PreneurCast is a business podcast. Each week, author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
In a special early edition, Pete and Dom talk about The Challenge, a totally free online course taking people through the basics of starting a business online, and they talk about the core principle behind it all, the Symphony of Four Parts.
Pete and Dom talk about The Challenge and the Symphony of Four Parts
Transcript:
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Episode 018:
The Challenge – How to Earn a Dollar Online
Pete Williams: Hello, hello.
Dom Goucher: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher.
Pete: And I guess that leaves me as Pete Williams.
Dom: I guess you’re right.
Pete: So how’s the week been?
Dom: Good. Busy. Very, very, very busy, but good.
Pete: Beautiful. Busy with The Challenge? Is that the focus of your time at the moment?
Dom: It has been the absolute focus of my time, yes.
Pete: Very cool.
Dom: For those who don’t know, each year I do a little bit of work for Ed Dale and the team on The Challenge. I produce the transcripts for all of the lessons.
Pete: Let’s just back this up a bit. Back it up just a little bit.
Dom: Yeah, I was just thinking as I was speaking. Do you know what? I don’t know if anybody knows what we’re talking about.
Pete: I’m sure there are definitely some people who have come across from other places, the blog and Twitter and that sort of stuff who know what The Challenge is, what used to be referred to as The Thirty Day Challenge. So it’s probably worth, before go down that rabbit hole, giving some context. For those previous listeners, they would know how important context is. So let’s give them some context and explain what The Challenge actually is.
Dom: And as a contributor to The Challenge in previous years, can I hand that over to you?
Pete: Sure. Well, basically Ed Dale, who again has been on this podcast, mentioned numerous times but also did the John Mayer love-in episode, started this little thing called The Challenge, I’m guessing, oh, memory – five or six years ago, anyway, a few years back and started what was called The Thirty Day Challenge. It was a program to show people how to make their first dollar on the internet and for 30 days gave away a metric-shit ton, it’s a technical term, of free content about lessons going from start to finish on how to make your first dollar online.
It’s not one of those how to go and make a million dollars in three months kind of thing. It’s simply just make your first dollar online. Set the right foundation and learn the right lessons. It started and it took off, and it’s now into its fifth, sixth year, or whatever sort of math equation it works out to be. I think last year we had about 160,000 people go through it or in the last 12 months or something. At some period of time, there’s been over 160,000 people go through this thing. It’s absolutely insane.
It’s growing astronomically. And it’s on again starting as of the first of September, which is today in Australia and tomorrow in the US. It’s sort of happening around about now at the time of recording. Yeah, it’s obviously growing and changing in the way it’s being delivered. It’s no longer a 30-day challenge anymore. It’s actually stretched out over a longer period of time. But that means more content, higher-quality content, and it’s still probably, in my opinion, and a lot of other people’s opinion to be honest, the best way to learn how the start marketing your business using the internet as the platform for that business.
Primarily, it’s all about starting a business that you can run from home. It’s an amazing process. Let’s be honest, it’s a lead-generation tool for Ed and the team, and all that stuff that gets done off the back of that. But the best lead-generation process obviously in any business anywhere in the world because it gives away so much value upfront. I guess that’s a good enough starting point. I’m sure you’ve got some stuff to add to help out with the overview of what it is.
Dom: Yeah. The first thing is you really skipped over one of the most important parts of this. I absolutely agree with everything that you said. But let’s break this down. If this was an advert…
Pete: Like rap? Do you mean like rap? Break it down like rappers?
Dom: Oh dear, no.
Pete: Ok.
Dom: Please, no. If this is for the advert, people would be a little bit skeptical because they’d say, “Hey, make your first dollar online.” And traditional advertising is, “Make $1,000 or $500 a day,” or whatever the usual trash is. But the premise is make a dollar online. But where people would fall down on this would be the word ‘free.’ Let’s emphasize this.
