How to create another revenue stream in your business.

G’Day everyone and welcome back to another episode of Australia’s # 1 marketing show, I am your host Timbo Reid. But you, you so much more importantly, are a motivated small business owner, ready to crank out some great marketing and build, build that baby of yours up to the big, strong business that you know it deserves to be. It might be that already. Got some listener feedback today and they are absolutely cranking it out, more on that in a minute. We are also brought to you by the very, very good folks at NetRegistry who make this show possible. So, I would suggest we all support them. Maybe you need to buy a domain name, have a website hosted, get a bit of SEO or PPC lovin’, maybe need a website designed. Don’t know. Don’t know your particular needs, but I do know that they can help you with all of your online marketing. So head over to NetRegistry.com.au, tell them Timbo sent you and you will get a bit of online lovin’. I have just been working with the guys over there, Karen and Sam, who have been working on some new packages for exclusive to Small Business Big Marketing listeners. Hope to share the link with you next week to those new packages. Hello to everyone “from the flying solo community.” That was a very, very average go at an Asian accent and I swallowed a little bit of almond that was caught in my teeth before I did that. Trap for young podcasters: that do not eat almonds and do Asian accents.
Right-o. Today’s show. Listener feedback. We have got a listener who has fed back to us the fact that they have implemented a little bit of the SBBM marketing G-O-L-D, the drips from the ceiling, and they have implemented it and they have won. I will share that with you. I have got some news, some more news on a past guest in Daniel Flynn. He has just nailed it. More on that. Got some new training added to the forum, which I think you will be quite excited about. New “How to’s”. We love a “How to.” Got a “listener” – wow, what is it about my elocution today and previous episodes? Always trip over words. People go “Do you edit your podcast, Timbo?” No. What have we got? A listener questions about providing feedback. Then we have a special guest. He owned a martial arts gym on Rhode Island up until recently. Then he got out of it 100% and took his martial arts business online and he is absolutely nailing it.
Right-o. So let’s get into this listener question from Jess. Jess does not have a sir name, but that is okay, because she is a listener and she came through SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com and sent me a question, which you can do too, you know. She says “Hey, Timbo, quick question for you. I have recently been trying to purchase an item, a handheld UHF, of a company; and I e-mailed them inquiring whether another product, earpiece was compatible. Instead of answering, they tried to upsell me to a much more expensive model. When I said I was not interested and just wanted my first question answered,” slamming her fist on the desk, I bet she was, young Jess, “they ignored me. It was only when I chased them up again, they responded. Their e-mails read “Dear Customer” or “Hi” and nothing else, even though I had clearly stated my name in previous e-mails. I was horrified. I was absolutely shocked” – maybe Jess is an Englishman – “by the lack of customer service by this company. So, Timbo. My question to you is this. Do you ever correct companies when you find this in your day-to-day life, seeing as this is your job?”
Thanks for the question Jess. Well my job is not to go around correcting companies. My job, my love, my passion, my way is to help the small business owner crank out great marketing to build their business, and feedback is a part of that. Let me answer your question, Jess. I think feedback is very useful. That is what I reckon. I do not think we can give enough of it. How else can we grow? I love getting feedback. But here is the “but” it has got to be constructive feedback. I think anything ‘but’ is coming from the wrong place. I think if you are going to give feedback to someone, it has to be constructive, it has to be useful and it has to come from a place that will help the person receiving that feedback to improve. And I also think you have got to remember that people are in different spaces at different times. So you do not want to be giving feedback to someone who is feeling pretty low or pretty down and make their day worse. I just think it is always good to come at it from a constructive place.
Another thing, Jess, is that as a business owner, if you are not getting any feedback, business owners out there, I know you are there, you are in 110 countries last time I looked, that is how many places this show is getting downloaded, then if you are not getting any feedback, ask for it. That is what I have been doing. I would be worried if you as the business owner are not receiving any feedback, whether it be from staff, suppliers, customers, any stakeholder. I think that would be a good thing. And you are not asking to get the feedback because you are looking for a pat on the back; you are looking for feedback that is going to allow you to improve. What am I doing wrong? What don’t you like about doing business with me? That type of stuff. How can we be doing things better? What really pisses you off about transacting with us? That type of stuff. The other thing, Jess, is one of the great things about small business is that we are really close to our customers; so I think that feedback loop, it is smaller and it is quicker and it should be more efficient. So I think we should kind of recognize that as small business owners. And finally, just small business owners, listen out for feedback. Sometimes it is not going to be direct. Someone is not going to tap you on the shoulder and go “Hey, owner. Here is some feedback for you.” But sometimes people, I find myself even doing it, you might drop a little idea or tip or a bit of advice when you are talking to an owner, but you are not directly saying “Hey, here is my feedback.” So I think as business owners, we need to have the feedback radar on a bit more and I think we can only grow from it. So hey Jess, thanks for your question. Anyone else listening, if you have got a question, head over to SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com, click on the Contact button and you can have a question to me faster than you can say “Geez, I have got a question for Timbo.”
Now speaking of feedback, I have got some very inspiring feedback for us all, not just me, but for us all. It is from Lee at IWoodLike.com.au. Now Lee, don’t know whether you are a boy or girl, but that is kind of rude of me to say that, so if I refer to you as one or the other and I get it wrong, I apologize upfront. You say “Well, Timbo. This is all your fault. We run a family business operating for over 35 odd years. We work in the manufacturing industry.” Oh by the way, it is a little bit lengthy this feedback, but there is value in it, there are learnings in it for us all. “We work in the manufacturing industry, so the last five years have been tough. Our historical success almost turned into our downfall. As a company, we were in a very strong financial position. Because of this, we took a long time to respond to the market changes caused by the GFC.” Isn’t that interesting? I just pause from the letter, but when we have success, we can often pause thinking maybe we think we have made it, maybe we get caught up in that success, maybe we just think it is going to last forever, but it does not, often it does not. Back to Lee’s letter. “We ate into our capital reserves in the hope the good times would return. The good news is the last 