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James Schramko and Luke Moulton lift the lid on the subject of Podcasting….  Luke Moulton used to co-host a podcast with Tim Reid.  I also co-host a podcast with Timbo so this episode was a bit of fun to make.

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Highlights from this podcast

• How professional do you need to go for your first podcast?
• Does a recording studio help?
• Do you need an official ‘bumper’?
• Broadcasting with no pants…
• Setting the stage quality wise for recording from the start
• How to invite interviewees to record with you
• Building a podcasts into a powerful and strong community
• How to start a podcast
• The key to getting good stories from interviewees
• Leverage your audience to the fullest extent possible
• The reason why you need to have a range of products that are appropriate products
• Podcasts are a more do to with traffic rather than being a product?
• Having a traffic source builds up traffic to the front door
• How to build authority build trust
• Are people in a position to take action when listening to your show?
• Selling versus developing authority
• How to reassure the audience that you are worth working with
• How to measure sales from podcasts using a trackable link
• Detailed podcasting strategy
• The biggest potential pitfalls and what you would might do differently
• Are podcasts growing or in a declining trend?
• The way people consume media is changing
• How does the apple iTunes algorithm work?
• Do you polarise an audience or go with the grain?
• Don’t try and be everyones cup of tea
• Production quality for podcasts are less onerous than video
• Why pro podcasting production values can create a difference
• The importance of keeping your sound levels consistent
• Press record and do it yourself
• The famed double headed recording technique
• Stats you can use pod track to discover data about your audience
• How you can tell what browsers people use.
• Why you should know your audience so that you can optimise the content
• Is podcasting for everyone?
• How to install your podcasting plugin to a blog then retro add it to iTunes
• The three most popular podcasting formats…
• What equipment is good?
• Why Amazon S3 might save you some headaches
• In iTunes should you target tight or broad?
• James special Facebook campaign around your experts name to bring new listeners trick
• The Authority Leverage  process for leveraging a podcast after publishing it

Enjoy!

Post from: InternetMarketingSpeed.com - FREE Internet Business Podcast...

The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…

• Podcast Like a Professional – Tips from Dan Lyons
• Podcasting For Authority and Traffic
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Is Facebook Marketing Worthwhile?
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast

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The late advertising great David Ogilvy once remarked about Drayton Bird:

“he knows more about direct response marketing than anyone else in the world”

Drayton spoke at a conference I attended in Washington many years ago and his ideas are both simple and effective. Today we cover some valuable copywriting and marketing concepts. I have consumed every newsletter and course he has published:

Summary notes from this interview between Drayton Bird and James Schramko

• Drayton has been teaching direct response marketing for over 40 years to thousands of people
• He once worked for David Ogilvy (who is considered to be one of the greats of Copywriting)
• The most important element for your marketing is relevance not originality or creativity
• Most marketers do too little study

How do you Innovate?

• Stick with what works
• Study and adapt what has worked before
• Take existing elements and put them together in new and exciting ways
• Study any category you are working in very deeply

• Change is meaningless without testing
• If you change more than one thing you dont know what made the difference
• Testing is the bedrock in this business
• Test one or test all
• Test everything
• Is you are not testing you are going to fail
• Video works. Put it everywhere
• Nothing fails like success (avoid complacency)

How Do You Craft Guarantees?

• Be as generous with guarantees as you can possibly be
• Focus on the benefits rather than the features

• Focus on the customers problems (not yours)
• You will do better if you do the right things than make outrageous promises
• Explore every conceivable means of solving and communicating problems

Highly Recommended Resource

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Access the valuable brain of Drayton, and see how Drayton Writes a Sales page HERE 

I recommend you buy his workshop recordings because when you watch them and apply the lessons you can expect your business to improve substantially.

Post from: InternetMarketingSpeed.com - FREE Internet Business Podcast...

The Confessions Of Drayton Bird

• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast
• Building Relationships With Your Customers (with Alexi Neocleous)
• ‘Bondodog’ Reveals Gary Halbert Family Copywriting Secrets
• John Carlton Copywriting Interview
• Internet Marketing Secrets

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Check out these insights from my humble fan page and you will see that my recent continual posts are snowballing. I currently have less than 3000 fans however the reach is quite strong. I tend to post a few times a day and often from a portable device. Most of my audience find me I rarely post on other pages for overt marketing. I don’t drive paid traffic to Facebook and none of the ‘likes’ are fake.

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Click To See FULL Image

What topics are good?

• Inspirational work-life pictures and mantras
• Pictures that point out herd mentality that people can relate to
• Funny email extracts
• News that is related to the audience
• Impressive stats – screenshots that others aspire to
• Life shots – that show the real you
• Tips and techniques that are really useful
• New products under development

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Click To See FULL Image

Hot Tip

Use lots of original Pictures and screenshots since they are emotion filled!!  (Is it any wonder pinterest is so popular?)

Get to it!

Post from: InternetMarketingSpeed.com - FREE Internet Business Podcast...

Is Facebook Marketing Worthwhile?