This program is completely free, 100% free, every element of it. Once you’ve signed up to receive the notifications to tell you when the lesson is out or whatever other information there is, there’s absolutely no fees. You do not pay to join this course. They’ve even negotiated free-trial memberships and copies of any software that they recommend you use during the process. It’s quite phenomenal.
Pete: Let me put one caveat around that just to make sure it’s completely transparent. We do suggest that you purchase a domain name and a little bit of hosting.
Dom: Ah, sorry.
Pete: Let’s say you don’t buy a coffee for four days and you’re good to go. It’s literally about $12 is all you really need in terms of the whole process.
Dom: Absolutely. You want to carry the entire thing through and take action. As we always say, you’ve got to take action. If you want to take the action, the action step of buying the domain for your website and putting it on some hosting, yes, that will cost you. But the recommendations that are made are the lowest, cheapest possible purchase cost for that.
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: But in terms of all the other tools that are recommended… But the most important thing is it’s free. Most people think, “Oh, free. It’s going to be rubbish. It’s going to be a haphazard. It’s going to be a bit blah, blah, blah,” no. And that is a truly amazing thing. As you said, there’s a phenomenal amount of content. This thing used to be, when it was The Thirty Day Challenge, it was 30 days’ worth of video-based training. That’s a lot in itself.
But also, and the intro to this came from the fact that Ed brought me into the team because every single piece of content also has a written PDF-generated transcript with screenshots, summaries, all the links, hyperlinks, references, everything broken out. So you’ve got the material in any format you want. It’s the highest-quality material for this kind of stuff.
And it’s actually, in my humble opinion, not as a super-elite internet marketer but as an ordinary everyday guy with an ordinary everyday business, it a process that actually works. It’s not some arbitrage like ‘get there now, do it now before somebody else.’ This has been tested and proved over the last six years with thousands and thousands of people. It’s amazing.
Pete: It works out like 59, I guess you’d could call it not modules but training sessions. And each session, I think, has about two videos in it. It’s like 100 pieces of content in here. It’s absolutely insane. Realistically, there are courses out there, it sounds a bit trite, but there are courses out there that have less quality, are less produced, have less content, selling for a couple of grand. This is completely free. Ed’s done an amazing job. An amazing, amazing job.
It’s actually the core training that I put all my new virtual team through. A person comes on board and joins the Preneur Group, so to speak. The first thing they do is they’ll sit and go through the entire Challenge training from where to go and taking notes. So it’s definitely something that I continually use for all my team to give them a strong foundation in what is, in my opinion, core internet marketing principles.
And also, I’m going to use the term again, it sets the context for them on what we do. Because everything that we do throughout PreneurMarketing.com and all the other stuff that springs off that is set in the foundations of what The Challenge teaches. So it’s a great way to give them the context of the projects and types of work they’re going to be working on.
Obviously, we go into this in a lot more depth and really ratchet it up a lot. The flow and the process, The Symphony of Four Parts, which I think we spoke about in one of the earliest episodes of PreneurCast. We spoke about the book that’s coming along and will be out at some point, let’s just leave it at that. We spoke about The Symphony of Four Parts, and that’s the foundation that I use in all our businesses and it came from The Challenge.
Dom: Yeah. Now, we did talk about it briefly and I want to come back to it because that’s really the core of what is taught in The Challenge. But before we do, let’s just do just some full disclosure here because this really sounds like an Ed Dale and The Challenge love-in. We’ve had Ed on this show before. You’ve had Ed on the show.
Pete: There’s a man crush going on somewhere in that sort of quote.
Dom: We’ve had Ed on the show before and we don’t hide the fact that you are pretty good friends with a lot of the guys that are involved in this. But one of the reasons you are involved in it is because of the way that they do this, that it’s given away for free. You haven’t hidden it. It’s upfront. It’s a lead-generator. These guys have got other businesses and they are interested in getting people to take on that stuff.
