Grow Your Online Business Super Fast with James Schramko

Founder of SuperFastBusiness – James Schramko

James has a huge internet business online at SuperFastBusiness.com – We discuss how all traffic is paid traffic, how to create a pull market, tactics and tips on finding buyers online, and how he makes millions a year with content marketing.

You don’t want to miss this!

Check out SuperFastBusiness.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: You asked for it, you've got it I have James Schramko on the show. Listeners suggested that I have him on and I am so happy that I did. He has an amazing site called SuperFast Business and it's all about online marketing and since you guys want to know about online marketing. I know because I get e-mails all the time he is exactly what you need right now. Go ahead and listen for tips, tricks and advice on what you should be doing to get more traffic, more opt-ins and more revenue in your online business or, if you're offline, learn more about how to get online because it's open all the time. I highly recommend listening to James and since this interview I've listened to almost every single one of his podcasts. I highly recommend it stay tuned.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you the eventual millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have James Schramko on the show. I'm really excited because a listener named Shannon e-mailed me and said I had to have him on the show and thankfully, an e-mail later, he said yes. He's got a great website called SuperFast Business and a podcast that you should definitely check out he talks about sales and marketing, tons of really interesting information about online marketing that I know you're going to want to know. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, James.

James: I'm glad someone asked for me; that's really special.

Jaime: It means you're special someone really, really wanted you on the show. So this is just for Shannon! No, I'm kidding, this will be for everybody. Why don't you give us a little bit of a history? Why did Shannon want you on the show so badly? Tell us how you started in business.

James: I'm not sure why Shannon asked for me. I guess only Shannon knows that.

Jaime: We'll ask her later.

James: I've been focusing pretty heavily on making good stuff and doing things a little bit differently to the average online market so hopefullythat's helping me be a little more remarkable and it creates that pull marketing which is different to the traditional push marketing where people ram things down your throat it's much better if people are coming to you or asking to try to draw you out in the marketplace. It's much easier to do that and also if you build your whole business around repeat customers, which is something that I learned in my last job, it makes life a lot simpler if you know what you're doing and you want to keep working with the same people.

Jaime: That's awesome. What was your previous job, if that's how you learned about repeat customers did you learn a lot of business stuff when you were working in a job?

James: I learned a lot of business stuff in my business job because, in a very quick transition, I went through debt collection, through to credit, through to customer service, through to sales, through to general management and that was my last job. So in that time I got exposed to a lot of differentthings but the one common thing was that building up that repeat referral business was always easier than going out and chasing new customers.

Jaime: Definitely. So what made you get into debt collection to begin with? People don't normally think that sounds fun.

James: The recession in the early '90s was when I started my career and it's absolutely the best job to have when recession hits. I got the job so easily, it was all so surreal, but I was good at it, it was speaking at people over the telephone and asking them to pay the bill. It was kind of like reverse sales they already had the goods and services and now you had to get the money which is much harder than getting the money before they get the goods and services so I had to work really hard at it and I learned a lot about the way that people behave under pressure, what led them to get into this scenario and tried to help people get out of that situation as well.

Jaime: You don't think about the psychology, you just think it would be a sucky job, going "Please, give me the money you owe me!" like it wouldn't be that much fun. But that you learned so much going through that process is kind of amazing.

James: You have to kind of partner with them and make arrangements build trust, get a common goal to avoid making it even worse,because it gets worse if they don't make the payments then bad things happen. So you've got to make sure that you're on the same side and work together to solve the problem, so it really become a problem solving machine. It escalated a lot when I got into repossessions, having to take people's cars back, there were some really interesting discussions. It's probably just a small percentage of society and I imagine it's bad now in some parts of the world, there's bad economy, thankfully not in Australia, but certainly in parts of Europe and I know that North America has had a bit of a tough time over the last few years as well. This would be a common scenario for people now.

Jaime: So you were a repo man, how did you get into owning your own business after doing all of that? Even general managing you didn't stay in a job, what made you go and start your own business?

