You can call it whatever you want. Going “viral” is what we all want, right? How about if I told you a way to get hundreds, thousands, or millions of people to talk about you? I have a little bit of an ego myself. I dig that. I like people doing that, talking about me and what I do. That’s what we want; that’s the whole goal. How do we get people to feed the system, to be a part of our community?

People say the term viral marketing a lot. They say things like, “Oh, I had a virus last month on my computer. I don’t want to learn this, Scott. It was wicked. It said it was the anti-virus ’09 and it screwed everything up.” Viral marketing has nothing to do with viruses. Viral simply means when a host person gets it out there and it spreads. Now one of the dangers with this kind of marketing is that once it goes, you can’t stop it and we’ll talk all about that and what’s horrible about not being able to stop it.

Viral marketing is pretty basic. It does not matter what kind of method you use, whether it is YouTube or “micro viral” like we find on Twitter. It doesn’t matter what the medium is.

There are four secrets to successful viral marketing that we talk about in this section of the book. Secret number one is to pick one of the following areas to focus on; the message either is funny, it has the WOW factor, or it evokes emotion.

The emotion can actually be yours, where you reveal something personal within a blog post, video, and so forth. I did one of those “25 things you didn’t know about me” posts and it was one of the most read and reacted to things that I have ever written.¹¹⁹

Without one of these three themes in play you lose any motivation for people to send things around, outside of outright bribery. Because a fourth way to get people to send things out is to give them incentives—commissions, as an affiliate, prize giveaways for the most tweets—but it’s not natural and they usually have a short life span.

Secret number two is critical, so listen closely . . . viral marketing is not about you. I cannot stress this enough. Your viral project, your viral attempt, is not about you. It’s about your audience. When I say be funny, I don’t mean you think it’s funny. I mean your audience thinks it’s funny. When I tell you about emotion, I mean what will make your audience feel, think, and react.

You do not even get to call it viral. I have seen people on Twitter talking about their new viral project. You are not the one who says it goes viral. It is not your call. I get e-mails all the time from people asking me to go and check out their new viral video! Then I go and follow the link to have a look and their “viral movie” has nine views! That’s the “viral” you’re talking about? Am I right? Oh, and you’re training people on how to produce viral videos? That’s great, awesome, wow. I just threw up on my laptop. It’s ridiculous. You do not say what goes viral. “I do!” I’m kidding, I don’t.¹²⁰ Your market and your audience dictate it. It is not about you. Meaning, please don’t put a picture of you in it.

The day you start talking to your audience and it’s about them, that’s the day that business really happens. Everything, I don’t care if it’s video or articles (which can go viral, too), if it’s a blog post, make it about your marketplace, not about you.

As an example of viral marketing I would like to share with you the first video that I did that “went viral.” This was way back in the day. It was about five or six years ago. This is the first-ever viral video that I made and I didn’t really know what I was in for.

The Time Movie is really a glorified slide show (thetimemovie. com) that is meant to have the viewer feel that life is too short to take for granted and all we have is time and it’s up to us to spend it wisely. It is a nice message, yet was a stand-alone one that really had nothing to do with my products. This allowed the viewer to believe it was all about them.

The Time Movie is a perfect example of a video that went viral because of the emotion it evoked in its audience. I launched it in about 2004, 2005-ish. I think it was October of 2004 to be exact. I said to myself, “I am going to do this. I’m going to get it out there. I’m going to harness the power of the Internet!” I got a web site designed and I put it up and then nothing happened. I really thought I would just get sales because I put the web site up. Apparently nobody got the memo that I put the web site up there, and so I got nothing.

The Time Movie has now been viewed more than 4 million times. People are watching it right now. How cool is that? You are here reading and they are there and they’re watching it. So it’s perpetual! Viral marketing, when done right, is the most perpetual marketing machine you can have—perpetual meaning that no effort has to be put into it any longer. That’s what I like. That’s what I want to do. I want to do something once and have it go a million times. That’s the whole point. I got more than a quarter million newsletter subscribers. I screwed them all up, which I will tell you all about shortly.¹²¹

I started out in motivational speaking. Scottstratten.com is my motivational speaking site. When I launched the Time Movie, I did it to get more speaking jobs and in turn got more than a thousand speaker kit requests. If you’re a speaker yourself, you understand the significance of that. Because when I was starting out, I would have been happy with four, five . . . one kit request. I would have been happy if one person had said,

You know what we most want in life, right? We just want validation. That’s human nature. I just wanted to be validated. Somebody wanted to hear what I had to say! And apparently that meant it was at the library at 3:00 in the afternoon with seven people there. And five of those were relatives. And two worked at the library and were on their lunch.