And I work for Ed. I provide the transcription services as part of The Challenge. You contribute content to The Challenge in the past. But the reason why I’m bigging this up is the same reason you are, which is that this content stands alone. If I didn’t know Ed, if I’ve never met the guy or any of the other really nice guys on The Challenge team actually, and some of them are frighteningly clever as well, I would still stand by this content absolutely.
It teaches, and this is another important point, the core concepts of an internet-based business and also of marketing a business on the internet from the ground up. These guys start with buying a domain name. They start before buying a domain name. They go all the way through right the way up to monetizing a reasonable monetization method and how to move forward. They don’t miss any steps out. As you say, for your team and any team out there, it’s a fantastic foundation.
If you have a normal everyday business and you’re thinking of promoting that business online or you want to start your own business and thinking of doing something with the business that runs online, this is a great way to get into it. It’s not the be all and end all. It doesn’t have the answer to everything, but it will give you that foundation, that grounding of knowledge.
To come back to The Symphony of Four Parts, what comes before all of the technical high-level, deep and meaningful stuff that they teach you about the internet, about getting a website, getting it into Google, getting it promoted and all the rest of that stuff, it is this concept that Ed put across years ago and it is built upon The Symphony of Four Parts. This way of looking at a business, any business. And I think it even maps to offline businesses, but it’s certainly is more obvious in mapping it to online businesses.
Pete: It’s absolutely applies to offline businesses, unquestionably applies. There are some elements of it which are easier to manage and easier to…
Dom: Measure. Don’t forget measuring. No measuring, no marketing.
Pete: Measure, yeah. Through online business because of the keyword research you can do and Analytics data and stuff like that. Unquestionably, it applies to any business. It’s something that we continually discuss in the Infiniti office when we’re looking at doing new business units under the telco brand or in the Preneur Group sort of stuff as well is The Symphony of Four Parts. Market research first. You’re going to work out if there’s a market out there. Are there people who are looking for your solution? Are there people that have the problem that your solution fixes?
You’ve got to make sure there’s a market there. Then you’ve got to make sure that there’s traffic. Can this business generate traffic? Or how do I go and generate traffic for this business, be it foot traffic or web traffic? We spoke about traffic in The Seven Levers episode a couple of weeks back about how important traffic is to a business. So you’ve got to make sure that you are getting traffic to that business whether it’s a retail store, phone inquiries or whatever it might be.
Then you’ve got conversion. You’ve got to have a conversion engine in your business, and that’s some sort of system that’s replicable and scalable that actually converts that traffic into buyers. And then finally, it’s about the product and about doing the product the best way you can, be it by producing the product or buying. From The Challenge perspective, to run through that quickly, it’s all about doing some research around the industry or the niche that you want to go after, putting a website out there that isn’t overly sexy but is effective to get traffic. It’s Google-friendly, it’s going to get you traffic.
Once you know that hey, there’s a market there and I can get traffic to my business, my website, then you go about working out how to convert that traffic into buyers. So you work out some affiliate offers or you sell some other products from other producers in that particular niche or industry. See if you can convert and get that conversion engine working. Then you decide on how you’re actually going to grow that business. “Am I going to create my own product? Am I going to continue just to sell other people’s products? What is the product going to be and how is it going to work?”
That’s the last thing you think about. To give you ideas and some other scenarios like in various niches that we play in, in the telco space, what we’ll do is before we even go and necessarily crunch the best deal or work out if we’re going to hold the stock ourselves and do deliveries and dispatches ourselves, we’ll put up a website, make sure we can get traffic and make sure we can sell it, and then just drop-ship that product to start with.
Then we’ll go about negotiating better prices. We’ll even sell at cost to start with just to make sure that we can get an engine that’s actually converting and generating leads for the business. And then we’ll go about working out the best way to actually facilitate the product, or get a larger product line, or find some distributors and things like that. There are so many different ways. It’s really important to get that process down pat first.
