7 Figures in 6 Months – How Jason Brown Went from Employee Entrepreneur Overnight

Co-Founder of SERPWoo – Jason Brown

Jason Brown is a digital marketer, innovator and speaker. He unravels his story of going from Employee to Entrepreneur over night and extreme hustle (and bravery) that would launch him into hitting 6 figures within 6 months.

Check out SERPWoo.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Jaime Tardy:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire.  I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I have Jason Brown.  I'm really excited to bring Jason on.  It's kinda funny, he owns a great company called SERPWoo.com but he's also done a ton of different things in the digital marketing space even one with a previous millionaire that we had on the show, Matt Kubancik from streetmoda.com, which I'm really excited to hear that everybody sorta knows everybody else.  Thanks so much for coming on the show today Jason.

Jason Brown:	Sure, thank you Jamie.

Jaime Tardy:	So, you crushed it in affiliate marketing way back when when Facebook ads came out.  Can you just tell me how you sort of fell into that and how you made it such a success for you?

Jason Brown:	Sure.  At the time, I was actually working with an affiliate network called MediaTrust at the time and I was employed for them.  I was about their only digital marketing employee and I was working with them and their clients that we were agency of record for, and I had noticed that Facebook was really taking off, not only as a social platform but within their paid advertising so they had just released the suppliers and we were really interested in participating in that.  It wasn't a large platform, but I personally took an interest into it and certain events had led up to where I actually got laid off from the job a few days before my birthday.

	And I thought to myself, if I'm gonna make a go at this, I need to do it now; I've got no other recourse.  So, I took some money that I had on a credit card and actually purchased ads, created a website, found some offers with MediaTrust itself and with a few other affiliate networks and that was right when all of Facebook advertising took off.  So, I was kinda there in the beginning.  I did a few things different and it worked out really well for me to where I ended up doing seven figures within six months.

Jaime Tardy:	Seven figures in six months?  Did you know it was gonna work?  Did you have this feeling that it was gonna work or were you like oh, crap, oh, crap, I have nothing else that I can do?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, I was extremely scared the entire time.  I had children who were very young.  I was the single worker in the home, the only breadwinner.  And I thought I know other people are doing affiliate marketing and I know that they're making money because I had seen the figures while at MediaTrust and I just thought to myself I had already been doing digital marketing for a long time up to that point, why not me.  And I kinda just went out with a leap of faith.

	I feel like I kinda guaranteed my success almost because I was literally on the computer and literally working on these campaigns anywhere from 18 to 23 hours a day.  I had other people that I was working with.  I made some great connections with other affiliate managers and I was very earnest about looking at my competition and what other people were doing to try to emulate that same success.

Jaime Tardy:	So, you had the skill beforehand?  You've seen it before, you've sort of done pieces of it before but never with your own money so this time it was like eek, I better not lose the money for my family, but you just had to put it all online and so you worked your butt off?

Jason Brown:	Correct.

Jaime Tardy:	What do you think that drive came from?  Was it just like oh, crap, I might lose it?  Do you think anyone else could have replicated that through that same thing or was it just a fluke for you?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, I think anybody could have replicated it.  I actually was in a Skype group with a few people that was kind of a mentor type relationship with all of us on Skype and I actually helped another person who lived in Brazil and English was not his first language and I actually helped him do the exact same thing and it really came down to persistence.  I didn't let him copy my landing pages or my targets, but I kinda walked him through it.  Me and him bounced a lot of ideas off each other and he was online the same time I was for hours and hours and hours and he ended up doing seven figures as well.

	So, I think it really came down to the persistence, the determination, the willingness to be open to try new ideas.  I don't think it was a fluke.  There was a lot of people who had success at the same time I did with Facebook.  We were kinda all running the same offers and the same pages, but I definitely do not think that it was a fluke because things changed within that year and the year afterward and you either had to adapt or die and there were a lot of people who simply, you know, after six or eight months couldn't cut it anymore and they were no longer affiliates or they went back to their day job.  So, I think it wasn't a fluke.  I think it really comes down to the persistence and the determination.