12 months have seen some significant improvements in our company, most of which fall under the marketing banner. We have redesigned our website, incorporated more video, customer case studies, etc., started a regular direct mail campaign, tracking the results and click-throughs.” Cannot management what you cannot measure, Lee. “Started a YouTube channel, changed our advertising strategy from product advertising to being purely about driving people to our website.” Very cleaver, very cleaver. It is not all about trying to get the sale immediately from one campaign. “Reduced our marketing spend with traditional methods, e.g. magazines. We are starting to see some results. Funny thing is we actually spend less dollars on marketing today than we did five years ago, although we do spend significantly much more time.” Gee, that is important. Let’s just talk about that for a minute. The new world of marketing, the brave new marketing landscape, yes it is generally cheaper than the old world, the advertising, the direct marketing, the sponsorship, all that type of stuff, but it does require an investment of time. And what I wish for you the small business owner, I have said it before and I will continue to say it, is that I want your marketing to become a hobby. I want you to love it. Not a chore but a hobby. I want you to love marketing your business. Back to Lee. “However, the biggest change is about to come online. Our newly applied web analytics showed us some significant information. Mainly a part of our market that we believe to be reduced from its heyday was actually some of the most popular product pages on our website. This market was always the poor cousin to our main product lines.” Exciting stuff here. Well done, Lee. So Lee has looked her analytics, seen she is getting some significant action on pages that were generally for a market that they did not pay much attention to. I bet that has changed, he said knowingly. Back to Lee. “This led to our “I want the best” campaign being launched about 10 months, targeting this market. The end result was we have seen a” – wait for it – “not 100, not 200, not 300, not 400, not 500, but a 600% increase in sales on some product lines. We are now capitalizing on thid success, taking a step further. We have now created a new sister company with market-specific branding.” Wow, that is cleaver. I think you will like this video. It makes heavy use of Fiverr, so she is having a great video, or he I should say. At a recent meeting, I quizzed the staff at their guess of the video cost. Estimates ranged from $4,000 to $8,000. In fact, it cost $75.” Love it. I will put a link to the video in the show notes, listeners. Back to Lee. “So why is this all your fault? Well, we discovered “Small Business Big Marketing a couple of years ago. I can confidently say most of the ideas, design and strategy for the new site have come from you and your guests on your podcast.” Very, very touching, Lee. To finish off, “I have never worked harder and have a renewed drive to make this business successful. Just wanted to drop you a line and say thanks. Reckon, I owe you a beer or three.” Lee, I love you. I do. I really appreciate feedback like that, but what I appreciate more is the fact that you have listened, learned and implemented. You have taken action. And I have got to tell you, if there is one linking factor between the 160-odd guests, give or take, that I have had on this show, is that they are all action takers, every single one of them. They do not wait for it to be perfect. They believe in an idea and they take, often, swift action. And I love that. Lee, thank you. I really appreciate it. Again, Lee is from IWoodLike.com.au. I appreciate the feedback.
Well, what a positive, positive show this is. And to continue the positivity, I just wanted to give you a quick update. I received this e-mail today, just before I hit record. Past guest, Daniel Flynn of the brand Thankyou, if we do not know who he is already, we have spoken about him enough. He is doing some great things. Dan has just been named the 2014 Victorian Young Australian of the Year; big round of applause for young Daniel Flynn. Head back into the archives of Small Business Big Marketing, click on the podcast button. You will find, in fact, not one but two interviews we have done with Dan. He has had a massive, massive year. He got his water, health products and food products into the two biggest supermarket chains in Australia after an amazing campaign. And he is just doing great. He is basically saving the world. So a big up ya’ to Daniel Flynn of Thankyou.
It is time for a bit of a Small Business Big Marketing forum update and it is a-rockin’ along in there. There are a bunch of motivated small business owners in there having their marketing questions answered by me on a daily basis and they are also pushing each other along to do some fantastic marketing. Lots of questions being answered, but there is also a classroom section of the Small Business Big Marketing forum that is full of lots of marketing training that I have created over the last few months and years. This week, I have just added two new modules to it. One is all about nailing your e-mail productivity. Not e-mail marketing, but a bit if inbox relief, a bit of just getting on top of that crazy amount of e-mails. And I did a wonderful webinar about a week ago with Paul Higgins of Think to Act. And he has an eight-step process to e-mail nirvana. He spent 18 years at Coca-Cola, sorting their productivity out. Paul’s eight-step process to getting on top of e-mails is amazing. That is about an hour-long video that I have dropped in the forum.
I have also got some additional cold calling training. I did that interview on last week’s show with Jennie Cartwright, who is a telesales expert. Subsequent to that, I have got an interview idea with Justin Laju from AppointmentSetters.net.au, and Justin shares his top 10 must do’s for when cold calling. And what I love about this chat with Justin is that it verges on the spiritual. Now, I do not mean woo-woo stuff, but I mean just really, really going inside yourself and understanding the kind of energies that you put out and the way you can create a conversation when you are cold calling that comes from a place of caring and that is just an honest approach to cold calling. It is a really wonderful interview with Justin. I suggest you get over to the Small Business Big Marketing forum. All you have to do is go to SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com, click on the Forum button. It is $49 a month and you will get that back in a heartbeat. I will see you inside.
Okay, let’s get stuck into today’s guest, so to speak. It is Daniel Faggella of the ScienceofSkill.com. What I like about Dan is that he was running an offline business, a martial arts gym in Rhode Island in the United States and he slowly but surely, actually not that slowly, over the course of about 15 months, was able to sell his offline bricks and mortar business and completely go online by creating a whole lot of revenue streams online. It is a very interesting story. He explains exactly why he did it and more importantly for you and I, the motivated small business owner, how he did. It is not hard as you think. I think one of the big take outs of this interview is it will get you thinking about if you are a bricks and mortar business, not selling online, what you can do to maybe add an additional revenue stream to your business that is online and open up an entire literally world of possibility. So let’s have a listen to how Daniel Faggella of Science of Skill went about it.
Daniel Faggella of Science of Skill and a number of other businesses, welcome to Small Business Big Marketing.