Anyway, I made more than $100,000 in product revenue from the movie. I also screwed that up royally, but that’s coming up.

Today, there are 1,540 inbound links from Yahoo and more than 400 from Google. If you put timemovie.com into the search you’ll see that. Again, I didn’t plant any of those. The audience decided. And this was four or five years ago! I can’t even imagine what would happen if I launched it fresh today with blogs the way they are and Twitter and Facebook. None of that was happening to the extent that it is today. I don’t even want to know what would have happened, because I’ll start crying.

FastCompany talked about it. The Wall Street Journal talked about it. Again, nothing to do with me. That was just me sitting there playing my Xbox at home and FastCompany calls:

“Hi, yeah, I can talk to you. Oh, you think I’m important? Okay, hi!”

The company validated me and I got in there because of the popularity of the movie—because it went viral. Now I can put in my bio “As featured in the Wall Street Journal and FastCompany.” It doesn’t change who I am. Validation of me and my work by media such as these two gives clout. In this case, instant clout. Clout is almost instant positioning as an expert on the hierarchy of buying.

You want to build a business and have people flock to you? Position yourself. Position yourself as the bringer of emotion that your market wants to feel. I don’t care what the emotion is, as long as it is about your market. The emotion can be success, financial windfall, doing daily business, meeting a significant other, or being a better parent. If you are the provider of that emotion for these people, you will have business for the rest of your life. No matter what state the economy is in, emotion always sells. We overcomplicate viral marketing to the nth degree. It doesn’t have to be hard.

For the Time Movie, the landing page says this:

“Sometimes, just sometimes we all need that reminder. The reminder that life is too short to waste and too precious to leave to routine. We need a reminder to give more time for families and friends and just as importantly, ourselves.” ‘Work your life’ is that reminder. It’s a gentle nudge to get you remembering what’s important to you. It’s free and it’s the kind of thinking you’ll find adding joy to your life. To start receiving these precious reminders just twice a month, enter your e-mail address below and click on the button that says ‘I deserve more.”’

The landing page continues the emotive theme of the movie, it connects to the feelings the audience is having right then, and it doesn’t ask for too much. If you liked the movie and you saw that landing page come up, would you want to take the next step? Of course, that is just the point. The landing page is where you take the emotion to the next step. The movie is not about you. The landing page is where you begin to introduce yourself. You bridge the emotion your audience is having into his or her taking one step.

Please look back at the wording and see that I am not selling anything on the landing page. That is probably the worst thing you can do. “I hope you enjoyed the movie, now give me money.” Not pitching too soon is part of helping the project go viral. If the landing page hits at the end, this screws up the emotion, and the audience won’t pass it along. It would be like seeing a performance and at the end the singer misses a note. What do you remember? The bad note.¹²³

There was a time when my web site was all about me. I changed it to be all about you, about my market, and potential and current customers.

Originally, the landing page had 11 choices along with my name and my picture. It drastically took viewers from a movie about them to a page about me. A great guy online, Paul Myers,¹²⁴ helped me rewrite the site and make it about the viewer. As an example of how important harnessing emotion is, remember the button. A change from “submit” to “I deserve more” on the button increased conversions by 8 percent. You can almost hear the viewer at their computer clicking the button and thinking, “Damn right I deserve more!” Continue the experience all the way down to the button. The landing page converted at 24 percent. That means that 24 percent of viewers converted into my newsletter. Of course, I don’t have even remotely that many now, because I messed it up . . . but you’re going to have to wait just a little bit longer for that.