James: There were a lot of problems with having a job that I could see, especially with having a family to support. I didn't like getting paid from one person, I didn't like that I was only able to sell one product, I was running out of passion and my income felt capped because even though I was good at what I did and I was the highest paid person it was still only hundreds of thousands and that wasn't going to get me to millions. I've had this expectation, after many other people who weren't making millions of dollars, that I wasn't that much different to them, and I think that's one of the premises of your show, that there's a lot of commonality between people making a lot of money and not making money and if they can identify what things they can do that are similar they will probably get there much faster. Benchmarking is one of my favorite techniques finding someone who's doing really well, understanding how they're doing it and realizing that they still have blood in their veins, they're not superhuman in many ways, they're just normal.

Jaime: That's the whole reason why I started this show. Are you sure you have blood, not superhuman? When I first started the show I remember being so excited to interview each person and they were like "Hey, what's going on?" So making that transition and realizing that you're not that much different to them is really important. What did you end up starting when you first made that leap?

James: I'd tried starting little business things of my own for some time before I quit. Everything from buying and selling vanity license plates through to trying to do this big advertising deal where I recognized that, at the supermarket, you know the little boom gate where you walk in and out of the supermarket? I thought I might be able to sell advertising space on that to someone like American Express. I started brokering the deal and I had a business partner on that and when we went to meet with American Express there was a bomb scare in the building and my partner, who wasn't a very good sales person, went back without me and tanked the deal. This was quite some time ago, before it was common to see advertising in the supermarket area. So I tried a lot of things but the one that really set me free was working with the online side of things because it's such a big marketplace and it was the perfect place for me to combine my sales skills and to access a huge audience of the rest of the world, rather than just locally with one product.

Jaime: I love that. One of the things that I get a lot, and it's the same with my story, where I made really good money before I quit, is that it's really hard to go from making good money to starting from scratch, and how long it's going to take before I can quit that job. I know my self-worth was going "But I made good money and I don't have that anymore!" So did you have anything like that? How was that transition?

James: I was making around $300,000 a year in my job and I started my online business and within a couple of years I was able to match my income, so I actually kept adding to my income, I went up to effectively $400,000 and $450,000 and then, for an instant, it was about $600,000 and then, the first full month after I quit I generated over $100,000 in that month.

Jaime: So you were building that business as you were working full time?

James: Yeah, I got to about halfway over a couple of years. I started really small, making $49.25 per sale of the product that I was an affiliate for. I'd make one sale per month, then a couple per month, then three or four per month, then five per month. I built it up into hundreds, then thousands, and got it up to around $10,000 per month, then starting selling my information product but I peaked at around $150,000 and I really needed to make $300,000 to feel comfortable about it. then I had this big idea and within six weeks of coming over to the United States and attending an event and learning a few things I went back and offered my services on a recurring basis to customers who I'd already built websites for and that added another $150,000 a year and I'd reached my goal and that was the "pull the ripcord" moment, which is the most frightening thing I'd ever done but also the most freeing activity, so that was a passive pivot point, and I'd suggest that now I'm probably unemployable.

Jaime: Good. That's amazing. What made you decide that you had to make $300,000? You're in Australia, so that's a little different but not that much different. What made you decide that you had to make $300,000 before you pulled the ripcord?

James: To live in Sidney is very expensive. The average house is a lot more expensive than your average house in the United States and we have a higher tax rate, plus I have four children, I had a mortgage on a property and a share portfolio and the cost of living is high, so that was pretty much the bare minimum that I needed to make and that's why I had to havemy own business. You need to take advantage of things like getting paid first and then paying your tax, rather than having it prepaid as you go. I needed to have hundreds and then thousands of customers instead of one employer who, if they don't like you one day, you're out.

Jaime: People think it's safe - "I have a job and it's safe. If he's not good at running his business then he's not even close to safe, you have no control whatsoever and that's really hard." So how long ago was it that you quit your day job?

James: It's six years at the end of this month.

Jaime: Tell us the things that you've learned that would have helped you then. When I talk about online marketing a lot of people are like "He's got a great story because he started eight or nine years ago when things weren't at crazy as they are." I know this is what you do on your site but can you give us some techniques now for people who are just getting started?