• The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• How To Tame The Search Engine

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[warning: recording contains the occasional swear word]

Transcript of discussion between James Schramko & Noah Kagan from Appsumo

James here, in this podcast I’m talking to Noah Kagan who runs AppSumo, and he’s an interesting guy because he worked for Intel, Facebook and Microsoft. So tune in as I catch him having breakfast.

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Noah: Oi

James: It’s morning there eh.

Noah: Ah, yeah… I was like, my phone was like oh you have uh… like 9 o’clock, shit I was still eating breakfast. So how’s everything over there?

James: Ah, mate, things are going very well. We had like a 50% increase. Just in the last two (2) months, from January to now. So it’s been a good year.

Noah: Uh, 50% increase in what?

James: Sales revenue.

Noah: Oh, for your business?

James: Yeah

Noah: That’s awesome.

James: Yeah it is.

Noah: What are you uh – yeah it’s like I love it when it works out that way. What do you attribute it to?

James: I’m paying a lot more attention to the numbers… you know how you’ve got your number?

Noah: Yeah…

James: I’m putting a lot more attention on projections and digging into the data. Coz I’ve had a very low pressure system that’s not forced. So when I start tuning things I get very fast wins, and I have an amazing team.

Noah: That’s it, once you start focusing… I’m actually giving a speech tonight about focus and it’s like, even our own team, we had some issues with refocusing, it’s like, Wow we are getting the results we want. That’s kind of cool. So that’s great man.

James: What do you think your focus topic’s going to be focused around? Like, are you going to tell a story?

Noah:  Yeah I’m going to be telling a lot of different stories that have happened, in terms of focusing. So like, one of the bigger ones that are more recent for us is, I think everyone needs to start with an objective, and a specific number around that objective. You know, ours was always email and a lot of my speeches you always hear me, “oh email this, email that” and for five (5) months though, the past five (5) months we focused on email and we kept hitting our goal. The sad part though is that the business stayed the same. Which is very depressing coz you’re like oh I’m like focused, I’m hitting my metrics. And what we realized though is that that objective and that metric wasn’t the right thing to focus on. Because it wasn’t growing our business, so we actually refocused on number of paying customers per day. And that actually now, we just started really digging deep and focusing on that, and now we’re seeing results.

James:  Right. So, I was going to ask that, how do you know if your number is the right number because I think a lot of people focus on the wrong thing. Something else that I’ve noticed is a lot of the start-up type companies focus on growth, but I’m wondering if growth for the sake of growth is a good idea unless you’re Amazon, and you want to wait seven (7) years or so. And you’ve worked for that sort of company that was growth focused.

Noah: That’s a really good question. So I think there’re two types of people but I’m just generally more traditional. So I don’t think it makes sense to focus on growth or any of that till you know you have a business. And so depending on where you are. I mean you’re much further ahead than a lot of people. So you’re focus is, how do I scale what I do? How do I grow it? The people in the beginning I would say, like the Silicone Valley, I hate most of those people because they’re like; oh we’re going to monetize it later. I think that’s okay for them, but for me, I’m like, does this make a good business, if it’s a real business does it make money? So my first focus will be value that would make money. Number two (2) will be, maybe then I would think about what’s my number towards growth? So validation will probably be how much money I could make.

James: I want to challenge you on something that you mentioned. You said you’re kind of traditional. And on the surface though, you look like wacky, quirky, you’ve got funny pictures, crazy angles, I mean you’ve got a fat suit logo, so how do you carry that? Is it structured or do you just wing it?

Noah: It’s interesting, have you talked to people about AppSumo? There’s a lot of people… they don’t say, they’re like yeah, they say, I love AppSumo, and some people are like oh I love your branding, your copywriting. Honestly it’s just a by-product of what we’ve been doing. It’s not like an intentional, like we’re trying to have a brand, we haven’t really thought about that. It’s just kind of we act like ourselves, and we treat our customers right. And it works out where people think of us as we’re a pretty cool company.

James: So you must have a pretty loose structure for the team members able to take risks and extend themselves beyond the normal bureaucratic style company.

Noah: Are you recording this? This is good stuff.

James: Yeah I started recording and I just thought we’ll just roll with it since you’re eating breakfast. It’s pretty formal.

