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Terry: So you end up having to continually find something new to smooth out the ups and downs of the business.

Marc: Absolutely. Or, you could never leave your day job because you can never say, “This is going to pay my rent next month and my car payment,” or reach your goals, whatever they might be. So, I knew that something had to change. In 1998, I had first studied joint ventures. I should back up a little bit… I had been reading about joint ventures since I got online. At that time, it was put on a lofty, mysterious platform, which I think it still is a little bit. Guys like Mike Enlow and Jay Abraham were the names talking about joint ventures. Ted Thomas as well. These three people seem to hold a mystical key that no one else could grab a hold of. I know that people have paid them $25,000 to come to their seminars, but I didn’t think that it was possible.

One day, I got an e-mail from Mike Enlow or someone who worked for him that said, “You can consult with Mike for one hour for $500.” At that time, I said, “That’s insane; who would do that?” But, Terri and I talked about it and we realized that this man might hold the key to unlock the power of joint ventures. So, let’s pay for it. We shelled out $500 and we scheduled a call with Mike. I tell you, Terry, that was the best $500 I spent at the time.

Terry: Fantastic. Before we go on, can you just explain what a joint venture is, for anybody who isn’t really sure of what it is?

Marc: Sure. A joint venture, in its simplest terms, is a partnership. It involved two or more parties, which could be individuals or businesses, partnering up, sharing resources, and leveraging off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses to bring more money in that didn’t exist before. I’ll simplify it: most people think that a joint venture is when, I have a product, I want to contact Terry, and I say to him, “Can you send this out to your list and I’ll pay you 50% or 60% or 70% of the profits that come in from your endorsement mailing of my product?” That’s been bastardized on the Internet; it’s been beaten to death.

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Terry: So what if I’m the opposite to exactly what you said, where I don’t have a business that’s totally unique, I don’t feel that I’ve developed something that someone hasn’t already done, and I can’t use anything else that any other business has done? What if I’m a business that, online especially, is in an extremely crowded marketplace? For example, like online marketing, instead of having two or three stores offline that are selling furniture or electronics or whatever, if you Google something like “online marketing,” you get 50 million results. How would I become a leader in an industry where there are millions of other websites that are my competition are just as accessible as I am or maybe even more so. How am I going to actually get to my prospects?

Marc: That’s a great question. It’s funny that you started out by saying that traditional offline businesses are less competitive than online businesses. The fact of the matter is that it’s 2006 when we’re recording this. No matter if you’re an online or offline business, your customer or prospect go online to research whatever it is that you’re going to sell before you buy it. There are a ton of very competitive industries both online and offline. The Internet isn’t doing anything but make it easier for the competition to enter the market. It’s lowering the barrier of entry so that any business can wake up one morning and find out that a furniture store is competing with a manufacturer from China.

People are saying, “I just bought something from online and bought it from a manufacturer,” or, “I just bought something online from the local furniture store here that’s national and competing against small businesses.” The Internet has opened up so that it’s difficult for offline businesses. Online marketing and businesses that are specifically online are extremely ramped. My first suggestion is to go run and hide. The reality of it is, if you jump into something competitive like online marketing and you haven’t been around for a while, be prepared to get very good at what you do.

The days are gone where you can just take someone else’s information, polish it up a little bit, put my name on it, and go sell it as well to make a little bit of money. Maybe those were very early on in online marketing, but those days are gone. Unless you’re prepared to become a very good online marketing guru and student, then you will find that it’s going to be a very tough up hill battle requiring ability to make yourself different, more unique, or special compared to your competitors out there.

All that said and done, when you find an industry that’s really competitive, for a marketing person, that’s a great sign. That’s a sign that you have a market that will sustain a lot of players. If you have a market that will sustain a lot of players, that means there’s a lot of money going around in that market. If there’s a lot of money flowing around in that market, that means that you have to figure out what you need to do to put your net in that cash flow and extract the amount that you think is worth your time, energy, and effort to be in that competitive industry.

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Terry: Just before we go on, can we go over what the difference is between a feature and a benefit so people are clear on that?