Dom: Absolutely. It’s worth looking at this and realizing a lot of what is in The Challenge goes against what most people would do, what the received wisdom is. It’s not even received wisdom, it’s just what most people would do if they were trying to get involved in starting a business. You’ve just given an example there and I’ll come back to that. We are looking at The Symphony of Four Parts. Look for market, look for traffic, look for conversion, and then and only then do you invest time and effort in developing and producing a product.
Now, what do most people do? I had a conversation with a friend yesterday and he said to me, “I’ve got this great idea. I think this Item A or this widget will sell really well. I’m going to go and look for what permits I need to set up, what licenses I need, what kind of equipment, who’s selling it, how much it costs, see if I can get some investment.” I said, “Whoa, trigger. Have you seen anybody selling this product here?” Then he said, “Well, no. But I’ll be the leader. I’ll be the first.” Whoa. Whoa, trigger.” And it’s the standard conversation time and time, and time again.
The way The Challenge does this is because on the internet it’s so easy, as you said, to do this, to set things, to do market research and they show you all of these: How to do market research from your armchair. How awesome is that? How to work out whether a market is commercially viable? You might think, “Oh, there’s a massive market here. Loads of people are interested in this topic,” but it may not be commercially viable.
They’ll show you how to work that out. And then just like you said, testing the traffic. Again, brilliant. A solution that you came up with which is let’s not invest in a couple of $100,00 worth of stock and then sit on it and try to sell it. Let’s slap up a site, see if anybody tries to buy it; and then if they do, we’ll drop-ship some to them. We may not make a massive amount of profit from that particular thing. But what we do learn is whether or not it’s a viable business before we invest a massive amount of capital.
Pete: I think it was carsonline.com or carsales, or one of the big dot-coms in ‘97, ‘98, ‘99 when the whole internet boom was coming along. Cars Direct, I think it was carsdirect.com. What they did, they’d set up their website. They did this. They’re actually one of the smarter dot-coms originally. I don’t know whether they stuck around and survived the bubble burst. But originally, they set up carsdirect.com and the story goes or the word around the campfire is, the way the website worked is when someone went on there to search for a particular car to buy online, there was actually someone at the other end of the computer literally typing back a price to the guy who was using the website with how much the car is going to be.
And if someone actually purchased the car online, he would then call up a local dealer and try and buy that car, and get it delivered to the person. It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. The original founders of that business, as far as the story goes, they had no inventory at all. They didn’t even care about the product. They don’t even own the product. They just went and actually made sure they can get traffic and make conversions, make sales by someone literally having the Red Book in front of them.
“Oh, you want a Ford Fiesta two-cylinder? Ok, that would be $34,326. You purchased it. Great. Now, let’s shop around and try to find someone who will sell it to us at that cost or as close to that cost as possible so we won’t lose money on that sale.” And that was able to prove their business model. So as you said, they could turn around and get some funding, “Hey, if people are willing to buy cars online, let’s go and invest in some serious money and build this out.”
Dom Goucher: Brilliant. Amazing. This actually links back to something that I’ve only just recently become aware of, something actually mentioned by Ed on one of the various pieces of content in one of his paid memberships. Referred to him by one of his mentorees is a book called Go For No. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.
Pete: I have heard of about it, I haven’t read it yet. It will be part of the Noise Reduction, hopefully, in a couple of week’s time.
Dom: Cool, I was going to ask you if you’ve gone through it. But the concept of Go for No is really backed up by what we’re talking about with The Challenge and the way The Challenge works. The idea of Go for No is that every successful sale, every successful purchase on a website, every sale by telephone call, whatever it is, actually comes from a long line of people saying no; whether it’s people who don’t even bother clicking on your listing in Google, or your advert on the side of Google; whether it is people who come to your website and then don’t buy; or whether it is people who you actually ring up and they say, “No, thank you.”