When you are designing your landing page, remember to keep it simple. On the Time Movie landing page, the disclaimer at the bottom says, “Your address will never be rented or sold, period.” It’s that simple. That is my legal statement.¹²⁵ That’s all I do. You can say something like, “I hate spam as much as you; I’d never do that to you.” Whatever you like is great, just give your audience that reassurance.¹²⁶

Secret number three to being successful in viral marketing is to properly define your success. You have got to define your success. What do you want this viral marketing thing to do? This is where people often miss the mark and lose out. People say that they just want their project to “go viral” but they don’t think about the why. Viral marketing is the best thing you can do to position yourself, your business, or your product in front of your market, but you’ve got to say what you want.

Do you want to build a following? Building your list is the most powerful thing that viral can do. Do you want sales? Viral marketing can work for sales, it has many times. I have had clients who have created sales from it but I don’t suggest that sales be your goal. Because you can turn off many people trying it. Do you want to build relationships? You can go viral and build relationships with other people in your industry. Twitter is a great example of that.

A note about building “your list.” Did any of you send out a newsletter in the late 1990s? Do you remember what it was like when people actually opened your newsletter? And got it, and read it, and there were no spam filters or traps and you didn’t have to spell words like sells with $ and a weird character so it just gets through the filter? That’s back in the day. Today I want to create a newsletter that gets opened, end of story. I want people to recognize my name and say, “Scott’s written me something and I’m opening it.” That’s what you want. You don’t want a huge list. You want an engaged list. The gold isn’t in the list anymore. The gold is in the engagement of your lists and the relationship you have with the list members.

The content of your newsletter is so important. If you are just feeding your list pitches and pitches and more affiliate pitches every month, you are going to lose people, fast. You can’t come back to your readers in every issue and say, “This is the greatest program!” with your affiliate link attached and then say the same in the next issue for a different product with another affiliate link. I subscribe to about four newsletters now. I used to subscribe to 400. You all lost me. And when you lose me once, I’m not coming back. What are your followers worth to you? Don’t try to sell them right at the start. Build the engagement with them.

Secret number four to success in viral marketing—choosing the right method to create and distribute your project. Depending on your goals for your viral marketing project, you now need to decide what process you are going to use to get there. Your success is defined by what method you’re going to use. When making this decision there are many things to consider; here are a few options for you. Just a note here: No one process is going to be the be-all or end-all for your business. Not one single technique is going to take your business from “here to here,” end of story, with one tip. Please take that into account.

So here are a few options that I have found successful for me . . . flash video, live video, streaming video, and social media. Let’s talk about each one a little more.

Over the past few years, we have made 65 flash videos. If you have seen one of those types of videos, 95 percent of the time we made it. We have found that it is best to use as many words as needed to get your point across, but no more. In my experience, the ideal has been about 10 to 12 scenes to be most effective. A length of three to four minutes is best.

File size is also important to keep an eye on. We have found one to two megs in size is best. People will not wait more than, I’d say, an eighth of a second for something to load nowadays. It’s the ADD nation. We’re all like gnats with no attention span. Nowadays, people will not wait for your viral message. It’s not about you, it’s them!

To begin, you create a storyboard. It’s like writing an essay outline: Scene 1 - opening. End Scene - ending. Then you fill up the middle and you are all set!

Live video really hooks your audience and can help connect you one-to-one with people—on a relationship level. If you are your brand, you need to be doing live video. End of story. I have never found a method more effective or more scalable than live video. If you want to position yourself in front of your audience, do a good live video. I don’t mean live as in “streaming” where it buffers and you’re getting a headset on and trying to make it work properly and it doesn’t. I mean you are going to record something so that it is a person versus flash, a person versus animation. It does not have to be hard or cost much money. It really doesn’t. You don’t have to spend much money to make live video successful for you and your business.

Delivery is the key. You cannot just post your video on YouTube and buy your limo because you are going to be so huge in the industry! YouTube is absolutely horrible for your business. Yeah, you heard that right.¹²⁷

Depending on your goals for your viral project, YouTube is the worst possible tool for your business. If you are looking just to accumulate as many views as possible, and that’s your ego trip of the day, then YouTube is for you. Every day you can check in and say, “Yay! Look! Twelve more views! Awesome!” I do that sometimes. Only sometimes, when I’m feeling really low.

