internet marketing success secrets with mike from maine ... · internet marketing success secrets...

Internet Marketing Success Secrets

with

Mike From Maine & Saul Maraney

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! ©"Saul"Maraney"–"All"Rights"Reserved""

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The Legal Stuff:

EVERY EFFORT HAS BEEN MADE TO ACCURATELY REPRESENT THIS PRODUCT/SERVICE AND IT'S POTENTIAL. IN TERMS OF EARNINGS, THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL EARN ANY MONEY USING THE TECHNIQUES AND IDEAS IN THIS MATERIAL OR ON THIS WEBSITE. INFORMATION PRESENTED ON THIS WEBSITE IS NOT TO BE INTERPRETED AS A PROMISE OR GUARANTEE OF EARNINGS. EARNING POTENTIAL IS ENTIRELY DEPENDENT ON THE PERSON USING OUR PRODUCT, IDEAS AND TECHNIQUES.

ANY CLAIMS MADE OF ACTUAL EARNINGS OR EXAMPLES OF ACTUAL RESULTS CAN BE VERIFIED UPON REQUEST. YOUR LEVEL OF SUCCESS IN ATTAINING THE RESULTS CLAIMED IN OUR MATERIALS DEPENDS ON THE TIME YOU DEVOTE TO THE PROGRAM, IDEAS AND TECHNIQUES MENTIONED, YOUR FINANCES, KNOWLEDGE AND VARIOUS SKILLS. SINCE THESE FACTORS DIFFER ACCORDING TO INDIVIDUALS, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SUCCESS OR INCOME LEVEL.

ANY AND ALL FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS HERE OR ON ANY OF OUR SALES MATERIAL ARE INTENDED TO EXPRESS OUR OPINION OF EARNINGS POTENTIAL. MANY FACTORS WILL BE IMPORTANT IN DETERMINING YOUR ACTUAL RESULTS AND NO GUARANTEES ARE MADE THAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE RESULTS SIMILAR TO OURS OR ANYONE ELSES. NO GUARANTEES ARE MADE THAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE ANY RESULTS FROM OUR IDEAS AND TECHNIQUES IN OUR MATERIAL.

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Introduction:

Hi, and let me first start off by thanking and congratulating you for purchasing Internet Marketing Success Secrets with Mike From Maine & Saul Maraney. You have made an excellent choice. I certainly believe that once you have studied this material, you will be in a much better position to make a success of your Internet Marketing career. I want you to know that you can contact me at any time if you are having trouble in your online business. I want to give you 3 different ways in which you can contact me. 1. By email: [email protected] 2. In The Facebook Group I created: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Marketing-With-Saul/708512565864531 3. On Skype: saul.maraney The only thing I ask is that you be direct. Time is the most valuable commodity that we have and the quicker and more direct question you ask, the faster more concise answer I will give you. I wish you all the best of luck and I look forward to helping you build a successful Internet Marketing business. Take action and succeed! To Your Internet Marketing Success,

Saul Maraney Johannesburg, South Africa

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Firstly, A Little Background Of Who I Am:

My name is Saul Maraney and I am from Johannesburg, South Africa. I have been involved in Internet Marketing since 2007, predominantly in the hypnosis niche. I have created 9 hypnosis products, which combined, have sold over 8000 copies to people in over 32 countries. My success has been based on the relationships I have developed, sheer hard work and getting to know what my subscribers most want to purchase. From day one of building my list, I continuously surveyed my customers, hung out at in the same forums in which they were spending time and attended the same conferences as they were attending. Since the launch of my first hypnosis product I have constantly been on the look out for tools and strategies to grow my business and take it to the next level. Like every naive newbie, over that time I joined a ton of people’s lists and started purchasing a lot of different products on Clickbank, The Warrior Forum and JVZoo. Some worked, and others really didn’t, and I wasted a lot of time and money. At this point of my online career, I feel grateful that I have been through that experience and I have vowed not to repeat that again.

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My turning point came in the form of two powerful experiences. 1. I joined a coaching program and got focused: If you look at any top athlete or businessperson around the world you will notice that they all have coaches. And in Internet Marketing, this is a vital component to anyone’s success too. My coach and the members of my coaching team have showed me how to get out of a buyer’s mainframe and into a seller’s one. – This shift has made a massive difference to everything that I do now. With a lack of focus, it is impossible to succeed in this game. 2. I became very, very, very selective about any further product that I

would purchase and started implementing the ones I already had: What a relief I felt when I started to actually implement what I had already purchased and started to finally see results. Now let me ask you: “Are you committed to taking action on what I am about to teach you?” Great! So let’s get started!

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SAUL MARANEY: Hello, everyone. This is Saul Maraney from

Johannesburg South Africa and today I'm very honoured and happy to be

speaking to Mike Thomas, also known as Mike from Maine. Mike has a daily

show on the internet at his blog, www.mikefrommaine.com, where he interviews

successful online entrepreneurs and I've been following Mike for a long time and

really, Mike, thank you for this wonderful opportunity to speak to you and I really

do appreciate the privilege of your time.

MIKE FROM MAINE: You're very welcome. I'm happy to be here.

Hopefully I'll be able to share some insider tips and tricks that can help the

audience.

SAUL MARANEY: Thanks, Mike, and I appreciate that. And I was

reading a little bit about your background on your website and you’ve had quite

a journey. And going even a step before that, I seems that you were interested

in travelling and the Internet was able to allow you to do that. But even before

that, what did you like originally think that your career would be when you were

younger?

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, it's kind of funny. I originally grew up in

in a very small town in Maine and I went to college at James Madison University

in Virginia. And while I was there, I was trying to figure out what am I going to

study? Like what am I going to do with my life? I loved books, I still love books,

(literature) and I also had an interest in learning Spanish because I wanted to

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travel to Spain and I started getting the travel books. So I figured okay, these

are the things I'm interested in, why not major in English literature and also

Spanish language. So I picked those things, I really didn't have any idea what I

wanted to do with them after I graduated. – It's kind of like when people tell you

to pick a niche. They're like: “Pick a passion niche. Pick something you're

passionate about.” So I picked something I was passionate about and I studied

that. Well, after I graduated I ended up going to Prague to teach English with

my girlfriend at the time and I taught English there for almost a year. During that

time I started thinking about money. – I grew up in a middle class household.

We weren’t rich but weren’t poor and we always had enough money, but I

started realising as I was on my own, that money was a little bit more important

than I had thought it was. I was living on a teacher's salary and it was hard to

get by. I hated and dreaded the times that I had to send my dad an email or

write him a message and say: “Hey, can you send me over 500 bucks. I need a

little bit of help here.” So I ended up doing that for about 8 months, almost a

year. I went back home to Maine in around 2004 and when I got back, my

brother, who's about 4 years older than me (he didn't graduate from college. He

went to college but he dropped out) was making between 100 to $300 000 a

year selling magazines as an affiliate. He was advertising on Yahoo ads and

those ads were just linking directly to an affiliate program for when someone

would type in “Time Magazine.” and his ad would come up. Someone would

click on it. When they bought the magazine, he'd get the commission, and he

was making a lot of money. And this was at the time when paid advertising like

that was fairly new. The rules were different. The stuff he was doing then, I

don’t think it will work the same as it would now. But I saw him doing that and I

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started thinking: “Wow, he's making a lot of money.” He had just bought a big

house that was impressive. He was just living a comfortable lifestyle. And I

started thinking to myself: “Okay, this is real.” And you see all these stories

online with these network-marketing scams and these people throwing these

huge numbers about they're making money and always have that little bit of

doubt in your mind. Like: “Okay, are they really doing it or do they know

something that I don’t know? Are they not revealing some little secret that is the

real reason why they're making money?” And I think when it was a real family

member of mine and a brother of mine who is doing it, it was like: “Okay this

obviously works. I've seen this with my eyes and I know that this actually works.”

