The Maverick Marketer Blog

Ever get a box full of really tasty brownies by Fed Ex?

Neither had I until yesterday. See, I did a teleclass on list building recently with Ellen Violette for her students and she sent me the brownies as a thank you.

Let me tell you about Ellen. I think you may relate to her story.

I first met her last year when she signed up for a list building teleclass I was doing that I offered to people who bought my friend Dr. Joe Vitale’s course. Ellen jumped on the opportunity and was an active contributor on the calls. She asked great questions and her writing background gave her some unique perspectives in our sessions.

At the time, she was researching exactly what to do for an online business. Things got crazy for me with the launch of my big list building course earlier this year and over the months I lost track of Ellen and what she was doing.

Well, it turns out she was very focused and diligent in those months because when I saw her at Big Seminar 6 in Los Angeles, she had it all figured out. She’s an ebook coach and teaches a fine course on how to start with nothing and create the perfect ebook for your market.

Her ebook coaching classes are in demand and her business is taking off (she’s got a course coming out early next year… stay tuned). I’ve agreed to do a call with Ellen next year, so you’ll be hearing more her then.

For now, I’m sitting here eating a caramel brownie from Fairytale Brownies (at www.brownies.com is that a cool domain or what?) and I’ve got to say, Ellen is a great example of someone who is doing things the right way.

She focused on one thing that she is great at (writing), identified an opportunity in the marketplace (that people struggle to write ebooks and yet ebooks are essential to your online business), and then she got out there and networked into getting more content for her course (my call, among others). Now she’s in a great position to get success stories from her students and then go back to folks like me for a Joint Venture to launch her book when it comes out.

Isn’t that what YOU want to? To find your ‘killer product’ and then JV the heck out of it? Then keep reading, because it’s no accident that Ellen is in that position. It’s because she did one thing above all else.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

This past weekend when I was at Robert Puddy and Richard Taylor’s Focus4thefuture seminar I realized what the missing ingredient is for most people trying to make money online who are struggling.

Focus.

In addition to all the solid content that my fellow speakers Mike Filsaime, Gary Ambrose, and Joel Comm (I’ll be telling you more about each of them soon), the lesson I took away above all else was that you have to focus on one thing in your business…

…what YOU are good at and outsource or partner up to do the rest. That’s what Robert, Mike, Gary, Joel, and now I, do.

That’s what Ellen did, too.

She took her passion for writing, found an opportunity for her in the market and she’s put together a program that is very popular by adding experts like me and others to her course to teach the stuff she isn’t an expert on.

Can you imagine how long it would have taken her to learn copywriting, list building, traffic generation, and graphics and website programming, etc? She’d still be learning instead of making money right now.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying ’stop learning’.

Far from it.

I buy ebooks, courses, subscribe to content sites, and listen to speakers’ presentations because I am CONSTANTLY learning. But don’t get sucked into the illusion that YOU personally have to master all of the information you are learning.

You just want to feed your ‘infopreneuer’ brain so you can spot opportunities for profit.

At the last three events I’ve gone to what I heard almost EVERYONE say is that they are too busy to take advantage of opportunities in their business because they are too busy wrestling with things they don’t like to do or aren’t good at.

That’s money they are leaving on the table… and I’ve been just as guilty of this as the next person (maybe more so).

As the business owner, YOU feed your brain info about what the opportunities are and the best resources for taking advantage of those opportunties, and then let others carry out the tasks.

Fact is, if you try to do everything yourself, you’re going to do yourself in.

You’ll never make any real money and it will take forever to reach your goals.

The first step is to identify what you are good at, like Ellen did. She’s a writer.

The next step is to see what else you need to do in your business that you are NOT good at or that you can do but that doesn’t make YOU any money.

For example, if you can program websites, but you make money selling ebooks, stop messing around with your websites and focus on selling more ebooks.

Why do you think I buy information? I’m buying the expertise of others. That’s leverage… to buy all that time and effort they put in to become experts at a discount. I’m trading my money for their time.

Time is irreplaceable. You can always get more money.

As an infopreneur, you are selling time at a discount… people will be able to shorten their ‘learning curve’ and get results faster than if they had to learn it all by themselves.

Here’s the simple truth about the info marketing business:

You have to specialize in something so that people are willing to trade their money for your expertise.

So, I suggest you identify the ONE thing that pays the most in your business and restrict yourself to doing that. Become even more specialized in that one thing so that your knowledge is so valuable that you can charge a premium for your time and expertise.

Get yourself a virtual assistant to handle your customer service. Use a company like www.workaholics4hire.com to handle almost every aspect of your projects. Let them be your team.

I know, when you are just starting out you don’t necessarily have the money to ‘outsource’.

But you may not have the money to ‘learn the hard way by doing it yourself’ either.