If you like the interaction of comments, fine, but remember, when you open up your video to the world, the world comes. This includes people who insult your video and don’t like it. Then you may get defensive and comment back, “How dare you? This is my video page, not yours!” Actually, it is YouTube’s video page. They own it and therefore anybody can comment on it. So, relax. You need a thick skin if you’re going to be out there. And that goes for anything to do with social media today, by the way. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, anything. As mentioned earlier in the Trolls section, many of those people aren’t worth your time. So define your success. If you just want views, then go nuts. YouTube it up!

One of my own viral videos was Im Breaking Up With The Leafs.com, where I got so frustrated with my lifelong hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, that I finally decided to end this madness and mockingly sit down to dinner with them and end it once and for all.

It cost me nothing to make. I was sitting on my couch and thought, “I’m going to make a video.” I grabbed my little camera, my little Sony camera, not like an HD thing. I went into the kitchen, got the tripod, sat down, and started. That was it.¹²⁸ I didn’t hold a staff meeting to talk about it. I just did it! It took me less than one hour, from idea, to filming, to uploading, to registering the URL. That’s it.

I e-mailed it out to two bloggers who didn’t know me. One blogger was an Ottawa Senators blog guy and one was a Montreal Canadiens guy. If you know anything about hockey, they don’t like the Leafs. I knew my market.

Remember when I mentioned negative comments above? Well, if you ever get the chance, go read the comments on that page. You’d have thought I shot somebody. You’d have thought I had shot the Queen. And I quote, “How dare you break up with the Leafs?!” And I reply, “Dude, I’m joking! I didn’t actually have dinner with the hockey team. They’re not really in my kitchen right now.”

What were the results of the video? To begin with, the video has almost 60,000 views. The local news picked it up and put it on television. My mom called me, “Why are you on TV? And why are you breaking up with somebody on TV?” TSN, the Canadian sports network,¹²⁹ put the video on their blog. Again, there was no further effort from me. I put it up and sent it to the two bloggers and that was it.

In the end, I did get new viral movie clients from it. Now, at the end of the day my goal with the video was not to gain new clients. They enjoyed it and liked my style and thought it was fun. I was booked to speak at events because of the video. I also met some local clients from it, too. That’s more than I ever got out of the Leafs in 30 years, so I’m pretty happy with that. Revenue did result from the video, but revenue was not my goal, and earning it was not what measured the movie’s success. My goal for this video was simply to just have fun. It was really more of a hobby type of thing.

Back to talking about YouTube . . . . If you ever want to use YouTube video and go against my words, make sure to create a unique domain to point to the video. Because when it said imbreakingupwiththeleafs.com, the URL itself was interesting. People were drawn in by the domain name; it did not just say youtube.6-5/5gg5431. That is not engaging or interesting, it doesn’t float my boat. The URL I use is simply a “redirect” so that when somebody types in that address it simply redirects them to the YouTube URL. This is handy if you are promoting the video off the Internet. I can say, “I am breaking up with the Leafs dot com” on TV or the radio and it sticks.

YouTube is not a good place to build a list. The only option is the subscribe button. It is weak at best. As a visitor to the site, you barely see it. It is difficult to engage with your YouTube subscribers and you cannot really e-mail them. You can message them on YouTube but they only get it when they log in. So your conversion rate on the “subscribe to a video” button is really low.

YouTube is filled with competition. You are basically putting your video on a supermarket shelf with better products around it! You have absolutely no control over where viewers will go, not to mention they can easily scroll up an inch or so and see another 18,000,000 videos. You are not controlling your message on YouTube.

Your goal needs to be focusing your viewers’ attention and pulling them into your funnel. You can use a squeeze page, which is pretty much a landing page, but has the video right on it, with the goal being for you to watch the live video and subscribe either during or after watching it by using a form right beside the video.

The squeeze page allows you to focus people into the focus funnel. As I have said, YouTube is fine but you need to use it the right way. You can use the YouTube embedding code and embed it into your site or embed it into a squeeze page. Own your video—remove the part where it says, “suggest other videos” at the end. You will still have the YouTube watermark, but you can own it. You can bring them toward it. Like I said, views mean nothing. It just makes you famous in your own mind.

