Evan is the Web Master and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert for a successful medium-sized firm in Sydney, Australia. He loves what he does but is in a quandary. Although he loves what he does, should he make the change to consulting, building upon an existing e-commerce web site owned and operated by himself and his fiancée, or bring some type information product to the market? In Evan’s words, “I’m going four different ways at once!”

This is an consulting interview that I did with Evan to try to help him to determine what he believes would be the best avenue. It’s nice to have so many options!

We discussed his current job responsibilities and he admits that being involved in so many of his employer’s integral functions is his first love. He makes a very good living, but are there better opportunities “out there” for a young man of Evan’s advanced and very marketable resources?

Evan explains his and his fiancee’s web site. You will hear how it came to be and what its current status is. I give Evan some ideas about how to market the web site and its products more effectively. You will hear some advice that I give him about creating an information product that would actually draw buyers to the site. I also give him my personal opinion about selling products that are commodities.

Lastly, we talk about Evan’s idea of becoming a consultant. After listening to so many of my audio recordings on www.hardtofindseminars.com , Evan had been leaning towards becoming an HMA Consultant. This is a great idea, but let’s go a step further. How about using the HMA techniques to create a consulting niche that Evan and his specialized expertise could fill, namely Search Engine Optimization and Information Technology functions?

I don’t want to give too much of this interview away but let’s suffice to say that if you’re on the fence about your career options, you should really listen to this informative interview. You may find yourself saying, “This guy sounds like me! Maybe I should…?” This recording is 36 minutes.

START

Hi, it’s Michael Senoff with HardtoFindSeminars.com. Here’s another 36 minute recording with a gentleman named Evan who called me from Australia asking for some advice of which way, what direction, and what he should do as far as working his existing or getting into the marketing consultant business or helping his fiancé with their home-based clothing marketing business.

Evan: Hi Michael. It’s Evan.

Michael: Hey, Evan, how are you?

Evan: Good, how are you?

Michael: Good, nice to meet by voice. What are you doing now?

Evan: Well, my biggest problem is I’m a jack of all trades, and not a master of anything. I’m lost. I’m in three different places at once. I don’t quite know how to find a forward direction.

Michael: Okay, how old are you?

Evan: I’m 26.

Michael: Are you done with school?

Evan: I’m done with school. I’ve actually got an application for a Master’s course in front of me right now. I’m considering a Master’s of Marketing Communication. Technically, I’m in IT now.

Michael: What do you do for a living?

Evan: Well, up until about six months ago, I was a Lotus Notes developer. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Lotus Notes. Effectively, it’s a word file and document security type application for a rather large corporation.

As of six months ago, I changed my day job. I’m now very much more a full-time Internet type person. Effectively, I’m helping my day job company with their Internet stuff to really get them online, established, and pulling people from the Internet rather than telemarketing.

Michael: You’re doing search engine optimization, trying to capture business leads through the Internet for your company?

Evan: Exactly, my role has been to do search engine optimization.

Michael: Are you the only one working on this?

Evan: I am the only one working on what we call the Internet program.

Michael: Okay, so you’re an employee for this company.

Evan: That’s correct, yes.

Michael: How long have you been working with them?

Evan: I’ve been here for about a year.

Michael: How big or small of a company is it?

Evan: There’s about 40, 41 people here.

Michael: So, let’s say you generate a lead for them. You may not know all of the details, but let’s say you capture a lead through your search engine optimization for this company, and they sell services and products that are wrapped around it. What type of money do you put in that company’s pocket for what you do?

Evan: I think it’s around 20k.

Michael: When you’re trying to capture leads, who are you trying to capture into your net or to get them into your company?

Evan: What we’re effectively trying to do, we’ve been exposed a lot to the American Internet marketing world people like Alex Mandozian and Armand Morin, and their associated companies, and what we try and do is we try and provide information of value so that we can start building a rapport with these people.

Effectively, what I’m doing in terms of search engine optimization is placing a direct marketing solicitation for information of some nature.

Michael: Okay, do you handle their website?

Evan: That’s correct.

Michael: You do. Who designs the website?

Evan: Effectively, the company’s had the corporate website since pretty much the get-go. I think initially they outsourced that to a web design company.