So, from that point on I started asking my brother: “Okay, like how can I get into

this? How can I do this?” And he gave me this book. I remember it was HTML

For Dummies, and I looked at it, and I studied English literature and Spanish.

Like computer language to me, HTML, it might as well have been Chinese to

me. I had no idea. But I sat down and I started learning it. I put together my first

website which was called freetrialofferguide.com. Like the longest domain

name you could think of. At the time I had seen some offers like freeipod.com.

So I had seen people do and I had also actually done it. If you had gone out

and got friends to sign up for an affiliate offer underneath your link, you would

get credit towards getting a free iPod. So it's pretty much instead of getting the

cash, you were going to get the iPod instead. So I did that and I started

thinking: “Okay, well there's all these different offers popping up now.” - There

were free headphones, free software and verything that you could think of. All of

these different kind of incentive programs started coming up. So I made my

website. I was doing reviews on these different products. So it was kind of like

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a review site and I put some ad sense on there and started making money from

ad sense and I started making money from some affiliate links that I had there.

And I think that website started making me 10 to $20 a day.

So again, I had seen the proof of concept, the proof that this actually

worked with my brother and now I was actually seeing real money coming into

my bank account. So at this time I had moved down to Washington DC. I was

working, doing marketing for Georgetown University and you might wonder how

I was doing marketing? Well, while I was at James Madison University, when I

was in college doing my undergraduate, I had worked at a call centre for the

school where the students would call the alumni to ask them for donations for

the university. So that was kind of my first taste. We'd be in this call centre, I'd

have my headset and my computer in front of me and the autodialer going and I

would call up and I had have to build rapport with the person that I was talking

with. You would’nt just say: “Hi, my name is Mike. I'm calling from James

Madison University, would you like to give money?” You would say: “Hey, like,

when's the last time you came back to the school?” And you'd build that

friendship with them. And if you were good at that, if you were good at doing that

little bit of small talk with them and getting them kind of reminiscing about the

school, they would end up giving $500, $1000, $50, $100 donation. Well I was

really good at getting them to donate the minimum amount, which was $25.

They would say: “No, no, no,” and then I would break them down and be like:

“Okay, look. The most important thing here for us to get support from other

areas, from other foundations, blah, blah, blah, is if you can just give a minimum

donation of $25.” And I would say 80% of the time, like every night, I would win

an award as the participation guy. I would be able to get people to at least

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participate in that. So if you translate that into marketing it's like at least you're

getting some kind of commitment and you're getting that one time commitment

from them. I'm sure that just by getting them to donate $25 that one time, that in

the future, because they had that history of giving and they started that, just that

consistency principle because they’ve already given one time they would give

more. So next time they would give $50 and next time give $100. It just kind of

gets them into that eco system.

SAUL MARANEY: Sure.

MIKE FROM MAINE: And got them much more likely to give later

on.

SAUL MARANEY: It's almost like having them onto a buyers list –

MIKE FROM MAINE: Exactly.

SAUL MARANEY: And they would get exposed to your funnel and

your marketing, etcetera.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, they're on the buyers list. You know that

they are already committed to giving, so they're probably more likely to give later

on in the future. So anyways, I was working at Georgetown University.

I was working there, doing marketing for them, helping out with their

campaigns for fundraising and little by little at home I started to keep delving into

Internet Marketing stuff. I built another website called dcguide.com, which was

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a website that was going to be a guide for Washington DC. And I bought a

special camera and I was going to do virtual tours. I did a little bit, it was a lot

harder than I thought it would be. But when I started making real money, was

when I started buying traffic from Google Adwords and sending it directly to

affiliate offers like an email submit and zip submits. So when someone puts in

their email address or their zip code, I would get between $1.40 to $1.60 per

email. So I was spending maybe 10 to 20 cents per click and making back. –I

was horrible with numbers. It's funny. If I was doing it now I would be going in

there an I'd be tweaking things and split testing and blah, blah, blah. I don’t know

what my numbers were, but all I know is that from doing that and a few other

things, I was making around $300 per day in profit, from doing this. So

eventually I saved up some money in my bank account. I think by the time I quit

working at Georgetown, I probably had about $50 000 in my bank account and

kept working, kept working. And then this whole travel thing came in 2008.

About a year before I broken up with a girlfriend and I got really depressed. I

gained a bunch of weight. I wasn’t happy with my life. So I said: “Okay, I can

make money anywhere in the world, why am I here? Why am I in this city where

I'm unhappy? I could be just travelling and doing my thing.” So I packed up

everything I owned, put in storage, moved out of my $2 000 a month rental

home that I was living in. I mean, 2 000 bucks a month, I can't even imagine

paying that now. So I moved out of there and travelled to India. I was in India

for 3 months. Then I travelled to Turkey. I was going to go Eastern Europe and

then South America, but I ended up staying in Turkey and working pretty much

for free at a bar in southern Turkey on the Mediterranean coast. There was this

alternative alternative hostel. And it was tree houses that people were staying in

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and there were nightclubs and bars, and I was working as a bartender pretty

much in exchange for free beer and free food and room. So it was fun. Lots of

pretty girls. Lots of fun nights. I did that for a couple of summers. Stayed in

Turkey throughout that whole time. Moved up to Istanbul during the winters and

here's the thing that happened though, and this is back to business. While I was

doing this, like when I first got there in 2008, I was probably doing between $100

to $200 a day on autopilot. All I would do was just go in and check my accounts

and make sure everything was going fine. Then things started slowing down.

For example, an affiliate program that I was promoting would shut down, or the

advertising method that I was using (I was using Ad Words and Yahoo) a rule

would change. Ad Words went through a lot of changes during that time. They

stopped allowing a lot of the stuff that I was doing. They stopped allowing these

direct linking to affiliate products. They started putting quality scores on things,

which made it a lot harder to buy cheap clicks. Clicks went up from 20 cents a

click to $10 a click overnight and there's no way I could make money from that.

So slowly, slowly my funds started to dry out. I went down to $100 a day, to

$50, to $30, to $20, to nothing.

And that all happened through about a year's time. And I remember back

in 2010, I was sitting on my couch in Istanbul as I stayed in Turkey, and I was

thinking to myself: “Okay, like I've been out of this game for quite a while now.

How am I going to get back in? How am I going to figure out what's going on

again?” I started going into the Warrior Forum and everyone that's been in there

knows what a scary place that can be. You never know what's real, what's not.