A great example of how you can take views and pull that audience into your funnel is my motivational site, Thank Goodness It’s Monday—TGIM.¹³⁰ Once you are in, once you’re watching, you’ve got nowhere to go, sister, nowhere to go except one way. Either get out, or sign up. No other videos of people who are better looking than I am. No other videos that have better words than I do. You’re just with me. I converted 38 percent of people who watched my video into a sublist of mine. I’ve got 14,000 people on that sublist who want to see these exact videos. That is huge! A huge, huge difference. Sometimes the problem with video is that much of the time people get overwhelmed. There’s just too much to do. So, you make it simple. There should be nowhere else viewers can go. They sign up or they’re done or they pass it along to someone else. It does not take away from the video, and that’s what works really well.

One note about video of any kind: If you do a video, even an instructional video, and it is long, respect your audience and tell them it’s going to be long. Tell them, “it’s an hour-long video and instead of compromising quality, we want to show you this to the best of our ability, so just let it load a bit. In the meantime, go play this penguin bash game or something.” I don’t care what it is. Tell them if it’s going take a minute. When that loads, please make sure it says “loading” and it gives a percentage so it shows you how soon it will load. If it just sits there and a bar is supposed to go across, you are going to lose people.

The biggest problems here are audience and skill. Audience is the ability to generate an audience on the spot for your broadcast. It is tough to get people to do anything at a specific time, let alone for a long period of time. In other words, people take time out to watch your new fancy web show. As an example, even having tens of thousands of followers, on average I will get 100 people watching at any given time.

We have already spoken quite a bit about the challenges of live video—this is 10 times harder in live streaming video because you do not have an opportunity to edit, the comments are live, and you can watch the number of viewers go up and down—all of which are very intimidating.

The best thing to do is to schedule the broadcast ahead of time and notify your subscribers, followers, and friends when it will be happening and then remind them that day. You can also record your live streaming videos. Pretty much all of the live streaming sites will allow you to record the video that can then be embedded in your blog. But be careful the recording does not contain the viewers’ questions and comments in a chat form as they do when you are live.

So if you are willing to take questions live, just make sure you repeat the questions on the recording so that viewers afterward will understand what you are answering. Also, one of the bad habits when people do live streams where chat is enabled is that people end up reading the chat while they are on camera and are always staring downward. It looks awkward and you lose the potential connection you get from “looking people in the eye.” The best way to handle this is to have somebody else monitor the chat stream for you and highlight key questions to send to you via private chat so your focus can be on engaging with the viewers. I do this with my assistant who sits across the table from me and then holds up good questions for me to read. I keep my focus on the camera and it looks much more professional.

Asking for questions is a great tool, but you need to be prepared ahead of time in case no one asks. It can get awkward when you ask for questions and no one types anything in. So ask your lists, friends, and followers questions beforehand so you can fall back on them if no one asks you questions live.

It really is a great tool. You need to make sure you have comfort in front of the camera and a platform that you have already built so you have an audience to pull from. This is not something for someone new because you will just be talking to yourself.

You need to decide which emotion you are going to engage. The Time Movie was designed to be inspiring. I knew my audience wanted to be inspired. I knew they wanted to think, and if you make people think, they will want to know more about you.

I was not prepared for the success of the Time Movie. My first problem was my server. I had the movie on my own server, my personal hosting account for $9 a month. I’m lucky I didn’t put it on a free site like Geocity or something like that from back in the day—the Angelfire days. I put it on my server at about $9 a month and asked if it had anything for $8. I put the movie on there and that’s when I learned about the term “transfer bandwidth.” So, the movie goes out. I sent it to a couple of hundred people I had on my own list and it took off.

The movie takes off! I am a somebody! As I am in the middle of congratulating myself, the movie stops working! “Why is it broken? I broke the Internet for crying out loud! I broke the tubes!”

Reenactment. . . .

Hey, Frank, go see the Time Movie!”

“It goes to error 404.”

“That’s not the thing I’m trying to show you. It’s not an error page!”

So I went to my host and told them I was paying a solid $9 a month here! So what the hell was going on? Which is when the rep told me about “transfer bandwidth,” which is how much goes from your server back and forth. My limit was less than a gig and at 50,000 views I was capped. Taking the cap off meant that I would be billed per meg. And because I wanted to go viral and show the movie to the world, I agreed! Release the hounds!

