Principle 10

Leveraging Technology and the Internet

Give me a lever long enough and a prop strong enough, and I can single-handedly move the world.

—Archimedes

In this chapter, you will learn a few strategies for leveraging technology and the Internet that will assist you in building the foundation for creating a successful business and becoming an Affluent Entrepreneur. You will also read examples of entrepreneurs who have used these strategies to expand their reach and build their business. Finally, you will see how “The Donald,” Mr. Trump, effectively uses technology continuously to build his empire.

Without question, this principle is one of the most essential in this book because technology has revolutionized the way business is done, and it is largely the way business is now done. I'm going to share with you here how to use e-mail, social networking, and search engine optimization (SEO) to your advantage. If you don't want to devote time to executing these strategies effectively, you will learn how to find talented experts to handle them for you. What's important to note is that you don't have to know how all this technology works; you only need to understand why you (or the person to whom you delegate these tasks) must leverage the Internet and technology to your benefit. By taking advantage of these wonderful tools, you will be able to market your business on a global basis around the clock, every day of the year, and then experience the wonder of making money while you sleep!

Conference Calls

As a publishing, book marketing, and speaking coach, I have well over 250 clients, and that number continues to grow month after month. As a result, I am often asked how I manage this growth and still provide personal service to all my clients. Well, one of the biggest tools I use, and I encourage you to use as an Affluent Entrepreneur, is the power of conference calls.

I host a Monday morning 8 AM PST Inner Circle Publishing Mastermind call every week, as I have been doing for years. This call is for my publishing, book marketing, and speaking clients. See, the cool thing about a conference call to me is that it does not matter whether there are 10 people on the call or 1,000 people; it takes me just one hour of time to host the call, yet if there are 25 people on the line, then that saves me 25 hours of individual coaching time by phone with 25 of my clients. Each caller dials in with questions . . . and the beautiful thing is that I do not need to be prepared for the call because after 15 years in this industry, I have personally discovered and learned almost every answer to every question the callers have. Even better, each caller gets to listen to the questions from the other dialers along with my answers, and then apply this new knowledge to their lives. As a result, it is a win-win for all involved.

E-mail

I give all of my clients unlimited e-mail access to me because I can more quickly answer their questions that way than trying to schedule one-on-one time with all of them. In addition, I can reply to them when it is convenient to me rather than having to field a bunch of phone calls throughout the day, or trying to call them back with answers, only to end up playing phone tag.

Despite e-mail's advantages, however, it does have its challenges. First, people are often inundated with spam and also personal e-mails, so the sheer volume of e-mail makes it difficult to sift through and determine which e-mails are priorities and need immediate responses, which ones can wait for later, and which ones just to delete without reading. And the more successful your business becomes, the greater the e-mail volume you are going to see.

To solve this dilemma, I recommend you either have an assistant filter through your e-mail, or you set up a folder system so all incoming e-mails are automatically filtered to one of your preset folders.

An additional difficulty is that with Facebook and other social networking sites, there are other ways besides e-mail for people to send you communications. To combat this issue, on these social networking sites where I have my profile page and my “follow me” links, I have a section that says, “e-mail preferred.” That way if visitors plan on contacting me, they will be encouraged to use e-mail since that is I how I prefer to communicate. Therefore, if you as the reader want to get in touch with me, the best way is to send me an e-mail at: [email protected]. In addition, you might also delegate having your assistant who monitors your e-mail also stay up to date on your social networking sites for you.

Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic way to get your message out into the marketplace. However, the challenge here is the time it takes to write your own blog and create a large following of readers. When promoting the Wiley release of my first book Creating Your Own Destiny, I learned about how to build a following from a pioneer in the industry. In his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott talks about how the media is completely changing the way everything is done on the Internet, and more specifically, how authors' strategies are changing so they can better market their books.

In the olden days, authors would publish a book and then blast e-mails out to their clients and to their list in hopes that people would purchase their books. This worked in the beginning, but it does not work anymore. Additionally, authors would e-mail or fax press releases to journalists in hopes that these journalists would actually go out of their way to write a story on their books. Well, the problem there is two-fold: (1) The journalist often does not get to select the exact subject matter he or she writes about. Many times journalists have bosses or managing editors who decide what content is produced by that newspaper or magazine, and (2) Journalists' in-boxes are flooded with hundreds of press releases that have been sent to them. Not to mention that the amount of mail received by journalists is also overwhelming.

Long story short, David Meerman Scott realized there had to be a better way for authors to be seen and heard. His idea was to get bloggers involved in the equation, so he amassed a list of 150 of the largest bloggers in North America who blogged on his subject matter (social media and public relations). He then sent a review copy of his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, to the bloggers on the list, asking them to blog about his book.

His results were absolutely stunning. In roughly the first 90 days, he sold thousands of books and hit the bestseller lists. With Creating Your Own Destiny, I applied David's wisdom and strategy to my book. In the process, I realized a couple of things.