Noah: Yeah I’m eating my breakfast right now. As we talk. It’s interesting so I’m, there’s literally a David’s Skok from forentrepreneurs.com, I love him. I kind of basically marked what he said, but I basically think there’re three stages of a business. And this is answering your question about bureaucracy in the company. And in the beginning of the business you just try to validate it. You’re very hands-on you’re very day-to-day. You’re very micro. And then stage two (2) is like, now, how do I market this thing that I have validated? I have proved that some people like it. Now how do I get the word out? And then stage three (3) you’re like, alright, now I know how to get the word out. Now I’m going to go do it. And you take it to the moon, as fast as you can. And I think I’ve evolved in stage one (1) where I did everything. Like I literally did programming, sales, support, blahblahblah, janitor… poop cleaning. Stage two (2) was like, alright now I’m starting to hire people. And the people weren’t the best people but it’s starting to get the idea that alright now I’m moving away from the business. And I’m going to start letting them make their own decisions. Coz before in my other businesses before AppSumo, I’m much more of a tyrant. I was like, I’m going to do it my way because it’s always the right way, and just do exactly what I want. And then stage three (3) now where I think we’re at the beginning of is, we fire all the people from stage one (1) and two (2), stage three is you hire people that are not employee, they’re actually teamy. You know one of things I like looking at is, every week I come back, like let’s say I go away for a week. Let’s say I go to Australia. I go to Australia, and we party for a week. We go scuba diving, fun stuff. And then I come back. And then I look at the business and I say, is the business the same as when I left it or is it better? And so that’s the combination of it. That’s what I’m trying to do now. We hire the right people; empower them to make their own decisions and really let them know the company goal and what that is at a high level. Let them make their own stuff. I think some of this team are working at Microsoft.  Here’s the football field. Here’s you with the football, here’s the end zone, I’m kind of giving you the outline. I don’t care how you score. I don’t care if it’s a touch down or a football pass, whatever. You score, you figure it out. And you hire people that are good so they can figure it out. I’m actually trying to get better of even getting further away from the business. Mostly you kind of get to thinking about, what’s the highest level stuff that you can be doing, and definitely less micromanaging and micro checking in on people.

James: Do you go into the building everyday?

Noah: I do, unfortunately.

James: But don’t you control that?

Noah: What do you mean?

James: Well I mean it’s up to you isn’t it?

Noah: I think what’s interesting is the evolution of that. Where I’ve always run businesses remotely, and I hire people remotely. Finally with AppSumo we did some team outing, we did two of them in Austin. Whereas everyone will come fly in, will pay for it, we got a big house, we drank, we went on a boat, and one of the guys wore Speedos which was awkward. But I noticed when we were all together the output was higher, and the morale was better. And so I’m like, I wanted to take them seriously; I want to see how far we can take AppSumo and said, alright by October we’re all going to be in the same location. And so we worked remote and then we went to the same location. And when we’re on the same location I said alright I just want everyone to come Mondays and Thursdays. You know sometimes I don’t want to be in an office. Right, sometimes it’s nice outside, I want to work at a café, or I don’t want to work at all. You know I told the team, come Mondays and Thursdays, I’m very results driven, you get your stuffs accomplished, maybe even try to do more than that, I don’t care what you do. But as it turns out, the best people, they want to be around the others. And I actually want that as well. I enjoy being with the team, I enjoy, we’re working on our mission, I enjoy like being in the office. So, I’m actually in the office five days a week. Some days like Monday I was getting a little restless. I was like holy f@*& how do people search computers for this long. But for the most part it’s fun to be, like they’re like your greatest calling. And you could be in the room with other people that are excited to work on. You see that they’re really happy there. It’s just a great feeling to do all day. So yeah I go to the office five days a week. But I only ask them to go twice a week.

James:  I mean it’s funny hearing that because I imagined that coming from your corporate background, and you’ve worked in places like Facebook that, that would’ve been the default setting I was surprised to hear that you were virtual. Coz I run a virtual team, and the same as you, when I go and meet them and hang out for a week it is incredible what you can do face to face, but it’s not logistically ideal for us. So, that’s real interesting.

Noah: Well take some more seriously man, so like I worked at Intel, I hope I didn’t cut you off, I’ll ride shotgun, you can drive. Is that word used in Australia?

James: Yeah, well we got a lot of American TV so it’s fine, we know what you’re talking about.

Noah: Dude I watched the, High School High; you know that show from Australia? You know that guy was awesome. Anyway, so the big thing… oh ah I lost my trail of thought.

James: You were talking about getting together with the team. Taking it seriously and what you learned at Intel.

Noah: You know man, f*^$ Intel was like going to hell. Think about everyday you’re just like, you know I think there’s a really easy test to know if you like your job. How do you feel driving to work in the morning? You can do that one, or you can do Sunday, on Sunday how do you feel? Every Sunday when I worked at Intel, I was like, f*^$ its Monday tomorrow. And then AppSumo, I’m like, hey cool Monday! I’ll see everybody. Like I’m excited to be there. One thing we found out about putting everyone in the same room, in the same area is we take it more seriously. And we’re playing for real like yeah I think we could do well, you can do your own business but I would challenge anyone who want to make something significant like true, one company that has done it remotely. And even thirty seven singles that have thirty five people in a room in Chicago so I don’t buy that. And is there even one company that’s big from being remote, I don’t think so. Hopefully I’d be proven wrong.

James: Well that depends on what you call big.

Noah: That’s a fair point. I mean like, any company making over 25 million dollars a year.

James: Yup, well there you go. That’s a good metric so that listeners could pop a note when they think of one. That’s good. I’m certainly not at that level yet. I’m aiming for half that, that’s my next objective. How big is AppSumo? Just out of interest. Is that something that’s public knowledge?