So off it went, and the tech rep uncapped it. And it grew . . . 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000. Would you look at me? I rule! And then I got my bandwidth bill. I went from $9 a month to $1,400, and that was only the last week of the month. I saw the bill and said . . . well, I can’t actually tell you what I said.

I looked at my site statistics and I just said, “Stop watching the video, stop watching the video, stop watching the video! No more viral. Bad movie, baaaaaad movie! Stop watching it right now.”

That is the danger of viral marketing. You cannot stop it. Once it goes, it goes. You can’t stop it once it starts going out. Now every time someone watched it, instead of my thinking about the people I was helping, I was thinking about the server. So, I stopped that pain. But, lucky for you, that’s not even the beginning . . . .

Next problem was my newsletter list. My subscribers. Oh, my subscribers. I found a way to convert them, that landing page, right? Good? I started my newsletter and I didn’t want to pay the $19 a month to host my newsletter. Because, you know, I was already paying $9 for hosting and, you know, that’s a lot of money. So I decided just to host the newsletter myself . . . from my Outlook.

You know, some of you right now are doing that. Don’t even think I don’t know you’re doing it. I just copied and pasted. I had a script, freescripts.com, e-mail me anytime somebody wanted to sign up with his or her name and address. I simply went copy, groups, add, paste. Not bad when you get three people a week. When the video blew up and went viral, I was getting 4,000 a day—into my Outlook Express. Express? I didn’t even upgrade to the real one. I would go to download my mail and it would go, “Oh no you don’t.” I couldn’t download; it would sit there for like 19 hours downloading all the e-mails. And then I still had to cut and paste each one, 12 seconds apiece. No. So you know what I did? I deleted them. I deleted 140,000 e-mail addresses. That was just in the first couple of weeks.

At this point I was ready to spend some money—you’ve got to spend money to make money. I decided to put the newsletter on my server and have a script—but then I found a free script! I don’t have to spend money to make money after all . . . free script!

I put the free My Mail Script in there. It’s an open source thing. The open source community is the most wonderful community in the world. Everybody helps each other. Only problem was that I broke the script! And I had the most open community in the world telling me to get out.

“You are out!”

I said, “You can’t, you don’t throw anybody out!”

“Except for you.”

I broke it. It stopped working. When people would try and sign up they would get an error message. I lost about 50,000 subscribers that way. At that point I finally made the right choice and decided to use AWeber. Pick your poison—Constant Contact, AWeber, whatever you want to use to collect and manage subscribers. I picked AWeber, and I did it and I started crying. Not because it worked, but because I realized how many subscribers I had lost beforehand. I want you to learn from my pain. Please don’t cry and make the same mistakes I made.

I don’t mean to be prepared for success by having your own dedicated server in rack space in your closet, or a $9,000 a month e-mail plan. I mean be prepared. Have a scalable plan like AWeber or Constant Contact.

We once made a movie for a woman. She loved it and gave us the go ahead. We launched it and she got 12,000 subscribers in 48 hours and then she got mad at me. She yelled at me. She phoned me up and said, “Scott, what the hell is going on?”

I said, “It’s working; that’s what we do.”

Still yelling, she says, “No, no. It just bumped me to a higher plan on my shopping cart system now. I have to pay $120 a month now.”

Seriously, if you can’t take 12,000 people (that’s what she had in 48 hours) and find a way to make $120 off them in one month, you’re doing something wrong. Seriously. Put away your “I’m in business” piece of paper and go work for somebody. Honestly.

I went to her and said, “I don’t know what to say.”

She said, “Well do something about it.”

“I could turn it off.”

“Maybe we should just do that.”

I told her she was ridiculous. Why would she not want these people signing up for her newsletter? That was the entire point!

. . . Now back to me ...

