Be Your Own Boss

Entrepreneurial Case Study this is a case study on how offline mail order marketing methods were converted to online marketing.

12 Month Millionaire

The 12 Month Millionaire is the title of a marketing manual written by a guy called Vince James a couple of years back. It’s out of print now, though there are a few used copies selling on ebay and elsewhere online.

Vince James came from a very disadvantaged background to build a very successful mail order business back in the nineties. So successful that he became a millionaire within a year and built that up to $100 million in a couple of years or so.

But this article is not about that manual, It’s about Vince James and a guy called Russell Brunson. I don’t know Vince and I hadn’t heard of his famous manual until a few days ago. But I do know Russell Brunson, I’ve done business with him a few times over the past few years. Russell is a very talented and successful young man in his own right and a leading light in internet marketing.

Vince’s manual and his methods have been described as quite hard hitting and controversial, Russell’s methods are very straight, skillfull and, in my experience, quite gentlemanly. Yet Russell credits much of his learning and a lot of his success to studying Vince’s manual, the 12 Month Millionaire, while on holiday with his wife! It might even have been his honeymoon, I forget the details - and yes, he is still married!

But, here’s the punchline - Russell and Vince have teamed up to share what Russell learned from Vince with the rest of us. But for me it’s not even about that unlikely pairing. No, how it came about is actually a real case study in entrepreneurial thinking on Russell’s part. It happened like this….

Russell was really impressed with what he learned, but there was a problem. Vince ran an offline businesss but Russell’s businesses are all internet based. What Russell really wanted to know was, could the same methods work online? Now most people would have been stuck at that point or tried to figure it out for themselves - and maybe come badly unstuck in the process. But not Russell - he sent Vince the following email

To his surprise, Vince agreed to show him exactly how to use his methods online. The result was a six hour in depth consultation during which Vince held nothing back. The learning point here for me was, if you really want to learn something - don’t be afraid to go direct to the one person who can teach you and ASK!

You can get the whole story here www.beyourownboss.co.uk/12-month-internet-millionaire.

Be Your Own Boss has had a long overdue ‘makeover’.

It’s been rebuilt using WordPress, a great tool for content managed websites, incorporating some of the latest Web 2.0 features. This makes it much easier to incorporate new content, so now I have no excuse for not adding lots of new information on the subject of starting and running your own business ;-). That should keep me busy!

The articles now give you the opportunity to comment and ask questions, blog style, so feel free to join in the business discussion. But please be nice

A few simple community rules:

• No fighting
• No abuse
• No Spamming
• No blatant self promotion
• Don’t include links in posts, put your email address and website in the boxes on the comment form

Your email address remains private, it’s just between you and me. Your website will be linked to from your name on the comment.

Comments are moderated, if they break the rules, they won’t appear!

I hope you like the new site. Join in, learn and have fun!

John

Many websites that manage to get listed in the search engines get little or no traffic. One reason can be that only the home page has been indexed in the engines but none of the others.

This can be for a number of reasons usually attritutable to poor site structure and content. One way of helping the search engines to find all of your web pages is to provide a sitemap.

The sitemap should be at level 1 on your site, i.e. in the root directory and should list and link to every other page on the website. The sitemap page should also be linked to directly from every other page on the site.

Doing business on the internet depends mostly on bringing visitors to your website. This stream of visitors is referred to by internet marketers as “traffic”.

There is a huge amount of “hype” and “misinformation” about generating traffic online. Basically there are four ways to get traffic - you can EARN it, you can PAY for it, you can BORROW it or you can STEAL it!

You EARN traffic by building a reputation for giving both visitors and search engines what they want - namely good, useful content and by getting referrals as a result of excellent customer service.

You PAY for traffic when you use Pay Per Click or other paid advertising, when you pay commission to affiliates for sending visitors who buy or when you pay for Search Engine Optimisation or Directory inclusion.

You BORROW traffic when you access the visitor flow from other websites or the readership of ezines/newsletters via Joint Ventures.

I’m not even going to begin to discuss STEALING traffic, sorry!