging their own marketing & killing their chances of getting new customers

* A simple but important to lesson to be learned from “Old Spice” commercials

* The number 1 writing mistake that will make people stop reading your marketing messages

* The “knock them off balance” technique to keep peoples attention squarely on your marketing message

* 3 devastating effects that the recession is having on businesses (Plus how to safeguard & recession proof your own business)

* Why cutting your marketing budget is the most stupid thing you can do in a down economy

* Why some businesses outgrow other businesses by 250% during a recession

* Why you can’t persuade anybody or change their mind

* How to earn a place of trust & importance in your readers mind

* Why you should forget about using a USP (unique selling proposition) & use a UVP instead

* Why neglecting 80% of your market is good for business

* The “40-40-20″ rule which determines how successful your ad will be

* How to craft a mouth watering offer

* How to give a strong call to action that people respond to right away

* Why psychologically you wouldn’t want to buy a Rolex for $10 even though that might sound like an amazing deal

* A great way to reverse all the risk so the buyer feels super comfortable when ordering

Kyle Lacy is the author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, Social Media CRM for Dummies and Brand Yourself. In this episode Kyle shares how we can use Twitter for business.

Chad Hamzeh is the creator of The Traffic Black Book, one of the most popular traffic getting courses in the world. In this interview Chad shares where to get traffic from, how to scale up your traffic and how to get an ROI.

For close to three decades, Kenrick Cleveland has dedicated himself to perfecting the techniques, the skill, the “art” of influence. He is known worldwide for his charismatic teachings in sales and conversational persuasion.

Drawing from a diversified career base that includes an extensive sales background coupled with experience in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnosis, Kenrick Cleveland created a model of persuasion that is so effective that it remains the benchmark of excellence in this field.

Getting Yes more often

We would all benefit in life if we could communicate in a way that gained more compliance from the person we are communicating with. In business & sales it is especially nice when people say “Yes” to us, rather than getting a “No”. Too many “No’s” and you’re out of business altogether. In this interview I ask Kenrick all about how we can get people to say “Yes” to us much more frequently, and he reveals…

* Why we need to stop thinking logically if we want to become “Yes Strategists”

* How to get people to say yes to you all the time & in any situation

* The reason why you currently struggle to get people to say yes to you

* 5 steps to hooking your prospect on an emotional level

* Why Kenrick forgets all about using features & benefits when selling

* How to build instant rapport & likeability

* The secret to never getting objections

* How to crack the belief that is causing the objection (We do a role play & Kenrick cracks me straight away!)

* How to persuade using the written word

* The 4 biggest mistakes that ruin all chances of you getting a yes from someone

* An easy 2 minute process to really uncover what drives your prospects & would make them want to buy from you

* And more! Just click on the play button below to listen to the interview…

Kenneth Yu is the creator of The Email Salvation System, The Twitter Salvation System and The Branding Salvation System. In this episode Kenneth share his email marketing secrets.

John was named AWAI copywriter of the year in 2008 and regularly writes for Agora. In this episode John defines the 6 types of lead we might encounter and how to market to each.

Miguel Hernandez is the founder of Grumo Media, the world's best product demo video companies. In this episode Miguel shares how we can get amazing quality videos that massively boost conversions

This is an interview with Bob Burg who is the Co-Author of the Go-Giver book series. Bob’s books have sold all over the world & is one of Americas most sought after speakers. In this recording he provides us entrepreneurs with motivation & encouragement. His philosophy is quite literally – The more you, the more receive. Check it out…

An interview with one of the world’s best copywriters & direct response marketers. He is the author of “How to make maximum money with minimum customers – 21 proven Direct-Marketing strategies anyone can use”. We talk info products, funnels, continuity, pricing, copywriting and more.

Daniel Levis is a top marketer/copywriter. He the creator of The Persuasion Marketing Club, Info-Marketing Academy, Master of Copywriting, The 5R Conversion System, Effortless Influence and Email Alchemy.

Ari Galper is the world’s #1 trust-based sales expert with over 45,000 clients, members and subscribers

Ari’s deep understanding of human communication and how it can be maximized in the sales process has lead him to discover the solution to the most dreaded selling experience of all: personal rejection.”How to ELIMINATE Personal Sales Rejection Forever… And Make More Sales!”

The sales techniques that we were taught by the “sales gurus” contradict everything we know about what it takes to build real relationships. But isn’t selling just another human relationship – a business relationship? No one likes to be pushed and no one wants to talk to someone who is only out to get what they want.

If you flick through most of the sales books and training manuals today, you’ll find a constant flow of messages like, ‘Focus only on closing the sale’; ‘Be relentless’; ‘Accept rejection as a normal part of selling’; ‘Chase the sale’.

In short, get the sale at the expense of the human relationship.

Chasing the sale makes selling a gut-wrenching and painful process both for you the seller, and your buyer.

Ari Galper, the founder of the best-selling sales program Unlock The Game®, has “cracked the code” on how tomake the shift from chasing the sale to building authentic relationships based on trust, authenticity and integrity — creating more sales than you could ever have imagined!

Unlock The Game® has helped thousands of business owners break free from sales rejection along with substantially increasing sales results.

1.Eliminate pressure and tension from the sales process

2.Rip up your sales scripts and easily get your message across

3.Stop chasing prospects and gain the respect you deserve

4.Get rid of your “fear of phone” once and for all

5.Stop “pitching” and start problem solving

During the call Ari mentions that you can get a free test drive of 10 email lessons of audio seminars over at his website which you can get at unlockthegame.com

Brian Carter is respected as one of the elite internet marketing experts in the world. He has 12 years experience with Google, Twitter and Facebook marketing, both as a consultant and marketing agency director. He develops strategies, builds search visibility and social marketing fan bases for companies of all sizes, including well known entities such as Universal Studios, The U.S. Army, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

Brian is the author of The Like Economy, LinkedIn for Business: How Advertisers, Marketers and Salespeople Get Leads, Sales and Profits, and co-author of Facebook Marketing. He also writes for two of the most popular marketing blogs, Search Engine Journal and AllFacebook. He occasionally writes for Mashable.com.