Noah: We don’t really talk about the revenue, and I’ve thought about this a lot. I think one of the reasons I don’t is coz I don’t want people thinking that’s only what we’re about. Which is just the money. It’s like oh what’s your money number? It’s kind of a penis size question but, I think for me it’s more of like how many people are in your mailing list, how many people are affected. For the million now, I mean if you’re curious, it’s not really public but I’ll share it. Our metric and what I care about, I don’t care about anything else besides how many people are there that are paying us. I’m not going to share that number but that’s actually the metric that we have found that affected a lot of pieces in the business.

James:  That will be your cohort metric right? From all your lean start up stuff.

Noah: Yeah I mean, the one thing I talked about when I met you and generally it’s much easier to focus just on one thing. And do it really well. Coz you can tell the problem is people are having multiple things they’re trying to accomplish and then they get it done really shitty. One of my favourite stories James, and I’d love to share this, and I hate stories about Apple, but I’ll do it, an exception and so the CEO, Tim Cook, who has gone on stage with the investor meeting. I don’t know if you’ve heard this but, he’s on stage, and he’s got a table in front of him. it’s a table maybe about four to five feet wide. And at the table he has the Macbook air, the Mac Mini, the Desktop, an iPad and I think maybe one more. He said, “We’re the world’s most successful company by having all the products that you see on this table.” And I didn’t just f*^$in blew my mind when my friend told me. I said this quote like maybe ten times now. And I think the real take away was; well for myself was, you don’t have to do a lot of things, right, but just do a few things really well. If they can be the world’s most successful company with just like five or less than ten products, think about your own business.

James: That’s kind of a Warren Buffett philosophy too isn’t it.

Noah: What did he say?

James: Well he’s basically like a buy and hold; he’s got very minimal stock (diversity). He doesn’t like diversifications so much. Because I think he can spread his strengths too far. And that actually averages out and the wins. That’s one thing I’ve noticed. I actually made a few little notes about what I think you do well, and from the amount of people that I come into contact with. You’re quite rare in this. You’re actually quite the generalist. Coz I’ve heard you talk about research, I’ve heard you talk about sales copy, I’ve heard you talk about design, I know you’re a strategic, you definitely do testing, you’re very good at communicating, and networking, you definitely do outsourcing and team. Plus you have the data management side of things. The less is more, and your analytics. So where did you get all these skills from?

Noah: I have a very good answer for that. The short answer is actually from my parents a little bit. So my step father is like a programmer engineer, my real father was a sales person. He was an entrepreneur with his own copier business. So I kind of came out the bi-sexual… by-product of these two people. My career was like I’ve always mentioned I wanted to make my own business. I think a lot of people always say that and that’s how I felt too. And then I got excited about the internet. I was like oh my god I don’t have to have inventory, and I don’t deal with people in real life. And the different attributes just came out through experience. What I love about sharing my stuff is I’m hoping I’m saving people time and money. So they can skip ahead and get to the stuff that actually matters. So I did sales at OfferMax for two years, I did sales at Macy’s, I read a lot of books like Jeffrey Gitomer, an amazing author about sales. Chet Holmes, Ultimate Sales Machine. And I think a lot of it was like filling in where I needed it filled in. I do think if I did something it’s like getting it done and then maybe marketing. Well I learned programming because I was at Facebook. Well I took two years of programming at Berkley. But when I was at Facebook, I kept asking the developers, like hey can you get this done? Can you get this done? And they were like, no. I was like alright well I’m going to learn programming and start doing it myself. And you kind of just fill in the gaps where you need it. And I think for me that is what I ended up and a lot of it was also through failure and just experimentation. So with analytics, you always hear, oh install analytics, you need to track this shit. You know my previous business we tracked everything. And you know what we did with all that? Nothing. It was just really pretty. It was like oh look at this data this is so cool. But oh you couldn’t do shit with it. Fortunately my partner Chad was amazing. What we’ve done with AppSumo is that, and so that was a learning experience, and so with AppSumo we only tracked things that are actionable. If it’s not actionable, it is not tracked. And even though it’s cool, it’s like you would actually know what’s your retention number, I mean I don’t know, I don’t care. It’s like I can’t do shit with it. Or this is not our focus right now. I have a kind of mind-set now that I’m sort of like a composer where I got to go find the best musicians to make this really great song and I like the orchestration of it. So I just kind of filled the gaps for the things that I don’t know. And also realizing what I don’t want to know. Like I’m okay at programming but I’m at point where I don’t want to know. And there’s this, f*^$in annoying man, you know this is the only business when you go out there, so I’m going to learn these codes so I can… you’re like should you really use your time? Are you going to focus and dedicate yourself to be really great at that? Like the Apple store so just pick one. So I’d say mine will probably be marketing and sales, but I guess I just compliment that so I understand the parts of the business.

James: Yeah I recognize many of those traits because I think we have a lot of parallels.

Noah: Yeah you oversee your own business right?

James: Yeah, I have almost the mirror image, it’s in the family. I do think that probably a lot of the things that we do later on in life were instilled when we were kids.

Noah: What did your parents do?

James: Well my mum used to speak at schools for Red Cross and my dad was a chemical engineer, so he was like the scientific guy who has a huge general knowledge, and my mum was the communicator and very empathetic. You know helping people all the time. Solving problems.

Noah: That’s really cool.