Daniel:
Thank you Tim. I am glad to be here, brother.

Tim:
Made it all the way from Rhode Island. Now you had a physical martial arts gym in little old Rhode Island, you told me that is the smallest state of America, which sold about two years ago. Why did you do that?

Daniel:
Yes. It was actually a little bit less than that. Essentially, I had sold that business a) I have got some other projects I am really excited about in Boston in kind of the technology world, but b) we had surpassed the monthly income in our physical academy with our online martial arts instruction within about half a year of teaching martial arts on the internet, so leveraging our same marketing tools, obviously a lot of the same techniques we are doing in our physical location and just expanding it to a wider audience. So that was kind of an inevitable transition for us.

Tim:
I think this is interesting because I know for a fact that a lot of the listeners of the Small Business Big Marketing show own bricks and mortar-based businesses and I know that not every single one of them is absolutely nailing it in an offline sense. There are probably a whole lot who could move their business online and open up their customer base to the world. So let’s talk about that transition. Did you have a whole lot of online experience prior to moving your business online, Dan?

Daniel:
I did not have a lot. To this day, for example, I cannot write a lick of code, I do not know how to do pay per click advertising myself, I have a guy. So there a lot of things I was not good at. The only things that I knew were basically setting up our martial arts gym website and honestly I kind of hired somebody to do the majority of the work. So my experience was I know how to use AWeber, that was pretty much the extent of it.