James: It's actually easier now because of the ease of having audio and video and having a website built for you within a day for a few hundred dollars those things are really easy. One of the most important things is, if you are prepared to step in front of a camera or in front of a microphone and be yourself, you can have a tremendous advantage. It's not too late and we're not even close to where it's going because, certainly in Australia, and it's probably not too different over there in the United States, 50% of businesses don't even have a website, so there's a great opportunity in learning about internet business and helping traditional businesses move towards that, to improve their online presence, to build their own authority. So if you're a service provider, that's a great opportunity. If you want to be an author, an expert speaker, then that's still easy to do, it's much easier to do now that you can just start your ownblog and get going and within a short period you'll get some traction if you have a strong enough message and you have aproblem solving focus.

Jaime: Okay, let's talk about that, you make it sound nice and easy and I love it when it sounds easy but as soon as implementation starts it can get a little convoluted and difficult. So let's say I was starting a new website right now, I have a day job and want to get out or I'm just starting in business and don't feel like things are going very well and I want to do online marketing. A lot of people would say "Start a blog!" but, to me, a blog is a marketing tactic it's not a business, it doesn't generate revenue unless you're selling sponsorship or ads. So what would you suggest for someone just starting to do?

James: You have to have an offer, and to have an offer you have to understand who your audience is and what problem you solve. You should make it compelling different and special in some way, compared to everyone else out there, and you'll need to have some expertise around it. chances are you're pretty good at something and if you can somehow align that to solving a problem that a lot of people have that they're prepared to pay to have solved then that's why you have your site. A site is just a platform but it's a place to put your offer. I publish a course and teach people that you're still better off creating your own platform than to go onto other people's platforms where you have very little control and it's just like a job, actuall= you put all your best work somewhere else and they can change the rules at any time. So think of a blog as just aplace where you can put your offer and think of your offer as a way you can have people pay you to solve a problem.

Jaime: So how do we determine what that offer is so that people will buy it? We are inundated; there are information products everywhere, so even if you're an expert and it's unique and you know people will want it but you don't know if they'll pay for it, how do you test to make sure that it's good?

James: You get someone to pay you for it! You keep talking about it to people until someone pays you and engages your services or buys the thing to be created in advance. There are lots of examples where we pay for things to be created in advance it could even be furnitur I know I've been asked to pay a deposit and then they make it, and that can happen with services. It happens with book forwards authors get paid first, then they go and write the book. So if you are good at something and the offer is good enough, someone will pay you before you even have to create it, in many cases.

Jaime: A lot of people that I've chatted with have that- they've created a product and they've sold a handful and they're like "Sweet! Someone bought it! Now what?" So I've verified that someone is willing to pay whatever the price is that I want, which is great, really good validation, but as soon as they hit that roadblock they're like "Now what? I had a couple ofpeople that were in my audience that wanted it,but what do I do after that?" Multiplying it is more difficult, it seems.

James: Yeah, so you scale it, you find out where there are other people just like that person, how do you access them and get that offer in front of them. It comes back to setting up your own platform with your offer on it.

Jaime: This all sounds too easy do you have an example of someone, maybe you, going through this process so we can see the step-by-step?

James: All the time. Hundreds of customers. I have a good ability to rank websites on Google and people kept asking me to help them. First I published a guide on how to do it and someone got it as a bonus and then they told someone else, then they wanted to buy it from me and they offered to send me $40 via Paypal so I gave it to them. The next day I got home from work and there were about 13 e-malls in my inbox from other people saying "Such-and-such said if I gave you $40 I could have this guide." So I knew there was a market there so I went and bought a domain, I named it, put the offer up and then went and found communities of people just like these and I was happy to hang out in internet marketing forums and market the product. The first week that I marketed the product I was making $1000 a day that was the first week that I had the idea that I could actually do tjis full time, because that was pretty much my salary. So that's a minimum viable product scaled up instantly. From there I figured out what else those people buy, what else they're interested in, and I started creating those things. Again, I get people to pay early and mine areas just like them. A professor of anthropology told me that the reason that we survived over the bigger, stronger, smarter species is because we would go down to the watering hole at dusk, when the animals come to drink, and that's when we'd pull out the spears. You've just got to find the watering hole where those customers hang out and if there is enough of them and they have enough need then you'll be able to grow that business.