There's great people in there and there's horrible people in there as well. We all

know it. And I was going through there. I bought a course about auto-blogging,

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and this was by a guy named Michael Johnson, and it was just teaching you

how you could go and create these blogs that we would pull content from other

places online and make money from them. So through that course I ended up

learning how to create some sites that were niche specific. I think the first one I

did was escortedbustours.org, and the whole escorted thing ended up being it

was in England and I didn't realise it. And I thought the search term that I had

picked was an exact match match. Searches were like 1 400 a month and the

actual exact match was like 44 a month or something. So I picked like the

wrong type of keyword to go for. I ended up ranking it on the first page of

Google and only a little bit of traffic came in and I made a few clicks and a little

bit of money from Ad Sense from it. But yeah, that was kind of my introduction

back into things.

Then I started making Ad Sense niche sites. So I started making

websites and I was just targeting one little term that was getting between 1 000

and 3 000 searches per month, ranking for that term with an exact match

domain and I ended up building, long story short on that, about 750 of those.

And in my income reports, which I document everything that I make on my

website (I got hacked at one time, but I've got active records since October

2011) you can see how I was investing things back into my business and

building up my income. I did that until September 2012 when Google came and

they did a major update and almost all my websites were pretty much slapped

overnight. And I went from doing my best month of 2012 which was around

$13 000 in profit from Ad Sense and from selling these websites to all that

income being gone. And then, I started the Mike from Maine Show. So right

before I got hit, I figured: “Okay I need to diversify my income a little bit.” I'd

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been wanting to start either a podcast or to do something with video and I took a

course by David Siteman Garland called: Create Awesome Interviews. It was

a $500 course that I had seen on a website called: Think Traffic, which is by

Corbett Barr who is a pretty famous guy in the space. And I ended up buying

that course, learning how to do interviews and I started doing daily interviews

and I was doing interviews with people that were releasing products. So the

idea was: “Okay, let's interview them a little bit about their story. Interview them

and try to get some value from them. Get some valuable tips. Also talk about

their product, so that if people wanted to learn more about what you're doing and

how they're doing it, that they can make an educated decision to buy that

product.” What I didn't want was to have them come on my show and say: This

is the best thing ever in the world. Everyone should buy this.” That's not what I

wanted. I wanted it to be really picky about who I had on my show, so that if I

did have them on my show, that it would be like almost like: “Okay, I'm saying

this person is good enough to have, and his product is going to be good enough

that they can be on my show. But at the same time, you don’t need to watch the

interview and then buy every single product that I interview someone about.”

So I started doing that. In the beginning I had some really big people on.

I had Pat Flynn who a lot of people know from smartpassiveincome.com,

Chris Brogan, Derek Halpern and tons and tons of different people.

Shoemoney and John Chow and lot of these big people. Butt here's the thing: I

enjoyed much more when I was doing interviews with smaller people and people

that are just getting started or either on the same level as me or maybe a little

above or a little below. Because when people get to these huge levels of

.making millions of dollars a year, it's hard I think for them to come back and

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remember what it's like to start at the beginning. And for me, it's much more

interesting to find someone that's found like a little method of getting traffic from

a secret source and they're making an extra $200 a day. That's more interesting

to me thanel. I mean that stuff it's a little too advanced for the common person.

So anyways, I started doing this. If you look at my income reports I was doing

like $500 a month, $1 000 a month, $1 500 a month, $2 000. And just in this last

year, I had my best month. I haven’t published my income report yet, but I did

$17 000 in profit in August and I'll put that income report out on Saturday. But,

yeah, it's my best month ever, $17 000 pure profit back into my bank account.

For me that's a big number. I just started breaking the $10 000 mark in 2014.

So yeah, it's been a long journey. I'm sure you’ve got questions for me, but

that's my story as a whole and, yeah, it's been a wild ride, ups and downs all the

way.

SAUL MARANEY: Well that’s an amazing story and thank you for

sharing it with me. And, yeah, as I say I've been watching your show for a long

time and to hear that, it's refreshing and I think the one point that you said and

why I resonated with you is that you remember what it was like to be where the

newbies are, and I think people forget quite quickly when they’ve made it of what

it was like and our memories are quite short. And people can relate to you. And

you’ve been through all those ups and downs and you never gave up and it's

quite incredible. I've seen statistics that such a huge percentage of people don’t

make it online and do you think that is because of the initial failure or the dream

that they sold with the shiny object and then they try it and it doesn’t work and

then they just throw in the towel?

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MIKE FROM MAINE: For me, since I've gone up and down so many

times, I'm always sceptical of things working forever. Like right now what I'm

doing, I know that something could change tomorrow. In affiliate marketing,

maybe a rule changes and we can't doing something anymore. Maybe PayPal

decides they don’t want affiliate marketers anymore. For me, I know that it can

change any time. One of the things that I did that helped me with my success

and helped me to get through those failures (and you mentioned most people

give up) is that after I had my first big success and I quit my my real job at

Georgetown University, I had money in my bank account. So I knew that I had

that cushion. Also, after I made all that money, I didn't go out and buy fancy

cars. I didn't go out and buy a big screen television. I put my money in the bank

and for me, a comfortable bank account is security for me. I know if something

happens, like when something did happen in 2012 when my sites all got

slapped, I still had at that time probably around $40 000 in my bank account. So

with that money in my bank account I was able to say: “Okay, I've got this

money. I can test. I can do things. I can go out and if I want to see how people

are making money, getting Kindle books written and making money from Kindle,

I can go and I can outsource that and I can put money into that and find out what

happens. I can invest money in solo ads if I wanted to test that and see how

that works.” But having that cushion there really helped. What was really hard

for me was, in May 2013 I got married. So when I got married, for anyone out

there who's gotten married you know it's pretty expensive to get married.

There's lots of expenses. My wife and I, we went from living in a small

apartment with a roommate where here in Istanbul I was paying $400 or $500 a

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month, to now I have to pay for my rent for my house for my wife and I and I

have a lot more expenses. I need to furnish my house. – I can't live on a

mattress anymore in my room, I need to actually have a real bed and have an

adult life. So I spent, and I went into my income and my savings. I got down to

about $8000 or $7 000 in my bank account nearing the end of 2013. That

scared me. I started thinking to myself: “Okay, like I've got money but I need to

do something quickly. I need to figure out how to really make this happen.” And

I knew, that because of my show I was building my email list. People were

finding me, joining my list. My income was going up but I needed to make it go

to the next level. So what I started doing is I started doing was because I had

some money, I started investing and buying advertising and being able to invest

back into my business. But I think the important point here is that whatever you

do and whatever success you have, just remember that it can go away. Don’t

get your first success and make your first $5 000 and then go out and spend it.

Keep that money in your bank account. And for, I think the original question you

asked me was, was about people giving up?

SAUL MARANEY: Yes. They give up quickly and they buy a nice

shiny object because they saw the PayPal and Click Bank earnings, and they

think it's going to happen overnight.

MIKE FROM MAINE: It's not.

SAUL MARANEY: And then they stop. And from what you’ve said

on all of your interviews and particularly on your blog, is that if someone is

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saying that they can sell you something that's easy to do and it's not going to

take hard work, you don’t like that. Because it's not true.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, I mean it's probably not true. There's

probably some little thing about it that they're not telling you about. And that's

why always when I interview people ,I love it when I see these headline claims.

And the first thing I do in my interview is I dig in. and say: “Okay, let's talk about

what you're claiming on this headline. Let's look.” I have a product that I'm

releasing next month. I'd written a copy and I sent to a copywriter to tweak and

to make it refined, and he sent it back to me and it had this headline. It was like:

“Copy Mike's results and be making $277 online next week.” And I was like:

“Dude, I can't say that. That's impossible.” I can say that they can start getting

results perhaps, but to claim that someone can have those kinds of results in the

next week is not possible.