In this interview I ask Brian how we can get more leads and make more sales through Facebook Marketing. Brian reveals…

* 3 main reasons why businesses have to be using Facebook

* The 5 ways to profit using Facebook

* How one of Brian’s clients got an extra $65,000 in one month, all thanks to an under used Facebook marketing tactic

* The best way to collect prospects emails and phone numbers on Facebook

* 4 services which will allow you to easily create your own customized Facebook fan page tabs

* 2 reasons why using contests may not be the best way to do Facebook marketing

* The “Sell the dream” method which will help your status updates get more likes and comments

* 4 ways to determine if your Facebook marketing is working or not

* An awesome tool which will help you track what sales resulted directly from your Facebook marketing efforts

* 4 costly Facebook marketing mistakes that people make

Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero was pretty much the first woman to make her mark in the male dominated industry of copywriting (Up until then freelance copywriting had been somewhat of a boy’s club) Today there are many female copywriters all over the globe & Lorrie was a big inspiration & pioneer for many of the worlds top female copywriters.

In this interview Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero shares her story & some of her best copywriting tips including….
* Lorries step by step formula for getting more sales than you can handle

* How to ensure what you write actually gets read

* How to build super quick trust & rapport to deepen the relationship between you & your target audience

* Why the made up word “Tarket” will be the difference between a high converting sales letter or one that totally flops

* Her method to easily produce copy even if you hate writing

* Where to swipe (for free) your markets best headlines that other people spent millions of dollars to test & refine

* Lorries weird order of events when it comes to writing copy (It’s so counter intuitive it’s seems back to front)

* The best way to answer the readers objections so their barriers of resistance dissolve immediately

* How to wrap up & close your sales letter so the reader almost can’t help but click the order button

James Malinchak is America’s foremost authority on public speaking & selling from the stage. He has trained and helped some of the worlds best speakers to learn their craft.

Personally he charges between $20,000 – $100,000 as a speaking fee. He also sells his products and services from the stage. His personal best is selling over $1m in back of the room sales from just one event

He has won several awards and has also been featured on ABC’s TV show “Secret Millionaire”

In this interview I ask James how we can become a highly paid and in demand public speaker. James reveals…

* How he was able to go from being a complete novice speaker to earning millions of dollars selling his products from the stage

* 4 reasons why at the beginning of your speaking career you should speak for free

* Why anyone can learn to become a speaker

* How to get your first “big pay day”

* 3 steps to getting started as a highly paid speaker

* 2 methods to build your email list by speaking

* The easiest way to gain credibility as an industry leader who gets invited to speak

* 3 types of coaching programs that you can sell from the stage

* The number 1 way to kill your chances of making sales from the stage (this is one is shocking & counter intuitive)

* The formula which will help you avoid over teaching

* The “soap opera technique” to make your audience want to buy

* How much of your best content you should be giving away during a free presentation

Lisa Manyon is an Award Winning Author, Marketing and Copywriting Strategist. She is the co-author of the #1 Best Selling book Success Rituals 2.O –Winning Habits of High-Achieving Women: How she does it and you can too! She is also the recipient of the Charles Schwab Financial Literacy Award in The Hot Mommas 2011 Competition. She has featured in the world’s largest women’s digital library of role models & mentors and the Write On Creative Blog received a 2011 APEX award for publication excellence.  Lisa offers a complimentary Copywriting Action Plan and publishes Manyon’s Musings a free monthly ezine . For more information visit her website www.WriteOnCreative.com

In this interview Lisa discusses a new copywriting formula that she has created, tried and tested herself. It not only challenges some old copywriting beliefs but could revolutionize the way that people write copy as well. Lisa reveals…

* Why the old saying “Copy is King” is not true anymore

* The copywriting formula that works far better when writing to women than men (Women make 85% of all buying decisions BTW)

* Why the “Problem, Agitate, Solve” formula doesn’t work quite as well as it used to

* What the CSI formula is & why it converts better

* How to close without the “Hard sell”

* The 3 biggest mistakes Lisa sees when people write copy & how to easily avoid them

* 3 shortcuts that will make the copywriting process at least twice as fast

Brian Bagnall is an in-demand author, speaker and consultant.  He is the “the go-to-guy” for Facebook Social Ads.  He has shared the stage with marketing legends like Mike Filsaime, Chris Farrell, Mark Anastasi and Rich Schefren just to name a few. He is an advisor to Fortune 500 and major brand-name corporations as well as thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners worldwide. He has personally crafted and written ads, direct-mail campaigns, and has created online marketing that has sold billions of dollars of goods and services.

Brian Bagnall has worked hands-on with over 500 clients in 79 different business categories, and has helped hundreds of his private clients become millionaires and multimillionaires in a relatively short space of time

His digital products include “Lost” Recession Proof Marketing Secrets and 80/20 Rule on Steroids

In this interview he reveals his secrets for making money with Facebook adverts such as…

* The big differences between FaceBook PPC & Google PPC (If you don’t know this you will waste a ton of money with FB ads)

* Whether to use CPC or CPM bidding?

