Jason Hartman is joined by Marc Ostrofsky, bestselling author of Get Rich Click!, to talk about making money on the internet with the right knowledge and timing. Marc says domain names and websites are real estate, comparable to buying a piece of land and building on it. He explains how to find good names, how to get started with little to no money through affiliate marketing, outsourcing parts of a business, and using social media sites to make money. He also talks about ways to save money online by taking advantage of technology. Marc explains how reverse e-commerce works, the benefits of crowd sourcing, defines pay-per-action, shares a bit about SEO, and more.
Marc Ostrofsky is a professional speaker, consultant, venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur. Known as a “Technology Wildcatter,” he founded the Prepaid Phone Card industry and was an early pioneer in the Voice Mail Industry, Pay Phone Industry, Prepaid Cellular Market and other deregulated telecommunications markets. He created numerous magazines, trade shows and market research studies and later sold those firms for $50 Million+. He is one of the few keynote speakers and authors that actually owns a portfolio of highly profitable online business ventures. His current Internet companies generate $75 Million+ annually and include Blinds.com, CuffLinks.com, SummerCamps.com, eTickets.com, MutualFunds.com, Photographer.com, Consulting.com, TechToys.com, BeautyProducts.com, Bachelor.com and others. He has been quoted in over 1000 media outlets including ABC’s 20/20, The Today Show, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today,CNN, FORBES and Inc. Magazine. His firms have won countless business awards including the Inc. 500 and the Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award.
Marc is one of the leading experts on making money online and teaches businesses how to compete effectively in the new digital world. He is known for selling the domain name Business.com for $7.5 million which landed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive domain name ever sold. He then invested in Business.com which later sold for $345 Million. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a major in Marketing. Marc and his wife live in Houston with their five teenage daughters and two dogs.
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Jason Hartman: My pleasure to welcome Marc Ostrofsky to the show. He is a professional speaker, a consultant, a venture capitalist and a serial entrepreneur and he has a Guinness Book of World Record holder. You’ve probably heard about him. He has made lots and lots of media appearances and in fact, over 1000 of them including The Today Show, 20/20, CNN, FORBES, Inc. Magazine, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times. He won the Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award. And wow! What a resume this guy has. You know, several years ago you may have heard about the domain name Business.com and today we are going to talk a little bit about domain names as real-estate as internet real-estate. So, without further due, Marc, welcome from Houston. How are you?
Marc: I am doing great. How are you, sir?
Jason Hartman: Good, good. Great to have you on the show. I love your book. I started reading it at about three weeks ago. It is entitled, Get Rich Click! And it is the ultimate guide to making money on the internet. So, it is great to have you here. Maybe we will start off, since I have such a background in real-estate market and we will talk about domain names and how they are really internet real-estate.
Marc: Yeah, I’ve always looked at domain names as the real-estate of the internet. If you think about a domain name, what it is is nothing more than a piece of empty land and when you have a good piece of empty land, you will look for its highest and best use and then build upon that. So, in the real-estate world, you know, if it’s an empty piece of land, you could put cars on it while you are thinking about what you want to do and then build a single family house or a large house or an apartment complex or a skyscraper. On the internet, it’s really no different except there is a whole lot less moving parts and a whole lot more upside, but not as much leverage that is the banks can typically not loan you the money like they will in real-estate because it is not their niche. And it gets really interesting that you can build a small website, you can build a large website or you can let it sit there and get money from people like Google who will send you a check every month for just sending them the traffic that you are not monetizing in other ways.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, the opportunities are pretty amazing. So, maybe first tell us the story of Business.com, I mean, your ROI on that was almost infinity. [Laughter] Great job. What happened there?
Marc: Well, I bought business. – back in the early days I bought a number of domain names when they were $70 including e-business and e many other subjects. IBM is running a campaign at that time and it worked for me. So, I started buying a bunch of domain names, e-research and e-real-estate and e-real – e everything. But I really wanted the name Business.com because if you looked and really thought about it, there were four markets. For the internet, in my opinion, they were news, weather, sports and business, like every newspaper. So, I went and contacted the guy who owned Business.com and cut a deal to buy that domain from him for $75,000. The day before I was to buy it, he upped it to $150,000. And he thought he’s really taken me to the cleaners and he had at that moment, so, but I paid it begrudgingly. And as soon as we sold it for seven and a half million he was the first one I e-mailed to let him know that the name had been sold and sent him a copy of the press release.