Jaime Tardy:	See, I love that you say that because just the thing that people I don't think understand how much work - when I surveyed a bunch of the millionaires for my book, I asked them how many hours at first did they work and there was no multiple choice.  It just was like how many hours a week did you work and they said all of them.

Jason Brown:	Yeah, oh, yeah.

Jaime Tardy:	I'm like whoa.  So, I mean that's what it sounds like for you too.  You know what I mean?  There was almost no time you were able to sleep or do anything else because you were constantly working.  Do you think people give up too early?  Why didn't you give up three months into it and go ugh, I'm 23 hours, I never see my family?

Jason Brown:	Sure.  There were many times that I wanted to.  It created a lot of problems.  My wife was not happy that I was working so much.  I had children that looked up to me.  I had other things that would come up like maybe my brother?s birthday or some type of party that my kids got invited to that maybe I had to miss out on.  And around the three-month mark, I actually became successful with the campaign that I was running within the first week so I was kind of in a situation where I didn?t fail for the first three months and I was getting ready to give up, but I was in a situation where I was having issues with the campaign overall.

	Nothing with the marketing or the sales but with cash flow, you know, I had never personally ever tried to spend $10,000.00 a day with Facebook at that three-month mark and how was I going to pay them because I didn?t have a credit card at that time that I had a $10,000.000 limit.  And even if I did have a credit card with that limit, the next problem would have been, how do I pay that off each day so that I can get that balance back to do it?

	So, I had to look at multiple ways of overcoming problems I had and that literally kept me so busy that I couldn?t think about quitting even though I was tremendously tired.  It was causing problems, but as a new business or new experience, you just kinda have to work through it and balance work and life, but you also have to be challenged in your work which I was to keep going to the next day or the next week or the next month.

Jaime Tardy:	What would you tell your wife?  Like honey, I know, I just have to do this for a short period of time so that way later it will be better?  Like what do you tell your wife in situations like that when she's like you are never home and available?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, probably the main thing that I used was I tried to use the scare tactic.  I said, you know, "Honey, if I'm not on this computer and I'm not watching these campaigns and I'm watching my hosting company or the affiliate network if my offer gets capped, I could potentially lose $10,000.00 or $20,000.00 in a day."  So, it was kind of a [inaudible][00:12:23] mindset at first and it did pay off.  I mean we enjoyed great trips, we enjoyed a great lifestyle so even though it was very hard upfront to kinda see the fruits of that labor, it definitely paid off.

	But I tried to be there as much as I could though there were times that I would just leave the campaigns for six or eight hours and walk off, but there were also many times that I would be at a restaurant and I'd take my laptop with me and be working on a campaign while everybody was eating around us and as embarrassing as that looked, I really took it serious that at any moment my hosting company could go down, my website could get hacked, my offer could get capped on how many elites that I could send and I would need to think on my feet to how to correct it because that could literally be the point where a winning campaign becomes a losing campaign.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, and then if it loses and you don't have the cash flow, it's like yeah, then it really gets tough.

Jason Brown:	Correct.

Jaime Tardy:	Do you think there're any opportunities like that now?  Like I heard about Instagram coming out with paid and all sorts of new, I mean Periscope, all this new stuff that's coming out, do you think there's anything that we can do to capitalize on some of those trends like you did with the Facebook side?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, I definitely think that first movers have an advantage into any platform.  I didn't even know about Periscope myself until recently, and I had been following some people on Twitter who were doing Periscope and it seemed that as soon as one of the people that I followed on Twitter that did it, I would check other Twitter feeds and just magically just kind of exploded and everybody was doing it.  And I had to actually look to find out myself what Periscope was but those people are definitely getting great responses back from it.  They're using it to their advantage.