There is a long list of no’s before they get a yes, and most people focus on the yes. And they don’t really think about the numbers of no’s; or they do, and it depresses them. But one of the premises inside The Challenge that I really love is the fact that because they make it so systematic and therefore, so easy to do the market research, test the traffic and look at the conversion. And you’re not investing anything but a little bit of time; and it really is a little bit of time. It’s quite scary how quickly you can loop through this process when you get used to it.
Really, your capital outlay is the price of the domain name. You can get a very reasonable lump of hosting for a small fee that will host a number of websites. So you really are only investing in domain name after the first turn. And they really advocate this Go for No strategy. You literally throw the site up just as you do in the telco. You throw the site up, do the minimum effort to promote it, get it in front of the eyeballs of the market if you find the market, test for traffic, test for conversion. And if the numbers don’t work, again, this is where most people would probably go wrong. If the numbers don’t work, get rid of it.
Pete: Well, this is…
Dom: Yeah? Go on.
Pete: No, go ahead.
Dom: Well, I was just going to say, it costs you, as you said, three coffees or whatever, and a bit of time to do this business market research. It didn’t work, fine. Do another.
Pete: Well, speaking of that, this is one of the brilliant things that I think was Rob Somerville aka Guru Bob’s brainchild. It could have been Ed’s, I don’t know. Half of Ed’s brilliance comes from Robert, to be honest about it. And this is about the whole starting with the end in mind and having outcomes already planned. Obviously, the original idea of all of this, is for a person to start at the start, funnily enough, and end up with a website that is making them their first dollar online and hopefully, go on to make them a nice bit of side income that can even just pay for a holiday with your family.
It doesn’t have to replace your job. You can just do this to make an extra five grand a year which can cover a nice little family vacation that you couldn’t have otherwise had. Or just take that little bit of pain away from the mortgage payments every month, or whatever it might be. It doesn’t have to be about making 100 grand a year and replacing your job or anything like that. The brilliance of The Challenge is they’ve got a profitable outcome when you hit a no, and it’s brilliant.
There is a website called Flippa.com, which is a website where you can sell other websites. If you build up a web property that’s making a dollar, or not making a dollar, there is a marketplace out there for people who want to buy that, who think they can fast-track part of it and jump on board and leverage that little bit of development that you have made. Think about it. If you build a shack, someone’s going to want to buy that shack in the real world. This is basically the selling of the shack online.
So even if your business doesn’t make you a dollar, you can still turn around and sell that website from anywhere from $50 to $200 on Flippa.com. You can actually make a profitable outcome by failing, which is bizarre. But because you planned that, because you started at the start with that outcome in mind going, “Ok, this is the outcome I want. I want to make a dollar. What happens if I don’t make that dollar? How can I actually profit from a failure?” And they’ve thought that through, which I think is brilliant.
Dom: Yeah. In the last few years, that has become a big part of The Challenge. The fact that it’s an absolute no-lose proposition. If you put the effort in, if you take the action: you do the initial market research, put up the site, get it listed in Google, each step of the process. It’s absolutely important that everyone understands this. It is very easy and a lot of people who listen to the podcast probably overlook the knowledge they have. But if you don’t have this knowledge, and I’ve come across this, if you don’t have anyone of these pieces of knowledge, each step of this process is priceless to a business wanting to be successful online, starting with getting your website indexed by Google.
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever come across, and I’ve come across this, one of my clients was a multinational pharmaceutical company and they had spent multiple tens of thousands of dollars having a website developed. It was developed in Flash, so I try not to laugh at them. But let’s overlook that minor detail. They called me in because they wanted to promote it online; they wanted it to rank for certain keywords and all these other things they had read about and heard about.
And I had the very difficult task of explaining to them that sometimes if you build it, they won’t come. Because this website which was very, very expensive, looked lovely, really very nice, lots of very expensive video and movie animations and stuff. And it had never been seen by Google. And I don’t mean they didn’t rank very well, I mean it had never been seen. It had been published over a month ago before they called me, and they didn’t even know how to check if it had been seen by Google.