* How to create compelling ads that get clicked on

* The single most important part of a FaceBook ad

* The 70-20-10 formula for FB ads

* 1 type of headline that always attracts people to click on your ad

* The key metric to determine if your ad is successful or not

* The secrets of making money with sponsored stories & premium ads

Jock Purtle of Digital Exits, helps people to sell their website/online business for the most profit possible. In this episode he shares how to value your website and sell it to hungry buyers.

James Wedmore is one of the USA’s best Video Marketing experts.He is the creator of several online training programs including Video Traffic Academy and 6 Figure Outsourcing secrets

He helps small business owners drive traffic, give great content, gather leads and make sales using online video

In this video interview he reveals…

*Why every online business has to be using video in 2012
*How to create high quality video even on a budget
*How to get your videos ranked highly in both YouTube & Google
*How to do great lighting & audio which will give your videos the edge
*Video alternatives for the camera shy (You don’t have to get in front of the camera to do video)
*James Wedmore’s “Hierarchy of video needs”
*The 3 step structure of a perfect video from beginning to end
*How to get more comments, likes & subscribes on YouTube

Chris Lomas is the senior copywriter at Clear Comms, a UK based copywriting agency that specializes in producing marketing communication that is crystal clear. Chris writes copy in plain English, he leaves buzzwords & fluff to one side. There are many different channels through which you can market your business & Chris has experience with all of them.

Most businesses have a website. Many will do email marketing. But the vast majority of small businesses just leave it there. They don’t tap into the huge potential of the other marketing methods at their disposal (And if they do, it’s often using poorly written copy)

In this interview I ask Chris what these forgotten marketing channels are & how we can use them successfully in our business. Chris reveals…

* The 5 keys to becoming a successful copywriter

* Why most copywriting pieces fail

* How to avoid saying too much in your copy & risk taking away from the message

* 3 steps to writing a first-class product description

* How to write very a concise story in just a paragraph or two

* The big secret to writing a company profile that oozes with personality

* How to collect lot’s of high quality case studies from your clients

* The type of case study that works best & will give you massive credibility & proof

* 2 major differences when writing editorial articles for magazines & newsletters

* When to use press releases

* 3 situations that make for a newsworthy story that the media will love

David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity which is one of the worlds most popular time management/productivity books. He is also the author of 2 follow up books Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life.

In this interview he shares his "Getting things done" methodology so that we can accomplish what we want to with minimum stress.

David shares...

• The key to getting lots of things done without stress or anxiety
• 3 steps to make sure you don’t break commitments with yourself or others
• The 5 stages of mastering workflow
• The 6 level model for reviewing your own work
• How to choose which task to be working on in any given moment
• The 5 step natural planning model

And much more! Just click the play button to listen to the interview or read the full transcript below...

Joey Bushnell: Hey, welcome to the online marketing show. This is Joey Bushnell. I am very excited to introduce today’s special guest, his name is David Allen and he is the author of Getting Things Done, one of the worlds most famous time management and productivity books. Go to Davidco.com to find out more.

David thank you so much for joining me today.

David Allen: My pleasure Joey

Joey Bushnell: David how did you come to write the book “Getting Things Done”

David Allen: I spent about 20 - 25 years doing the work which is the foundation for the methodology that I put together. So it really was writing a manual after all of those years. It took me 25 years, as I said, to figure out what I figured out and that it actually was unique and no one else had quite done it that way.

It also took that long for me to feel really comfortable  that it was bullet proof. I tested it across culture, I tested it with all kinds of people from CEO’s of fortune 50 corporations, to kids, to everybody! And basically couldn’t punch a hole in it.

So once I trusted that it really, really did work and that people still needed it, I said in case I get run over by a bus I better put it in writing because somebody might figure it out at some point. So that was really the prime driver.

Joey Bushnell: You’ve also written several other books since then based on the core ideas in “Getting Things Done” as well?

David Allen: Yeah, what is fascinating to me Joey is I could still make a living and still keep doing what I’m doing for 30 plus years, with the 12 things that I know! How may ways can you spin it?

But I’m sure the same is true for the core elements to good marketing or anything else. It’s really how many ways you can spin it and how deep you can go with it. It is, as simple as the model is, it really is a lifestyle and a lifetime craft to get really good at how you manage your work and life in that way.

Joey Bushnell: The book changed my life David. I used to find myself getting very stressed, overwhelmed and not getting enough done each day, that I would have liked to have got done. I know having spoken to friends who are business owners as well, they find themselves in a similar position too. So I think this is something that is universal and a lot of people struggle with this.

In your opinion why do you think business owners tend to find themselves getting stressed and getting overwhelmed?

David Allen: Well, first of all you’re not going to get rid of challenges and you’re not going to get rid of stress in the positive way. If you didn’t have challenges you would never grow, expand or express and also your competition would have it just as easy as you. So I don’t kid anybody you don’t get rid of the kind of challenges that a business owner or entrepreneur have to deal with in terms of making it in the world. That is going to be a challenge.

What you want is to be able to be in the drivers seat about it.

It’s like you might be out in a sail boat in stormy weather so it is a challenge but you want to make sure you don’t let go of the helm. In other words you need to stay in control and in the drivers seat of what you are doing.

So a lot of my methodology was... how do you get on top of that game so you are appropriately focused and appropriately in the drivers seat with your hand on the helm? I think that is the big key and in a way the issue for business owners and entrepreneurs is no different than the issue for most everybody on the planet, certainly who are trying to get things done, and that is most people are trying to use their psyche as their system. Your psyche, your head, is a terrible office, it really is!

So a lot of my message, I don’t know how long I’m going to keep preaching this is “Guys, you’ve got to get it out of your head, it’s a really crappy office”. If you are just trying to use your head for strategy and for thinking about what you need to do and to try and get rid of the pressures, that won’t work. It’s not designed like that, your head is designed for handling ideas not for holding them.