	Technically, they're not selling anything in an affiliate marketing sense there, but it's definitely helping them grow and grow their brand and expose themselves in new areas.  And whenever you have that, you definitely have a first mover advantage and people can take advantage of that whether it's with a Pinterest or with Periscope or even Facebook ads years ago.

Jaime Tardy:	Interesting because I find it funny, I mean the speed of technology moves so quickly, right, and digital marketing moves so quickly and people sort of get used to the tactics that have been working and you have to constantly keep going and then you look at the new thing, how do you keep up with all of that stuff?  I know for when you quit you're like well, I have to this now and I knew this information so it just makes logical sense, but now you've been doing this for a long time, how do you sort of stay on top of all that stuff and know what's working and not working?

Jason Brown:	Well, it's extremely hard.  There's so much going on right now it's really hard to keep up with it.  People who blog but they do video, they have an advantage over people who just do podcasts and people who podcast have an advantage over people who just write text just on their blog only.

	And it really comes to the point now where maybe the people who do Periscope are going to have that advantage and it's really hard to keep up because I love websites like Product Time, and I love going on Product Time or betas list and looking at new technologies that are coming out and new companies but even viewing that, you miss new opportunities that might come your way and it's very hard to stay on top of it.

	I don't think there's a great answer that I can give you for it, but if you keep your eyes open and you're willing to read and you're willing to look at sites like Product Time or follow people on Twitter, you're gonna eventually come across the technology and by the time you come across it, even if it's been out for a few months, you can still take advantage of it.

Jaime Tardy:	That's kinda crazy then you have to learn all that whole new thing, it's kinda crazy, yeah, and it's constant ever learning, which is great for entrepreneurs because I think most entrepreneurs are really hungry for that knowledge.

	When we were talking before, you were saying it's mostly been you and learning these skills and figuring things out and helping other people and how have you sort of kept up on just being you and learning all the technology and everything because it's a lot of work to do all the business and I'm assuming you didn't do 18 to 23 hours forever afterwards.  So, how do you keep up with all of that just being you?

Jason Brown:	I think at some point you have to learn to say no and you have to learn to limit yourself.  I had a develop background so I knew HTML, CSS and JavaScript, PHP and PERL and even though I've been marketing now and I own a company, I still love to develop stuff.  And there're many times I felt like oh, I need to go learn Ruby or I need to learn Python or .NET and as much as that feeling is there that I wanna do it and I want to build upon myself, I've had to learn to say no and be choosy in a limit and just say the skill set that I have is good enough.

	If somebody tells me that Ruby is better than PHP, that's their opinion, and I could build a company or a page or a marketing campaign with the skills that I have that could make over a million dollars and it doesn't matter what technology it's built on.  And I kinda look at that as with all things, you know, we use a certain email provider called Mandrill and I would love to learn AWeber or I would love to learn other email marketing platforms, but at some point you have to tell yourself what you have is good enough.

	You don't have to be perfect, which I think kind of goes into wanting to learn new things and explore new things, that what you have actually can be good enough and that you can build upon that strength to get you to where you want to be that you don't actually have to have or use HTML 5 or use Python or use a new email marketing platform.  I think that's where people are kinda stuck is they think that they have to have their fingers in all kinds of pies when really you just need to get a fistful of what you have currently.

Jaime Tardy:	Thank you for saying that.  Everyone asks me what's the newest - how am I supposed to do my email, the newest, greatest, latest?  I'm like just keep what's working and then focus on revenue -

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	- anymore revenue?  How much when you switch from one email program to another, how much is that gonna bring you because that really makes a difference.  We all have so much time.  So, when you went through, because you have SERPWoo.com too, how many people and how big is that and how did you get into starting that to begin with?

Jason Brown:	Well, currently we have 4,000 customers.  They're not all paid customers of course.  We've got a large base of free customers and paid customers, and I kinda got involved with it because I was doing some consulting work and I started questioning, you know, am I really the expert that I was six months ago or 12 months ago?