For people just starting: It's frustrating, I know. But I think once you find

something, whether you're building Ad Sense sites or you're building Amazon

sites or you're doing Kindle marketing or you're doing Facebook marketing, once

you start finding something that works, once you find something where you’ve

made a little bit of money doing it, that should be a sign. “Okay there's

something right here.” For example, I did a case study last year where I went

and for two months in a row I was making about $500 a month on Fivver. Now

people would say: “Oh, it's just $500 a month. It's nothing.” Well what you do

with something like that, is you make $500 a month and then you turn around

and you make a course about how you do it and you sell that course. You

leverage what you're doing. You have to remember that there's always going to

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be someone behind you. There's always going to be someone that is in the

place where you were that year before. You can always teach people things,

and the only way you're going to learn that real stuff is by doing it. You could

take up 1 000 courses, Saul, about doing interviews, and the only way you're

really going to learn how to do interviews is just by getting in there and actually

doing it. Sure, courses can help you in the beginning, but it's taking action that

you find really what's working and what doesn’t. And I know people are sick of

hearing: “Take action, build a list blah, blah, blah.” But the reason why we say it

all the time is because it's so true. And I'm guilty of not taking action sometimes

too. I've been sitting on this course that I'm making. I just finished the course

last night. I'm so happy, I finished my second one time offer that I incorporated

into it and it took me longer than it should have to finish it just because I didn't

take action on it. So, yeah, take action and build an email list. For the love of G-

d, start a list and start putting in your people that are following you. Build a

website, have a place where people can find you. And I don’t know how many

times I'll say when I meet someone: “Let me see your your website.” And they're

like: “I don’t have a website.” So I say: “Just set something up. All you need is a

simple WordPress website. It costs you, it can cost $2 for a domain, if you look

for a – if you look for a godaddy.com discount coupon.

SAUL MARANEY: Yes, exactly.

MIKE FROM MAINE: And then for a hosting: I think there's hosting

that's like 5 bucks or even cheaper. Have a website.

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SAUL MARANEY: Exactly. And, yeah, it's interesting what you're

telling me and I think that obviously you were brought up in a family with good

values. So when you made that initial $50 000 you didn't go and lease a BMW

and you didn't go into big debt. And I've read and I've seen that a lot of even big

marketers and even some of the biggest affiliate guys, they may be earning a lot

of money but their overheads may be extremely high or they may be having a lot

of personal debt and then they're unable to be focused and really produce in

their business. And another point that I like what you said, is taking action and

even if it's imperfect action online, it's a lot better than no action.

MIKE FROM MAINE: That's correct.

SAUL MARANEY: Like if your first interview sucks, it's who cares.

At least you got the interview out.

MIKE FROM MAINE: My first interview was horrible. I remember, I

was recording the pre-interview and I was like: “Hey there everyone.” I was

yelling at the screen. I don’t know why I was yelling? I wasn’t being me. And

now I'm a lot more me. But if I hadn’t taken that action and done that first

interview, I wouldn’t be sitting here and today I'm at 484. And of all those, some

of are non interviews. Well I've done over 450 interviews now that I've

published, which is quite a lot of interviews.

SAUL MARANEY: It is a lot of interviews. And I'd like to ask you as

well: A lot of newbies come online and then they may be introduced to The

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Warrior Forum, or they may be introduced to JVZoo or even get their way to

www.Muncheye.com, or something like that, or come to your show. And then

they are seeing all these new products coming out every day. How important is

it to be focused and, as you were saying, find one method and actually perfect it

and specialise in it before you start moving on to new stuff? And attached to

that, how do you stay so focused, Mike? Because if one has to go onto

Facebook, you can go down so many black holes there. And then you can be on

YouTube and even your email. How do you stay so focused? And what's your

advice for a newbie just not to be one of the statistics dead on the side of the

road?

MIKE FROM MAINE: Sure. Yeah, I mean it's hard. And even for me

it's almost harder because I see probably 90% of the big stuff that comes out. I

mean. this week there was a keyword tool that I didn't look at, but most

everything. - I know what's going on. I have my finger on the pulse of all the

different product launches that are coming out and I get to play with things. I get

distracted. About a couple of weeks ago a really excellent product came out. It

was called Tee Profits Recipe.

SAUL MARANEY: With Damian. Yes, I saw your interview with him.

MIKE FROM MAINE: And the interview actually was horrible

because his connection was terrible

SAUL MARANEY: The interview was a bit fuzzy.

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MIKE FROM MAINE: His connection was horrible, I was going to kill

him. I was like: “Damian, next time you're going to spend some of the money

you're making on these t-shirts to get a better Internet connection.

SAUL MARANEY: Yeah, he was like fuzzeed out but it was a good

interview.

MIKE FROM MAINE: It was crazy. Buy yeah, but the product was

excellent, and I got to go through it and it got me thinking like: “Maybe I should

be doing some t-shirts. Maybe I should have a side income of t-shirts. Like this

guy, he's really explaining it well.” I choose a product every week and I ended

up choosing his product as my product of the week, that was the best product

that I did an interview about, and I was really considering doing it. But then I

have to say to myself: “Okay, Mike, you can't be doing everything all at once.

You have to just stick to one thing.” And I've got products that I want to release

myself, and I know that it's better for me to leverage what I'm doing than it is to

start trying to dive into something else.

Now that being said, it's okay to try. If you’ve got something that you're

doing and it's working fine and you’ve got it going, it's fine to work on maybe one

other project at a time while you're doing it because you don’t want to have all

your eggs in one basket. But if you're trying to do that and you're trying to do

something else, something else, something else, you're not going to get

anything done. And some ways that I keep myself on track is: First I put out an

interview every day. Very rarely do I not either put out an interview or preview

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video if I can't get the guy to come on the show or to do the interview, and the

product's good enough, I'll just do a preview video of the product. I put out two

pieces of content every day. And it's just like: “Oh am I going to do it?” it's like: “I

have to do it.” And if the product's launching at 11 am, I need to have my review

video out before that. I need to have my email queued so I can send my email

out when it goes live. Because I know that if I don’t do that, I'm going to lose

money pretty much. This is a professional business. This is my livelihood. My

wife is saying where's the money? And I need to have answers. I need to have

the money in the bank account and I need to have the cash coming in because

it's my only income source. It's not a hobby for me.

SAUL MARANEY: Correct

MIKE FROM MAINE: - I think that people need to say: “Okay, is this

a hobby? Is this something you're doing for fun? Are you trying to make an

extra 20 to $50 maybe a week?” And that's fine, if that's what you want to do. If

it's fun for you – a lot of these products, there's entertainment value in them.

Like it's just fun to see what these people are doing in the watch case studies

and to see what is going on. That's why a lot of people buy the products. They

just want to see what other people are doing. But if you want to take it seriously

you need to start tracking your expenses. You need to know how much you're

spending on these products. That's why I started doing income reports in the

beginning. In the beginning the income reports weren’t as: “Hey everyone, I'm

making tons of money online.” Because I wasn’t making tons of money online.