James: Yes. She was like the most amazing marketer you could ever meet. Like she would go to a bunch of strangers and within minutes she’ll have rapport with all of them.

Noah: That is great.

James: So I’m just curious. I want to get your angle on risk reversal because that’s a big part of AppSumo, is that you know you’ve got this very generous refund policy. Do you ever get bothered by people putting in you know frivolous refund requests? Does it get under your skin or you just know that’s part of the business.

Noah: You’re hitting my soft spot. James, you’re hitting where it hurts.

James: Because you know, I have a certain stance on refunds. And so I look at that and I think I just wonder about that, I wonder how do you just ignore it? Do you get taken advantage of or is it, it really does increase sales so much more that it’s worth doing.

Noah:  So, there’s a book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely says it and I think it’s really fascinating. I think it’s that book. When you actually don’t have a refund policy, purchases that people make, they enjoy more. This is counter intuitive but the idea there is that, when you have to make a decision and you know it’s final, you’re going to accept that this is the best decision for you. When you have that open ended like return whenever, like Costco in America, you’re going to be like oh what the f*^$ I’m going to return It whenever or you’re like REI you know camping store you’ll be like oh I’ll return it whenever. But on the other hand that open and return policy theoretically should increase your conversion rates so that more will buy. And part of the problem now though is that those refund policies, everyone does a refund policy. Refunds forever! Refunds until the storm comes or until the reawakening of some famous person. I was going to say something religious but I don’t want to offend people. Anyway the point being is that you can do either way right. So the way it did bother me, what happened was, one guy I got an email Friday night, I’m out drinking with some friends, it was like eight PM, I got an email and it was like. Hey I’m returning two thousand dollars ($2000) worth of stuff because I just want to make my money back. He wants to make his money back from us. And my immediate reaction was like… what a b&%#h, right. And Derek Sivers had a great post one time where it’s like, it’s called signs. And in his post like they put up signs in restaurants and stores, and then one person messes it up but you shouldn’t ruin the 99% because the 1% sucked. So what I did was, I kind of pulled the top hundred returners on AppSumo and I looked at what was the outcome of that. Was it negative in terms of the overall profit or is it positive? And it was positive. And these are the top hundred, right, so like thousands of dollars. So it kind of hurts and I don’t know if they realize but we have to pay salaries, for the office and then for the servers, and we had to pay our partners. If it was an honest return I’d gladly return it. Like I actually like people returning things and I love returns. I love when you return if it ain’t working right. That’s fine. But I think others out there who take advantage of like they use all the products, they like take totally advantage of it. And then they return them. You know they have to live with that. And at the end of the day they net was still positive for us. But I think returns are a good chance to make a great experience to a lifetime customer. Because if you go and return something and the company stands by it and treat you well. “Oh cool yeah, just get anything you want to buy from us” and that’s how I feel about REI and Costco.  That’s why I’m ok with the return policy where we are today.

James: That’s a great answer. Okay I want to ask you one more slightly off the wall question. You must get a lot of people saying Noah’s doing well, he’s got AppSumo, I’m just going to come up with like AppClonesSumo. How do you feel about that and what sort of challenges have you had as a company protecting your space?

Noah: The two pieces of that, it’s always interesting about perception versus reality because I don’t really feel successful. Like after you make a certain amount of money, supposedly I think in America you make 60 – 75 thousand dollars for your salary. The amount of money above that isn’t really going to change how much you work or how you feel. Ones you get passed half a million or something like that. So, I’m always passing through and people are saying oh you’re successful and I’m like I guess… I don’t know. I think we each have our own internal barometer of what that looks like. So there’s a fair amount of competitors and I actually don’t see many real competitors. And the reason that is, is that it’s very easy to know what something wants. But I think the two pieces that are missing are one, the why, like why do you do it? And my why is very strong. Like my calling in life is to help people start their businesses, improve their careers. I didn’t notice until this year that I always try to get people that I hardly know into their jobs that they really want to be doing. Even if they work for someone else but if that’s what they really want, I love that. That makes my drive curves very strong, well as someone else at the first speed bump they quit. The second thing is like; frankly we take it more seriously. There have been a lot of competitors. Some are still around, some are doing okay and some are failing. We play for keeps and I think a lot of your people are like that. They’re there to make money, and they try it out and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work or it does work a little bit and they’re not just going to stick with it and keep going. And then third, we’re not a daily deal, we’re not a rip on a block. We’re actually a store for professionals. So we’re trying to be this destination, like the massive thing for the world. I think people have different perception of what they’re doing. Most of our competitors they’re like oh we’re daily deals for like ever. In fact the daily deals stuff is just a medium. That’s just a medium of sale. That’s just how you sell whatever your business is. And I think they kind of miss that which affects their business. Yeah so, I actually wish we had more competition. I compete will people talking on the street. They don’t even know they’re listening to me, I just walk pass them. Yeah that’s really awkward. I just can’t help myself.