So they were completely and utterly unaware that there was no forest with no tree to make no sound when it fell. It was so heartbreaking to have to break it to these guys. And then, even better, was the knowledge that on average if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s no real given process; or there wasn’t at that time, there is now. There wasn’t a given process to kind of nudge Google and say, “Go on. Go and have a look. Go on.”
Pete: Give me some love. Come on.
Dom: Go on. You know you want to. Give me some love. Go on.
Pete: Just a peck. Just give me a little peck, just to start out with.
Dom: Yeah, anything. Anything. And so they were in this real situation and using techniques that are taught for free in The Challenge, and almost glossed over those. I got their site indexed, seen by Google so that it was able to achieve some form of ranking in the search engines within 24 hours. And, again, back then this was unheard of.
Pete: Like the ladies say, mate; you have the magic touch. But it’s a challenge. It’s the touch that was passed on by Rob Somerville, Ed Dale and the rest of the crew.
Dom: Absolutely. Yes, start with the end in mind. First of all, they give you a goal, and they give you the goal of a dollar. Not $500, not replace your income, but a dollar. Because the real goal of this, and this is important, the real goal of this is not making the money, it’s going through the process, maybe more than once so that you do it and learn it, and realize that you do this, this, this; it’s the process. As we used to say, it’s handle-turning. Every step of this can be outsourced, which proves that it’s a process.
Pete: There are two things that I’d love to touch on before we finish the podcast. If you look at it from the context of the Market Symphony, The Challenge is also about finding out a niche that doesn’t work and finding that out early enough.
Dom: Exactly.
Pete: And what I mean by that is, you might have an idea for a business, as you alluded to earlier, or an idea for a potential niche that you want to go after, a particular subject or industry. And part of this is working out and testing if that niche is a profitable niche. Are there people out there who: A) want what the heck you’re trying to sell, and B) do those people even have the money to buy the solution that you’re trying to sell. There’s plenty of markets out there with huge amount of people, but none of those people are willing to spend money or have the capacity to spend money. So that’s the first thing to try to educate you on.
It’s as much about finding what isn’t going to work as early as possible before you go and invest a lot of time, money, sweat, tears into a business that is never going to work anyway. That’s another great thing about the process as well. And the other thing I want to touch on is, I guess, a suggestion, a piece of advice. Ed actually tweeted out yesterday or the day before a question saying, “For those new people starting The Challenge, what’s your one piece of advice?’
And I kind of thought about it. Let’s get a little deep in here. To me, really, the secret to success is just self-discipline and commitment. And it sounds wonky and yeah, really obvious. But there’s a lot of content to get through. And if you can just discipline yourself and be consistent enough to invest 30 minutes a day, two hours every two days, three hours per week just to work through this at your own pace but you make that commitment to start or make the commitment to finish what you start, you’ll succeed.
If you really think about it, all failure is, is not finishing what you started, kind of. If you look at all the successful people, half the reason they’re successful is because they made the commitment to be self-disciplined and actually just do what they say they’re going to do and work through it and make the commitment. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in here, Ed talks about CFTs. I know he definitely talks about it in some of his other programs and things like that. And what a CFT is, is Critical Focus Time.
It’s about sitting down for a particular period of time and focusing on the one critical thing you can do today. And obviously, if you’re starting The Challenge, that critical thing should be watch the video, implement the actions. So you’re making the commitment. I’m not going to go and check Twitter. I’m not going to go and check Facebook. I’m going to sit down for 45 minutes, 25 minutes, two hours and I’m going to watch the video, take notes, implement what they tell me to do. That’s it. And then you can spend the next 23 hours of the day doing what the hell you want.
Go on MySpace and Facebook and stuff like that. But just make that Critical Focus Time be dedicated to it. We spoke about this in the triathlon episode as well in that the way you finish an Ironman triathlon is by turning up the training and doing nothing else but train while you’re training. Unlike entrepreneurs, you turn up to the computer to do work and end up distracted on Facebook or replying to email; that’s not going to work at an Ironman. You can’t. You can’t show up at the swimming pool and sit there and read a book on swimming and think that you’ve actually made some progress. It ain’t going to happen.