Jay: A feature is what is in your product and a benefit is what that means to them and what they get out of it. One of my clients goes to Norway to get their furniture. They get Norwegian slat beds. That?s the feature. The benefit is that you have a more inexpensive sleeping surface that gives you the body support you need and you don?t have to worry about a dirty innerspring mattress, you can use a slat bed. People only care about what is going to benefit them out of a product or service, and not care about anything else. Did that answer your question, Terry?

Terry: Yea, I just wanted to make sure our listeners know the difference between a feature and a benefit because way back in the day when I was in advertising, it was very difficult to figure out the difference between them. That explanation is absolutely perfect, thank you.

Jay: Here's the thing to keep in mind, quality is not what people think it is. Quality is not what you put into a product or service; quality is what people get out of your product or service. Don't talk to them about you, talk to them about themselves and they'll care like crazy.

Okay, so the first sentence talks about the purpose of your marketing and the second shows an advantage you have to achieve that purpose.

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Terry: So if somebody searches for, “HP Pavilion desktop computer,” that’s what should be in the headline of my Google AdWord.

Phil: Yes, absolutely. That’s far more likely to get the click than a generic headline of “desktop computers.”

Terry: Right. So, where do I go about getting these keywords? I have a computer company, I’m sure I can think of a bunch of things off the top of my head, but not keywords that people are searching on. Where do I go to find out what people are actually looking for?

Phil: That’s a great question, Terry. The most important point that I touched on earlier is to not just go by gut feeling using the tool at Google. They are improving that tool all the time, though. But, I have a great example from our first website why not to do your keyword research that way. When we started out on the Intern et, we started with a site that sold and still sells high quality oil painting. Now, I wouldn’t have set up an oil painting website if I knew then what I know now.

We got everyone together, including friends and family, and brainstormed the phrases that we thought people would be typing into their favorite search engine if they wanted to buy a painting, which is what we were selling. The two phrases that were most popular in our discussion were, “oil paintings from photographs,” and, “old master reproductions.” They sounded fair enough. Within that business field they were the field that people used to describe those products.

We spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars on software to learn search engine optimization for ourselves to enable us to create web pages that should rank high in the search engines for those phrases. This isn’t talking about pay per click; this is talking about generic search listings, which is the database of listings that cause pages to appear at the top of the ranking when people search for a particular term. That was the free search engine listings, if you’d like to differentiate it from pay per click.

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Terry: Yea, I’ve gone through the same procedure that you’re talking about now, yep.

Mike: Yea, you know, as soon as you join they ask you for two e-mail addresses, your admin and your safe list e-mail. As soon as you enter your safe list e-mail, the first thing that happens is they send you to a page that says, “We just sent a validation e-mail to this address. Please go to your inbox and click on the validation link, and then you could start using our mailer.”

But what ended up happening, and I’m sure you remember this if you joined, sometimes you didn’t get those validation e-mails for about five minutes, sometimes an hour. So what ends up happening is, if you start using a lot of safe lists, your inbox starts getting up to 5,000 or 10,000 e-mails a day.

So what I started doing was the next day, I would just do all the validations at one time and I would sort my inbox alphabetically and scroll down to the “v” section, or I would just type in the filter, “val” and then all of a sudden I would see all the validations. That’s when it hit me.

I said to myself, “If all these other people are getting 10,000 e-mails a day and using a one click delete option and not reading everything, what if I put the subject line ‘validation’ in the subject of my ad?” So at that time I got a course from Mark Joyner and he had said something about target, tie in and collect; you want to target your audience, tie in a free offer, and collect their e-mail addresses. So basically what I did at that time, just to speed up the story, is I created this little membership called “Powerless,” and I took about 15 of the biggest safe lists on the Internet and I just created an ad for them.

I also made a free membership area around it and I said that Powerless will give you access to e-mail millions of people each month spam-free, 100% double opt in. Then, I tied in some free offers. I said, “If you join now, you get the safe list directory eBook, and this web army knife…” They got four or five different gifts just for giving their name and their e-mail address.

So now at this time the submitters started coming out; things like I post ad or a safe list submitter. You could join about 500 of these safe lists automatically and then it would automatically once a day, at midnight, when all the clocks reset, I would just reload the software and send it out.