The cognitive scientists in the last 10 years have done all kinds of research to validate what GPD and the Getting Things Done methodology really figured out from the street, which is to get it out of your head. I’ve never seen anybody and I’ve dealt one on one and spent thousands of hours with business owners literally sitting desk side with them and having them just dump their head...

"Hey, what do you have your attention on?"

"Well I have the bank thing, and this thing, and the competition, and we have the product, and this launch, and the advertising and I have this staff thing".

"Great get it all out!"

Once they get it out, they feel both relief and angst because they are looking at it feeling "Oh my, look at how many things I have my attention on and have commitments about".

Yeah no kidding! People get mad at me about their list! sorry it’s not my list it’s yours. Your choice is what you do with those commitments. Most people have internalized those instead of externalized those and you need to build an external brain.

Joey Bushnell: So it’s having all of those things stored up in your head that is creating the overwhelm, you just feel like you got a never ending to do list.

David Allen: Yeah, here is the problem, if you are just trying to keep track of something in your head, that part of you that is hanging onto that, is hanging onto it and taking up space that is not available for other things. There really is limited psychic space or psychic RAM which can fill up and choke the system if you do that. That place also seems to have no sense of past or future.

So if you tell yourself you need to hire somebody and you keep saying in your head "I need to hire somebody" but that’s the only place you keep track of that and reviewing it, there is a part of you that thinks you should be hiring somebody 24/7, all the time.

As soon as you file 2 things in your head that are unfinished and you have your attention on and it’s the only place you are tracking it, you’ve created instant failure and stress because you can’t do them both at the same time and there is a part of you psychologically that is trying to.

Joey Bushnell: You mention in the book that there is a power in not breaking internal commitments and agreements that we make with ourselves. So what are the emotional benefits of not breaking those commitments and how can we prevent ourselves from doing it?

David Allen: Well the main down side to breaking an agreement is the disintegration of trust. That is an automatic price you pay when you tell yourself to do something and you don’t do it, you automatically lose your own self trust. If you tell other people you are going to do something and you don’t do it you automatically lose their trust. There are people I love dearly but I wouldn’t trust further than I could spit. They show up when they tell me they are going to show up based upon data. But they didn’t keep that agreement, OK then, I don't trust them. Doesn’t mean I don’t love them anymore but it means I lack trust.

So the self trust is the price you pay when you break an agreement with yourself. If that is true, and all of these agreements, most people haven’t a clue of how many things they have agreed with themselves about. It’s all of their would’s, should’s, could’s, need to’s, ought to’s  and that is what I have spent thousands of hours, and my coaching staff have as well, literally getting people to just objectify all of the things they’ve told themselves they ought to, need to or could do, everything they have their attention on about that. Most people are blown away by how much that’s really there.

Now those agreements, you obviously can’t go and finish those 150 things or those 25 big projects all at once. The best things to do is, if you don’t want to break an agreement you have 3 options...

The first option is don’t make the agreement in the first place. A lot of times people dump stuff out of their head and they go “That’s a dumb idea when I look at all of the other stuff I’m going to do, I’m not going to do that at all.” Which is great just take it off your list. Most people are a bit spoiled thinking they can do everything. Like I say, you can do anything but not everything. So just being aware and being more mature about what your inventory is and what you can handle that is a smart thing to do. So option one is don’t make the agreement or unhook from it.

Another option is go and finish your agreement, go and do the stuff you tell yourself you are going to do. You need cat food? Go and buy cat food! You want to hire somebody? Hire someone. Those are your better days when you actually finish a lot of things you told yourself you want to do. So completing things is another way you will complete the agreement.

The third one, which is the most critical one to be aware of, which is, if I agree with you Joey, I’m going to call you at 9am and something comes up in my world and I can’t keep that agreement, obviously the thing for me to do is contact you and rearrange that agreement “Hey Joey, can we make it some other time? Something else has come up”. If we renegotiate the agreement then it’s not broken. All of that big thing I just said, is why you need to write it down, look at it and go "Not now". You can only feel good about what you are not doing when you know what you’re not doing.

So it’s not really about getting things done believe it or not. Here is a big secret and I’ll only tell you and of course the smart, savvy listeners to your program but getting things done is really about getting appropriately engaged with everything in your work and your life so you can become present with everything that you are doing. Which is really the optimal way to do anything, is presence, when you are fully there and you are in your flow. Being appropriately engaged. How many things are you not doing right now because you are talking to me?

Joey Bushnell: Lot’s of things!

David Allen: Yeah me too! So the only way we can be present here in this conversation, is if some part of us has looked at all the rest of it and said “No, that can wait. Talking to Joey is the best thing for me to do in my life right now”. Now, I need to know what that is, if I hadn’t kept everything out of my head and looked at it every few days in some detail then there is a part of me that is going to walk around with this angst, that I won’t even know what the source of it is, I’ll just feel uncomfortable.

So shutting that up really is a master key to how you start to get control and to be able to be in control and appropriately focused on whatever it is you are doing, whether it is playing golf, writing a business plan or doing a marketing plan. You want to be able to be there fully. So that doesn’t solve the problem of what do I put in the marketing plan or business plan but it allows you to be fully available so you can access your intelligence and not be distracted.

I think that is the master key to productivity and it also means appropriate engagement with all of those things. You just need to look at them on some regular basis and go “OK, that’s OK, oh that reminds me and oh I ought to...” It’s that kind of thinking and everybody does that intuitively and instinctively but you usually do that when the pressure gets really bad. But I’ve never had anybody in the 30 plus years I’ve been doing this who started to write it all down take a look at it and didn't feel slightly more in control and more focused.