Michael: You’re the webmaster.

Evan: That’s correct.

Michael: You say you’re going in different directions. What do you ideally want to do?

Evan: I’m really passionate about this.

Michael: You’re passionate about what you’re doing now with the company?

Evan: I’m involved in the marketing. I’m involved in the development of the content. I’m involved with the general traffic and conversion strategies. I really like that.

I guess where my challenge comes is that I’m doing it for my daytime employer. I can do it by myself, and also I’ve got a kids clothing business with my partner that I’d love to see take off.

Michael: Didn’t you send me the link? What was that called?

Evan: It was BestDressedKids.com.

Michael: That’s right. I did go to that. Let me ask you this – you’ve been with them a year. Is there anyway you can quantify or have an idea of what your work has put in this company’s pockets? Does he give you feedback on deals that happen because of your work, because of your search engine optimization, because of your strategies that you’ve implemented for these guys?

Evan: When the sale is direct from the Internet, I’ve got to exposure to that, and so I can see that. I guess as I’ve only been doing it for six months and we’re doing it for information, it probably amounts to not very much at this stage. There’s been a few enquiries through our corporate website which I search engine optimized, but I don’t really know what’s happened to that. That’s gone into more traditional sales directions from there.

Michael: When you say if a deals goes down, it could make them about 20 grand, you don’t know how many deals have been done because of Internet leads?

Evan: I have no idea. What we’ve done up until the present is we’ve simply said, “Give us a call on the phone” and then it goes into traditional sales channels.

Michael: I see. So, you have no way of tracking that. So, you’re not tracking your Internet leads. You’re getting them, but you have no idea if these leads are converting into sales.

Evan: Off the corporate website, no idea. Off the actual direct sales website, we’ve had one up for about a month now, those ones I do know about.

Michael: So, you like this stuff. This is what you’re doing for your main job, and you enjoy it. Are they paying you some decent money?

Evan: It’s a good return.

Michael: And, then you have your fiance’s clothing store?

Evan: That’s correct.

Michael: And, how’s that going for her? She has a retail location, right?

Evan: No.

Michael: Is it just online?

Evan: We’re pure online.

Michael: It’s all first quality clothes, not used clothes?

Evan: Absolutely.

Michael: Are you doing that together? Did she start that or what?

Evan: Effectively, she does the fashion. She’ll pick out the items to go on the website and acquire the stock, and then I’m the web guy behind it. So, I build the site. I do the SEO. I get the traffic to comes, the conversion – that type of thing.

Michael: You had mentioned in your email.

Evan: Yeah, that it was getting some pretty decent traffic, in total in the sense of mailing lists and product sales it’s converting about one percent.

Michael: So, you’re getting a few sales here.

Evan: Yeah, about a sale a week.

Michael: And, you’re inventorying all the clothes?

Evan: Yes, absolutely.

Michael: This is a tough way to go. I can kind of relate because I used to have a tie-dyed t-shirt manufacturing business. I used to sell tie-dye clothing. So, I somewhat know. I had a retail store, but I also sold wholesale. Is your fiancé passionate about clothes?

Evan: She just loves them, yep.

Michael: Does she have kids?

Evan: No.

Michael: I don’t know. Is it just a labor of love? Or does she want to make a good go of this as a business? Does she need to make money from this?

Evan: We really want to ramp this. Effectively, what we’ve done with the selling proposition out on the website is in Australia, there’s a lot of rural areas where people just can’t get access to high quality, well-designed clothing, and so what we’ve done is we’ve gone – well, every man, woman and child on the Internet in Australia is selling cheap, crap quality clothes. “Let’s build a site where we can offer high quality clothes for those that can’t get it without coming into a major city.”

Michael: All right, and you would know that really better than I. So, in a lot of areas in Australia, there are people who would like to dress their kids nicely, but it’s such a long distance to go get the nice clothes, they want a way to get it through the Internet. So, you’re solving that problem.

Evan: That’s right.

Michael: You know, there’s always stuff that can be done on the side. I’ll email this recording over because I did go over some stuff. The front page is confusing to me. I see the little girl there and I see, “The customer is always right by J.C. Penney” and it’s confusing. I think when someone comes there maybe a lot of people get into the site, but a lot of people are confused as to what they’re seeing, “What is this?” “What is this first page?” I’m guilty of it too even on my site. I have so much stuff up there.