Tim:
AWeber being the e-mail auto-responder software. We will come to that, because you have built a pretty decent list and I want to talk about how you did that. This transition is really interesting and I am glad actually that you were not some kind of online guru, because that makes the transition braver and achievable, I think, for anyone listening to this. Tell me about the point where you are in the gym every day, you are teaching martial arts face to face. Tell me about that point where you have gone “Okay, we are going to go online.” What did you do?

Daniel:
Well, the first thing I did, to be honest, in the beginning, we did not build momentum very fast. I only had a very limited amount of time to work on what I was kind of referring to playfully as the online project. It was basically like Tuesday night. All I did differently was that I started filming a lot more, I will tell you that much. We started saving up a pretty big backlog of pretty much everything we were doing on the net. I tried not to spend too much extra time. I just put a camera on what I was doing everyday, which now with other martial arts, we pretty have given the same advice. You just put a camera on the stuff you are doing already. We started loading it up, we put it on YouTube and we popped out a couple of blog posts and things like that every week, and then it was just really focusing on distribution. The biggest thing for me was just designating Tuesday night, even if it starts at darn 9 o’clock, if I do not even if time for a shower, I just sit down in the office for an extra couple of hours, process these videos, put up some blogs and focus on this presence. It was a little bit of a time crunch, but that is how it how it started it off.

Tim:
That is interesting. And those videos I am guessing you might even look back at those early videos like I do my early episodes of this show and God, I go “Oh, really. Were they that bad?” But you have got to start somewhere.

Daniel:
You do man. And some of it was not great stuff, I will be honest with you. We had a terrible camera back then. But at the end of the day, many of those programs we still sell and I think we have gotten maybe two e-mails about “Hey, your camera is from 19…, but that is about it. So you have to eat it a little bit, but we fought and made the transition anyway.

Tim:
So Dan, just to understand that, you had obviously the gym. What was the name of the gym.

Daniel:
The gym is Black Diamond Mixed Martial Arts, still around.

Tim:
Okay. So Black Diamond Mixed Martial Arts in Rhode Island. Had a website. You then added a blog. You started filming some stuff that you guys were doing on the mat. You were offering some advice in those little videos. I am guessing, tell me if I am wrong, you were just uploading them to YouTube, embedding them into your blog, writing some posts, making some comments and starting to build a bit of an audience that way. At that point, what you are offering is free. At what point and how did you go about starting to charge for that?

Daniel:
That one is sort of interesting as well. I had done some minor and fleeting efforts in the past of having a couple of paid programs, which I did like through PayPal and they were like really, really small time launches and announcement, really before I ever focused on things, it was just kind of small stuff. The way that we really started transitioning into a paid model, to be honest, it was very, very important for us early on to partner up with somebody who had massive distribution. So I found a guy who happens to have one of the biggest fan pages in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu spaces, a good buddy of mine. He was not a buddy of mine at the time by the way. I met him at an event, I called him before, we kind of got to know each other. Basically I knew the marketing and he just had a bunch of traffic and was not as familiar with marketing and the limited marketing automation stuff I had. We both did some filming, put some products together and then we primarily used his presence, not mine, to launch it. And then we split the profits, I was able to still able to expand from there and build a pretty darn sizable list basically off of his traffic, my marketing efforts. That is how we took things off quickly.

Tim:
So you put it some kind of paid wall?

Daniel:
Yes, yes. So we created a membership program for $37 a month, specifically around the stuff that, you know the perspective of jiu-jitsu that we have, which is kind of more on skill develop and goal setting and structured training, so a month-by-month program devoted to different areas of jiu-jitsu, devoted to the goal setting process and procedure, pre-competition preparation, a whole bunch of different modules that sort of rolled out and then we just opened that thing up to the world.

Tim:
And what was the actual software you used? Was it some kind of WordPress member plug-in?

Daniel:
What I actually used, we had transitioned not too long before, to Infusionsoft. I do not know if you are familiar with Infusionsoft?

Tim:
Yes, yes.

Daniel:
We had transitioned to Infusionsoft in my brick and mortar business and I did not buy another one for this business, honestly. They say you are not supposed to use it for two…but, you know. You do what you do.

Tim:
Be careful because Infusionsoft ranked this show very highly just recently so I know they listen.

Daniel:
Great, great. Well, they are good guys.

Tim:
Really good guys.