James: Winning (laugh)

Noah: No seriously, even when I’m on the stairs, or I’m jogging, I pick one person and I’m like I’m going to spew you. And so I actually prefer that there are more people playing really hard to get this. And I think it’ll push us to be a lot better. Coz there isn’t as much intense direct pressure on it right now. Like when I was at Facebook, I swear to god we talk about MySpace a lot. We’re like look at those A$$holes in Los Angeles, they’re f*^#in killing us. We got to push harder. I mean if it wasn’t for MySpace we wouldn’t have been as big. Right?

James: Yeah well you know when I was working with Mercedes-Benz; every second word was BMW in the corporate meetings. So they’re just obsessed with each other.

Noah: You’re exactly right. That’s exactly the point.

James: And I was watching Ed and Sander video and he was obsessed with beating LA and Pros that was it. That was his sole mission. It was just to be number one.

Noah: Yeah and you know I’ve learned about myself and I don’t know about other listeners and yourself too James is that I just work really well with goals. Right, so it’s a lot easier if you’re like we’re going to be number one. Being number one, well you can look at it both ways but I think it’s the worse position to be in. Coz all you can do is go down. When you’re number two you’ve got nothing to lose, you can go as crazy as you want. And you know exactly what number one is doing and what has worked and has not. When you’re number one, I don’t think people realize this but it’s very easy to get complacent. It’s very easy to be like, hey we’re a billion dollar company with a billion people. Let’s just take it easy. And I think the companies that stay on top are the companies that keep revolving and so forth. And so I think being number one is much harder.

James: Okay, I’m going to ask you one last question.

Noah: Man, those are good questions dude. You could say I liked it.

James: Okay, well you should like this one. If you’re in a burrito bar, do you get the same burrito because you know it’s awesome or do you try different ones at the risk that it might not be as good but you get to try or you may find a better one?

Noah:  So there’s a book that I would encourage all your listeners to stop and go buy. It’s called Paradox of Choice. And Paradox of Choice is really fascinating because the author says whenever you look at more options generally your happiness goes down. And I fully agree with that. And so what the author does is when he goes to a restaurant he starts at the top of the menu for entrees, goes down finds something he likes and then stops. He doesn’t look at a lot of the options. He just picks it and goes on.  And then every time he goes to that restaurant he just gets the same dish. Coz then he doesn’t have oh should I get something better? So I get the same thing every time at the same places that I go to. You know I’m open to trying new things but what I found out is that I know it’s good, I enjoy it, it’s not like it could get any worse. It’s like getting married. Like there probably is a hotter woman out there, but I love my wife. I’m not married… I’m single.

James: (laugh) That is random. Your fake wife… Oh I love it.

Noah: Yeah, but you get the point. It’s marriage. It’s not like you can never try, well if you’re married you shouldn’t be trying new girls unless you’re open. But yeah when I go to certain restaurants it just reduces the thinking that I have to put into it so I can put it into other things. So if I go to Taco Bell, I always get Cowboy Tacos and then maybe I’ll try one new one. But I always got to have the same dish. I did a diet ones, fruits and vegetables and water for three weeks. To make a long story short, one of the greatest thing about it was I didn’t have to think about food, because every day I almost always have the same thing. And I don’t know it’s kind of freeing when you don’t have that kind of pressure and you can put your mind into some other activity. So if I go and read about it, if it’s new, I’m on a health kit lately so I’ll get beans, broth and chicken. That’s pretty much what I would just get now. And I actually don’t get the tortillas as much as I used to.

James: Nice, well there you go. Well thanks for sharing breakfast with us today. And also I want to let you know that I ended up making a few purchases after you gave me that RSS feed. So that has been working out pretty well for the both of us.

Noah: Well you see, that’s actually what differentiates you from others James, is that you came and you said you know I don’t subscribe and f*^@ AppSumo and all that mean things and stuff. But you said hey if I had an RSS feed and you know. And I think every person miss that every single customer is valuable and that, well not all of them, you can fire some of them like we did that to the guy who returned $2000 worth of products. But I don’t think people are hungry enough these days. And what I mean by that is a lot like you know we have hungry people here and there and like blahblahblah. But I still give a shit about you. And to me it’s like each individual person and that makes a difference. And I feel that everybody who’s running their own business needs to say, let me make one of my customers happy today, or if you need to meet one of them, I’d make sure that I treat you well. I feel that so many people just let that slide.

James: Well I think that was your first question, why did I unsubscribe coz I commented that I really liked the unsubscribe picture on your thing. It’s like my welcoming line. Good day. (laugh) You asked why and then you solved it. And it’s definitely made you some money. Hopefully more people get that RSS feed. That becomes worthwhile for you to do but you know I certainly talk about it on every occasion and I have two podcasts in them. And I have a couple of thousand members in my community who are going to find out about AppSumo. So it’s working well.

Noah: What’s  your biggest challenge? If there anything about the listeners that I can help you with I’d appreciate that. Awesome.

James: I think like every business, I’m the biggest constraint in my business. We’ve got a big team now and we’re growing rapidly. I’m pretty good at solving my own problems. Do you know I’ve got a mirror and I think that’s actually helped me more than anything else asking the big questions of myself. Just by talking to me today, you’ve really helped me because I’m able to do what I do which is help all of my listeners to get some value. We don’t charge for podcast course. But if they can implement ideas then that actually helps them become my customers. So I guess it’s a good equation.