But, “At Best Dressed Kids we share the same belief that you are always right because no one knows your kids like you do. We are tirelessly scouring the world to bring you the best children’s fashion on offer. From there, it’s up to you to choose from among these to make your kids best dressed kids.”

So, in the recording which I’ll send you, if I had asked, is that what your customers are looking for? Is that what’s important to them, that they’re kids are the best dressed kids? This is the market you’re going after, people who want high end clothes that do cost a little more than the normal clothes?

Evan: That’s correct.

Michael: What kind of margins are there on the clothing? Do you make fifty percent or can you double your money on it? Or not even that?

Evan: We do a lot more business when we have a sale, but normal retail prices are making 40-50 percent mark up on the items.

Michael: I know when I had my tie-dye t-shirt business, there’s a lot of negatives in a business like this. If you compare it to, for instance, one of my business is selling information products, and the reason information products are great is because they’re not a commodity. You are selling somewhat of a commodity, and you’re making 40 percent. That doesn’t even include your cost, your time, your labor, your website. You have all this money tied up in your inventory. It’s not inventory that you can liquidate that quick if you needed to.

I always steer people into looking their business that has to do with developing an information product. Look at Alex Mandosian and Arman Morin. These guys, they’re millionaires, and they’re selling products that have some upfront costs in development, but it’s nothing. They’re just selling digital information, software and website access.

Look at the stuff I have on my site, audio recordings. This stuff is great because the margins are there. You don’t have all the negatives of inventory. With a website and search engine optimization, it’s just an endless cat and mouse game. Google is always changing their standards to what sites get indexed.

I had two of my sites that were banned from Google about six weeks ago. I mean banned. You could type HardtoFindSeminars.com , and you wouldn’t even get it on Google. It did stay up on Yahoo and some of the other ones, and you have no idea why it got banned.

Now, very luckily I got them listed, but it took a lot of work and a lot of contacting Google. Google handles billions of pages, and thank god, I’m back up on the listings with Google.

With search engines and stuff, it takes a lot of energy. It takes effort and money to get someone to your site. Now, once you get them to your site, when you’re going to sell them something, you’ve got to sell them something that you can make some good money on. Selling them some clothing where you’re going to make 20 or 30 or 40 or even $50 a pop, it’s just a long road to go. There are easier ways to do it.

I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m just giving you my advice. Now, if your fiancé is just in love with clothes, there are still things she can do that center around clothes and I don’t know exactly what, but you can create and develop information products related to any subject you want.

I’ll give you an example – I’m just throwing something off the top of my head, which is the way that I think with audio interviews. Whatever she likes about clothes, let’s say she likes the design of really nice children’s clothes. Well, I’m sure there’s some top designers all over the world who design children’s clothes, right? She could contact these people and do an audio interview with them about how to design great children’s clothes, what’s important, talk about the fabric, the stitching, the colors, how they were successful as designers.

Then, you can have ten audio recordings with children’s clothes designers, some of the most world renowned ones because it’s not hard to get interviews with designers, with anyone really. People are so willing to talk about their passion and what they do, and it’s not often that someone will come along and take an interest. When someone does come along and take interest, they’ll be glad to spend time with you and talk about what their passionate about. Would you agree?

Evan: Absolutely.

Michael: She can have an information product, and it’s a win-win for the designers. I’m just using this as an example because let’s say that she said this was going to be a product that she’s going to be marketing, “The Ten Greatest Children’s Clothes Designers.” Your fiancé could say that she’s publishing a book, and the designer would do it because there’s potential publicity for that designer because what if that book gets out in a big way and that designer’s information and their passion is in that book? That means more promotion, more sales for their clothes. So, why wouldn’t they do it?

I’m saying you could pick a market or a subject or an expertise and put something like this together for a great product with real value within a month’s time, if you’re willing to do the audio interviews.

Evan: In a sense, we do something like that. What we do at the moment is we have a bunch of feeder sites, and effectively we use them to bring people to our retail site. So, we have a site up there that looks through the designer’s eyes. What type of clothes they make, what makes them great – that type of thing. We also have another site out there that looks at the latest fashion trends, what’s coming, what’s big – that type of thing.