But in the beginning it was just: “Okay, I'm spending this amount of money on

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articles, I’m spending this amount of money on advertising and I'm making this

much money.” So what I would do at the time when I first started is: I would take

the money that I was making and reinvest that back into my business. So I

would say: “Okay, I made $500 this month, I can invest $500 back in to what I'm

doing now and I'm just going to keep on growing my business.” If you can invest

a dollar back into your business and you can get a dollar back from that

relatively quickly and your business grows, that's when you hit something.

That's when you can keep on putting money in, growing your business (and

usually that means your email list) and keep on growing, growing and growing.

And that's when you can start to see some real traction there. It's when you can

invest money back in. Whenever we talk about pay traffic on the show it's like

people are like: No. Paid traffic. Like that sounds so scary.” It is scary and you

have to be careful with it and you need to have things set up before you do it.

You need to have a sales funnel set up and that also scares people as well. “A

sales funnel, oh no.” “Product creation, oh no.” These are things that require

work. If you're not willing to put in some work, then you're not willing to make

any money. You need to put in some work or some money in order to have

success with this. Going back to when I was making money through the CPA

offers, when I was talking about how it's buying traffic. I was paying for that

traffic. And I had to work to make that money. So I was paying with my work to

get that traffic to my offers. Whatever way: You're going to put in time, you're

going to have put in money, but the way you're going to get to that next level is

by being able to put in money into your business. It takes money to make

money.

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SAUL MARANEY: Yeah, I agree with you. And it sounds like you're

almost grown up. You're taking it seriously now. You're watching your numbers

and I actually bought Damian's course on your recommendation as well.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Oh thank you.

SAUL MARANEY: And I was very impressed with him and I've been

through it and I was actually on a training call with him this week. And the most

important thing, as he said, is that it's all about the numbers. So you have to be

running that spreadsheet and it's like that in any business. In any professional

business in the world, it would be ridiculous for a company to be running and not

looking at the profit and loss sheet. And you know, my dad gave me a good

advice so many years ago, and he said: “People that are short of money, they

never look at their bank account because they know that they’ve got their stop

orders at the beginning of the month and basically they're out of money for the

rest of the month. But people that do have money and successful businesses,

they're looking at that bank account every day and they're monitoring it. So

Damian is very successful and he's making a lot of money. So just him as an

example, but the main thing is that he's got that spreadsheet that he's

monitoring every day. And even if he goes for a surf, he comes back and he

looks at his numbers. And I think a lot of people, esecially the newbies, they

come online, and as you say: “The funnel and the email list, that's core.“ But

even as core as that is, is the numbers and to take your job seriously. And quite

like you said, if the product is launching at 11:00am, you have to have your

video out and you have to have your email qued. And it's the same thing if you

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are a trader on the New York Stock Exchange and the market is opening up at 9

o'clock. Well, you’ve got to be on the phones becausethat's when the clients

want to start trading. And you can't rock up at 10:00am or 11:00am because

you're not going to last long there. And for you it's the same thing. There are a

lot of people depending on you and that email has to go out on time and you

take your job seriously. I'm sure also, if a product creator messes you around

and doesn’t show up for two interviews, well next time he's releasing something

you will say: “You know what buddy, you you messed me around.” And maybe

you wouldn’t be that keen to have him back on. So it's serious business.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah. Punctuality is really important. In the

whole time that I've done my interviews, I have missed, I think it was one or two

interviews. One of them I had slept in and I missed it. Pissed the guy off and he

was a bigger guy in the space, and I was like: “Man, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

This is not like me. Punctuality is very important to me. I'm usually there.” And

he just deleted me from Skype. So that was a lesson. But in general, you need

to be punctual. And he got the message that: “Mike doesn’t respect my time.”

And if you don’t respect someone else's time how are you to expect them to

respect yours? And there's things that happen. This is real life. I've been late

to an interview or someone's been late to come on, and if you're apologetic and

you're sorry about it and there's real reasons for it, like we're real people.

Things happen. Life gets in the way. But if you're just like: “Hey, like what's

going on?” and then you're like rolling up half an hour late, you can tell. There's

just common courtesy with that. So, anyway, punctuality is really important. And

it's interesting, you mention like the numbers. I have on my computer here,

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there's a little application on my mac book called Mint. It's a great program for

anyone out there. It's free. If you go to www.mint.com . And you can put it on

your savings accounts, your investment accounts, your credit card, everything.

It tells me exactly, after subtracting my credit card and everything, how much

money I have in my bank account at this moment, including my PayPal account

and everything. And it's funny, I think that to understand business you really

need to start respecting money and its value. I know that the money that's

sitting in my bank account now, if I had that money in a special savings account,

a CD account or whatever, I could be making a certain amount of interest off of

it. The money can work for you, which is the amazing thing. And I know that

some people are saying: “Well I don’t have any money to make it work for me.”

Well, once you do get to that point, and I hope you do, you can start leveraging.

And I think leverage is a word that I've used a couple of times already. You

need to leverage everything that you have in order to move ahead at a faster

level. You need to leverage the content that you create. Sometimes I'll create

videos for my private coaching students and I'll take those and I'll use that as a

one time offer on a product. So it's like I'm creating awesome value for my

coaching students, but then repackaging it and putting it in as a one time offer.

What that's going to do is it's going to is: I'm going to continue to make money

off of it. And also, it's going to show people that buy it: “That well this guy really

puts out great stuff.” And potentially, some of those people are going to end up

joining my coaching program and seeing all the other great content I have in

there as well. It's like when you have a win. You learn how to make $20 a day

from doing very little work with advertising with Bing Ads and Fiverr or whatever

the little thing is. Take that and repackage it and teach it. And when you teach

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that, that's when you'll start learning so many more skills and the skills just pile

up and pile up and pile up. If you would have asked me four years ago to do

some editing in Photoshop, I would've been like: “Huh? But now I know enough.

I don’t know about all the little tools in there. I know what I need to know to take

an image, to write on it, to change the writing a little bit, to resize things and to

get something that I can use when I need it. And when I can't figure it out, I go

to Fiverr and pay 5 bucks and have someone do it for me which saves me a ton

of time and effort. Also, when doing videos and editing and whatnot, when I first

started doing my interviews I had no idea how to do that. Now I don’t even think

about it. It's so easy. It's just something that I've learned how to do and it all

adds up over time. Like whenever I interview my coaching students to to see if

they're fit for my coaching group, I always ask them: “Okay, what do you expect?

Do you expect you're going to make $10 000 in a month?” And if they have

those expectations I can accept them, because they're going to be disappointed.

I need to have them know that it's going to take time and t's going to take work.