Daniel:
And I think they like me because I pay them a lot. We have recently started paying another $100 a month. When I go to their events, I throw dollars to those guys, so I am sure they are happy. But either way, we started using Infusionsoft and they have something called Customer Hub on the backend, which I think is about $79 a month. So I was paying for that and Customer Hub allows you to upload all different videos files, unlimited hosting. It is pretty darn useful and it really lets you roll out the content month by month in a very convenient way. So we used the Customer Hub from Infusionsoft to actually facilitate the member site, sort of speak.
Tim:
This is turning into a bit of a “How to,” which is not a bad thing because I know how much our listeners love the “How to’s.” I want to go a bit deeper into Infusionsoft. We have not spoken about it before on the show. What are the three or five killer applications of Infusionsoft for a business like yours, Dan.

Daniel:
Well, I can tell you if there are folks out there with brick and mortar businesses that I could not recommend Infusionsoft more. Their deliverability had some issues, there is stuff to work on, but at the end of the day, Infusionsoft really just facilitates a lot. The main thing with Infusion is that you can set out drip sequences and marketing automation that changes depending on the actions of the person in the system. Let’s say I have somebody who opts in for a free course about chokes or something, martial arts self-defense chokes. They get this free course and then they get a bunch of free articles and things like that, and then we bring them to an eventual page where they can pay. It is not only a CRM, but it also processes payments. I get to see when they make that purchase and then switch them automatically to a different sequence, which can then upsell to a different program, talk about a different topic, kick off a phone call, “Thank you for making your first purchase. I really appreciate it,” kick off a notification and send out a mailer in addition to an e-mail, it can kick off tasks. The differentiation in the marketing automation is just massive. We used the same exact functionality for our physical gym basically. I just took it online.

Tim:
Does that do your head in, trying to figure out “Okay, so they bought that, now I am going to direct them to this,” or “they decided not to buy that and they abandoned the shopping cart, so I have got to send them…” How do you plan all that out?

Daniel:
I try to simplify it to be honest. I did not simplify it as much as I should early on, Tim. We had way too many funnels to start off with, especially now we are really honed in to just a couple. So it is just kind of like “Okay, we have this lead source and they go on to this darn e-mail sequence. It is 24 e-mails long and if at any point they make this purchase, we put them on this sequence and that is it. We have a couple of other little bells and whistles, so if they click the order form and they do not buy, we send them a reminder e-mail from my assistant, whose name is Tim as well, and it says “Hey, this is Tim with Micro BJJ. I saw that you had seen the order form, but it looks like it did not go through. Is there anything wrong, anything I can help with?” So we had that one little kick off. But we really just try to simplify the funnel. I think it is very easy to say “Okay, we are going to build out these 18 million octopus marketing eggs that will kick off. It is like “Man, what is your core product? What is your core offering? What do you do when they buy that? What is the next step?” If you just have that built out… We actually, believe it or not, I do not know if I even talked to you about this off camera, but now I teach a lot of not only martial arts gym owners but folks in guitar, folks who are teaching mental confidence, all kinds of things, to do the same thing we do, which is teaching our passion. The main thing I say is most people who say they want to teach their passion online, if you go online, you find their name, you find their website, they do not have a way for you to opt in and buy something. They have everything but that. They have a fancy blog, their logo looks nice, maybe they do have e-mails, but there is no darn core offer. For me, it is what is your core offer and just drive to that. That is how I try to simplify it for myself.

Tim:
Yes, it is almost like even if you are not selling anything online, I say to a lot of small businesses that I come into contact with, your website is not Facebook or YouTube, i.e. People are not coming to it every five minutes of the day. For most small businesses, a prospect will come to their website once, maybe twice, at the best three times, just to check them out, what do they do, who are they, where are they, that type of information. The idea of actually grabbing their e-mail address and building a list I would say is now Marketing 101.

Daniel:
It is completely in. For our martial arts gym, we would have nothing without that. I live in such a small town, if we had to start from scratch every single day with no recorded contacts, nobody previous to reach out to, we would be doomed. It would be all over. In our small town, we cycle through e-mails of our past students and our prospects, we find who opens those e-mails and those are the people that we do our cold calls with. It is essential stuff. That was really a thing for me. What is that main funnel, make sure that opt in is prevalent, make sure it is everywhere and load people into that one system and then refine that one system.

Tim:
Totally, totally. You have built a list, Dan. How big is the list and how long did it take you?

Daniel:
Our list now is just shy of 20,000 actual folks who can get the e-mail, not a list of 20,000 e-mails, but a list of close to 20,000 people who can actually get them, not counting opt outs and all that stuff. That has taken us a little bit over a year, so actually just about 12 months pretty much to the day. We started working on this mid-October of last year.