So, in a sense, we certainly haven’t gone to interviews, but we’ve got something like that.

Michael: Okay, you do, but it’s all leading to sell the clothes on this Best Dressed Kids site?

Evan: Exactly, yes.

Michael: How long have you had this site up?

Evan: Since March, 2005.

Michael: And, what kind of sales is it generated so far?

Evan: We’re getting about one sale a week off about 350 uniques.

Michael: So, you have 350 unique visitors a week, and you’re getting one sale? So, all right, one sale and I don’t know what the average ticket of the item is. So, you may make $30 or $40.

Evan: That’s about right, yep.

Michael: I don’t know how much money you guys want to make, but it’s going to take a lot more traffic obviously.

Evan: Sure, I think at this stage, we’re doing the mailing lists to sell products, which certainly brings us some kind of hope that maybe someone’s looking for that type of thing, and they’ll be on our mailing list and they’ll come and buy.

Michael: Out of the 350 unique visitors a week, how many are you getting on your mailing list?

Evan: We’re getting about two on our mailing list.

Michael: Two. If you look at my site, you need some kind of pop-up right on that front page. Your front page really needs to be reworked because it’s confusing. The customer is always right by J.C. Penney. Does everyone in Australia know who J.C. Penney’s is?

Evan: Probably not.

Michael: You do? But, J.C. Penney’s is American. So, they’re going to say, “Well, who’s J.C. Penney?” It just doesn’t mean anything to most of the people, and the little girl on there, she’s cute and it’s attention getting, but it’s confusing. This page I think you could really improve. I’ll send you an audio of this recording, but you even said what you felt like your main niche was. “Would you like to have your child be the best dressed child in his class, but you live to far away from a major city to get the real quality clothes you wish you could have? Well, this website offers you topline children’s clothing that you don’t have to drive 200 or 300 miles to get. Come on in to the site and take a look at what we have.”

You’ve got to tell them right up front what’s in the site and what’s in it for them and what the unique benefit is. You could do that more succinctly on the front page for sure. So, you’ve got a certain amount of customers. When your customers call and order, do you know why they’re ordering from your site? You believe it’s because they live so far away and that’s what you want the niche of the site to be – easy to access, nice clothing without driving or traveling. Have you ever talked to your customers to really find out what they like about this site and why they ordered from you guys online?

Evan: We really haven’t. My fiancé does keep barking up my tree, but we need to get a survey onto the site so we can find out what type of things people are looking for, why they’re shopping with us and what they like and what they don’t like. I guess my experience with online surveys, at least, is that you don’t get a response that quantifies your time.

Michael: Yeah, it’s got to be more proactive. If someone orders, are they ordering all 100 percent online? They’re not calling or anything?

Evan: That’s correct.

Michael: Is your fiancé home to take calls if someone was to call during the day or not really?

Evan: She’s available two days of the week. She works the other three days of the week. We’re generally out and about on the weekends as well. So, it’s not something that would easily be done.

Michael: Having a phone number probably would be a good idea to have it on there even if they get your voice mail or even if it’s a voicemail system where someone can leave a message saying they have a question because when someone wants to talk to you, let’s say they’re looking at something and they have a question, there’s no way to get in touch with you. You’ve got the contact, but you’ve got to fill a form out.

I know when I want to reach someone online, I can’t stand when there’s a form. I want to be able to pick up the phone, call, get an answer to my question. If I had a question about one of these dresses, and it’s something that’s not answered on the site, I’m going to pick up the phone and call. But, if there’s no way to get in touch with you guys, you’re probably losing customers by not having a phone number to call.

Evan: True.

Michael: There’s so many things you could do to improve the site. You probably know this. It’s just a factor of time and doing it. I’m just talking about we’re different things that we’re talking about your sites, but you first started saying that you don’t know which direction to go. So, what your real problem is you don’t know if you should focus your attention on your fiance’s site, building this business, or what? You had mentioned something about you had a lot of things going. What’s the problem about all that?