But if they put in that work, then those times where you make money overnight,

will happen. I wake up every morning and I'm a little bit spoilt now. I mean it's

amazing. I wake up, I look at my JVZoo account. I've got the money here

coming in, and if I don’t make $300 a day, I think there's something wrong. And

if I don’t hit my numbers – I get depressed. My wife will come home and she'll

say: WWhy you sad?” And I'm like: “Well I've only made $70 today.” But if you

had talked to me about a year ago and I had made $100 in a day, I would've

been really happy. I remember sitting down and I was writing down aspirations

type stuff. I was trying to figure out what I was doing and what I was being

successful with. And I was like: “I'm currently making $50 a day.” But at the time,

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making $50 a day is huge. If you can make $50 a day you can make $100 a

day. If you can make $100 a day, you can make $200 a day and it just goes on

from there. But you need to make that first dollar, that first $10 and then ramp up

what you're doing. Then invest in and crank it up and just go all in. There's a

little bit of gambling in this as well. You're gambling here. And if you can't

gamble on yourself, if you can't bet on yourself no one else is going to bet on

you. You have to win first. You have to do this all first. No one else is going to

invest in your new software tool unless you’ve gone out and you’ve bought some

traffic to it and you can prove that it's working. No one else wants to test out

your stuff. You need to test it. And another thing I want to mention, and I was

going to say this before, is that: The other day, a well respected marketer, Dillon

Kingsbury, he put up a post on Facebook talking about how he's the first one

into his office. (He has a little private space up in Canada and he has an

entrepreneur floor where he works.) And he was like: “I'm the first one in and

I'm the last one out. I'm the guy turning on the lights and the guy turning them

off.” And this whole thing about people saying that: “Oh, I don’t work. I work

three hours a day or three hours a week, a Four Hour Work Week type thing.” I

mean it can happen, and there's times in your business when you're going

away, but most people love who get into this, they do it because they love it.

Like I love working on my business. For me, sitting in my office, which is my

living room, all day and doing this, it's not a chore for me. When I'm on vacation

I'll miss going back to my office and doing my work, because I don’t have a

boss, other than my wife, who's telling me what to do. I don’t have deadlines

that are like ridiculous reports that I need to file and all that crap. I control my

destiny, and I control how much money I make this year is going to be directly in

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relation to how much I work, how much I test and how much I put into my work.

If I want to, I can just sit and keep on doing what I'm doing now, but the reason

why I keep moving forward, the reason why I'm working on products, the reason

I was up until 3 o'clock in the morning last night working on these things is

because I want to keep moving forward. I love what I'm doing. I know that

there's other things out there. I want to help people with what I'm doing. I know

that the more people that I help that the more money that I will make. I'm in this

to make money. Don’t get me wrong, but I'm also in this to help people

because, as I said: “Once you can help people get what they want you'll get

everything that.” – I think Zig Ziglar said something like that.

SAUL MARANEY: Yes. Zig Ziglar said that and totally agree. And

attached to that, I find you very real and this is who you are. And maybe not

everyone's going to like you, but there will be people that do like you, and that

will be your tribe and that will be your email following. And my question on that

is: If one has 20 000 people on your email list but you're getting hardly anyone to

open your emails, that's useless. But a buyers list are 400 people that have

bought from you and are actually opening your emails and are looking forward to

get your emails, that's a completely different story. So you built that up by being

real. People do trust you and I know that you are very selective. You won't let

any single person come onto your show, even if it could make you money in

affiliate commissions. So how important is that for a newbie or for anyone that's

really trying to have a solid foundation and build up? Your name is so important

and to be real is so important and your reputation is too. If you're known for

putting out nonsense, if people don’t unsubscribe, they're definitely not going to

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open up your emails or take action.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, I mean email marketing is tough and I

don’t think anyone has it fully figured out. It's different styles. I'm pretty

aggressive with my mailings and I'll be the first to admit it. I mail out every

evening EST, every evening US, I'll mail out my interview, which is my value, my

content that I mail out. That's kind of like: You know, people talk about how you

need to mail out some free training and stuff to people. Well this is my free

training. This is my free gift to people. I don’t charge any money for the

interviews and that's my free stuff that I mail out. Then when the product

launches, I usually put out two emails: One to tell about the early bird discount, if

there is one, and then I'll mail again once the product goes live. It gets my clicks

up and it gets a lot more eyes on, on the products. I get unsubscribes, of course

I do. Some people don’t want that many emails. But at the same time, it's a

strategy that works. There's going to be positives and negatives to both. There's

different strategies that people have when it comes to providing value and

promoting for offers. You can do one or two things. You can promote every

day, which is a strategy. You're going to get a lot more unsubscribes. You're

going to get less responsiveness with your list. They're not going to respond to

you as well. Or you can choose maybe once a week or a couple of times a

week a product to promote and you can go all in on that. So let's say you pick

up a great keyword tool, and first you tell your audience about it before the

launch. And then you promote the launch, and then you send out something

maybe a little bit more of how it works. And you should keep on promoting the

same thing. That's a great strategy. That's something a lot of people do. But

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it's just going to depend upon what you do. My whole strategy is: I love making

the relationships that I have through the interviews. So for me it's, there's a lot

of incentive to keep on promoting people, building relationships and building the

value. I also have a website (which I said before you should have a website). If

someone doesn’t want to be on my email list they can unsubscribe and come

back to my site every day, or when they think about it or when they see it on

Facebook. If you come to my website you're getting retargeted and you're going

to see the interviews on Facebook as well. Depending upon where you are in

the world. I play around with it a little bit, but I'm also retargeting so that the

people that have visited, I know are going to recognise me and are going to see

that on Facebook as well. But – what was the original question? Do you

remember? I get a little sidetracked sometimes.

SAUL MARANEY: No problem. I wask asking about your

trustworthiness and to be yourself. I mean if someone unsubscribes, that's

actually a good thing, because why do you want a person that doesn’t like you

and that never opened your emails on your email list?

MIKE FROM MAINE: It doesn’t meant that they don’t like you either.

It just means that maybe they open it up on a bad day, maybe they're getting a

ton of emails or maybe they've forgotten who you are. It's tons of reasons why

someone can unsubscribe from you. It's going to happen. I get tons of

unsubscribes. It's a natural thing with email marketing. I've unsubscribed from

Pat Flynn. He's like one of the nicest internet marketers around. He's like the

guy who never promotes anything. I mean he does, don’t get me wrong, he

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makes great money and he promotes stuff, but I unsubscribed from Pat Flynn's

list because I just didn't want to get his emails anymore. I can go to his website

and see what he's doing. People get unsubscribes. I remember I was hearing

someone who was saying that he had sent out an email about how his aunt had

died and he was being honest with his list in telling about it. He got more

unsubscribes from that and he wasn’t even promoting anything. And another

thing, don’t be afraid to promote to your list. Don’t be afraid. I don’t want to be

on an email list if someone's not recommending great stuff to me. If you're

doing your job right and you're telling me about good stuff, that's fine. If you're

promoting crap to me, then I'm gone. But if you're telling me about good stuff

then I'm happy. Great, I'll check it out and if you've got an affiliate link, (which I

expect you do) I'll buy through your link. I have people emailing me and say:

“Hey Mike, did you do an interview about this product? And if not, send me over

your link, I'll buy it through your link.” Like people want to thank me for that.

But as far as trust and authority goes, you don’t want to promote

something that you're not going to feel comfortable with. I've been in situations

where I knew that I could make money from promoting something and that I

would make a lot of money from it, but I couldn’t put my name behind it.

Because I knew people would be like: “Why is Mike promoting this? What is

this?” And I have a responsibility to take care of my audience. And there's

some products that have got negatives and positives about them. Whenever I

do a review of a product I try to pick out the negatives as well as the positives.