	And I had a lot of doubts because with marketing, especially with Google or with SEO, it changes so fast, I needed a tool that I could say I definitely know what my competitors are doing, I know where they're going, I know what's working and I can actually differentiate that my work is actually working for a client compared to maybe an algorithm update that pushed everybody up or pushed everybody down and I just kind of rode that wave.  So, I actually built SERPWoo by myself at first to kind of solve an itch to say what are other people doing that's working, where are my competitors going and how can I emulate their success.

	And, you know, we're identified a lot with rank trackers so when somebody puts in a keyword, they can track their rank across Google or Bing for a particular keyword and the problem with that was that was just tracking my domain, and what I really wanted to see was what are my competitors doing and more importantly, if I'm competing say in a keyword that happens to be nursing degrees and I wanna be No. 1 for nursing degrees, I really wanna know who my competitors are and my competitors might not really be a person who's first or second in Google.

	My competitor is actually somebody who may be seventh right now but they were fourth last month and they're gonna be third next month and they have a history of over six months of being on the first page.

	They're not somebody who's now No. 1 or No. 2 and they've only been there for 30 days and might disappear tomorrow so trying to find that information ended up to where I needed to record what everybody was doing over a set amount of time and actually find out who are the competitors, who has staying power and more importantly, if I'm building links or doing SEO for my site, is what I'm doing actually working or am I just riding the wave of when an algorithm update comes by and knocks five people down and I jump up.  I really wanna know if what I'm doing is working and how I can watch my competitors and find out who are the real players in that market.

Jaime Tardy:	So, I'm a geek right, so when I first started I was sorta going in SEO then I was like wow, this is all crazy, it's like woo, woo, crazy magic stuff or something because you'd go and you'd put it in and then like you said, you wouldn't be able to tell why yours jumped or why other people's went down or I'd tweet stuff but then maybe I went lower and what the heck happened there like it's kind of an insane thing.  So, that's an awesome tool.  Did you see that as sort of a distraction?  You're scratching your own itch going okay, I really need this piece.  Did that take you away from the other things that you were doing and how did you mitigate all that?

Jason Brown:	It really didn't take me away from other stuff that I was doing at the time.  I kinda built it with the focus of it was just gonna be me using that and it was gonna give me an advantage as a consultant, something that other consultants didn't have and that I could understand better.  So, when I built it, I kinda took my own spare time to build it so it was like the weekends or at night.  Maybe I was jotting down notes while I was eating dinner.

	So, I was always thinking about it, but it wasn't taking away from any of my primary duties and it actually took me about a year to build it out to the standard that I wanted, but it was definitely not at that point a standard where other people could use it and it wasn't until I showed a few other people and they got really interested in it and started giving me feedback that I brought it upon a partner who took a lot of the work on himself to bring his ideas to the table and work on it while I was working on other things at the time and it just kinda grew from that.

Jaime Tardy:	How did you take on a partner because I know people ask me that sort of question all the time, and we were talking about how you were sort of solo for a while, how did that work?

Jason Brown:	Well, this was another Skype group and we were all digital marketers.  We're all [inaudible][00:24:05] workers so we were sharing ideas back and forth and one day I just kinda showed the tool to the group and immediately five people just loved it.  Funny enough, one of the people in the group copied it and is now my competitor, but some of the other people loved it enough that they started giving me feedback on it and when that happened, it kinda clicked with me I can sell this to other people or at least create a service out of it.

	And at one point, one of the people approached me and he said, you know, "I would love to work on this.  I've got some ideas that could improve it.  I'll even do it for free for you."  Because he was really wanting to use it for the same reason that I built it was for myself and I said, "That's great.  I'll give you access to the code and I'll see what you can do.  Here are some problems I have right now."  And he worked on it and it just kind of amazed me actually and he brought a lot of ideas to the table that I hadn't even thought of.  And at that point I said, "Let's be partners with it 50/50."

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, wow, after you spent a year building the main concept and you said 50/50.

Jason Brown:	Yeah.

Jaime Tardy:	Wow, he must have loved you.