Tim:
Okay. That is a really, really good rate. What did you do on page and what did you do off page? What I mean by that to anyone listening is what did you do on your website to capture that information. You must have offered something. What were the tricks behind that? And what did you do off site in order to drive traffic to the website to capture?

Daniel:
The most important things for me were really two things. It was content marketing and then it was also joint ventures and affiliate marketing. I will explain. On our own website, we have blogs, we have videos we are constantly uploading and the videos have tracking links that go to opt in pages, the blogs have related banners and related images and related links that go to various opt in pages. Not so much that is freaking people out, but enough that if you reading an article about leg locks and at the very bottom of the article is a banner for a free 45-minute leg-lock seminar that I taught, well, by golly, if you have read the whole darn article, why don’t you just opt in and get it. So content marketing was very important for us. We did that on our own website, but the most important thing for us, Tim, really was getting the trust of about a dozen other websites in our niche, many of whom are pretty notable and sizable, one of them is a PR4, one of them is a PR5, halfway decent for a tiny niche, I mean Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a ridiculously small niche, comparatively speaking to many other things. We have to earn their trust and we did the same thing on so many other websites. It got to the point where I could basically get hit by a bus and there is not going to be a day that goes by where we do not get a bunch of different opt ins from where ever they are in the world, simply because there are too many links out there, too many links in too many websites and too many videos. We have videos and other people’s channel that drive to squeeze us, videos and posts and other people’s websites, so that was massive for us.

Tim:
Let’s just talk about that. We can control what happens on our own sites. You have spoken a little about these fan pages. How are you getting your content and the ability for people to sign up on other people’s sites?

Daniel:
Well, first and foremost, and this has been important, there are a whole systems and ways of going about this that have been really important for me, the primary of which is I had to have some kind of credibility; so I have got some national tournament stuff, had a book do decent on Amazon. We were doing stuff a little bit before then, but the tournament was kind of a decent feather in the cap. One thing, even if I did not have the tournament, however, that was huge, and Tim, you have probably interviewed some pretty sharp folks on this show obviously doing it for a while, was we got to interview many very, very prominent world champions. Here is the thing. What I did early on was I fought to write for a couple of magazines. So I fought, I fought tooth and nail. I contacted these guys. I hit them up. I sent them sample stuff. I took a long time and wrote really great stuff and I got in a couple of magazines. And I do not really do it too much anymore unless I feel like it, but I did it to say that I did because now I can to these websites and say “Hey, you know I have written for a jiu-jitsu magazine and a jiu-jitsu style magazine and I have recently interviewed this world champion. Can I write you a free article?” You would have to be in the middle of having a stroke to say no. I mean it is just ridiculous. I mean you have to say yes, that is what you say. You say yes when somebody says that. So that is what I did. I gave them an e-mail where they have to say yes. So I wrote for a couple of magazines and then we made sure that we interviewed some really sharp guys. It is not that hard. If you send out enough e-mails, customized, you know the person, you respect them, it’s is not that hard, especially if you can help them talk about a tournament they are proud of, a book maybe, to get somebody on a show for 20 minutes or so. And then we went to all these websites to say “Hey, I would love to contribute some stuff for free.”

Tim:
So when you contribute that stuff, it is all about getting a link on either that blog post or that embedded video back to your site or are they signing up to your list from another site?

Daniel:
They are not primarily signing…I do not have any websites that actually have opt ins besides my own websites for my lists per se; and a lot of our big traffic driving is from specific joint venture partners and affiliates who have fan pages and e-mail lists, really. So the blogs are kind of much lower key. But yes, of course, the point is to get opt ins, but the point is also to rank for important terms. The cool thing about writing on 12 different websites is if somebody comes out with a DVD program and I want to own the entire first page for “xyz athlete comes out with first jiu-jitsu DVD,” we can just own the whole first page and then we can have all the SEO-affiliate traffic for that course without having to eat up our e-mail list and still make a lot of sales. So we can rank our own website for some very important terms, like athlete names, techniques, things like that, and then we can also work really well with JV. So we have people who have paid us $600 to $2,000 to basically just write blogs and put them on these darn websites and rank really high for the things they are promoting. It is not only just about driving to squeeze pages and it is certainly not about being too overt and beat them over the head about it, it is about good content they would not be able to get from other writers and an inevitable link either to a keyword we want to rank or to a squeeze page, of course.

Tim:
You talked about content marketing before, Danny. Are you still punching out a whole lot of content?

Daniel:
Oh yes. A ton of it, ton of it, ton of it.

Tim:
Video? What else?