Joey Bushnell: I guess the great thing is when you get into the habit of this and you are consistently getting things done, like you said before, if you break commitments you lose trust in yourself but I guess after practicing this for a while, you will get a positive reinforcement that you are the kind of person who is reliable and gets things done, and surely that has got to do wonders for the psyche.

David Allen: Oh it’s huge, yeah, and that takes a lot of forms. I usually respond to every email within 24 hours, sometimes 48 or 72, if I’m on a real roll doing something else but my backlog starts at zero and I get it back to zero pretty fast. People then pretty much don’t send me trash because I respond, I’m a responder, they get feedback right away from that.

So it not only builds trust, there is something recently which is called psychological capital and that means I’m feeling optimistic, I’m in control of my life, I have hope, I have direction. That is a very very powerful state to be in. When people see that you have that, your equity goes up in terms of their perception of value to you, their interest in communicating with you and all of that good stuff.

Joey Bushnell: One of the main concepts in the book is something you call “Mastering the 5 stages of work flow” is it OK to go through that please?

David Allen: Sure, first thing you have to do is capture anything that might potentially be work. The first stage is collective capture and that I like writing it down. You can’t just leave one stage otherwise it will back up on you like bad plumbing.

Once you write it down, you then need to go through each one of those things that has your attention and then clarify what you are going to do about it, what the outcome is and the action step is if there is any.  So that is the executive thinking about the notes you took in the meeting or the things you wrote down on your list. You wrote down bank, well what is that what is the outcome you are after? Well I need to see if I can extend my credit line. Great what is your next action? I think I should call Bill Smith and see what he did with his bank. Good, now you have an outcome and you have an action but those things don’t show up by themselves you actually have to think through the stuff that you have captured.

So stage 2 is a clarification or processing. Essentially it’s emptying your in basket. Not by finishing the work that is in there but by defining what the work is specifically in there. Is this trash? Is this reference? Is it something I need to review later? Is it actionable? If so, what are the outcomes and what are the action steps? Those are the basic executive decisions you would make about what does this stuff actually mean that I have now captured.

Stage 3 would then be to organize that. By the way between stage 2 and 3, that is where the little magic 2 minute rule sits. That is, once you figure out what action step it is, if you can take it in 2 minutes or less you ought to do it right then and there because it would take you longer to stack it, track it and review than it would be to finish it the first time it’s in your face. So just cleaning up your in baskets, your email in basket and your physical in basket, if you hold the 2 minute rule you will actually get a lot of stuff done and make a lot of progress on a lot of things. You’ll be amazed how many things with the action step could be finished in less than 2 minutes, assuming you have decent keyboard skills.

That is also where you delegate. So once I pick something up and say "This is going to take me longer than 2 minutes to do", great, can you give this off to somebody else? That is also where you want to hand it off in some sort of systematic way.

So going through from stage 2 to 3, what you then organize is, what is left. What I need to organize are the things that I need to keep track of, the projects I’ve got, the action steps I need to take that I can’t hand off or finish in the moment and that’s where I need to organize that. Basically you need to organize everything that you need to keep around you or has value to you. So your reference stuff goes where that goes, trash obviously goes  in the recycle bin or shredder. Actionable things then need to be parked somewhere where they remind you appropriately.

So where do I put a list of projects that I’ve got? Where do I put the reminders of phone calls I need to make? Where do I put the reminders about the things I want to talk to my banker about when I see him or her? Now that I'm defining what moves the needle on all of the actionable things I’m committed to, then I need to make sure they are parked appropriately in the right place so my head doesn’t lose them and my head doesn’t have to take them back. That is the organize stage that is stage 3. So now I’m organized, I’ve captured everything out of my head, I’ve decided what it means, I’ve parked it in appropriate places.

Then stage 4 is I need to the engage with the material, I need to look at my list, I need to look at my categories for things that I’ve held on some regular basis so I keep it current and I keep the larger perspective. So that is the review stage that is stage 4.

Review takes on lots of different levels, you obviously need to review your diary or your calendar before you start your day or the night before. On your phone if you have some spare time, say you’re at a Starbucks and you have some time, you can review your phone call list so you can be productive while you are waiting for someone to show up. So that is the review phase and it takes on a lot of different levels as I say.

But then after all of that you have to be engaged, stage 5 is  basically how do I now allocate resources? Do I go have a beer? Do I go to my computer to draft a document? Or do I go to sleep? So that is where to engage once you’ve done all that.

So the best practice of all of those is, as I said, to have captured everything, make sure it’s not banging around in your head. If you decided what those things mean, once you decide what they mean, park them where those things go. Then make sure you engage in some regular review process with all of it so you feel comfortable with what you are doing and what you are not doing.

Joey Bushnell: OK, David in the second stage, the processing stage what options do we have there? In the book you have a nice diagram which makes it very visual, so could you try to describe for those listening, what are the main options we have when it comes to stage two?

David Allen: Well your first question is, is this actionable yes or no? That is the first thing to decide. Are you actually going to do something about what it is that you wrote down or this email? So that is the first distinction you need to make, that is the first decision.

Well actually, the first decision is what the hell is this?! What is this email? Why does it have 14 attachments to it and why did they send this to me? is it CC’d to me, what is this? So believe it or not that is something you need to clarify. So the first thing is what the heck is it that I have captured, collected or that has come to me in my in basket. Then the critical decision is is it an actionable item yes or no?

If it is a no and there is no action on it, now you now have three options of no’s. First of all is it’s trash I don’t need it or now I’ve seen it I don’t need it. So that is one option.