Jason Brown:	Yeah, and even that changed for a while.  I realized that I was the bottleneck with it because I kinda set back and looked at it as this was something that I built, but I'm not gonna be able to take it to the point where I can get people into it and charge it for them, it might take me another year to do that and I don't want to wait another year.  And then I had the fear of that there were other people copying it which did become true and I thought I wanna be the first mover.  I don't mind to give up half of it because I'd rather give up half of something that's valuable and ends up making me money than to own 100 percent of something that maybe never does anything for me.

	So, I took that leap and it's been great.  I've got a great partner.  It definitely, SERPWoo wouldn't be where it's at today without him, but it is very hard to kinda give that up but it's definitely a learning lesson and something that pushes you to your next skill set as an entrepreneur.

Jaime Tardy:	That's so awesome to hear.  Why didn't you make it 51 percent and did you think that maybe he wouldn't, you know, because he really wanted to be one of the co-owners of the company?

Jason Brown:	Sure, yeah, I debated that of doing 51 and 49 and actually at one point, he was doing so much work with it daily that I actually said, "I think it's unfair that you're actually doing more work on it than me."  And I felt guilty and I actually gave him 75 percent of the company at that point because I was actually going to work on a few other projects and after a few months, we settled back down on 50/50.  So, I thought about it -

Jaime Tardy:	So cool.

Jason Brown:	- yeah, I thought about it and doing 51 to 49, having control of the company wasn't my main goal.  Building something that was valuable and letting other people use it and being a part of it was my goal.  Controlling the company and making tons of money from it, I didn't need that.  I mean I'd already made money as an affiliate so it was really about building something that was great and going through the challenge and working with somebody else who was excellent at the things that I was not excellent at.

Jaime Tardy:	So, you mentioned Skype groups twice and so I have to ask you, how do you get in these Skype groups, who are in them, what do you do, how do you get - because it sounded like they were pivotal for what you've done in your life?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, I get invited to a lot of them.  There's a core group of people who are Internet marketers and we kinda all know each other and one of us will have an idea that says hey, let's have a Skype group that's all about software as a service business or let's have a Skype group that's all about affiliate marketers or PPC or SEO or just one called Daily Hustle where we all motivate each other and -

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, that's so awesome.

Jason Brown:	- yeah, and what happens is usually these Skype groups die out after about a year or so.  So, they're definitely great to get in and to network with other people and then that kinda lends itself to being invited into other groups because those people are in other groups themselves.

Jaime Tardy:	Yep.  Well, it's funny because I'm on Skype right now and I'm looking - I'm in three groups also and how do you deal with the distraction of it because man, it freaking pops up all the time and I'm like one has 1,600 things that I haven't clicked on in a really long time, how do you deal with working and trying to deal with that at the same time?

Jason Brown:	At some point, and it's not just Skype, it's everything.  When you're running a business, you get these distractions.  And with Skype specifically, a lot of times I'm turning the notifications off and maybe I have the notification alert me like if my name gets typed or my Skype handle gets typed or maybe the name SERPWoo gets typed and then I'll go and look at that Skype chat, but I also have a setting technique where I'm only looking at Skype and reading messages in groups, you know, on Mondays from 8:00 to 9:00 or maybe on Thursdays from 6:00 to 7:00 in the morning.

	So, I do block off time to where I'll allow those distractions so that I can talk to other people and keep up with it, but I'm also trying to keep those distractions away with the notifications.  Just like you, I mean I've got a group that's got about 480 messages right now that I haven't looked at and probably still won't, but I think with all distractions, you have to do your day to where you don't allow those to interrupt you and then plan time to go back and go through your emails or go through your Skypes or go back through your voicemails or even time just to read blogs or forums and you just cut that time out and you don't do that unless it's between that time or unless you have a need for it.