Daniel:
Videos and blogs primarily. So videos and blogs are really what we do the most of. A lot of my videos luckily now, and holy goodness, if anybody else is going to teach their skills on the internet, I would totally say make sure you have one or two or three or four external hard drives and just stack them. Make sure you organize that footage and just stack the ever-loving heck out of it, because the great thing is now I do not have to do jiu-jitsu for another two years and the entire internet would think I did. Now, of course, it is not like I completely would stop doing jiu-jitsu for two years, but if I go on a lot of different trips and I do other stuff and different stuff and I do not get behind the camera, I have that footage. So yes, we are still doing a lot of videos. Luckily, it is much easier than it was early. We are still doing a lot of blogs as well, so we are really cranking that out. I have a team of guys that does really great writing and we really work with that. A lot of our other stuff is just me and you are doing right now, Tim, is on Skype. We just record Skype calls, either video or audio, and then put that right up on YouTube with different world champions and stuff like that.

Tim:
Dan, with your video, you are squeezing off a whole lot of video. I guess it is action on the mat, as you would call it. Once you have got that raw footage, what do you do with it? Do you sit there and edit it? Do you send it off to a team somewhere?

Daniel:
Yes. The majority of the video stuff now kind of unfortunately does still fall on me to some extent; so the YouTube channel for whatever reason is still under a decent amount of my jurisdiction. There is probably a way to auto post that stuff. If I had more brain cells or maybe slept more or something, I would do a little bit more of that. But luckily it is pretty simple. I put a quick description. I can do a write for my movie, literally. I just slap a title; I slap an ending call to action. We have the URL at the bottom. It takes me a couple of minutes to put up a video, which is really nothing. We do that a couple of times a week. And then if we do a couple of extra interviews or a seminar, then we will do a couple more in addition to that. So yes, right now, that is primarily me. Not all of the article writing is currently me. There are some other folks who work with me.

Tim:
Where do you seek inspiration for content, because I know one of the great blockages to content marketing for small business owners is once they break through, once we kind of help them figure out what to write about, I call them it their editorial mission, they then think “Gosh, how can I kick this going even past a month.” So where do you seek inspiration?

Daniel:
I don’t know if it is inspiration to be honest. I am certainly inspired by jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is really the first thing I dedicated my mind and my body to. I love jiu-jitsu and so I am infinitely fascinated by it and that is a very easy way to get myself pumped up to create content. To be honest, Tim, you can throw me in a pest control business and I could shoot 500 videos for those guys, no if’s, no ands, zero buts. I can write 500 articles. I will tell you exactly. I will just say “Okay, what are your customers concerned about? Termites. Okay, great. How many ways can termites get into a house? 15. Okay, well, if you give me one way that a termite can get into a house, I can write 10 different articles about that one way, because I can just describe it in different ways. And for some reason, I have always, I think it is grad school. I am not necessarily big on…my education did not really do me much solid for business. I did not get an MBA, I was a psychology guy. But you have to B.S. a lot of papers to get through school. Even in high school, middle school, you have got to B.S. papers. You have to pretend you read Shakespeare.

Tim:
I think what you have pointed out is the fact that some small business owners, they may come up with 15 different ways that termites can get in the house and then break that down and they will think “But who would want to read or listen or watch that,” And I think that is the wrong question to ask, because it is not for us to decide that. It is for us the business owner to create content that answers questions of our prospects, that entertains them, that makes their life a little bit easier. For some people, they will go “Well, that is boring,” others will go “That was the most useful thing I have ever watched.” I know one of my listeners sent me a video 12 months ago. It was called “How to Froth Milk.” And James, if you are listening, well done. He owns a coffee business. He has had 40,000 views on that video. Now some people would go “Really, how to froth milk? I would rather set fire to myself.” But there are 40,000 people who want to know how to froth milk.

Daniel:
Damn straight there on. You had mentioned, I think it is a great term, an editorial mission. I think you had really hit the nail on the head. You have got to build the editorial mission about your potential prospects, who are they and what is it that they actually care about. I happen to know my jiu-jitsu readers, the buyers, are maybe 42 years old and they usually get to train only one-to-two days a week. So if I really want to speak to them, I can talk about injury prevention or I can talk about maximizing the limited amount of time or I can talk about shoring up your fundamentals and I can talk about things like that that I know are going to resonate with them. Now is it always the most exciting for me? No, not necessarily. And I am sure the guy that runs the coffee shop, he can only froth the milk so many times before it gets boring, but there is another person and another person and another person, that is 40,000 people who want to learn how to froth milk. It is the same thing with martial arts; it is the same thing with pest control. In my opinion, I imagine as though I have my life threatened when I am writing content, so I imagine as though I have to write 10 articles or something terrible and horrific will happen. In my opinion, most people, under the gun so to speak, would be more than capable of doing so. It is just a matter of “Hey, you have got 10 ways that termites can get into the house, time to write 10 articles.” You just tell yourself it is time to write 10 damn articles, then you write them. That part, I do not think, is actually all that hard once you get used to the pace. I think once you do article six, article seven, article 70 is not a problem.