Jaime: So how do you spear them? How do you capture them? Especially if you're going into a community.

James: The offer.

Jaime: Your offer just has to be so good that they're like"I want this in a second and I'll pay you whatever you want for it?"

James: Yeah, just explain why they need it, what it is, how it works and what the best thing to do now is. Eventually, as we talked about at the start of this discussion, if people can refer people to you without you even having to be there, then that's the ultimate scenario. If we continue with the SEO situation, I bought a domain name for $500 on GoDaddy auctions for an SEO-branded domain. I then built a website on that and offered it to people in my own community and that grew into a seven-figure business, just from scaling up something that worked, and I was able to start hiring people to provide the services for me and then we continued to scale that up. It had a rapid expansion. Then people get good results because you look after them and they tell other people and so on. So without any advertising and without marketing it heavily, without even really updating the website copy for a year or two, it's been a solid seven-figure business. And that's justone I've got lots of other examples like this. Mostly people come to me now saying "Can you help me with?" or "Do you know where I can get?" They are good lead-ins.

Jaime: Can you tell me about someone who isn't you? Because people are going to think you touch things and they turn to gold. Can you tell me about someone who isn't you who started going through this and what they did?

James: I've got a community of people in my mastermind who I help to do this. There are 30 of them and I speak to them every week. There's this one guy who was making $30,000 per month, doing quite well with an MLM organization. I don't really get into MLM but that's beside the point. I said "What are you doing?" and he said "I go out and I buy solo e-mail advertising and I promote this offer," and I said "You're quite good at that why don't you go and register a domain for solo e-mail advertising and sell that service to all the other people doing MLM?" and within a few months he's doing $300,000 a month. So he was sitting on top of an asset that he didn't even realize but it's simply a case of identifying what thing he's doing well, or better than most, whothe perfect customer for that is, and then matching that up.

Jaime: Let's talk about that let's say we have an offer that's doing pretty well and we can always work on conversion rates later but for now we're looking to find these people, where these watering holes are.

James: We should start with conversions, actually. It's so much easier to double your conversions than to find twice as much traffic.

Jaime: Definitely, okay. But you need some traffic coming so that you can do conversions. Is there a specific number, like we should have this many visitors coming to the website before the conversions make sense?

James: Sure. I'm not a rocket scientist but a lot of people will sya you need 30 actions of something. When I was a super affiliate that was one of the core income things that I was doing about five years ago I would find an offer that converts, a CPA offer, and I would have to go and find as much traffic as I could, so I started finding every possible traffic source. But at the same time you really want to work on your conversions, because if one traffic source is strong and you can double conversions, it's money in the bank. So get really good at AdWords and just learn the fundamentals like always have two versions of the offer at any one time. Almost all of my pages or offers will be split tests, at least an A/B split test, so one is going to be better than the offer it's pretty rare that you'll have the identical so just for the small effort that it takes with the easy to use programs that are out there, like Visual WebsiteOptimizer, it's just so easy to run two offers and just about every website owner can do that. So get your baseline and the thing that most people don't do that's so easy to do is track your traffic to conversions and there are free tools to do that, even Google have a URL builder where you can track your offers and measure in Google Analytics if you set goals. So A/B split test, setting goals and tracking your traffic source are just the basics that are going to make you money, even if you have a small amount of traffic and a moderate offer. But then, if you can enhance the offer with some good copywriting, if you look at how you can have a recurring sale instead of a one-time sale that was the big one for me, that was what shifted my business into overdrive. I really only focus on recurring sales now and that means that you are pretty much converting on purchase, monthly, for years  and that is huge I've had some customers paying $5,500 per month, going on into their sixth year now.

Jaime: That one sale was worth it! That's great.

