Video Transcript
David: …the adviser, the teacher in that particular niche, the value-bringer.
Alex: Exactly. You know, my wife is actually a romance novelist, and she is actually not a native English speaker, so if you want to talk about a tough market to get into…
David: She writes English language romance novels.
Alex: She writes English language romance novels and her English, I mean it’s great but it’s not native, and so basically one of my jobs these days is polishing the manuscript, but she is writing it. She’s coming up with the plots. She’s doing the you know the characters, the story arcs, the the whole thing, and she’s doing all of the marketing, all of the business side of it, and she’s really good at that. So it’s been a very successful thing for her but it took her a long time to get up to speed on that. Actually the figure is eight years, okay, so I would not recommend for somebody who is just going to dabble to go for something that’s gonna take you eight years to crack because you’re gonna lose interest before that. My wife is uniquely headstrong and in that sense, but certainly it just goes to show that, you know, you can overcome pretty much anything if you really go and just say that you’re gonna do it and then figure out what you have to do.
David: Do you have any recommendations for people about how they can actually take action? Because this is the big… The big thing that stops people is that they don’t start!
Alex: Well, one of the things that we, one of the points in here, the key to the kingdom as I say is, you’ve got to get something done every day. You have to do one thing every day, and make sure, you know, make sure that you get that done, because as long as you’re generating forward progress, as long as you’ve got some forward momentum there, sooner or later it will happen for you. It’s not a question of “if.” It will happen, but if you stop then it’s never gonna happen. So, it seems obvious to say it, but it’s just unbelievable how many people don’t get it.
David: Yeah, well it’s easy to get distracted by everything else going on…
Alex: Yeah, there’s lot going on.
David: Yes, especially if it is – and it almost certainly is – a side-hustle; you got a main job, you’ve got your family, you’ve got your entertainment you know…
Alex: And you’re not gonna you’re not gonna set up a websiteand start making a thousand dollars a month in the next step, you know, it’s just not going to happen, so it’s not a quick fix. If you’re having money problems or something like that, I don’t recommend internet marketing.
But to sort of circle back a little bit to your question, in the fitness industry, you know, I’ve worked as a personal trainer, and the first, you know, people that say, “Oh, how do I get into shape?” Well, the first step is get into the gym.
David: Yeah!
Alex: That’s the first step, or start running, or enroll in a yoga class, or whatever it is that you feel like doing, whatever mode you want to take is fine, but you have to do it. And with something like internet marketing, I would say the first thing is, sit down and see if you have, you know, what you what you want to sell, see if you have a product idea. If you don’t have a product idea, see if you have something like we talked about, an affiliate marketing idea, so they can join something like what you’re doing, or they can join Amazon as an affiliate, and that’s easy,you know. If you say, “Oh well, I don’t know if I want to do it,” you’re fooling yourself, yeah, you’re not you’re not suited to this kind of thing, because it takes you about, I would say, ten minutes to go to Amazon, look down at the bottom of the page where it says “Affiliates Sign Up,” and sign up you know literally ten minutes out of your day. So if you’re not willing to do that, you know, just be honest with yourself and say, “Okay, this isn’t for me.”
David: Yeah, I think that is one thing – a lot of people are just half-hearted. They kind of keep dabbling. I had a guy sent me an email, one of my affiliates, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. I’d given him some advice – you can take the horse to water – I’d taken him to the water, and he was looking at it, and he sent me a marvelous email … The line was, “Dear David, I am planning to quit.” And I thought, well if you plan to quit you certainly will quit. Now, if you plan to succeed, it might work the other way. It may have taken a bit longer because quitting is very quick, but I just love that phrase: “I am planning to quit.”
Alex: Yeah, it’s funny how nobody plans to continue!
David: That’s right, yes!
Alex: So, get something done, you know, start out with your idea. Once you have your idea, get your product name. Once you have the product name, register a domain. Once you’ve done that, get some hosting, and then you know, just just keep going from there. That’s your first four steps right there.
David: Yeah, and you can do all that while you’re doing it. I have a video which there’s a link to in this book, which shows you how to set up your first WordPress blog in 90 seconds, and that includes domain name – I mean, maybe you should think about the domain name first…
Alex: Yes, you should put a little thought into that.
David: But you can get set up…
Alex: Which we also talked about here, how to kind of pick a good product name for your product…
David: Yes, but… so taking action every day is incredibly important, but the action should be significant, but it doesn’thave to be huge, does it?
Alex: Right, it should be something concrete that you have accomplished, so it could be registering a domain name. Thinking about a domain name doesn’t count.
David: Ah!
Alex: Thinking about it doesn’t count, but putting let’s say ten domain name possibilities down on a piece of paper and then going through and seeing you know, asking some of your friends, talking to your mother or talking to your wife, talking to your husband, you know, whatever it is, and then seeing what their response is and narrowing that down until you’ve got the one that actually resonates best with, you know, the normal people. That would a good one. And then the next day you can go out and register it. So thinking about something doesn’t really count. Taking concrete action on it does count, and in fact it will get you there because that’s a step, that’s a natural step. If you’re just thinking, you haven’t actually moved your legs; you know, you haven’t taken action, you haven’t placed your foot in new patch of ground.
David: And if you’re in the affiliate marketing field, or if you have a product already, then doing something every day – one thing you should do everyday is do something to promote that business of yours. If you have a webpage you’re promoting, if you’ve got a blog you want to promote, if you’ve got a product you’re promoting, you should do something every day.
So, yesterday what did I do to promote my business? I didn’t do much, but I went to I think it was five traffic exchanges, and on each one I click through and earned 50 credits which now means that people will see my affiliate pages or whatever it is I’m advertising. Actually, I’m advertising a squeeze page to my list, which leads towards one of the products I’m selling, so traffic is coming through.
Alex: Sure, yeah, that’s concrete, right. You’re gonna see something from that.
David: Yes, it was concrete. I was doing that while watching a YouTube video on another screen, so I was just clicking and watching. It was the end of the day. I wasn’t feeling particularly creative. The creative part of the day had gone by, so I was just clicking and watching a YouTube video. But those clicks I then applied to the site I wanted to promote in each case; that’s something I did yesterday.
Alex: Yes yeah, yeah. So it could be writing, you know one in my case when I was putting together you know my minimum was I was gonna write one paragraph per day.
David: Yes, so that’s a nice micro goal.
Alex: Right.
David: But you very often find when you start with that micro goal, you set the bar nice and low for the achievement, but the act of writing, you get warmed up, don’t you, so if that paragraph is say fifty words, by the end of that paragraph you find it’s really easy to get going. It’s starting that’s difficult.
Alex: Yeah, it’s almost never one paragraph,
David: Right, yeah.
Alex: So, you’d end up with you know or at least in my case, I’d end up with half a page, or a page, and so when you do that, like I said my first iteration of the book was about thirty pages, so you know it’s 30 days, or maybe 60 days if it’s half a page a day, so it’s two months, and then you’ve actually got the product. And that’s totally in my spare time. I did not quit my job. I didn’t take a vacation. I didn’t alter my life at all except that I was using a little bit of my free time to write this ebook and that was it.
David: However, I would recommend that people look at their time, how they’re spending their time, because there’s a lot of stuff that you could cut out of your life, and that comes back to whether you think it’s worthwhile or not running an Internet business.
Alex: Sure.
David: You have to ask yourself, “What is the value I’m putting on what I’m doing? Do I want to…” – you know I like watching football, soccer…