Another option is there’s no action on it now but there might be later. There are other things pending, I can’t make the decision about this right now, let me see it in a week, two days, two months or the beginning of next quarter. That would be the incubate. It could be something that you decide could have potential action but not now, then you need to make sure you revisit it on some recursion, so that’s number two of the non-action options.

The third thing is reference material. There is no action on it but it is information I need to keep it because I made need access to it for some reason.

So if it’s non actionable it’s either trash, incubate or reference.

Now if it is actionable than you have those 2 key questions to answer about it. Essentially the zero’s and ones of productive work, are what is the outcome I’m committed to, if any? And what is the next action required? So outcome and action become the core elements of productive engagement. What am I moving toward as some final outcome IE Is there a project here? If it’s more than one step, we call that a project because you might do the one step and then get distracted or go onto other things and you’ve still got an open loop.

So defining the project of actionable things, if you have one and most people have between 30 and 100 projects. If you consider that simple definition of more than one step things that you are committed to finish in the next few weeks or months and include personal as well as professional. So that includes your next holiday, it’s getting tires on your car, launching the ad campaign, hire a new assistant, research the new mobile phone app. I would consider all of those projects and most people have 40, 60, 70 of those. 

So defining those things, if it’s actionable, is there an outcome I need to capture? When getting things done you need to define what does “done” mean? That is the outcome.

Then what does doing look like? In other words, where does doing happen? What’s the very next physical, visible action you would need to take to start to move the needle on that? Is it a phone call you need to make? Is it an email you need to send? A document you need to draft? A website you need to surf? A conversation you need to have with your life partner, banker or assistant? And defining that, "OK, I’ve got an outcome and I’ve got a next action".

Those are the real key distinctions about actionable things, then you wind up with projects and actions. Most people have 150, 180 or 200 next actions if you really did this inventory completely. Those are all the executive decisions and then that starts to define for you how you organize that. Organization just simply means that where something is, matches what it means to you.

Which begs the question what does it mean to me? So I just answered that... "It’s an incubate", OK so I need to put it where incubate things go. "There is a project embedded in this", great I need to capture that where I’ve got a list of projects. "There is a phone call I need to make about this", great I’ll park that where I see a list of phone calls to make.

Joey Bushnell: And are you doing this digitally or do you like doing it on paper?

David Allen: I do them both, if you can’t do it low tech you’re going to have a hard time doing it high tech because you are going to need to understand what the functions are. Once you understand the function you can do it low tech, mid tech or high tech.

The truth is I do a lot of pen and paper in capture because the batteries in pen and paper last a long time, you don’t need to plug them in and they are pretty ubiquitous. Good thoughts occur in the strangest places! So a lot of my capturing in stage one is done on pen and paper just because it’s so ubiquitous and so easy.

Though you could call your own answering machine, voicemail or you could Siri yourself a note into your email. There are a lot of ways you could capture with the technology now. It ranges but mostly I use pen and paper for that piece. But obviously a lot of it is being digitally collected through social media or email. If your email is getting LinkedIn notices or Facebook requests all of that is coming in, in digital form just by it's very nature.

But usually the question comes down to how do I organize that? And to a large degree, most of these categories are lists and that is how I keep track of those?

Right now I’m keeping track of that, we use lotus notes in my company so within the lists or task function are all of those notes. But then also replicas are synced with my iPhone. But I’ve done all of that, I’ve carried an elegant danish loose leaf planner for 20 years. But I’ve got a lot of high tech people going back to planners right now because they have found that paper is a lot more obvious and fits the way your mind likes to see larger contexts of things and relationships of things computers are kind of tricky about that.

Joey Bushnell: I guess the key thing is just making sure you do it, whether you prefer digital, paper or whiteboard, it’s just making sure you do that processing stage.

David Allen: Sure and then you need to, obviously once you’ve organized this, it needs to accessible somewhere where it is easy for you to have it accessible. So technology has certainly made that easier on your smart phone to be able to keep lists and things like that so you can then synchronize those in different places. If you don’t need to see a reminder of something other than where you have a white board then white board is fine. But again there is a big difference between capturing ideas and deciding what they mean and organizing the results of that.

Joey Bushnell: So onto stage 4 reviewing. In the book you talk about a 6 level model for reviewing your own work, could you explain a little bit about that please?

David Allen: Yeah I couldn’t get it any simpler than 6. If you think about the, I call them, different horizons of your commitments or horizons of focus.

You have a commitment Joey to be a good human being or to be some sort of human being or to do something on the planet. So that is the big commitment, why do you exist? What is your purpose?

Or you could do it for your company, what is the purpose of your company or your organization? The big “why?”. Why do I exist? What is my ultimate intentionality? That is one level, that is kind of a top level of your priorities. You wouldn’t want to be off purpose in terms of being a human being or your company.

Then you have more operational levels of that too. If you were fulfilling your purpose wildly successfully what would that look like?  And that comes down to what I call horizon 4. I’ve labelled these horizon 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and ground level in the new vocabulary, it’s a bit more global. So if you think about levels in a building, there is a ground floor then floor 1, next floor up is 2, 3, 4 and 5.

So the top floor is the top level which would be purpose.

The 4th floor is... what would the vision look like if you were fulfilling your purpose? Your long term goal, in other words. What is the picture 5 years from now? When you grow up what do you want to be doing? So that would be another level of commitment is to be fulfilling that commitment.

Then more operational at level 3 if you come down to that, is what do you need to in the next 3-12-24 months? What are the objectives you have or goals you have that you need to achieve that you think will move you toward your vision, it’s another level of commitment. Level 3 is often times what you see in company plans. Their strategic or operational plan that they have been looking at a year or 2 and what they want to accomplish.