Jaime Tardy:	So, you said you do it at certain times of the day.  Do you really do that because I know a lot of people, I work with what I call a master schedule though mine's a little bit flexible because, you know, things especially with kids, you know, it gets a little crazy, do you normally go okay, every Thursday, 6:00 to 7:00 in the morning, I wake up and I'm like okay, Skype it is, like how rigid is your schedule and what does it look like?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, you know, that's been a huge problem.  When I started doing that, I've gotta be a robot.  It's cut and dry, 6:00 to 8:00 only on this particular day and whenever that didn't happen, I actually felt bad.  I thought well, I'm not on this schedule that somebody else had recommended or I had read in a book to do and then I realized we're all human.  We're all going to miss times because maybe you had to be at a birthday party at that time or you were sick.  We're gonna miss these things, especially something like reading Skype isn't something that's needed so if I did miss it, it's not a huge deal.

	But I'm human and I realize that I'm not always gonna be rigid or a robot on all these schedules so there definitely are times in the day where I've planned the whole day out hour by hour, week by week, and things just don't happen the way that you plan it.  And I've learned that, again, I don't have to be perfect.  If I'm doing at least 80 percent of it or 85 percent of it, that's good enough and what is important though are always gonna be the first things I do in the morning so if the rest of my day after those important things I miss something, it's not a huge deal.

Jaime Tardy:	So, you do do because I mean we've read a thousand productivity books and all that stuff and they're like do the hardest thing first, eat that frog, you do do that, tell me about how you figure which one's the hardest thing and when that happens like give me your system.

Jason Brown:	Sure.  Well, I look at mainly what's gonna create revenue for me or future revenue and that's always the most important thing and there're different ways to justify that, you know, like taking on an interview or writing a blog article that gets my company more exposure.  And I always do the revenue-generating things first.  What comes second would be any hard deadlines that I know I can't miss like maybe I have a doctor's appointment or an eye vision appointment at a certain time or day or I have to catch a flight.  Now, those are things that I generally don't modify.  And then I also look at activities that are gonna help me get to my goals in life.

	So, if I've got a goal for five years from now to travel the world and be in every country, I've got a map that lays out what I'm going to do that year to help me achieve that goal and then that year is broken down by month and by week and by day, and I'm trying to take an action, maybe two or three actions a day if possible to kinda get me to that goal so that after 365 days I've taken all these steps to actually get there.  So, I definitely look at revenue first, I look at things that cannot be modified like flight times or other schedules and then I'm looking at my goals and how to achieve my goals.  But I'm definitely doing things like Pomodoro where I'm taking tasks in 25-minute chunks.

	I'm doing things like getting things done or the 80/20 concept where 20 percent of my work is gonna be 80 percent of my income and what are those activities.  And I'm definitely time boxing so that if I'm doing a Pomodoro for 25 minutes on an activity, I don't have to get that activity perfect and I don't have to get that activity done with a certain end goal, but I time box it to where what I got done I that 25 minutes is probably going to be good enough.  And if I know that it's not going to be a 25-minute task like say this interview, it definitely can be a 50-minute task

	 So, I'm doing a lot of things like that and I'm definitely reviewing what I'm doing every week on Sunday night to see what I've missed and what I can improve on and I'm definitely trying to build habits too.  And one of the habits that I've got right now is to wake up at 6:00 in the morning which has proved very difficult, and the reason why I wanna wake up at 6:00 is because I wanna eat my frog of course and I wanna get the hardest thing out of the way at 6:00.

	So, now I'm getting about 7:30 or 8:00.  I'm still eating my frog and getting my tasks done, but it's definitely trying to improve and those are all the things that I do to try to get me to my goals or get me through my day.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, I love hearing that you're like and I'm still not perfect in this right now because when we hear you go like and then I do Pomodoros and I do this and I do this, everyone's like wow, you do it all, good job, but I don't but being able to hear you go okay, still working on this one is really huge because what it sounds like you're saying is that that consistency factor like that is a huge component of what adds up over time.