Jason Hartman: Well, I am sure he was pretty bummed about that, huh [laughter]?
Marc: You know what? I wouldn’t have [unintelligible 6:16] in his face had he not been a jerk to begin with and done what he did to me. But people will be people and then, you know, they squeeze what they can out of people if not how I played, but it’s how he played.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, yeah, now I hear you. Well, the thing is though, I mean, I have been a real-estate investor for many years, I know you’ve done a lot of real-estate deals too, but I like real-estate because, you know, I invest for cash rather than speculation. When you are doing domain names, you know, if you buy them direct they are super cheap to buy, but if you buy them and you pay a premium, if you buy a premium domain name, you know, they can be really expensive as Business.com was. At that time, how did you know, you know, you were a speculator, now you owned Blinds.com as well and CuffLinks.com, you’ve got lots of domain names, but really your – it’s a guessing game, isn’t it, Marc?
Marc: Yeah, it’s just like real-estate. You use the statistics and the analytics to give you an idea of what it’s worth, but if you know there is a shopping center going down the street or a major street going through the front of your house and they are going to need part of the land, there are whole kind of things you can speculate on, but you have more information than the next guy. My only information was just that knowledge and I knew that the internet was something big, I didn’t know what, but I knew these names could be the [unintelligible 7:36]. And what I wanted was to start a magazine or a trade show called Business.com, have it do business on the Internet, because there are two ways to do business. You either do it online or offline. These days you almost have to do both. So, the offline people have to use the Internet in most of their businesses, but the internet people do not have to go offline, which makes it really interesting so that name and that mind, M-I-N-D share are very very important in creating a website that has value, but if I am against you and you are selling abcblinds.com and I am selling off of blinds.com, my guess is I am going to get more type-in traffic than you are, which has inherent value on a per click basis, which is proven.
Jason Hartman: Well, and if the domain name contains the key words, you know, you give more search engine traffic as well, so it is good both ways but type-in traffic certainly. And what you mean is people that are directly the name into the browser guessing that something they want is going to be there and you know, with a name as generic as Business.com or Blinds.com, certainly people will do that. So, good stuff. Well, your book really covers Marc, so many areas of Internet marketing and the ways to profit online. Let’s talk about some others, there is affiliate marketing, there is just all kinds of stuff, you take it where you want to go.
Marc: Well, the book, let me clarify something, it’s Get Rich Click!, C-L-I-C-K, unfortunately people hear quick, Q-U-I-C-K. It’s not quick. It’s called Get Rich Click! and it’s nothing but fun and it’s fun and it’s different but that meat of the book and what made it the New York Times best-seller, six times in a row was the meat inside the book. We talk about hundreds and hundreds of ways as you are finding that anyone who is interested in making money can understand whether it is making money on eBay or using Guru and Elance to outsource products that you have or you are a graphic artist and you take a job and instead of doing the work you put it on 99designs.com, pay someone $250 to give you 50 logos, you take those to the client and then you sell the client on the final choice and still charge the client your normal $950 fee. You just found a way to outsource the major part of that work in your business. And there are so many ways to make money. The big ways that you and I talked about to bring up to your listeners start with affiliate marketing, which is simply put anyone who wants to sell a product can sell it direct on the Internet, but there are other people who can sell it on their websites and you can give them a commission every time they make a sale. If they don’t make a sale, you owe them nothing, which is a wonderful way to do business. So, having an affiliate marketing program and tying with a company like Commission Junction, which is cj.com, you can have an affiliate program out there and 500 people are selling your product instead of just you. That’s a brilliant way to that people are making a lot of money.
Jason Hartman: It’s interesting Marc because what you said with like the 99designs example, you know, and I have used that website to create logos for my different shows and so forth and originally in the sort of the fist round of the Internet in the late 90s, the thing everybody was saying then is the Internet is disintermediating a lot of businesses, you know, disintermediation, I heard that word constantly. And now, it’s actually creating more intermediaries in a way because someone can go, graphic designers sort of doing the work themselves, they can crowd source that work with a brilliant idea like 99designs and get designers from all over the world to submit their ideas and then even take those ideas and build off of them maybe and add their own tweaks and their own ideas to it. It’s just kind of interesting conceptually how that shift is, it’s going both ways at the same time, isn’t it?