Then you need to come down to level 2 and say "Yeah but we have to make sure this enterprise is healthy and balanced and maintains itself so we can move forward". That is the level of maintenance. What are the things you need to maintain?

In a company you need to maintain public relations, marketing, sales, operations, finance, admin and executive functions. These are things that you need to make sure that you maintain at a certain level of standards. So level 2 is a lot about what is your job description? What are all the hats you wear? What are all of your areas of focus and responsibility or accountability?

Personally that would be how is your health and vitality? Your relationships? Your household? How’s your creative expression? Your career? Or any of those types of things. So level 2 is what drives you a lot and why you have a lot of projects and why you do a lot of actions is because you have a lot of areas of accountability and focus.

Then you come down to level 1 and say what do you need to finish about all of that and that is projects. Level 1 would be all of your commitments you had, as I mentioned most people have 40, 50, 60 or 70 of those.

Then what are all the things you need to do about those projects? That is when you get down to the ground floor and all the actions you need to take... the phone calls, emails, talk to’s etc and most people have a couple of hundred of those. I couldn’t get it any simpler than that.

Those are 6 very different levels of conversation with yourself and they’re 6 very different levels of content. Your strategic plan looks very different than your job description. Is one better than the other? No, they are kind of equal. But you can only do things on the ground floor. All of those other levels help to give you direction and help you set priorities.

Joey Bushnell: And do you work top down when you are doing this or bottom up?

David Allen: I personally focus on whatever I need to focus on to get it off my mind. In other words when I'm playing with my dog, I don’t want to be thinking of my strategic plan, I need to have already thought about it.  There is no really better or worse but there is a hierarchy that my actions should be fulfilling my finishing projects which should be maintaining areas of focus which is also moving me toward my goals which is going to help me fulfill my vision which is going to be ultimately aligned with my purpose. Ideally all of these things will be aligned up toward the top level.

The truth is that you can’t do anything except on the ground level. No matter how important your strategic plan is you still have to bring it down to “So what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do against all the other things you have to do?”.

Ultimately I’ve never seen anybody be able to create a formula other than trusting their gut, the seat of their pants, their liver, their spirit, their heart or whatever it may be, that still, small voice that you trust when you are making a judgement call based upon that. Ideally you want to have had all of those conversations. You and your life partner talk about where you want to be 4 years from now, you and your company have talked about your strategic plan and your own performance goals.

All of that tied back to what’s really important to you, you don’t care where you live or work as long as what’s true. You kind of bounce all around those things, there is not necessarily a linear sequence of how to think through those. As I say, it’s often times easier to start getting control on the ground level and the first floor. In other words if your projects and your action level is out of control, don’t even try to be thinking that you can be doing much thinking or good work on any of the other levels.

So you need to feel confident that you can execute on direction. So as I say, how long does it take for you to change a goal? Oh about half a second. How long does it take for you to learn to execute seamlessly? It takes about 2 years to get really good at the GTD methodology, if you are really good.

That’s why we teach, train and coach a lot, in a way it looks like we start bottom up. "Hi, what is that piece of paper on your desk? Hi, what is that email sitting on your computer right now, why is it there? What is your next action?" Once you start to do that and start to get control there it becomes a lot easier to allow your thinking and it will automatically start to elevate to some other levels once you get that under control.

Joey Bushnell: You mentioned that you can only ever do things on the ground level, let’s explore that further if we can. How do you decide which actions to take when it comes to the “in the moment, daily level, near term” kind of tasks?

David Allen: Well the daily dance is between 3 things...

There is all the predefined actions. Here is all the phone calls and computer actions, things like that I have already defined that I need to do and those are on my lists.

Then there is all the stuff that is unplanned or unexpected. Like I get a phone call I didn’t expect or I got an email by surprise which has now put a spin on my day. For either good or challenging reasons, whatever the reason, it was unexpected. Now you are dancing between those but the unexpected stuff if that comes in, in order for me to feel comfortable I need to say "Hey I now need to focus on that instead of all the rest" I just need to know what all the rest is. In other words, I need to make sure my list of defined work is complete so I can assess the new stuff against that.

That is why the 3rd things I might be doing is cleaning up my back log and zeroing out my in basket and my email. Why? So I can trust that I don’t have a bunch of stuff lurking in there that I don’t know. The bigger your backlog the more interruptions will bother you. I’ve got 3,000 emails and this bunch of stuff I have to do inside all of that but I don’t know how exactly what it is, oh damn someone just walked in to my office. But if you have a zero backlog and someone walks into your office you say "Hi, what do you want? What can I do for you? How can you influence my world?" That is why when I'm not doing anything else, I’m cleaning up backlog but that takes 30-90 minutes a day just to do that and make sure that back log is cleaned up.

Now a lot of work get’s done there and a lot of executive thinking happens while I’m cleaning up that. I’m not just sitting there like some dumb robot cleaning up my in basket, there is a lot going on while I’m doing that but it’s still just part of your work. A lot of people complain about email, "I have to stay after hours dealing with the email", I'm like "Dealing email is your work". If you shouldn’t be getting it you shouldn’t get it, stop it. If you should then you should. That is how the world works these days.

Joey Bushnell: In the book you talk about something called the natural planning model, what is that and why do you recommend it?

David Allen: Years ago I spent some time thinking about what is the best planning model? And there seemed to be a lot of different ways that people tried to manage projects and planning. I don’t know whether it took me hours or days, I don’t really remember but I sat down and said "Wait a minute, we are planning all the time. We planned this call, we plan when we get dressed, we plan what we eat, where we go, we are planning all of the time". The most brilliant planner in the universe is your mind. You couldn’t stop planning. If I asked you to stop planning you would plan how to do that! The mind is planning all of the time.