Jason Brown:	Yeah, yeah, it is.  Will power is a muscle, goal setting is a muscle and you've gotta actively work on it and it's okay to fail.  I mean even at one time I was kinda doing what they call the Jerry Seinfeld Method, which is don't break the chain where you're writing an X and following what you're doing each day and I would look at my week and there would be two or three days that didn't have an X and I would just beat myself up mentally over it and then I finally realized listen, it doesn't have to be perfect.  If my Pomodoro goes over or if I don't take my break or I don't get to this task, it's fine.

Jaime Tardy:	Life will go on.

Jason Brown:	Yeah, and I think that's hard because people think that they hear from others this is what I did and people think I need to do that too and I need to do it exactly step by step the way that they did it in order to get that same success and that's not true at all.

Jaime Tardy:	Because it all depends, each person is different no matter what it is.  How do you do your goal setting?  I know you said you look at the goals that you set and you look at your week on Sunday night, how do you set goals and where do you put them?  Do you have a whiteboard?  What's your system for actual goal setting?

Jason Brown:	Well, I've probably tried about every system that's out there whether it's digital or it's a certain type of journal or even on index cards and what I really found was that everything that I've tried and everything that I looked at, nothing was better than just pen and paper, at least for me, and as far as what I choose for my goals, what I normally do is I pick three personal goals, three business goals and then three improvement goals.

	And improvement can kinda be personal as well, but I like to break them out to say these are my personal goals.  Maybe I wanna travel the world and visit every country or I want to be a digital nomad which that's kinda the same, but like my personal goals are things that I wanna do personally.  It's the kind of things that might be on my vision board.  And then my business goals, I might plan out I want five different sources of revenue that are passive as much as possible or I wanna grow SERPWoo to a certain number of customers within six months.

	All my goals are going to have a specific action or a clear direction plus a time component to it so that it's just not a goal, it's just open ended.  And then my improvement goals might be something like I wanna run a marathon or I wanna go and read 52 books a year, maybe I wanna go back to college, enter my Master's.  So, those are all improvement goals.  And I do three in each and what I'm trying to do is I know that maybe I might not do all three in each three areas, but if I can at least do two or get 80 percent or 90 percent of the way there, I'm definitely better than where I was last year or even last month.

	And I'm just writing it down on paper and I'm keeping a journal that says, you know, this is what I did today for this goal, here's what's planned for it and then I'm gonna review it on Sunday to say, you know, did I do what I expected of myself in these goals and if I didn't, what can I do to make that up in this next coming up week.

Jaime Tardy:	Ah, so you actually - so, it's not just about like putting it up on a vision board or whatever and being like yes, eventually, but you're writing it down like what did I do this week that really made a difference towards that one specific goal.

Jason Brown:	Yeah.  Yeah, and I've done the vision board, I've done the electronic tracking, I've done Evernote and it just can't, I mean I put stuff on my phone and I found myself not wanting to pick up my phone or losing it or not checking Evernote on my computer, but one thing that I know that I was always doing was I was always carrying around a notepad with me and a pen and I started that because I was just writing down ideas and it ended up being, I've always got a pen with me, I've always got a notebook so why not just do the journaling on the paper.

Jaime Tardy:	Nice.  Now, do you keep it because I have like a bazillion journals too, right, like I just, I collect, I just like journals.  I think they're the coolest thing ever, but what I have a tendency - look, this one even says goals on it.  This is from 2012 I think, right, and so what's funny is I look at - yeah, 2012, wow, I've been doing this for a long time.  But then I'll go and I'll write in half of it and then the last half will be empty.  Do you know what I mean?

Jason Brown:	Oh, yeah.

Jaime Tardy:	Like do you have one specific goal-setting journal and then you just keep writing in one journal or how does that work for you?

Jason Brown:	Yeah, just like you, I've got a lot of notepads like that from prior times, you know, moleskins and just legal pads and stuff and I have decided that I'm gonna keep one for a whole year and write in it so I do have one for 2015, but all the prior ones, I've got three or four that I did last year that are halfway filled in and then maybe one of my kids got a hold of it and started coloring in it and I've got some that are in boxes -

Jaime Tardy:	That happens to me too.