James: That one sale took all of 15 minutes to make.

Jaime: That's awesome. So, as far as traffic goes, let's say we're just getting starting on Visual Optimizer, for people who are new to it, whether they have a tech who does it for them or they're doing it themselves, it can be a little cumbersome at first, but let's say we've got that done or we're figuring it out do you recommend paid traffic? Are you a paid traffic guy, or free traffic? I would love a list of the top strategies of traffic that you've seen are working. I know it depends on the offer, but we're going to go with what we've got.

James: All traffic is paid traffic, even if it's free traffic it's paid traffic in some way, there's a cost. Even if it's referral traffic you've got to earn that, so there's going to be some energy or cost to it. but what works for me and my students now is building a very strong, self-hosted WordPress website and putting good content on there that's an authority content model, but it's easy to syndicate that content to iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, and then of course you're building your house e-mail list and that is the best asset. So the best traffic source is your own e-mail list and beyond that, if you're building good content, then you will create a pull market, people will refer and share it, and the way SEO is this days, these things are helpful you're getting natural links to your site, you're getting a bit of social activity, a broad profile. You go on a few podcasts or put up some videos on YouTube and you start to get some really nice exposure. Hot places to find buyers are forums, especially paid forums, because people are hanging out with other people who have a common interest and they invest in it financially. So I've always been into forum marketing and these days Facebook groups might be a great replacement or addition to that because, again, you've got likeminded people who are grouped by some kind of common interest and I would say that Facebook group marketing is underutilized by most. That means being reasonablysociable but the way to do it is to just answer questions and when people show an interest in it you can engage in a private message.

Jaime: Really? I was going to ask you what the tactic is. You can't just go and blast Facebook groups.

James: You give first and you'll create a natural connection. I've actually been giving to one Facebook group in particular ' I'll just go on and answer questions and any time someone asks a question relating to those topics they link to me, they link to my site, they link to my opt-ins and they refer people to me for those specialties. The thing is, because I answer on different topics, I'm now being referred to for a lot of stuff so I get a lot of traffic from Facebook groups without even having to be there.

Jaime: You're doing it yourself, so there's a lot of time involved. If you told me that tactic it would seem that going onto a Facebook group and referring one or two people doesn't seem like a lot of traffic. Are you getting lots of traffic from that?

James: Only a couple of million dollars a year worth. My main job is to spend 15-30 minutes per day creating a piece of content one podcast, one video that turns into a blog post that gets transcribed, I've got a small team that do the rest of that stuff, then I send an e-mail to announce it and I post it on Facebook. I probablyspend about 20-30 minutes on Facebook, it's not a big deal, and the rest of the time I'm talking to my customers or participating in my own paid communities. I have a couple of paid communities. Then I've got a team who I contact most days for a small meeting and answer a few queries and deal with the odd customer acquisition. And I have a lot of time off as well.

Jaime: So now, how many hours a week do you work?

James: I've got it down to about four hours a day, seven days a week.

Jaime: So at the beginning, when you were working your butt off because we love to hear that you don't work much now, but when you were first trying to get this going, how much did you work?

James: At the beginning I had a pretty responsible job and I was working from 9:30pm until 2:30am every day, seven days a week, for the first few years and when I quit my job I tended to do more of a night shift, so I would just sleep in and, instead of having to go into work at 8am, I would just sleep in until 11-11:30am.

Jaime: Freedom is great!

James: Well it was partly because that's when I would have the fastest internet, when everyone was asleep. All the kids in the area would be asleep and I had the internet to myself. Now I'm more of a morning person. I have a great capacity for work and I could easily work 12, 14, 16 hours a day and grind for seven days a week. There are times where I've put in huge efforts and I can't work anymore and I've just done what it takes at certain times because you go through growth spurts. But everything cycles; you can't sustain that forever. So I have on periods and off periods. For the last month or two I've really lightened the load because I'm really focusing on what I can take away, what I can remove, and that's actually giving me more focus, and then there are other times where I'll just stack it on and work extra shifts, make extra content. I can make 12 videos in one day if I'm going away for three weeks then I'll put in a long Friday and that will give me enough content for the next three weeks, which I can intersperse with stuff while I'm on the go.