So I sat back and sort of unpacked it... "OK, how do we actually plan?" I discovered this little 5 phase model that the mind uses in order to go to dinner or do anything.

First of all it has some sort of intention or purpose. Like I’m hungry, I need to eat or sign a business deal over dinner or romance. There is some sort of intention that drives it, that's the first thing.

Then it creates a vision, it’s going to look like this, here is what dinner looks like. But then if you are not at dinner, your vision does not match your current reality then it creates the need to brainstorm, which is stage 3. Is it raining outside? Shall we invite people round for dinner? Where are we going to go? What time? Then whereas stage 1 was the why, stage 2 is the what, what it will look like. Then stage 3 is how but the how comes in part A and part B.

How part A is the brain storming meaning your mind just starts to pre-associate ideas that are potentially relevant and meaningful to this outcome. Then stage 4 your mind goes "OK, let me organize those things". So stage 4 is organizing that thinking into sequences or components or priorities in terms of the project.

Then stage 5 says "Let’s pick up the phone and see if we can get a reservation", is the action, "OK, now I take action based upon that".

So if you think about how you think that is how people are planning all the time. The problem is that is not the way a lot of people are approaching planning when they plan bigger things. Or they’re trying to explicitly plan, they usually sit down and say "Who has got a good idea?" or "How should we organize this?" and that is stage 4, that’s not stage 1.

The first question is "Why are we doing this software? What is the purpose of the software?" Stage 2 is "What would the wild success of the software allow somebody to be able to do?". Then stage 3 is "Let’s get every single potentially wild, crazy, good, bad idea on the planet about this and throw it at the wall". Then stage 4 says "OK, let’s find some of the components" then stage 5 "Hey, bill you’re going to handle that load of research". That’s nice if people would do that but mostly people tend not to pay attention to the why question or wild success question or even to the brainstorming question. They just try to get organized and get moving on things and often times that doesn’t work.

Joey Bushnell: David thank you so much for answering my questions today. If someone follows the Getting Things Done methodology as a business owner, what do you think the result for them will be?

David Allen: A clear head, space to think and optimal energy to be able to put your focus where it needs to be with absolutely minimal distraction.  It really allows people to flourish. It creates a condition that people flourish whether you are a musician, a CEO of a company, a baker or chef, it can help all of those people or a clergyman. It allows people to do what they love to do, what they want to do, what they find meaningful, to be able to really focus on that and to spend most of their time doing those things and get the world off their back.

Joey Bushnell: Brilliant. You’ve shared so much during this interview and talked about a lot of different things but I think for anyone to get the maximum benefit they need to go out and buy the book and read it.

David Allen:  Even if you have the book and have read it, you need to read it again! About the 5th time you read it, you’ll start to really catch it. Believe me, it’s a different book every time you read it, for anybody who has gone back and read it again. But yes, it is a manual it is easy to get into as you know it’s a fairly simple model and it’s quite specific instructions.

Joey Bushnell: So where can we go to get the book?

David Allen: Well in the UK, Little Brown is the publisher, so you can get that at any online book stores, amazon so forth, they should have all 3 of my books.

Getting Things Done is probably the most tactical kind of manual for it. The last book Making it all work is a little wider and deeper about the same topics and my second book was just a collection of essays, it’s kind of fun a little more of the "zen of Getting Things Done" in that one. Any way that’s the place to go.

Joey Bushnell: Great and where can we go to find out more about you David? Do you have a website where people can read about you and your story?

David Allen: It’s davidco.com, yeah a lot of cool stuff there.

Joey Bushnell: Great. David thank you so much for coming on the show.

David Allen: My pleasure Joey

Ted Nicholas is without question one of the worlds greatest copywriters & marketers. He has sold over $8 Billion worth of products and services during his illustrious career.He is the author of many copywriting and marketing books including Magic words that bring you riches, The Golden Mailbox: How to Get Rich Direct Marketing Your Product, How to turn words into money and How to Publish a Book & Sell a Million Copies just to name a few

He is quite simply the best of the best & in this exclusive interview he spills the beans on some of his most closely guarded money making secrets which will help you get more customers.

In this short interview Ted reveals…

* The “Hidden Benefit” technique Ted uses to write multimillion dollar headlines

* 1 powerful word which can make people willingly pay more money for your product (Clue: It begins with “D”)

* How to use transition phrases so your copy flows smoothly from one idea to the next

* A surprising method to test the readability of your copy

* 2 words you must never include on your order form or you will lose many would-be sales

* How to construct the perfect order form

* An easy tactic to make people hurry to buy your product right now

* How to use discounts & bonuses to push hesitant readers into action

* The 2 typefaces you should use in your marketing materials for maximum results

Dawn McGruer M IDM AIBA has over 10 years experience in Digital & Social Media Marketing and has built her company, Business Consort – The Premier Networking Forum which hosts over 100 corporate networking events & training courses a year across the UK up to a subscribership of 2 million – Check out Dawn’s recent interview about Social Media For Business Profits filmed by The Telegraph Business Club at www.businessconsort.com.

In addition, Dawn’s courses are all accredited by The Chartered Institute of Marketing plus she also trains ‘The Digital Marketing Diploma’. As well as hosting a variety of speaking engagements in the business world and is regularly sought for comment on social media news stories by the press.”

In this short interview Dawn reveals…

* Why you can compete with the big companies because of Social Media

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* 3 ninja tips for Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn

Richard Armstrong won the AWAI copywriter of the year award in 2012. He's been freelance copywriting for over 40 years so he knows a thing or two. In this interview Richard shares his copywriting and direct mail wisdom that he has gathered over the years.