Marc: It is. It is, I mean, that’s what happens with the new technology that has so many functionality parts that people don’t understand it. I got in early when the voicemail industry started and made a lot of money in that business because people didn’t understand the power of the medium and my job was to explain all the different ways to use voice technology. This is the same way. Yes, it has a lot of – it’s very powerful, so the porn industry and other people who want to take advantage jump in because there is a lot of confusion and there is a lot of money being made at different levels, but the bottom line is when you wipe away all the bad stuff, there is an awful lot of good stuff left and using a site like 99designs, which is crowd sourcing for artists, so if you need a logo or a letterhead or a business identification product or even a website design, typically you go to an artist, they would charge you $995, they will give you three or four examples of a logo, you pick one and they fill fix it up and hand it to you. Now, you go to 99designs, that’s a 9 and a 9 and the word designs and you post the contest, the contest runs to get you a winner and you only pick the one you like and if you don’t like any of them, you don’t even have to give the money away, which I did it for the cover of my book and got 700 responses. So, I now get to choose from 700 ideas versus four ideas for the same money. And people respond from all over the world, not just the person who you happened to know who happens to say they are graphic artists.
Jason Hartman: Right, pretty amazing stuff.
Marc: Very clever and crowd sourcing is another wonderful business model that the Internet brings to the table which wasn’t around before it.
Jason Hartman: Sure, sure. We are going to talk more about making money online. Well, you know, one of the things you also talk about is some easy things that people can do right now to start saving money online. Any thoughts there?
Marc: Well, the example we just gave, 99designs is a good example. Understanding what crowd sourcing is, outsourcing things that you normally wouldn’t think to do. For instance, look at a website called Guru, G-U-R-U.com or Elance. Most small entrepreneurs know what those two sites are because instead of hiring staff and having a sacred assistant and having a full-time artist or a full-time person who does something else in your organization, they go to these two sites and they find people to outsource the projects to so they don’t have to pay full-time expenses. They can get better people committed to getting the job done and handing it to you and going away versus having to manage those people every day, week, month and year and paying all the exuberant fees we have to pay to these people these days.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, I think the government is having a really tough time dealing with the new economy in that sense and you know, they have done it to us. I mean, we as entrepreneurs are constantly asking ourselves, how can we save money, how can we make our companies more efficient? And the cost of static labor and people talking around the water cooler is just, you know, and paying for an office and dealing with office politics and all that stuff, you just don’t need to do it anymore, very success entrepreneurs nowadays have virtual companies that they have no office. They don’t have all of those restrictions and they can do their business from anywhere on Planet Earth. And it is truly amazing, you know, I first really realized that Marc, when I was in Estonia in Eastern Europe a few years back and I uploaded one of my podcasts from a coffee shop in Estonia and I thought, I can really live anywhere, I am free. It’s the Tim [unintelligible 15:23] concept. And combined with the specifics that you talk about in Get Rich Click!, very powerful stuff. Very powerful stuff indeed.
Marc: No, it’s absolutely true. My friend is one of the top talk show – radio talk show guy here in Houston and I taught him, you don’t have to live here. And he didn’t believe me and I said, “You don’t have to live here. You can do your show traveling anywhere in the world and the radio industry makes the gizmo that allows him to broadcast from wherever he is in clear hi-def.” And he did it and now he literally is not tied to going into the office, if he wants to travel or not, he does it from wherever he is. That’s exactly why Get Rick Click! was written. In the whole book it’s filled with examples. Here’s one of my favorite examples. I stand next to the guy in the first class who does the audio engineering for IMAX theaters and he creates the music behind the videos or the movies if you will. And he said for years he has been in-charge and going to the LA Philharmonic, hiring them, which is a unionized scenario that cost him – I’m going to guess the number, but it’s something like 40 or 50 people who are using their instruments at so much per hour at a minimum so hours at a minimum so many days. So, one audio score might cost him $70,000. Now, he outsources that over the water to another country, uses their Philharmonic, pays no special fees, and instead of going to the facility overseas he does it overstate because he said, I am really been able to hear it and I don’t need to see it, it’s kind of like the TV show right now. They don’t need to look at them to see if they are good. They want to hear them. So, he lowered his cost by 90%. He’s now doing the same thing for 7,000 that he was charging 70 and he took his price down to 50, so it look like he saved all this money when in fact he is really making four times what he used to make.