Noah: Yeah man, I’ve actually yesterday signed up for an executive coach. I remember at Facebook Mark had a coach and I always thought that he was kind of a douche.  I was like why do you need a coach? Like we’re smart and we can do everything. I think there’s a lot to be said about when you go work out and you have a trainer, when you play basketball you have a coach. So I’m open to try something new so if we have another podcast later I’ll tell you all about that.

James: I’d love to do another podcast. So I’m going to let you go coz you’ve probably got stuff to do. Some fat suits to strap on and some deals to help entrepreneurs with. Well it’s awesome to catch up now and then. Thanks Noah.

Noah: Be well James.

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Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast

• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• Building Relationships With Your Customers (with Alexi Neocleous)
• Business Growth Planning
• Internet Marketing Is Changing… A Revealing Interview With Ed Dale

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A few months ago I recorded some highlights from the first SilverCircle business mastermind intensive workshop. This month I invite my friend and participant Steve Ovens back to discuss the highlights from the second workshop.

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Steve O sharing tips with SilverCircle Intensive members

Highlights in this business focused podcast:

• How to get 11% more conversions from your sales funnel
• A rare way to track squeeze page conversions
• The special built-in  Optimizepress feature that increases sales
• How to create automation rules for segmenting autoresponder emails
• A / B Split test results from my recent product launch
• How to get more than 50% conversions for new products you release
• The secret to knowing which one of your segments is the most powerful
• How to massively expand your available market
• Why your market dictates your medium (where you can sell your product)
• The definition of selling
• The phases of a sales process and actual words you can use to boost conversions
• The equation that helps you charge higher prices
• Why it is important to increase authority and how to do it
• How to lead people to get autonomy and growth in your business
• The unavoidable truth about providing services and how to deal with it
• How to set core values properly

I hope you enjoyed this episode, please comment below or share with your friends.

[These small group workshops are occasionally available to current SilverCircle members]

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Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast
• Wealthification Review – Successful Business Strategy Training with James Schramko
• All about Apps
• Success Mindset Strategies with Ed Okeefe

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This video was created for SEO customers in light of the recent Google webmaster guideline updates and it is relevant to all Internet marketing businesses. The best way to tame the search engine is to feed it what it wants:

These are my top tips for ranking well now:

• Place really up–to-date pages, posts, images and videos on your website.
• Avoid spun content. Synonyms are more accurate now. Write better content.
• Include sharing icons such as Google +1 buttons, FB like, Pinit, Retweet on your site.
• Make sure you encourage social users to share content and announce your content on social sites.
• Create news worthy press releases often.
• Produce videos and load them to Youtube then embed them everywhere like your site and Facebook.
• Mix up the links coming to your site with different anchor text and point to inner (deep) pages.
• Put a picture or video per post to increase the usefulness.
• Infographics and original pictures are really popular. Use them!
• Ensure you post your great content to many different websites not just one place…

Do you need help with this stuff?  SEO Partner is my company and we do it for you.

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How To Tame The Search Engine

• How To Start An Internet Business
• The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Is Facebook Marketing Worthwhile?
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast

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The online world is paying attention to Pinterest. Pinterest is growing fast. How fast? See this infographic:

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Are you using Pinterest yet?

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Pinterest Infographic Reveals Stunning Growth

• Why Asset Control Matters To Internet Marketers
• Is the iPhone the greatest tool EVER for Internet Marketers?
• Are you Syndicating Your Content via RSS?
• Essential Accounts for Internet Marketers
• 74.2% Opt-in Sales Page Review

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SEO is a great traffic source when done right. Some search ranking techniques still work today as well as they ever have. There are always changes going on and importantly you need to be aware of them and make adjustments as social media signals become more important. Blog networks have been targeted heavily for having low quality posts and being paid links.

Discover why you need to own the racecourse in this traffic training Video. Watch as James Schramko outlines some very powerful RSS to PDF and Press Release strategies for distributing your content further (and ethically).

Beyond SEO you can go way deeper into increasing your conversions and scaling up with more traffic channels. Do not rely on any one source of traffic.

Did you enjoy this video?

If so, please share the social love with a ‘like’, +1 and Retweet!

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Search Engine Optimization, Traffic and Conversions With James Schramko

• Read more...

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Wealthification is my new business training course. Digitally delivered to you via an online membership, the fresh content is designed for business owners and people looking to get a business and take it to a new profit level. The course is going to upset many high priced course sellers.

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What do you get for your one time investment in Wealthification?

• You get access to at least nine short sharp content packed streaming business growth video modules
• Downloadable MP4 versions of each video to play on your smart phone
• MP3 audio from each module for listening on the move
• Full word for word + images PDF transcriptions to read
• Also there is an XLS spreadsheet for you to chart your profit ratios and tune your business
• The content totals aprox 1 hour and 40 minutes.
• More bonuses will be added later

Here are snippets from some of the modules:

Is there an affiliate program?

Yes join here if you have a business crowd and you want to flex your affiliate marketing muscles.