Jaime: I love that. Let's talk about your content strategy too. I have seven interviews scheduled for today. My interviews are longer so it takes me all day to do that. You told me earlier that it takes you 15-30 minutes to create a piece of content, which is crazy. I'm lucky enough to have transcripts that I can pull from, but even just one blog post, that's one thousand words plus, which takes a long time to write, so how do you create something in 15-30 minutes?

James: I don't write; I just talk. I'll make a video. Most of my news videos will be under five minutes; they're usually 3-5 minutes. To make that video I just have to draw from ideas or an e-mail will prompt me or a conversation that I had, and I have a list on my iPhone called "Make these videos." So I'll just look at the topic, set the camera up and I'll record it, then I'll edit it myself and drag it into Dropbox.

Jaime: You edit it yourself too? You don't have anyone else to edit it?

James: Not the videos. I have someone else edit the audios. I've got two primary podcasts that I do, one of them I do every week, the other is more sporadic, mainly because my cohost is pretty hard to wrangle. The weekly one is about 45 minutes and as soon as I stop the recording I drag it into Dropbox and that's it I won't see it again until it's published.

Jaime: Good. I do the exact same thing. Tell us what works really well about the 5 minute pieces of content,or even the 45 minute pieces, in terms of promoting them? I know you have a community, which helps, but do you do any promotion on specific videos?

James: There's heaps of stuff that can do that. If you're putting them on YouTube they'll start showing on related videos. The same with iTunes.

Jaime: How do you do that?

James: How? It just happens automatically. It happens when you use a good title and when you put in tags for your video. When you start tagging them and titling them correctly, when people are searching for those topics on YouTube, your videos start to show up on the right hand side. Also, whenever someone embeds a YouTube video anywhere, a forum or a blog, then it might show up in the related videos at the end of that video and they might jump from that site to your site. When I put them on my website I use a plugin that eliminates referrals at the end of the video and also allows me to put an option in my videos,

Jaime: Is that LeadPlayer or something else?

James: That?s LeadPlayer.

Jaime: I love LeadPlayer. I love Clay, he?s been helping me a lot. That?s great. Let me ask you about that, specifically about me I just started going a little crazy on my YouTube site, so I?ve got all of these videos on YouTube, I use LeadPlayer also I have one video that I made for a contest years ago that has over 100,000 views just because it started coming up as a related video, apparently I worded it right a long time ago, without knowing what I was doing whatsoever. Now, I?ve got a team of people doing my video SEO that know what they?re doing, and it?s increasing slowly, but it?s not going as fast as I hoped. Do you have any advice for me?

James: Focus on optimizing your site so with LeadPlayer you can rename the video on your site so that it looks different to the one on YouTube and you can rank the page that your videos appear on. You can build a pretty good authority blogging site from scratch just by putting up regular content, taking time to put the tags on the site, so that video gets more SEO value if you rename it. You can use the same video on several sites, renaming it each time.

Jaime: Okay, that's interesting. I didn't even think of that.

James: You can even use someone else's video so some ofyour experts, go and pick one of their most viral videos, put that on your site and rename it with LeadPlayer and then put some fresh content around it and that will appear as new to Google.

Jaime: Okay, good. You're giving me good ideas. I'll let you know how it works. I like these strategies do you have any more for me, by any chance?

James: You can use a related post plugin so that when people come for that they're seeing the most relevant content on your own site and it starts generating more page views and Google takes notice of that, that people visit your site more often and you'll make more sales if you've got an offer on your site. It works with iTunes as well when you put something on iTunes, and hopefully you're podcasting all of your videos.

Jaime: Of course, both audio and video.