Jason Hartman: You know Marc, the moral of that story, it is so true it’s happening all over the place. Governments have taxed themselves out of meaning. They are just overtaxing and over-regulating people. Unions have priced themselves out of existence and the highly paid, overpaid employees with big fat bureaucratic jobs have priced themselves out of existence too. And I’ll tell you folks the world is changing fast and you’ve got to keep up with this, but on the other hand, entrepreneurs and info publishers and online marketers, they have the power of this leverage that it’s such a phenomenal time in which to be living, isn’t it?
Marc: It is, you know, the Internet is a real game changer and people that run towards what they are afraid of and understand that they don’t know it so that they can bring in people who do know it are the ones who are winning the game. And then that’s what this book is all about. You don’t have to know all this stuff. I don’t know all of this stuff, but I know who to turn to for the answers. So, I am one who interprets the story, does as much of it as I can, just like you have multiple businesses and incomes, I do the same thing and out of a bunch of Internet companies I don’t like moving parts, I try and manage it with other people sharing in the wealth, but we have very small infrastructures whenever we can so at our company Blinds, we now have over a 120 people, which is hard to believe, but a normal company of this size would have had two or three hundred people because all those people do are take orders, handle customer service and run the website. Everything else, the creation of the Blinds, the physical asset is done third-party outsource drop ship. We don’t own any Blinds at Blinds.com and we are killing it. We do $18 million this year.
Jason Hartman: That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. You know, in Chapter 2 you talk about e-commerce, but what’s most interesting is reverse e-commerce: selling it first and then buying it and you talk about like seven different business models. Can you give us a little overview of that?
Marc: Sure. We came up with the term reverse e-commerce because the reality is you can make money with no money. So, to explain that it’s exactly the one I just mentioned which is Blinds. I figured it out we were doing it, but it didn’t hit me until someone said to me, “Why can’t you take that subject and kind of break it down into its components for the smaller player?” So, here’s how you make money with no money. If you need to go get a pen, get one or stop the tape because this one you are going to want to write down. Here’s how it works. You find something you believe other people will buy. It can be sunglasses, it can be pens, it can be a car, it can be a book. Anything you think they want to buy that you can get at a better price than the next guy. In Houston we have a street called Harwin, which is all of the importers. In San Francisco they have, in New York they have, in Los Angeles they have. All these cities have importers that are on certain part of this city and you can go to those areas and find 50 products for the price of 4, I mean, it is ridiculous when you buy them in quantity. So, what you do? You take a picture of these items, you upload them to eBay or any other site that you can sell them on, you put a price on them that is the guaranteed profit for you at a minimum price, you sell it, you collect the money, then you go buy the product and ship it. In the world of the Internet just like Blinds. Com, we don’t own any Blinds. We take the order, it’s a custom order, we get their money, we strip their money, we then send the order electronically the very moment it comes in to the manufacturer who makes it one at a time and drop ships it directly to the consumer.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, just in time delivery. What do you mean you strip their money? What does that money?
Marc: Well, I mean, we take their money off their credit card. That’s our business is collecting money for an order, but we don’t pay the manufacturer for 30 days, so we have the money, we have the flow, we send the order to them, they drop ship it directly to the client, we have no warehouse, no product, no inventory, none. We don’t have to deal with that. And if someone comes in with a better price and a better plan and strategy, we can very easily test them by giving them 10 orders out of our 1000 orders to see how well they do and slowly migrate over to the next supplier that might be bigger, better, faster, quicker, smarter than the one we are using and it’s no problem, it’s very easy to do.
Jason Hartman: Marc, that’s so interesting that you mentioned that because my real-estate investment company, I didn’t realize it until you just told me that. That’s pretty much the business model we have. So, that’s [laughter] fantastic. I mean, you know, we change suppliers all the time, you know, we go with the best suppliers so the clients gets the best deal and the one who keeps their promises the best and that’s just great to be so agile and to be virtual and – whereas most people, I don’t know it’s changing fortunately, but so many people I will say think of it as though if I want to sell Blinds, I got to go get a warehouse, I got to go get some guys to make them kind of import them to try and have inventories sitting here costing me money rather than being a just-in-time supplier in a nimble, virtual e-Commerce or reverse e-Commerce business. It’s a great business model. Fantastic.