Tim:
That is good point, Dan. Now mate, just to wrap up, what do you say to…we started off talking at the start of the interview the idea that there are small business owners listening, they are offline, they have got the bricks and mortar business, the idea of actually ever creating something that they could sell online is a bit alien to them. But what you and I both know and one of the things that I noticed when I started my kind of online journey a number of years ago is that all of a sudden you are opening up the entire world. I mean here you are, Rhode Island, little town, little guy in a little town as you said early on, all of a sudden you have got a target audience of the world. Anyone interested in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, all of a sudden you can sell to them. It is pretty exciting stuff. That is what online marketing can do. What do you say to a bricks and mortar small business owner who is freaked out by the idea?

Daniel:
Are you talking about building an entirely separate revenue stream online?

Tim:
Maybe.

Daniel:
Okay.

Tim:
Well, yes. An additional revenue stream and continue to open the door in your high street shop each day or move right across, either or.

Daniel:
Okay, cool. Yes. I would say that probably most small business owners, the folks who are tuned in here certainly, the guys who are listening to you on a regular basis, you have already gone through so many additional struggles to be running an small business, managing books, hiring and firing. Really, making a transition online is just, of all those hurdles, it is such a low one compared to the rest of the stuff that small business owners have been tough enough to do. In my opinion, you set your sites on what the internet can and should do you for. For me it was expand my market share and expand my student base to be able to have a wider swath of folks paying attention to me. If there is someone out there running a coffee shop, you used a great example, maybe it is just drawing more attention there, building a huge blog presence and following so you are just ranking like crazy in your local area, but also maybe you are able to sell specialized coffee, like gourmet coffee guide stuff, on the internet. You have got thousands of people buying $17 guides all over the web. So if you determine the mission, just like you did when you opened your shop, and you go at it just like you did when you opened your shop, there is nothing more complicated, it is not a foreign language, just a matter of effort.

Tim:
Yes, love your work, mate. That is great advice, Dan, and inspiring stuff. Thanks for tuning into the show because I know you listen in all the way up from over there, from over the pond.

Daniel:
You got it, over the pond, so to speak.

Tim:
By the way, where can people find you more to the point?

Daniel:
Oh yes. ScienceofSkill.com is for my jiu-jitsu stuff. I have another site FirstInternetIncome.com, which is where I do a lot of my online marketing stuff as well, so danfagella@firstinternetincome.com.

Tim:
Love you work, mate. Thanks Dan.

Daniel:
Cool. Thank you, Tim.

Tim:
Well guys, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you. I have got four learnings I would like to share with you. Number one: Consider adding an online revenue stream to your offline business. I do not think enough small business owners are doing it. They think it is too technical, it is too scary. As Dan explained, he did not have a lot of experience going in and now he has actually replaced his entire income from his offline business with an online business. So think seriously about doing that if you purely trade offline at the moment. Number two: Content marketing is powerful. I would suggest going out and writing out all the questions your prospects have and start answering them via video, blogs, audio interviews, whatever it is, and then even break those questions down into micro questions that you might find boring, no one might want to hear, listen or read about them, but you will be surprised. Do not judge them. Let others judge them. Number three: Start to list all the other sites you would like to see your business appear on and then contact the owner of those sites to find out how you can contribute. It is a great search engine optimization play. You will find your rankings increase significantly if you make that a part of what you do. I am amazed at the amount of people, the amount of e-mails I get from other websites asking to be able to guest post on my site. It is a good play so that would be a good one. Number four: Start to capture leads. If you are not already on your website, if you have not got some way of capturing people’s e-mail addresses on your website, then add it. Whether you go down the path of Infusionsoft or use something like AWeber or Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, just do it. Again, do not wait for any of this stuff to be perfect guys. It might be a bit wonky, a bit ugly when you start off, but it will improve as time goes by. You will improve as time goes by. There are the four tips that I got from having that fireside chat with Dan Fagella. I hope you did too. Head over to the blog at SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com, the show notes for episode 160 and leave your comments and learnings. Let me know what you got from it.