Action Step:

 Watch the first full module and download the PDF transcription for that module here: Business Training

Recommended:

There is a reason why I dont send you affiliate ‘blasts’ all the time. Most products on the market truly suck. I have created quality coaching services to grow your business for real. If you are fed up with chasing bright shiny objects and being ‘hustled’ then perhaps you are ready for some training with integrity:

For weekly business masterminding apply to join James Schramko’s seriously high level SilverCircle

For Internet Business coaching join James Schramko’s very affordable Internet Business Coaching FastWebFormula

I am looking forward to building a strong online business with you. 

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Wealthification Review – Successful Business Strategy Training with James Schramko

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast
• Success Mindset Strategies with Ed Okeefe
• Applying a Business Plan Design
• The Best Internet Marketing Tools

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A recent study in the U.S. shows the number of adults that own e-book readers has jumped from 10% to 19% over the mid-December up to early January 2012. The holiday season may have something to with that, but the numbers are there nonetheless.
source

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It’s a huge business nowadays. Take Amazon.com

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Hachette Book Group reports a 130% increase in eBooks and audiobooks sales for 2011 which made up for 22% of the company’s overall revenue for that year. Other bookstores are reporting similar results.

Hardcover and paperback sales are said to have dropped, a fact that many print book publishers somewhat resent. However, there is no stopping this advance in technology – we must adapt if we are to run profitable businesses in the years to come.

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I have a library and a large collection of books at home. I have only recently switched to the Kindle and I am sold. It is very practical, especially during travel.

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Expect e-Reader numbers to further increase with devices like the new Kindle Fire

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I am looking to publish some of my own work on the Kindle in the coming months. From a business perspective, publishing eBooks is far more cost-efficient, not to mention you can have an almost infinite amount of titles and never run out of stock. Your products are accessible to anyone around the world equipped with an e-reader or any other supported devices. Delivery is instantaneous. I also expect kids and schools will really drive this into the education system.

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People read MORE often when they buy kindles

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eBook, Amazon Kindle & E-Reader Market Growing Dramatically

• The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Is Facebook Marketing Worthwhile?
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2

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Steve O rejoins James Schramko for an Internet business discussion revolving around the SilverCircle Intensive workshop and the key highlights. We cover the advanced elements that cause rapid success when you have these things working correctly in your internet business.

Highlights in this episode

- Doubling your profit in three months
- The importance of measuring your numbers with a spreadsheet
- How to tell what is causing your success
- What foundation steps should you structure your online business with
- The key metrics you need to know to work out your hourly rate
- The super power of ‘veneering’
- Managing a high performance team

Post your comments below

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Advanced Internet Business Podcast

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• Internet Business Process Optimization
• Why Build An Internet Business?
• Internet Business: How to avoid the pitfalls!
• Wealthification Review – Successful Business Strategy Training with James Schramko

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Apps are popular so James schramko interviews Software Integrations expert Steve “O” (Steve Ovens) about ‘apps (and other geeky stuff like ‘gyroscopic’).

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Steve Ovens was a software developer in Silicon Valley when the first tech boom occurred. Will it happen again?
Listen in for our discussion surrounding IPads, iPhones, Androids, Apps, Games, User behaviour and more. Enjoy!

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All about Apps

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast
• Is the iPhone the greatest tool EVER for Internet Marketers?
• The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird

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Some marketers are happy with 5% email broadcast open rates and others achieve 25% or much higher. The difference? The relationship with the list according to copywriter and conversions expert Alexi Neocleous. Should you hammer your lists with up-sells and down-sells? Or work on the lifetime value of the customers instead? – Watch this short video:

This video is an extract from James Schramko’s FastWebFormula

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Building Relationships With Your Customers (with Alexi Neocleous)

• Internet Marketing Secrets
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Noah Kagan And James Schramko Discuss Appsumo.com And Related Internet Business Ventures During Breakfast
• Alexi Neocleous Discusses How To Have Only The Best Customers Coming To You Ready To Buy What You Sell
• Download My Fast Web Formula Internet Training for FREE

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When you are observing Internet Marketing success you often only see the surface. You don’t see the behind the scenes effort and functions that went into that success. Ed O’Keefe explains how to accelerate your own business results by devouring everything from the best source:

This was one of the videos from James Schramko’s FastWebFormula Internet Business membership

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Success Mindset Strategies with Ed Okeefe

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast – Part 2
• Wealthification Review – Successful Business Strategy Training with James Schramko
• Advanced Internet Business Podcast
• Applying a Business Plan Design
• The Best Internet Marketing Tools

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When you have a great core strength for your business you can wrap a different outer layer over the top of it to appeal to different markets. James Schramko coined the expression ‘veneering’ to make this powerful business strategy easy to understand:

Get access to all the amazing FastWebFormula information here

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Veneering Core Business Units for Increasing Asset Value

• Advanced Internet Business Podcast
• Business Growth Planning
• The Ugly Truth About Podcasting – A Behind The Scenes Look At What Really Goes On…
• The Confessions Of Drayton Bird
• Is Facebook Marketing Worthwhile?