Marc: Well, it is and it’s – let’s just say it’s new to our world and it’s come up in the last few years because there is a need to push down our expenses and find every way possible to spread those numbers and that’s what happened and in the world of the Internet so much is already being disintermediated, this is just one more item.
Jason Hartman: One of the keys though is getting traffic, getting eyeballs, getting customers. Talk to us a little bit about advertising and paying per action and search engine optimization, you know, that’s not the holy grail and the interesting thing about it Marc, is it’s just not an exact science. It seems like it’s an art and the science.
Marc: Well, I mean, you are asking and answering, you are correct. You can’t open shop and sit there on a street corner and only sell the people that are driving by from left to right. You got to sell the ones going left to right, going right to left, sending you a fax, sending you an e-mail, picking up the cellphone, walking out of the street, coming at you from above and below. You can’t just do one type of sales and expect to make it anymore. So, online at least you have the benefit of not having a physical inventory or a physical presence or all the overhead associated with having a store mall and the people and the overhead and the insurance and all the baloney that goes with that. You click your money into a great website with a great customer service back end and good delivery and that’s what people are looking for at this point. And they come to expect that and you have to, you know, keeping up with the jobs, but you have eliminated online so many expenses that the legacy systems have and legacy systems is the term that is killing business today that’s been around for 50 years. My dad is a business professor and taught me, “Son, if you keep doing what you have always doing, you keep getting what you’ve always gotten.” We all have heard that, but that’s not true anymore. The reality is with the Internet and that’s why I wrote this book, if you keep doing what you’ve always doing, you are going to disappear because someone else is going to do it better, faster, quicker, smarter and more efficient than you and you are just going to dwindle until you are not there anymore and you don’t matter. So, that’s the first time you can ever say that in my business lifetime because there is that much change happening that quickly and you got to figure out where to play and where not to play. In that regard, search engine optimization is vital. There is a whole section, you know, 132 ways in my book to search engine optimize the website. That’s the most comprehensive list I have ever seen in any material ever printed. It took me a month and a half to interview every search engine expert I could find to put together a list that had to be the de facto list SEO website because I was looking for competitive advantage amongst other books and that’s what I put into this book. I think there is 132 ways.
Jason Hartman: Right, right, yeah. Lots of resources here. Your appendices in this book are great. They got all sorts of list of different things from Internet conferences, directories, just e-mail marketing services, drop shipping services, just great. It’s not just a book, it’s a reference book that you have to keep referring back to and it’s just a great resource. What about the affiliate marketing, you know, people have made fortunes off of the affiliate marketing and doing business with companies like ClickBank but also other affiliate systems as well. Tell us about that.
Marc: Well, let’s talk about ClickBank for a moment because I really think that company is a little different than the rest. Here’s a way for people to make money that are listening to you that they have never heard. We all have heard of writing an e-book. We’ve heard of posting a video. We’ve heard of creating an audio. How about if I explain to your listeners how to make money tomorrow with – starting today with nothing but your iPhone? You take your iPhone and you interview an expect on a subject. Let’s say you interview me or you or a doctor or a lawyer, a consultant, psychologist about diverse – it doesn’t matter what it is, you do a video. You upload that video to YouTube as soon as you are done. You then take that link and you send that link to someone in India who is listed on Guru.com or any other of a 100 sites that will do transcriptions and they will do it for a 1 to 2 cents a word. You – overnight you give it to them and say, please transcribe this by tomorrow morning, you will send it to me in an e-mail. The next morning you take that video, you now have a written transcription of your interview. So, if you took what you and I are doing now, you could do the same thing. You could have an audio and you could have a e-book by tomorrow morning. But if we did this on Skype or on video, you would have three products, not just two: an audio, a video and a transcription, the transcription in essence is an e-book. You put all three of those up on ClickBank and now you have three products selling from 130 minutes interview. Now, imagine if you spend your time finding experts to interview and overtime you find out, “Wow! The ones I do on marriage or on weight loss or on diverse really seemed to sell well.” And you figure out what works and what doesn’t, but everyday of the week you do a new interview and you have three new products. At the end of a week you have 21 products that are out there being sold. You put a high commission on them at the ClickBank because ClickBank allows you to charge let’s say $49 for a half hour interview with an expert on any given subject, but the beauty of ClickBank is you can give any commission you want to their resellers. So, on a $49 product, let’s say I give a just for a mathematical easiness 50% (five oh), I got a %25 bounty every time someone sells my interview and I make $25 less a dollar or so for ClickBank. So, suddenly I had given – I created three products, I put them up on ClickBank, they are up in 24 hours and I have created a phenomenal incentive so the ClickBank resellers who were trolling ClickBank looking for things to sell are out there selling my product and getting $25 every time someone buys one. That’s being in business in the age of the Internet and using your smarts and not having employees and the Internet itself is creating more sales for you because of how you set your business up.