But in general, you're not going to see me do a review that's going to say: “This

product sucks.” And the reason why is because I screen the products before I

even bring the person on my show to interview. So I'm not going to go on one of

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the launch boards, www.muncheye.com , find a crappy product, bring the

person on, spend the time to interview them and then say: “Well this thing

sucks.” For me that's a waste of my time, and that's a waste of their time. It's

going to piss the person off, and it's going to not make any friends with them. I

have a delicate relationship that I have to have with my JV partners. I have a

relationship with my audience that I need to take care of. If I can find that

balance between those, then I'm able to do a good job. Now’s there's some

products that I've said: “Okay, like this kind of sucks and about parts of their

product.” But in general, yeah, just follow your gut. You'll know inside. I don’t

bring people on and talk about The Empower Network. I had one guy, way back

(The Empower Network is a Network Marketing company) come on, and we

talked about what it was because I wanted to educate my audience about what it

was. I had questions about how it worked and whatnot. So in general I don’t do

those type of Network Marketing promotions, things where people are signing up

underneath each other and whatnot. For some people that's fine for them, I

don’t want to get into an argument about that, but for me that's not my style and I

bring people on that have had real results with things. That's when I want to

have someone on my show. If someone puts out a product and it's about

generally about something and they haven’t really done it themselves, then I

don’t feel comfortable promoting that. Even if you've built a list of 125

subscribers doing this method and you spent 10 bucks on it, like that's

interesting to me. But if you are talking about: “This is how listbuilding works.”

“Okay, so how big is your list?” “Well I don’t have one.” No, I can't have you on

my show.

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SAUL MARANEY: Interesting. And have there been a few cases

where you’ve interviewed a product great and then decided not to even put it up

onto your show because you figured out during the interview that this guy's not

actually great, or this product's not going to share my list?

MIKE FROM MAINE: Interesting question. I've had people where

I've gotten them on Skype before I set up the interview and just a couple of

weeks ago, I had a guy who had a product coming out and it looked good. The

sales base looked good. You get these awesome numbers showing like he was

making all these PayPal sales and I was like: “Okay I never heard of him.” And

so when I've never heard of someone I need to clarify and I need to see. So I

said: “Hey, this looks cool. I've just got a few questions for you.” And we got on

Skype and I said: “Let me see inside your PayPal account.” And I said: “Look, I

have to, I have a responsibility to my audience. Nothing against you, I need to

verify that what you're saying you're doing, you're actually doing.” And some

people could get pissed off and say: “What? Are you calling me a liar?” “Well,

no, I need to make sure that this is real before I put you out to the world.

Because if this comes back that you're not really doing this, then it makes me

look like crap, and I have to be careful.” So he he showed me his PayPal

account and actually, he had gotten the money, but he pushed them all together

and they weren’t really from that time. He had said that they were recent but

they were really back before. And I said: “Dude, I see that you're doing this. I

see that you're having success with this, but if you want me to promote you, I

need you to go out and do this again. I need to see that you can replicate this.”

So I ended up not having him on the show. And I don’t think he's a liar, but it

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was stretching the truth a little bit. So, yeah, there's people that have not gone

through my screening process.

SAUL MARANEY: Interesting. So I know that we don’t have much

longer and I'd just like to ask you a few more questions.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Sure.

SAUL MARANEY: For a newbie and or for anyone that's really

suffering online and has not had the breakthrough that they want to to, are there

are a few steps how to find that niche where there'll be a demand? And as you

were saying earlier, I think to a lot of people, product creation sounds so scary

but it doesn’t need to be so scary. For someone that needs like their luck turned

around and just that boost to get going: They’ve been spending maybe all night

at the computer. Their wives never see them anymore. They've almost burnt

out. What's a way to come back from the dead in this business, for anyone

that's listening now and they want to end the year off on a high note and actually

at least recoup what they put into this business?

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah. – I think a lot of people try to reinvent

the wheel. And if you notice, most of the products that come out, are actually

very similar. There'll be a product that comes out about making money on

Facebook. And then there'll be a product that comes out about doing CPA

marketing. And there'll be a product that comes out about how to rank videos on

YouTube and make money from those. If you try to put out a product and it's

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about something that's different than these, most of the time, it's going to be a

little bit harder. I mean if you’ve got a method of making money and it's working,

you’ve got proof of doing it and it's something that no one's heard of, like that's

great. Then that's different. But in my opinion, and especially for new product

creators: Go out and see what other people are creating. See what other people

are having success with. If you're on the JVZoo Product Of The Day list,

you're going to get emails. They're going to tell you what the products of the day

are. Pay attention to what products are getting products of the day. Pay

attention to what products are getting WSO Of The Day. Pay attention to what

products, people that you're on their email list for, pay attention to what they're

promoting. You'll see that if you look at what I promote, in general a lot of the

offers are about email marketing, about YouTube marketing, about Facebook

marketing. I try to pick ones that people are going to be interested in and people

are going to buy. So as far as picking your niche goes: From the ones that are

popular and are profitable, go in there and find something that you're passionate

about. Like if you are really interested in Facebook marketing and that

fascinates you and the t-shirt thing fascinates you, then go in there and start

testing things out. Start creating your first t-shirt campaign. Spend your first 20

bucks on testing out things. You're going to learn more from that test than you

are from waiting any longer or from going through another course. You have

everything that you need to get started, you just need to do it. As far as

recouping money back that you’ve made, the best way you could that is to get a

job. The easiest way to make money is to go out and to get a side job. If you

need to do that, if you need to work in MacDonald’s, if you need to work at the

Starbucks or whatever, there's sacrifices that people make. Back in 2011 and

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part of 2012, I was teaching English and I was doing that. I was doing my Ad

Sense websites but I was also teaching English at the same time because I

needed to make some extra money. I needed to bring some extra money in and

to pay my rent and whatnot. I hated teaching English, hated it. I loathe teaching

English. I like teaching Internet Marketing but I loathe teaching English. And I

did it because I had to. There wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t going to come and just

sit on my couch and be like: “Oh, nothing ever happens to me, I never get any

success.” You need to make your success happen and you need to do things

some times that you don’t want to do in order to do that. To make money online,

one of the best places you can make money is: www.fiverr.com . Go there and

be an article writer. Write frigging articles for people. You don’t need to be an

expert article writer. That course that I did about making $500 a month, I was

doing that in my spare time writing little articles for people. After

www.fiverr.com, I was getting paid 4 bucks (after www.fiverr.com takes their

fee,) an article. They were taking me about 15 minutes to write the article.

Write it out, people just want the keyword articles done and I was doing that. I

was making an extra $500 a month. What can you do with that? You can take

that $500 and you can buy courses, you can start investing in having an email

auto responder, you can get a website. If you put in the work there's tons of

stuff out there that you can do. But in the beginning, you're going to be trading

your time for money. Later on once you start having a little bit of money, you

can start trading money for money and investing in your success.

SAUL MARANEY: Right. And so if you’ve had that success with

www.fiverr.com you could document that, and that could be an information

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product that could go out and teach other people and then you build on that

success and you get yourself known in the industry and you start getting your

name out there. Then you're taking action and you're building your confidence.

And probably at that stage you're not going to be able to attract any affiliates, but

don’t worry about that. Just get something out. I think the Warrior Forum could

be quite good for that instead of a self hosted launch because you’ve got people

there already and you're going to get the feedback.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Sure.

SAUL MARANEY: And if it bonds and you make 10 sales it's better

than buying another course and not going through it.

MIKE FROM MAINE: You'll break your product creation virginity.