So that’s the biggest success tip I can give you, directly with The Challenge. But with anything, it’s just to work out what your outcome is, be dedicated, be committed, and work your way through it. And trust the process. Trust that 160,000 people have gone through this. Rob, Ed, Dan and the rest of the team, there’s a lot of effort in planning. We sit down and go through this really in-depth. I wasn’t involved as much this year; but in prior years, we’ve had planning days to sit down and months to work through this to make sure it’s exactly right and easy to implement for people. So, trust the process, stay committed and stay disciplined. That’s really the key to any sort of success if you really think about it, and believe it and do it.
Dom: Absolutely. I support what you said, I’ve got my own tip. But I support what you said because, as you said, it started off with The Thirty Day Challenge. The original goal was to achieve something in 30 days. And when they reviewed it and moved to it to call it The Challenge, one of the reasons I understand they reviewed it and modified the structure was to give people a realistic chance of working through the program in a realistic amount of time. So now, every ‘day’ of content is a reasonable amount of content. It’s like less than half an hour of video to watch.
In fact, I believe the goal is to basically give you a piece of content and the task against that content that can be achieved in half an hour, or at least less then an hour. And also, there are seven days on, seven days off that’s recommended. So there are seven tasks to do, and then a week to give you either to catch up with those tasks or let those tasks percolate in various online environments. So, it’s absolutely realistic that if you take the idea of CFTs, Critical Focus Time, the tasks that’s going to make the most difference to your goal, half an hour or an hour every day, seven days on, and the seven days off, you are going to get somewhere if you stick with it, absolutely.
My tip is, from this book that I’ve just found out about, is go for no. Most people will start the process going for the $1. “Oh, I’ve got to make the dollar. I’ve got to make the dollar.” And if they don’t, they might get disheartened, pack up and just give up. “Ah, it’s all rubbish. It’s all crap. It’s blah, blah, blah.” The game here, as you said earlier, is go for no. Get it out of the way. Go through the process. Throw yourself at it. So what if you make a dollar or you don’t make a dollar? As I was saying earlier, you’ve put in the effort and as part of the process, you’re shown how to produce a good-quality website.
How much does a good-quality website cost? If you hired a website designer out in the real world, away from internet marketing and people that know about things like WordPress and WordPress themes and all the rest of this; how much does a real website cost? You’re talking a couple of hundred dollars. Even if you hire some spotty oik in the shed. So, when you get to the end of the process, you’ve worked through the process the first time; you’ve thrown yourself at it; you’ve picked the first thing that came to mind, the first market; you’ve thrown the site up; you’ve looked for traffic; you tried to convert and it didn’t work.
But in your possession is that website. And one of the integral parts of the course now, as you said earlier, is they coach you through, if you don’t want to keep the website because it failed or whatever; there’s this online auction place called Flippa. And Danny Batelic, who is the guy who’s going to step you through listing your site on this auction site, Danny calls it ‘the eBay of websites,’ and you know people will buy anything on eBay. The reason why Danny Batelic is giving these lessons this year is because a few years ago when Danny started, as a basically a drummer, and Ed had lots of scathing things to say about him and drumming in general. But Danny started where everyone else started, at the beginning.
He started with The Challenge. He followed it through. He got to the end. He got this website that wasn’t converting. So he sold it on Flippa for a profit. And he sat down and he thought, “You know what, I could just do that. I could just build these sites that are already indexed by Google, which is a thing that has value. They’re already seeing a certain amount of traffic, which is a thing that has value. And they’re a website in their own right that have been built so that has value. And I can just list them on this Flippa place.” And the guy now makes a living just doing that, just by following the steps of the process in The Challenge.