Evan: I’ve got my day job, which I love. I’ve got this website which certainly keeps me just sitting on the weekends, and at night, I guess one of the other things that you mentioned information products and certainly being exposed to people like Alex and Armand, there’s always that nagging in the back of your mind. On HardtoFindSeminars.com , there’s of course the invitation to become a marketing consulting. So, there’s four roads heading out from our home, and I’m smack in the middle.

Michael: You’re kind of obligated to your fiancé somewhat. If she wasn’t your fiancé, would you be working on this site? Do you know what I’m saying?

Evan: Sure.

Michael: I understand you’ve got your job. You’ve got to work your job for sure to pay your rent and everything. How much time are you putting into the Best Dressed Kids site?

Evan: Probably at this stage around ten to fifteen hours a week.

Michael: Okay, how much money do you guys have tied up in inventory?

Evan: Probably somewhere around fifteen, twenty thousand?

Michael: You’ve got that much inventory?

Evan: Yes.

Michael: Geez, did you all go to a show and buy?

Evan: We’ve just recently made a couple of orders through actual design houses. We sell some of it through eBay and we went on a trip to America last Christmas. We got some stuff when we were in the state as well.

Michael: So, you have been selling some on eBay?

Evan: We haven’t been selling the clothing on eBay, no. We’ve been sourcing some of the stuff for the store.

Michael: Oh, I see. You’ve got a lot of money tied up inventory, and you need to move it.

Evan: Exactly. If there’s turnover, then you can’t pay the credit card bills at the end of the month.

Michael: Yeah, you need to move your inventory. See, this is a traditional problem when you’re talking about a business like this. The inventory will kill you. Just imagine that this business if going really good, do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to need more inventory, and then guess what else you’re going to need? You’re going to need a place to put it. Where’s all your inventory right now?

Evan: It’s actually in our house.

Michael: You probably got boxes all over the place.

Evan: No doubt.

Michael: Okay, let’s just imagine that your business is really growing. Let’s say ten times twenty, thirty times the business. You’re going to need more inventory, and then you’re going to need a place to put. Then, you’re going to have some kind of warehouse. So, you’re going to have to open up some kind of store. As it grows, so does your liability.

I’ve done the retail. I’ve done inventory of shirts and pants and bandanas and all that. It was growing. I was selling wholesale to a lot of the department stores, and it was nightmare. I was doing okay, but I wasn’t doing that great because there were no margins. I got out of that, and once I got into the information products business it was just night and day.

There’s no hassle. You’re 26, so you may have a lot of energy right now. I’m 40, but as you get older, you look for less hassles and headaches in your life.

It’s like, you’ve heard of “be careful what you wish for”, you may wish for this business to be really big. Well, you may be turning over a lot of volume and you may be able to make it grow, but you’re dealing with customers. You’re dealing with returns. You’re dealing with individual orders – onesy, twosy stuff. The more customers you have, the more headaches you have.

I would just try and talk you out of this business. I know your fiancé is probably emotionally attached to children’s clothing and she loves it. I’m just telling you what I would do, and I hope I’m not hurting your feelings. I don’t want to hurt your fiance’s feelings, but there are easier ways to go, and information products, software, something she may be able to find something or you can find something where you can show here the numbers where there’s less risk and more upside leverage because it’s an information product.

You probably can still remain around the children’s clothing is she’s really attached to it. If I were you, I’d keep your existing job, but I would think about developing an information product. Look at all those recordings on my site. I give a lot of those things away for free.

Let’s look at the HMA program. That took a long time to put together because I control the information, but I’m doing it with Richard. It’s really a joint venture partnership. He’s the expert, but he’s pretty clueless when it comes to the Internet. So, I’ve been able to create the marketing and the interviews with him.

Let’s look at a different information product, something that there’s some real margins because even though the HMA system, consulting system is $3,900, there’s profit in it, but there’s not much profit compared to let’s say I take all my audio recordings on the subject of joint venture. I have a course that I sell on joint ventures. I don’t know if you’ve seen the sales letters for it, but it just a series of six or seven of my audio recordings that relate to joint ventures, and there’s some other bonuses there. It’s all digital.

At first we had it all on CD, and I was sending out CDs. I said, “You know what, forget this.” Because I was sending a hard copy CD because I believed there was going to be less returns when you send out a physical product, but I found this not to be true. There might be a light increase in returns with a digital product compared to a hard copy product like a CD or a mailing or whatever, but most people are pretty honest. If you give them a good quality product whether it’s digital, whether it’s not, they’re going to keep it, and they’re not going to return it.