Everyone needs to do it. I did mine and I did 250 sales on my first product,

which for some people it might sound great but I was expecting more. I wanted

to have more sales than that. But you learn by doing. I learned how to set up a

product in JVZoo. I learned how to do a membership area. I learned how the

relationship with JVs and how all that works. If you can get that all together and

if you can learn that just by putting out something, just put out something, then

you're going to be way ahead of everyone else.

SAUL MARANEY: Exactly and everyone has to start somewhere

and you know, if you look at where you are and where you’ve got to, it's been

slow hard work to get where you are and now, as you say, you can leverage it

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and people are quoting you and you’ve had wonderful people on your show.

You're putting out content that you can reuse and we all have to start from

somewhere. And if someone looks at the top affiliates and they want to be a top

affiliate, well you know, if you're making two affiliate commissions a day and

then it's three and it builds up, that's the way to go.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yes. It's slow and sometimes a little painful

but in the end there's a light at the end of the tunnel and I can attest to that.

SAUL MARANEY: Thank you. So, Mike, thank you so much for

talking to me today. I really appreciate it. I know that you’ve added for me a lot

of value and I'm quite sure that anyone that watches this and takes notes and

implements it, everything that one actually needs is here. And it almost goes

back to like an old saying that: “Everything that we need to be happy is within us

already. We've got it already. We know it. The knowledge is there.” We talked

about the URL, to get your own website. We talked about an email list. We

talked about product creation. We talked about self-belief. We talked about

keeping a good reputation, about marketing to that list and that's the foundation.

That's the basics and by building that up and then being consistent, that's

actually all that anyone's doing out there. But they're doing it to a different

degree and they're doing it to a different level and what I love about this industry

is that it's so fluid and it's changing all the time. So we have to keep on top of

our game. You meet new people all the time and your reputation, that's even

like with social media - is that it's social. If people don’t like you they they're not

going to be your friend online or offline. And it's about sharing and it's about

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being a real person.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, just don’t try to be anyone that your not.

Just be yourself. Don’t try to pretend that you are super-successful when you're

not. If you write a post about how you lost $500 testing something, that will be

one of your most popular posts on your blog. But if you can write about that and

what you learned from it and make it into a positive that's what people like to

see. They want to see that you are a real person. On my website, if I had

started today with my income reports and I had said: “Oh look, I just made

$17 000 this month, that doesn’t have the impact. It doesn’t have the same

effect. If you click on my income reports and you go down, you will see that

there are 40 of them. I don’t know how many there are here, but you can go

through month after month after month and see the journey. You can see the

story and that's what makes someone different form all the other people out

there. It’s your story. No one else can be Mike from Maine. No one else can be

you. No one else can take that from you. And you could come out and you

could complete copy my model, which you ould go right ahead and do. And I'm

sure you'll have success with it. But still you won't be me. You'll be you and

you'll do things differently than me. You'll go off on your own thing and that's the

way that this works. But you need to document it and to be authentic in

everything you do. And if you do that, then will in the future, you will be ahead of

so many other people and you have that advantage.

SAUL MARANEY: I agree and it's magnetic and it's attractive

because you built up your confidence and you don’t need to beg people to

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promote your product now that you're going to be launching. You'll have people

that will want to promote for you and they understand who you are. Maybe like

a chap with his first new product, he's like hounding everyone to promote it –

you know affiliates are not going to want to promote you because they don’t

know who you are and affiliates promote if they can see a return. But if you do it

slowly and you do it the way that you described, the chances of success are just

infinitely much better.

MIKE FROM MAINE: One more thing, I think it's interesting you say

that, with that whole affiliate thing. Even if you are a huge person in the industry

and you come out with a product, if your product sucks, just because people like

you doesn’t mean they're going to promote you. Big people in this space will

approach me and I will look at the product, and just because maybe they're my

friend and I've promoted them before, maybe they’ve even promoted me before.

But if it's not going to make me money and if I don’t think that it's a good product

and if their sales pages isn’t set up right, if their funnel isn’t set up right... – like

being an authority, making these relationship doesn’t give you free ticket. The

work never ends there. Even Alex Jeffreys, He is putting out a product next

week and it's got a lot of buzz around it. I'm not even sure if I'm going to

promote it yet because –

SAUL MARANEY: It's the video product. Yes, I saw it.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah, I'm talking to his affiliate manager right

now. I need to see their sales page, I need to see what he's promoting, what

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he's promising. Probably I'll end up promoting it. Like in general Alex puts out

great stuff and he's an excellent Internet Marketer. But still that being said, it

doesn’t exclude him from me taking a look at exactly what I'll be promoting to

people. So just to make sure that you understand, just because someone goes

and has a great reputation the work doesn’t end. Alex knows that he still has to

put out good products and put out great value in order to keep having his

affiliates come back to him. Because his affiliates know that when they promote

for him, that he's going to give a good experience for the customers and that the

affiliates are going to make money. He has all those things all set up and he

knows that, and that's why he's successful. So he doesn’t forget about the

whole process of it.

SAUL MARANEY: Great. And just on that point and then we're

going to be wrapping up. So when you interview people, will they send you the

product first to go through and do you look at the product before you promote it

to your list?

MIKE FROM MAINE: When people approach me or when I

approach people about their products, things that I want to see first: I want to

see your sales page or at least your sales page preview. It doesn’t have to be

the finished polished version of it, but I want to see your sales page preview to

see what kind of things that you are promising on your sales page. I want to see

your JV page, I want to see what your funnel looks like. I want to see what your

upsells look like, price points and any other information like that. When you're

launching, all that information, I need to know that too. And if that matches up,

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then I say: “Okay, let me take a look at your product. Because I don’t want to

look at products and then find out that I can't promote it. Like there's a little kind

of a “stepping stone” of going through that. And people will message me and

they’ll be like: “Hey Mike, can you look at my product.” I'm like: “Send me over

your sales page first. Like I don’t have time to test out your software. I don’t

have time to go through your whole product.” But normally before I interview

people, and let's say it's a course about how they built a list or whatever. I will

quickly. – If I don’t know the person I will look at it a little bit more. But if I know

the person already and I know that they have a history of putting out good

products, I'll kind of browse through just to kind of make sure that it's actually a

good product. And then if it matches up and it's good then I'll say: “Okay, let's do

the interview.” And I don’t want to go through it too much because then my

questions become too specific. I need to make sure my questions are based

upon the combined experience. Like the audience and myself are both going to

have the mutual experience of seeing that sales page. So that's going to be

their first introduction to the product. So that's how I focus my questions on. On

what they're claiming on their sales page. And for me, it's been a great formula

for good interviews.

SAUL MARANEY: It's been a good formula and I'm sure now you

have developed a feel and “good nose”. Like you can look at sales page and just

see this is actually good or t's not good, and then that would be the next step.

And as you were saying, it's like a major sports team, like for example Argentina,

they're only good as their last game. So they could’ve got smashed in their last

game, and then even their previous games mean nothing. And so if you bring

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out rubbish and promotes it and then they didn't enjoy it, you're going to pay the

price.

MIKE FROM MAINE: Yeah.

SAUL MARANEY: Mike, thank you so much for speaking to me, I

really appreciate it and this has been Saul Maraney from Johannesburg South

Africa. I've been speaking to Mike Thomas, that's Mike from Maine and thank

you so much for all your time.

MIKE FROM MAINE: You're very welcome.

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