If you do have to run every aspect of your business, only do it for the short term. Set a deadline to start to leverage your profits by hiring out as you make more money so that at least eventually you break free of working in your business.

Once you have your team, you literally can think of an idea for profit, get your team to research it, put it together in a product, and then you simply focus on marketing your new product through JV’s and other channels to market.

If you do that, then like Ellen did, you can find the right opportunities for you and take advantage of them.

Then, you can literally turn digital information into dollars and make your time worth more per hour than most professionals who have years and years of schooling.

And I’m thankful today that we live in an age where you can transform your life, the life of your family and friends, just by following in the footsteps of others who share their knowledge and pave the way. My life is living proof, as is Ellen’s, as are most of the ‘big names’ you know.

If you are having success in your business right now, you know what I mean. If you are just starting out or struggling, then look to narrow the focus of what you are doing to what you do best and push the rest off to other people who specialize in things that block you from moving forward.

If you find this helpful, go ahead and leave a comment. If there is a lot of interest in this, I’ll do another post on specific resources for outsourcing.

In the mean time, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and I’m going to shut off the computer and get back to my brownies.

Ok, I’ll share some with my family, too.

Craig

P.S. I’ve got some interesting things coming up next week, so stay tuned!

Have you ever wanted to just freeze everything, all the busy people, all the noise and all the distraction, just so everyone would hear what you have to say?

That’s how I feel right now.

So I’m saying ‘freeze’ because I just got an email from a very nice lady who is completely stuck in her Internet business and is in fact sinking fast. She’s spent thousands on her ‘marketing library’ and her confession to me is that she is no closer to making money now than she was when she started. And her husband is threatening to leave her if she doesn’t stop screwing around with her ‘online business fantasies’.

She’s got a couple ebooks that aren’t selling. She’s trying to make Adsense work but her checks from Google aren’t enough to brag about. And she’s got literally 14 different money making projects that she is working on.

She’s a lot like me… years ago, when I was trying to make something (anything) pay off.

I was about 18, fresh out of high school and I had my hand in every money making scheme I came across. I was an Amway distributor, bought my first suit, went to meetings, and all that. I sponsored like 18 people including friends, co workers, and I event tried to sponsor my mom.

I had a 900 number program I ‘invested’ in selling I don’t even remember what anymore. And the list goes on and on from one mail order or mlm or business idea after another. And here’s the cold hard truth. I didn’t succeed for another 5 years until I cleared my plate of all the crap that wasn’t working and focused on one thing: commodities trading.

I know, talk about a Risky Business.

But I had a knack for it and started making really good money in Gold Futures among other things. Eventually, I got into currency trading (not Forex, but Futures) and then by 1994 I was heavy into day trading the stock market indexes (SP500 futures).

Go figure, but it was working for me.

Then, through a series of unlikely events, I started selling a product about trading with all the direct marketing knowledge I had picked up. After all, I had been reading folks like Gary Halbert, Robert Collier, Dan Kennedy, and Jeff Paul for years at that point. Heck, I bought some of my best direct marketing books from Carl Galletti back in 1990 or so (you should have seen his face in Phoenix when I told him that story — we had a good laugh).

But I digress. Back to my story.

What happened next literally changed my life.

I wrote a 10 page salesletter all about my trading product with 15 pages of charts and other supporting proof and had to make a decision. Do I place an ad in a magazine and send them this 25 page package or do I chicken out and avoid failing yet again?

From my point of view I had written 16 drafts of this damn letter and it was pretty good, but I wasn’t sure.

And that’s when I did the first truly smart thing I had ever done in my marketing career (such as it was). I asked for help.

When I bought Jeff Paul’s ‘Make Money at Home in Your Underwear’ course it came with a couple copywriting critiques. Being a die hard ‘do it yourselfer’ I had never actaully spoken to a successful marketer at that point. I had attended NONE of the expensive seminars Gary Halbert and others were putting on back then (if I had, I would have met my friend David Garfinkel about a decade earlier because he was there, but that’s another story).

I don’t remember what my reason was (aside from the fact that I really didn’t want to spend $3,500 to $7,000 for a weekend seminar and thought anyone who did had more money than brains).

I think it was ego. I wanted to say "I did it myself."

What an idiotic idea that turned out to be.

Because here’s what happened. I got the critique of my salesletter from one of Jeff Paul’s guys and he essentially said, "Craig, this letter is pretty darn good. Make the few changes we talked about and give it a shot."

I did and in the next 90 days I pulled in over $100,000 in sales of my trading home study course.

After failing like clockwork for over 5 years and going thousands upon thousands of dollars in debt, I had hit a home run.

All because I got the encouragement to take action on all the knowledge I had learned from a real, live human being.