He is literally is going for the no because he’s not even trying to make the dollar half the time. I mean he does now because he has progressed his business. He’s grown his business to buying and selling high-value websites and developing high-value web assets, which is another story all together. And we know a couple of people we could talk to about that in another podcast. So, it’s ok, go for the no. Go through the process, learn the process, go for the no. If you get a no, list it. List it on Flippa, get your money back. At least get your money back for the domain name. And then you’re on a positive because you’ve learned something. Apply it again, just keep going. That’s my tip.
Pete: I like it. 40 minutes, mate. I think we should wrap this up. We can obviously talk for ages about The Challenge and the theories that it teaches, not only actual items around internet marketing but general business philosophies, business processes and stuff like that. I think one of the reasons Ed and I get on so well and have built such a strong friendship is because we have the same underlying philosophy of what growing a business and making a business means, which is great. So, I couldn’t endorse it enough. Just getting involved in The Challenge community, the amount of amazing friends.
I’ll probably going to have like a The Challenge table at my wedding next year just for people I consider family now that I’ve met through The Challenge world. So that in itself is valuable in terms of building a great community of like-minded people to share ideas, support, network and things like that; and build your mastermind groups that we spoke about in our previous episode, off people in The Challenge. So you all have the same foundation and context that you can grow together with.
Dom: Absolutely fantastic extra, extra tips there. The last thing for me is, whenever you’re listening to this podcast and hopefully, you’re listening to it as we go live and as we put it out in iTunes. But maybe you come to us somewhere through the year. You find out about us and you’re listening to this episode, The Challenge now runs, is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year. Once The Challenge launches on September the 1st and the content is renewed; if there is anything that needs to be updated because technologies have changed – this year, a few small things have changed, the content might be renewed.
But it’s available for access all year round. So whenever you are listening to this, even is you’re already involved in internet marketing or you never really got it going. It doesn’t matter where you’re coming at it from; if you’ve not gone through The Challenge, it’s worth a look. We’ve got our own little quick link to that. We’ve put something up at PreneurMarketing.com/Challenge. So go to that link and take action. Just go through the course, and go for no. Just try it. There’s nothing to lose.
Pete: And my little request is just a bit of self-promotion here. Let’s keep that happening as well. If you are on the internet, which I think a lot of you are, send us a tweet on @preneur. You are at?
Dom: @dgoucher.
Pete: And we would really appreciate it. Every week, we always ask for iTunes reviews and stuff like that. And we continue to subtly ask for iTunes reviews. But what we’d also love is to just share the love. If you’re enjoying the podcast, you are a regular listener and you think there’s a great tip or a great episode as a whole, feel free to tweet about it or blog about it, or however you feel might be helpful.
That would be really cool guys, if you could share the love and help us at getting the word out. We really enjoy doing this. We like to stroke our egos by checking the stats and seeing where people are listening from. The growth has been phenomenal. So, listeners just continue to grow week on week. It’s amazing. So help up continue that and help stroke our egos.
Dom: Indeed, please do. Please continue giving us feedback on the iTunes Store, positive or negative. Email us preneurcast [at]…
Pete: …preneurgroup [dot] com. Little bit of tag team here.
Dom: Yeah. I’ve got to work on the timing there.
Pete: You can edit that out. Can’t you edit the silence out afterwards?
Dom: I’m leaving it.
Pete: Also, big, big props to Chris who sent a tweet to me this week saying that he’s listened to the last two episodes of our podcast, has implemented some stuff already; and his business has started to grow a little bit. So that’s great. Hopefully, we can buy you breakfast next week by the stuff you’ve learned.
Dom: Awesome. That’s really what we’re doing this for. We’re doing this because hopefully people out there can take some of the things that we talk about, implement them, take action on what we say, implement these ideas – whether it’s the 7 Levers or whether it’s the book we recommend, whatever it is; and it will hopefully improve your business, and then we’ve done our job.
Pete: That’s it. See you next week.
Dom: See you next week, buddy
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Links:
preneurmarketing.com/challenge – The Challenge
Go for No – Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton
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