James: So you'll show up in other videos when people listen to the podcast on their iPad or Apple TV or whatever, it will show up in the related shows. So go and listen to the related shows, comment on them, and find out who's in the same market as you. Whoever's show is right near your show, go and listen to them and get yourself on that show because they have your audience and you can bring them across to your show. At least get a mention send them your product, do something.  A really simple tip is to just mention a famous podcaster like John Lee Dumas or someone and they'll give you a shout out send them a note saying "I just mentioned you in this podcast" and they'llretweet it or LinkedIn it to their group or mention it on their podcast.

Jaime: I love that you mentioned John - John was a client of mine, I helped him start his podcast, he lived in Maine too, and now he's a big deal, even you know about him. That's awesome, go John!

James: There's another guy called Rob.

Jaime: Rob? There's Mike from Maine.

James: Mike from Maine.

Jaime: Mike doesn't actually live in Maine he lives in Israel but he's from Maine. John doesn't live in Maine anymore either, he lives in San Diego. I'm the only one left! Anyway, I had one more question on this, I know you have to get to bed, it's kind of late over there. I heard this strategy before and I had my guy go and do exactly what they said, which is, when we're trying to rank, you can rank more easily for a video on Google than for just a regular website. That's what I've heard, anyway, and that's the strategy that I tried. I tried that a couple of different times with a couple of different times and I couldn't get it to work. Is that what you were referring to with embedding someone else's video?

James: No, you're better to focus on ranking your own website for that video. Don't worry so much about trying to rank the YouTube videos because it's notoriously difficult to get traffic from YouTube to your site. What I suggest you do, which I do with a lot of my sites, is I'll just use a Wistia embed and use their sitemap and then you're more likely to get that video ranked and when people click on it, it goes to your site instead of YouTube.

Jaime: I guess that's the question that I had. So you're talking about regular Google, not YouTube? Like if you search for something it will show the video thumbnail but it will be my website?

James: With universal search you're still going to see normal videos in the Google search results, but I think that people in the YouTube environment generally stay in the YouTube environment. If people are just searching for anything in Google search it will still show videos, they like rich media, and you've still got a shot of having your site shown, but if you really want to rank your videos I'd be using Wistia videos and using their sitemap and having it on your site.

Jaime: Okay, now I'm a little confused, I completely admit it. So you use YouTube with LeadPlayer but you're saying that if I want to rank in Google then I should use Wistia. Which one doyou think is better? Because right now I have YouTube and LeadPlayer.

James: Ithink at some point I'll switch back to just using Wistia videos on my own site, because the sitemap is stronger, there's no leakage at all, and I've now figured out how to get really good opt-ins without having to use the in-video opt-in. that's now one of my least opt-in sources compared to what it used to be because I've done so much testing on my site I track each opt-in position on my site and some of them work really, really well.

Jaime: Tell us why, give us your secret! I know you don't want to, but tell us why.

James: On my site, the top opt-ins are the header bar, which is like a feature box, and the other one is the lead pages opt-in, which is triggered by a banner on the right hand side that people click on that's still on my site and it goes through an A/B split test and lead page. The third one is called a Dreamgrow scroll triggered box and it's a little yellow box that hovers up when people scroll down and it's a behavioral based opt-in on the basis that, if people scroll down, then they're more engaged with the content and they can now be shown the opt-in and that one is a very, very highly converting opt-in box.

Jaime: Is that a popup over the content?

James: Yeah, it appears as a popup.

Jaime: Good, we love that. What conversions should we expect? I got an e-mail from someone the other day going "I have a website, I have conversions, but I don't know what I should be getting from the right hand side of my blog." What is possible?

James: If it's a blog it depends on how much of your traffic is repeat visits. In my case, 65% of the visits to my site are repeat visits, so I'm only going to see 3-4%, tops, because of the amount of traffic. On a site where there's more new traffic, if you want to use something like Clay's LeadPages with Welcome Gate, you might see 7-8%. But if it's not a dedicated squeeze page you're generally going to see single digit percentages.

Jaime: That's good to know too. People throw out numbers like "I got 30%!" but where and what?

James: If it's a dedicated landing page you might see between 25% and 75%, depending on the offer and the traffic source. One of the things that I've learned about conversions is that it's good to have a different landing page for different traffic sources because they have different expectations.