I really hope you have NO idea what it’s like to fail for the first 5 years of your adult life, fresh out of high school, through college, and build up the self image of a ‘dreamer’ who would never really make it but was too desperate to quit. It gives you a hollow feeling inside and you start to think you are wasting away as your dreams slip through your fingers while only being a couple inches out of reach.

But I hope with all my heart that you experience a home run in your business, or even a good solid run to first base.

When it happens, it will change you forever.

If you haven’t had that success yet, it’s probably because you have your hands in too many projects and don’t know what to focus on (which is understandable… that’s how it goes for just about everyone).

I’d like to say that I learned my lesson and life was all peaches and cream after that first success. Sure, I had a six year run with that business and they were mostly very good years.

Unfortunately, I thought my ‘breakthrough’ was that I finally finding the right market and product to sell and that I was a genius after all and I could do it all by myself.

Wrong.

Eventually, I had to face the fact that I could not do it all and again went through some tough times, closing that business forever. All the while, I knew more about marketing than many folks who were peddling home study courses at the time, but I had no idea exactly what I should focus on next.

I was completely overwhelmed with information and paralyzed into doing nothing about it.

As it happened, with a family to support and ‘gun to my head’ pressure I prevailed. I applied my experience and generated millions in sales for a few start up companies and select clients, putting my independent business ideas on hold for a few years.

I wasn’t my own boss again until 2001 when a start up company I worked for went ‘dot bomb’ and I went from six figures to zero in two weeks. That is when I got back into working my own business again.

By 2002 I started to focus all my energy on building a list for my home business and I began publishing a newsletter. Things were getting exciting…

But it wasn’t until I teamed up with a couple really successful Internet marketers that things broke out to the next level (over $282,000 in ten months) in 2003. That’s when everything finally clicked. I built some huge lists for myself, cutomers and clients, and started speaking about how to do what I had done.

Now, almost 3 years later, I’m friends with just about every top marketer, I speak at selected seminars and workshops, and I’m a contributing author to a #1 Best Seller with my own book in the works.

My wife and I just built our dream house outside Austin Texas that makes me feel in awe every morning when I wake up and grateful every night when I go to bed. My wife Aimee and my three boys are what all this entrepreneurial journey has been all about, and the house is where it all comes together.

And now I know what made the differenence, and it wasn’t that I became a genius, either.

Sure, I have ‘paid my dues’ and I do know my stuff after keeping at it for over 21 years. But I’ve made more money, made more friends, and had more fun in the last 3 years than the previous two decades combined.

The difference? Relationships. I got out there. I met people. I learned from them and developed new streams of income by partnering with other people.

I think every entrepreneur believes they have to go it alone when they start out. The dream is to be a ’self made millionaire’ and all that.

But the ’self made’ and ‘millionaire’ don’t really go together. All you really need to do is get specialized knowledge about something and team up with other people to fill in whatever skills or resources you don’t have.

Somebody else out there knows what you need to learn and has already solved the same problems that are driving you nuts.

That’s why I love telling you about the people, products and services that I discover along my journey to becoming a better marketer and entrepreneur. I now make money as an affiliate and joint venture partner with people who have in many cases become the best of friends.

It’s a great life. Last night I was at dinner here in Charlotte, North Carolina with Mike Filsaime, his father, and his cousin. Mike and I are speaking at the ‘Focus 4 The Future’ workshop I told you about a couple weeks ago and he and his father flew in yesterday.

Anyway, Mike and I were explaining what we do to his cousin, Claude, who lives here in the Charlotte area.

When we told him how much money you can make just by building a list of targeted subscribers his face lit up. Once again, it hit me how different my life is now from what most Americans (or anyone around the world) experience.

And you know what? I did it the slow way. Today, with the networking, the Internet, and all the amazing tools and information out there, I can easily see how someone could go from scratch to six figures in less than a year.

Back to where I started this rant. The nice lady that I was telling you about asked me what the ONE thing is that I thought would be the best place for her to focus her energy if I had to pick just one. She’s got thousands of dollars of debt and a husband who’s had it with supporting her dream. She wanted to know if she should take a job offer she had or keep at her dream.

No pressure, right?

I told her to take the job offer and solve their immediate financial crisis and restore her husband’s faith in her. But I also told her not to give up on her dream, just to give doing the same things that weren’t working.

She needed something affordable that she could use to leverage her efforts and make money while she supported herself with her day job.

That’s not an easy question because everyone is different and unique knowledge and skills.

But there is only ONE thing I know of right now where you can take content (either your own ebook or public domain or articles) and turn that into passive income that you can build at your own pace. And that is a new tool that my dear friends Michel Fortin and Sylvie Charrier just released that I told you about the other day.

Why did I pick that one thing above all else?

Because they have found a way to make money even from ‘dud’ ebooks and content that otherwise won’t sell.

Think about that for a minute and I believe you’ll see what that is so powerful.