Jason Hartman: It’s awesome, so here is the holy grail of questions though. How do you get noticed on ClickBank? If you are an info marketer and you have a product to sell, there are so many products being offered and you know, you can offer a higher commission so you can offer 70% or 80%, you know, give a lot away which, you know, is fine, but anything else you can do to get your products in the affiliate system?
Marc: Well, there is – look the game is not just how do I get more sellers on ClickBank. It’s how do I get more sellers. Period. It means you have to have the best database of potential buyers or resellers. If you are creating products for resellers, then your real goal is to create more products and have more resellers and giving those resellers an incentive to give you their contact data so that you can deal directly with them in the future. So, you are in essence whatever business you are in online or offline, you need to have a database. I’ll give you a very quick little example. I’m a golfer and I go to this golf shop down the street for years. It’s been there for 30 years. And one day he puts a sign in the window, “Moving vocations on May 8,” which was literally like 22 days from the day he put the sign up. So, I walk in, I said, “What Gibbs?” He said, “They took my lease away. They wouldn’t renew it. They are putting in some other concept and I need you to sign this piece of paper and give me your e-mail address.” I said, “You are kidding.? He says, “No, I don’t have the names of my clients for the last 30 years.” He has no clue other than the receipt that he has run for 30 years worth of business.
Jason Hartman: Isn’t that sad though. I mean, just…
Marc: It’s terribly sad.
Jason Hartman: Yeah.
Marc: But he got bad and happy, he didn’t stay with the times and the time’s caught up with him and he knowing he had to move was always looming in the deal he got for his lease. But what he never thought up was, “Oh my God, if I move how do I tell people that that I am going to move.” So, you know, other than word of mouth, M-O-U-T-H, he is in trouble. If he had used word of mouse, M-O-U-S-E, he had been able to tell all of his clients in one click.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, no question about it. You know Marc, what I say when I used to train realtors, I guess, I still do it, but when I train realtors and my own sales people in my organizations, I would say, money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on databases that database is critically important. It’s a vitally important part of the business. You develop it, nurture it, care for it. Don’t abuse it, because you don’t want to get spammy with your database to where they all opt out of your mail and then so forth and give them value. You’ve got to do that. That’s a good point, great point, definitely have that database.
Marc: And will you allow me to steal, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on databases.”
Jason Hartman: Sure. Just give me…
Marc: It’s in my book, but I don’t say it so eloquently.
Jason Hartman: Just give me credit, yes, absolutely [laughter]. Thank you. That’s awesome. Let me take a brief pause. We will be back in just a minute. [Advertisement]
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Jason Hartman: So, affiliate marketing very powerful, domain names we talked about that. Your book is, there is just so much to it. Do you want to talk about social media maybe as a last point…?
Marc: Well, let’s talk about – because I wanted to finish something on the last subject.
Jason Hartman: Oh! Sure.