Jaime: And you can talk directly to them. Okay, awesome. I know it's getting late and I have torun but I love pulling all of this information out because it helps me too and hopefully it's helping everyone that's listening. I really appreciate it. I always ask the same last question what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towardstheir goal of $1 million?

James: I think it's to remove stuff - people are carrying around too much in their head. My favorite tool for that is the whiteboard. I like to purge, just get all of that stuff in your head out and write in on a whiteboard get the biggest whiteboard you can possibly fit in your room, write everything down, take a picture of it, then remove anything that's not essential now that you've taken a picture it's safe, you can refer to it later but start removing stuff and try to get it down to just a couple of things. You can score things based on opportunity costs or how important or urgent it is, which ones are must-dos, which ones are "one day?". You can have a "someday" file which could just be the picture and refer to the picture if you run out of ideas, but find that statue of David from the block of marble and find that one thing that is really going to shift everything for you. It's probably the thing that you're most scared of or are putting off, that you have a blockage about. Think about the compound effect or the leveraged impact that it will have to do that one thing and just get stuck into it. When there's only one thing left on the board you can't really ignore it - it's there, looking at you in the face, and now it's just a contest between you and that one thing and can just demolish it.

Jaime: I love that. I love how you turned the camera around before and I got to see your big whiteboard. I have a huge whiteboard with tons of stuff so after this I'm going to have to erase some of that because probably not all of it is as important as I think it is.

James: Take a picture of it.

Jaime: Yes.

James: I even have an Evernote folder that I just drag pictures into - an ideas thing. The fact that you know that you retrieve it means that you can let go of it; you can go and look it up later. Really, the key thing that I think helps me the mostis to reduce the focal points. You can't escape from the fewer items and if you focus on that you'll find that youget through them really quickly.

Jaime: I love that, especially if someone doesn't have a lot of time. I think that's a great tip for someone working in a day job, feeling like they have to do 17,000 things at a time and they can't.

James: We all have the same time so it's really just a mental game. I've hardly met a mastermind or coaching student who isn't log jammed and just pulling those logs out to let them float down the river one at a time is simple. Like people who are into juicing - you can't jam a fruit bowl into the juicer in one you, you have to chop it into little pieces and put them in one at a time.

Jaime: I love your analogies - all of those are great! I hope this is really helpful for everyone. Where can we find more information on you, James?

James: Well if you want to test out my opt-ins, it's over at superfastbusiness.com. By the way, while you were talking about the SEO for the videos or whatever, for anything, a simple thing you can do is just get links to your videos. That's one thing you can do. So have links to them from outside the YouTube environment and that might give it a little more weight.

Jaime: Nice, so for anyone listening, if you want to link to my videos, go ahead - free reign!

James: You should ask people. Ifyou ask people to do that stuff they probably will.

Jaime: Let's find out. Let's use this as a test. Send me an e-mail ifyou link to it. I do get a lot of links - I checked an e-mail before asking ifthey can embed. It's funny, people feel like they can't embed your videos because of copyright or something. No, go, please, do whatever you want with my videos, please! Don't pretend you're me - but who can do that? Thank you so much for coming on. everyone should check out superfastbusiness.com, even just to see that opt-in and see the scroll down thing, because I'm going to hop back on there and check that out too. So thank you so much for coming on today, James, I really appreciate it.

James: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Jaime: I hope you took some good notes. He gave so many tips and tactics. I wrote them all down and had a huge list afterwards, I haven't even had a chance to go through them all because he gave me so many and it's been amazing, so far, for the ones I've been able to change. He was great, I hope you really enjoy his site too. Check out his podcast at superfastbusiness.com. If you'd like more interviews just like this, let me know. If you want more online marketing, shoot me an e-mail at jaime@eventualmillionaire.com or comment and let me know what you want to hear because I'm doing this for you, so go ahead and tell me what you want so that I can give it to you. Take care, have a great day.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on eventualmillionaire.com.

Tags: Business Growth, content marketing, James Schramko, millionaire interview, online business, online traffic, web traffic

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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