First, yes, it is important to be active in social networking and to develop thousands of followers and friends. But no matter how many friends we attract (unless you are Ashton Kutcher, whom I understand has more followers than anyone on the planet), you will never be able to attract as many fans and friends as the top bloggers in your area already have reading their blogs. My thoughts were that since bloggers oftentimes work from home and rarely get large volumes of mail, they can actually select the subject matters they write about and determine when to write about it, so David Meerman Scott's strategy was pure genius.

Secondly, I discovered the one flaw in this strategy. Why would anyone blog about my book without my doing anything in return? I could have solved that problem by starting my own blog and blogging about the other bloggers, thereby returning the favor, but I did not want to get into the blog space and try to compete for readers. I concluded that it made more sense for me to be a matchmaker, a resource for existing bloggers, and to create a link on my site called “Cool Blogs.” Next I would add each blogger's name, blog address, and subject matter to my site and promote his or her book and blog to my large list subscribers. Next, I would show this link on my page to these bloggers, and finally, I would follow up with a review copy of my book and cover letter asking them to help me out, just as I had done for them.

Bottom line, I do something for them by promoting their blogs, and in return, they promote my book, thereby creating a win-win situation. When Creating Your Own Destiny was republished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in April 2010, my results of leveraging other people's blogs resulted in the sale of thousands of books.

Fan Pages and Social Networking Ads

Next, due to the red-hot growth experienced by Facebook, I took this strategy to the next level. I started microblogging from my fan page by sending out a daily two- to three-line inspirational quote from my book in an attempt to inspire all of those who had joined my fan page. The way it works is that I post one small quote/entry on my fan page, which is automatically placed on the page of all those fans. Once I set up my fan page, literally in a few short months, I had thousands of fans enjoying and passing on these inspirational quotes. Each day in an attempt to brand both my book cover and my photo, I would alternate these images used in my communications.

To become a fan of my Facebook page, simply go to my site www.PatrickSnow.com and then scroll down and join my fan page, or visit http://www.facebook.com/TheDeanOfDestiny.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth-largest country in the world—it has over 400 million members at the time I am writing this book, and by the time you read these words, it will probably be in the half a billion range. Due to the vast number of people on Facebook and my desire as an author to build my brand and sell more books, I wanted to investigate how social networking ads worked. At the nudging of my buddy, Denny Andrews, I decided to test market some Facebook ads and commit to spending $15 per day on this site and then measure the results after seven days.

The results absolutely shocked me. My ads were for book sales, publishing coaching, and speaking engagements. I placed about seven ads in total and set my advertising budget to $10 per day ($300 per month). After forty-five days and $450 invested, 2.3 million impressions of the book cover led to 800 click-throughs to my web site. The results were a bunch of books being sold and $5,000 from coaching clients coming my way. The actual cost to do this ad for that timeframe was $450. Trading $450 for $5,000 and having over 2 million people see my book cover—that is the best deal going.

Needless to say, I have decided to continue with my Facebook ads as a permanent part of my marketing strategy moving forward.

The Internet

Small business owners often ask me what is the best resource available today to find buyers for your products or services. My answer is simple—and there is only one resource that deserves this kind of praise and recognition: the Internet. The Internet is the single greatest resource available today that can easily give you access to finding all of your customers.

In a previous chapter, I introduced you to my VP of Sales Mary West. Well, Mary is nothing less than brilliant; she consistently surprises me with new ways to leverage the Internet to find more business. A recent strategy she used resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in revenue for my business. Mary is constantly trying to identify meeting planners who are looking to book world-class speakers to entertain their audiences at conferences throughout the world.

To make a long story short, Mary Googled “Speaker Bureaus.” A speaker bureau is an organization that has a database of speakers and is constantly trying to match its speakers with meeting planners. To make this match happen, the speaker bureau is paid a commission fee for its time. Well, Mary stumbled across one speaker bureau on the Internet and then looked at its list of speakers. The cool thing about this site was she could read testimonials for each of the speakers along with their bios. Meeting planners, who had paid big money to book these speakers, wrote all the testimonials.

Well, Mary stumbled across a speaker who apparently had spoken for Subway, the giant franchiser of fresh deli sandwiches. Mary read the name of the meeting planner from Subway who wrote a glorious testimonial for this particular speaker. With this name in hand, Mary then Googled the meeting planner's name and the address for Subway's world headquarters. She found the name, phone number, and address, all online. The meeting planner was located in Milton, Connecticut, and since I was going to be traveling to Connecticut soon, it was perfect timing.

You already know the rest of the story, which I told in an earlier chapter. In short, Subway booked me to speak in Chicago later that summer for thousands of dollars. This opportunity wouldn't have happened if Mary had not leveraged the Internet. Subway is just one example of many, many speaking engagements Mary West has found for me, by leveraging the Internet.

Summary

Without question, if you want to become an Affluent Entrepreneur, you must do everything possible to keep up with all the changes going on around you in the technology sector. Keep an open mind. If you don't understand a technology, let others explain not only how it works, but more important, how the technology can work for your company and your financial gain. Once you comprehend what is happening, you can take action and leverage all the technology, information, and communication capabilities the Internet has to offer to better position yourself and your company to be exposed to the billions of people online.

The Internet is the best tool you can have in your arsenal. Once you learn to leverage it to work for you, you will become an Affluent Entrepreneur.