Marc: We talked about building a database. Social media is the ultimate in doing it. You don’t realize that if you have a 100 friends and those friends have a 100 friends each, you have access to reach 10,000 people with the right incentives. If you are giving away tickets to the Madonna concert because you had a way to do that, you can bet, if you have a 100 friends, they are going to tell their 100 friends and you suddenly have 10,000 that will reach you and find you really quickly if not the next 100 level which puts you at 100,000, right? So, it gets really interesting if you create the right product and the right incentive. So, let’s talk social media. You’ve created the Facebook friends, your LinkedIn friends, your Twitter friends, your YouTube contacts, all the different and now Google+, your all the different social media ways to get people to communicate with you are important for the simple fact that people communicate differently. I can’t speak Chinese to someone who speaks German and they can’t speak German to someone who speaks some other language. So, you have to know what they are speaking and you have to talk to them in the language that they are speaking because it doesn’t matter what you speak. If you don’t speak their language, you can’t communicate with them. It’s the same in the internet. If the kids that they are using Facebook, the marketers today know I better find a way to use Facebook. You know, I’ve read a story this weekend in one of the magazines I was reading. I can’t remember which side it was. They said, “We stopped trying to send people to our company website. We send them to our Facebook page because the kids were trying to reach in the 24 to 36 age demographic are more on Facebook and they are more likely to go to our Facebook page than they are to our website. That’s thinking like a marketer. And so, you as an entrepreneur must think that way. You must. And that’s how you get more people in to your network, into your sphere, into your following. That’s your goal. And you have to figure out, “Okay, can I afford to do this, this and this.” That’s a different issue, but the concepts behind what I am saying are pretty absolute. If you don’t go to them and speak their language, you are not going to be able to talk to them because they are speaking one language and you are talking in a different language.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, great point, great point. And then the thing to do is, once you get them to your Facebook page, if that’s the first point of contact, you’ve got to figure out a way to get their information from there and move them to your website. So, it’s a nurturing process than to and you know, I’ve got to get busy on Google+ because everybody is just saying that if you want the search results obviously Google controls the search market, you better be on Google+. So, it’s not just about Facebook and Twitter. Google+ I think is becoming a significant factor, isn’t it?
Marc: And they will be there for a long time and someone who, you know, move them aside for something new every day and it’s overwhelming and so a lot of people are just like, “I don’t want to deal with any of it.” And the reality is, you could be that golf shop. If you don’t deal with it, you are going to be disappearing and over time you are going to disappear.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you can fit in one last topic before you go Marc whether it’s Internet video, mobile – you know, mobiles really are right now, do you want to talk about mobile in closing?
Marc: Sure. I like mobile. I don’t know anything about it relative to a marketing concept. I know what a five digit short code is and I explain to other speakers and who do keynotes like I do. In the old days you would stand at the end of your speech and say, “Now anyone who wants to copy my speech or whatever bring me your business card.” And if there is a 1000 people you would be lucky to get 50 because people aren’t going to wait in the line to do that. They are embarrassed. I do it a different way. When I am done with my speech, I say, “Well, have your smartphone, send a text to this phone number with the words Click and give me your e-mail address inside the e-mail.” So, you sent the text that says the word Click and then your name and e-mail address. When you do that, I capture your phone number, I capture your e-mail address and I know you are looking for me because of the word click and I automatically send you a copy of my speech and whatever else I am offering at that time. I am using the technology with the smartphone as a public speaker to eliminate having to stand around and wait for a business card. That technology is called the five digit smart code and you can look them up. They are brilliant for what they do.
Jason Hartman: Fascinating way to build a database. Again, building a database is key. It’s what it’s all about. Well, hey, tell people where they can get the book and just anymore in terms of your website and so forth?
Marc: Getrichclick, C-L-I-C-K, you can go to getrickclick.com. We sell them off the website and on the website if you are buying from me versus at Amazon, we send you I think it’s six or seven hundred dollars worth of coupons to be used to teach you about pay-per-click. So, $50 or $100 of Google, from Yahoo, from YouTube, all the different sites that want you to start advertising with them gave me and several other marketers a coupon to give away for free so that if you want to learn how to buy pay-per-click marketing you can get the first $100 free and I have six or seven of those that you get downloaded as soon as you buy the book. The book is 20 bucks, I think it’s 1995. On Amazon, its marked at 24, which is the retail and they sell it cheaper than that online. So, depends on when you go and what they are charging for at Amazon.com. And it’s at Barnes and Noble, at Amazon or at my website where you get the extra bonuses.
Jason Hartman: And it is fantastic. I can personally tell you that it’s a great resource. So, everybody go out and get Get Rich Click! and the ultimate guide to making money on the Internet. Marc, thank you so much for sharing with us today. We appreciate it.
Marc: Very good and we’ll be in touch and thank you very much and I hope everyone learnt how to use the Internet for making money because it’s probably one of the rare, rare opportunities that anyone can get in right now and make themselves a lot of money without a lot of cost.
Jason Hartman: You are definitely right about that. Thanks Marc.
Marc: Thank you, sir.
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The Speaking of Wealth Team
Transcribed by: Renee