Jason Brown:	- yeah, and I've got some that are just in boxes that I'll find randomly when cleaning and I'll open it up and it's from 2009 and it says some weird goal or dream that I had that I'm glad I gave up on, but yeah, I've got one for this year that I'm trying to dedicate that I'm gonna do it every day and that's actually one of my goals each day that I keep track of is to write and keep track of it.  But yeah, I do have one.

Jaime Tardy:	I started doing that this year too because I just would have a bunch of random ones and then I couldn't remember.  It's always fun going back to them, but I was like oh, wait.  So, mine's by my bed which so that's why it's not here and I do the exact same thing.  It's so neat to hear that you do the same thing too.  I know we have to start wrapping up so I'm gonna ask you what's the one thing listeners can do this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Jason Brown:	I think that what would help listeners a lot is they've actually gotta visualize what they want and where they want to be when they become a millionaire.  Being a millionaire might meet your expectations and it might not, but the one thing that's gonna happen is if you don't set what your expectations are, you're definitely going to miss the goal.  So, if you visualize where you wanna be when you're a millionaire, you need to write that down and focus on that goal and then work backwards to say I think this goal is gonna take me a year.  I think this goal might take me two years.

	I think anything past a year is too long, but maybe your first-year goal is you wanna have half a million dollars.  And what you need to do from that point is once you determine where you wanna be in the timeframe, work backwards to say what are 12 steps that I can take to become a millionaire or to get to this goal and you don't have to spend a lot of time researching this.  There're a lot of people that get mixed up to say well, I think I know what the 12 steps are, but I don't know if they're correct.  I don't know if this is really gonna make me a millionaire.

	You don't really need to know that.  You just need to map out in your head what you think would be 12 steps to become a millionaire and they need to be rather large steps.  And then you need to break each one of those steps down into four steps that equal one of those 12 steps and what that's looking like now is if it's gonna take a year to be a millionaire, the 12 steps are 12 months.  And then the four steps within that month are four weeks.  And then you're gonna look at well, here's your weekly step, what are seven steps to get you to your weekly and that's your daily steps.

	And you might have it all wrong, you know, maybe you do all these steps for 30 steps and now you're at one month and you reflect on it and say well, this really isn't getting me to my direction.  Well, that's when you can pivot and recreate your map but at least you're moving forward, you're not being stagnant, you're not being paralyzed with information overload and you're actually taking steps forward.  It's okay to fail.  You probably will fail a few times, but the great gift that you have is is that you can pivot and recreate that map to get you to your destination.

Jaime Tardy:	Hmm and if someone doesn't have that clarify, they won't take any steps forward and therefore -

[Crosstalk]

Jason Brown:	Right.

Jaime Tardy:	- there, okay, I love that.  Thank you so much.  And it just makes perfect sense and aligned with what you just talked about before in that we really do need to have the next step and the next step and that's exactly what you live so I thank you so much Jason.  Where can we find more information about you and your company online?

Jason Brown:	Well, the best place to go is to SERPWoo.com.  We have a blog there.  Of course, it's mostly about marketing and about SERPWoo itself.  You can follow us on Twitter which is just @SERPWoo.  Those will probably be the two best places that you can either reach me or learn more information either about marketing or about lifestyle or any other questions that you have that you can send to me personally there.

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, good.  So, it will definitely get to you.  And we will definitely link up to that because I know it's S - E - R - P - W - O - O just so everybody knows.  Thank you so much for coming on the show today Jason, I really appreciate it.

Jason Brown:	Sure, thank you Jaime.

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services

Tags: business startup, Focus, Goal Setting, Goals, Jason Brown, Journaling, Mastermind, Mastermind Group, Mentor, Mentoring, Mentorship, millionaire interview, productivity, programming, Startup

Categories: All, Best Life, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Marketing, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews, Productivity, Systems/Processes, Visioning

---