When the Time Movie launched, I didn’t have any scalable services. Experts talk about scalable products all the time. I was a speaker, I had a product, and I had me. First thing I needed was a speaker request kit. Two weeks after launching the Time Movie I had 50 requests for kits. Remember, I would have been happy with one in a year, and I had 50! But here is the next problem. Do you know how I was putting together my speaker kits? First, I would go to Staples, get the business stuff, get three folders (I don’t want to buy the 10, it’s too much), put it in, put it through the printer, then my VHS cassette at the time (yeah I was new), put it in there, fold, bubble envelope, walk to the post office, there’s one! And now I needed 50? You know how many I ended up making? Zero. In total, I received about 785 speaker requests before I made the system properly. I had the golden ring of speaking, and I threw it away! Because I wasn’t ready.

You know what I should have done? I should have had a fulfillment center on call. One that charged by piece, so if I got one, I only got charged for one. I don’t mean open your own warehouse and get ready. Have it ready. Make it scalable. Fulfillment houses will help you. They print it, they ship it, and you just bring the people in.¹³⁴

Plan scalable products. At the time, I had a CD that was called “Relaxation on Demand.” Pretty cool title. It was two minutes per track for whatever was stressing you out. If driving was stressing you out you put it on the driving track. So we put it out there on the landing page, available for sale to anyone interested, and it worked! I received 50 orders for CDs in a week.

Do you know how I was making the CDs? Pick up, insert, burn. Fifteen minutes to go. While the CD is burning I print the Avery labels while I’m waiting. Twenty minutes later and the CD is finally done. Then I try and stick the label on the CD . . . and I screw it up! “I need the CD stomper, where is it?” Okay, CD done, sticker on, all together, in the bubble envelope, sealed and all done. It took me 40 minutes per piece.

I sold more than a thousand CDs in a month. I could not keep up. So I refunded all the sales. I thanked the people for buying my product and refunded their money.

“What do you mean? I want the product.”

“No, no that’s fine, just take the refund back. But thank you. Thank you for buying what I wanted you to buy. Please stay on my newsletter? I put you in my Outlook so you’re there.”

Do you know how long it takes to bcc 4,000 people? About nine days.

Be prepared! I don’t care if it’s viral. Maybe it’s a program. Automate as much as you can. Make it scalable as much as you can. The TGIM video that I did, the one of me just sitting there talking, led me to do a video coaching program. Not how to make video, but a video of me coaching people on video. Six weeks, sequential, automated. I filmed them once, though, and they’re perpetual. The videos can be used forever. That’s what I want you to do.

Please learn from my pain. The pain of success stinks if you’re not ready for it. Be ready for it. Have things in place. Everybody reading this book could help each other out just by talking about the mistakes you have made and what you have learned. This is one of the best things about Twitter—it is a great resource for good tools.

When I needed a recording program for Skype because I was interviewing for an e-book, I went on Twitter and asked, “What kind of recording program do you use for Skype?” In 30 seconds I had 27 replies.

That’s what you need to do. Be prepared for it, because if you are not, it is going to be much worse than not having success at all. By the way, have you ever said that to people who are not successful yet? It’s like the worst thing in the world. They hate you. They say, “You sound like a spoiled brat. Don’t tell me success stinks.” But it does. It’s worse because it ruins your reputation. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and one tweet to screw it all up. Don’t do it. Be ready with everything.

So, here’s the part where I tell you how we made it right. We have made more than 65 movies total in four years. We made movies that are inspirational, motivational, and funny. We have focused on niche markets such as women, pet owners, real estate, MLM. If you’re in direct sales, by the way, it’s probably the biggest industry you could get this for. It’s all about numbers and building and being scalable. It’s huge. Whatever your niche, you can make a movie out of it. I don’t care if your market is regional real estate agents in Washington. You can do something. Just do the top 10 ways you know you’re from Washington. I just gave you the movie, by the way. It’ll work. It’ll go. It’ll happen.

Our top movie has had 45,000,000-plus views and more than $5,000,000 in sales. Again, it doesn’t stop. It’s always perpetual, always comes in, and is always building leads. Fifteen of those 65 have more than 1,000,000,000 views. Four are my own businesses. And it never, ever stops. The Time Movie has never stopped. Think about that for a second. It’s perpetual. Right now, somebody just signed up for my newsletter. I’m not psychic or anything, I just know, because it comes in every single day. That, to me, is what business is. Stop trading dollars for hours and start scaling. And viral is a great way to do it, if you do it right.