From my perspective, there are two main reasons why:

1) Most beginner marketers come up with ebooks and ideas that don’t sell.

2) People surfing the net for information want to get it free and beginners struggle to get them to buy.

Once you understand how brilliantly Michel and Sylvie have overcome those two challenges you’ll see that whether you are a beginner or advanced what they’ve created is simply an unbelievable leap forward toward making money online (and potentially a lot of money).

Of course, I want you to build a list and all the other things I tell you are important.

But if you want my single recommendation for something that you can focus on that will help you turn your efforts into income, I believe this comes darn close to perfection.

I hope you forgive the length of this rant.

I just felt that between telling you about Michel and Sylvies new program and hearing that nice lady’s tough situation, I had to really focus on WHY I made my recommendation for their new program the other day.

It’s not just some ‘next hot thing’ to tell you about. I solves some tough problems infopreneurs have and opens up new doorways to profit that I believe even beginners (especially beginners) can really use.

And like I said in my last post, if you get Michel and Sylvie’s product through the link below and reply to any of my emails with the receipt, I will sign you up for a private training where I’ll reveal how to use what they created to make the easiest list profits I’ve ever seen (and build a list, too, if you don’t have one).

So go here to check out the video and screen shots of what Michel and Sylvie have put together for you. It’s different than anything else I’ve seen in over 21 years of research and it’s perfect if you’ve been looking for one thing to focus on to generate steady income online.

See for yourself.

Do it now because they have a 72 hour deadline from their launch for some powerful bonuses that expire today.

Here’s to leveraging your business with the brilliance and experience of others and making success easy

- Craig

P.S. I hope to report more from this workshop here in Charlotte, North Carolina so stay tuned. Plus, I’ve still got more to share from Big Seminar (including pics…).

And, I’ve got a ‘back story’ that only a few people know and a twist that I’ve never shared before today.

(If you are in a hurry, just click here)

You may have heard about the famous ‘on stage’ in September when Michel Fortin proposed to Sylvie Charrier, right near the end of their presentation.

It was a movie moment.

Michel proposed on one knee and everything right in front of 150 people, on camera. When she said yes the crowd launched to their feet in a standing ovation.

As I was clapping and hollering I couldn’t see straight because my eyes had watered up after Michel announced that I was to be his best man at the wedding.

I know, I’m a sap. Heck, I KNEW I was the best man already, but in the moment I couldn’t help it.

I’m telling you, it was just like the movies.

You probably know Michel as one of the most successful copywriters online today because of the fame he earned by writing several mega hit salesletters, including one for John Reese’s Traffic Secrets, which sold over a
million dollars in 18 hours.

He’s no one hit wonder, either.

I could name drop a ‘who’s who’ of top marketers who have cranked out home run after home run with Michel’s sales copy.

Sylvie runs what I call ‘outsource heaven’ for again, all the top marketers it seems, handling just about any function you can imagine for an infopreneur. She’s brilliant and I’m one of her newest customers

Watch these two. On their own they are incredible, but now that they’v combined ‘minds’ it’s literally breathtaking to listen to them crank out million dollar ideas at a mile a minute.

For example, what’s going to blow your mind today is the ‘accidental discovery’ these two made that ‘marries’ two different ways to make money online that I predict will forever change how you market your business.

When they revealed this in September at the event in Phoenix several people rushed up and literally threw their credit cards on stage. It was that exciting.

(Find out why here)

It’s an even bigger deal than anyone realizes when you combine what Michel and Sylvie have with my list marketing tactics.

Most people don’t make a dime with their lists and work too hard for what they do make. What Michel and Sylvie have created changes all that and I bet people who otherwise wouldn’t have a prayer of making money with their list can now.

That’s all I’m going to say right now. Until today I’ve only discussed this with Michel and Sylvie and I’ve agreed to share what I’ve discovered with their customers. Because what I’m doing involves their proprietary breakthrough I can only train you if you are one of their customers.

Once you have the tool, I’m going to train you on an exclusive teleclass how to use their amazing new tool to pull profits out of a list quicker and easier than I’ve ever seen before.

Even if you have a cold, unresponsive list.

So… go check out the whole story of what Michel and Sylvie have just released and if you take advantage of their offer, immediately forward me the receipt to craig@maverickmarketer.com

This is the cutting edge. It’s a paradigm shift in how you monetize a list and I’m going to be working with Michel and Sylvie on sharing this with their customers.

If you match up what they’re launching today with the training I give you, I bet you’ll lose some sleep when you see the full implications of what you’ve got here.

Click here to find out what this is all about and get in early on what I believe will be the easiest, no brainer way for you to turn the power of the Internet into income in 2006 and beyond.

Trust me, if you are secretly hoping for passive income, I’ve never seen anything like this before. Yes, I’m a customer of theirs too and this is a major part of my plans for next year.

- Craig