But, this joint venture product of six audio recordings and all I do is send someone a link, and it’s a $300 product. My offer’s pretty good kind of like your one dollar offer on that other site. It’s a totally risk free offer where I use subscription payments through PayPal. People can order this product and pay nothing and I send them the digital link to the product and they have 30 days to cancel their subscription and if they don’t cancel, their credit card is billed for $297.

Look at the margins - $297, I do a little work upfront to get the sales letter and get the product put together, but what cost do I have? Absolutely nothing. The click of a mouse button, and it’s all margins. I keep it all, and there’s no inventory. Isn’t that beautiful when you compare it to something like you’re doing or something like almost every other brick and mortar business out there?

Evan: Sure.

Michael: It takes a lot of work putting a product together. I would definitely recommend you do put together rather than buying into someone else’s product because you want the control of the intellectual property. You want it to be yours, but I’m sure if you think about it, you can come up with something, and if you don’t know how to write a sales letter, you can hire someone to write a sales letter. I can refer you to some great copywriters who could do a good job.

There’s no guarantee, but if you got a hungry market that’s really passionate about the product you develop, one sales letter that can be put up on a website can make you a lot of money. It could support you for the rest of your life. It really could.

Evan: That’s kind of what I’m looking for.

Michael: You’re young right now. You’re only 26. You’ve got plenty of time to screw up, but when I was 26, I was still entrepreneurial, but I didn’t know about this stuff I know about today. Information products – you’ve got the skills on the Internet. You’ve got a huge advantage over most people.

Do you know all these marketing gurus like Jay Abraham and them? They’re clueless when it comes to the Internet. Do you know Yanik Silver? Have you ever heard of him?

Evan: Absolutely.

Michael: He can’t even put up a webpage.

Evan: Alex Mandozian makes the same claim.

Michael: Yeah, that’s fine, but I can put up a webpage. I know I have a huge advantage being able to do that. At least, I believe I do because you can make changes quickly.

If you’re starting out and you can’t put up a webpage and you have a sales letter and you’re relying on your webmaster to do it all, you’re not going to make the changes you want because you know everytime you talk to him, he’s going to charge you money.

So, you’ve got a great skill to be able to do all that stuff yourself. Now, have you listened to the HMA recordings?

Evan: I have listened to the HMA recordings, and I’ve gone through that list collection.

Michael: You’ve gone through all the transcripts.

Evan: Yep.

Michael: You’ve got enough content right there to probably go out and you’re right in Sydney. You have a lot of businesses out there. You could probably do some practice opportunity analysis and get yourself a client. Is that something you could see yourself doing?

Evan: Yep, that’s one of the avenues that I don’t know which one to go down.

Michael: If you can see yourself doing it, helping businesses, so many people are doing it so poorly, and really consulting is nothing but you just talk to the customer and find out what their problems are, and you just solve them. But, you’re solving them with just ideas not necessarily hard labor. You could use your skills with the Internet and search engine optimization.

You could take that whole HMA thing and you could be not a marketing consultant to anybody and everybody which it’s presented that way in the recordings, but you’re better off niching into a specific niche. If you’ve got some good skill in search engine optimization, that’s such a hungry market because everyone wants traffic on the Internet, and barely anyone knows how.

You could be a search engine optimization consultant, and you could use the HMA system to market yourself. You could develop your USP. Why should someone use you for search engine optimization rather than any of these other guys? You develop your USP. I’m sure you’ve come up with ideas after going through all the transcripts and the recordings.

What else are you thinking? Is it you’ve only have so much time, but you don’t know what to do?

Evan: I think that’s it. I think with my fiance’s website, you managed to talk me into keeping that as a hobby. I don’t like selling a $27 and at the end of the day, it’s not going to help for the rest of your life.

Michael: Yeah, just do the numbers. You’re not going to get rich off of selling clothing. My father was in the, we used to call it the Smata business. I used to go around with my father. He had a big motorhome, and he had four kids so as we were growing up, he’d be gone all week.

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. So, Florida is the state right under Georgia. You probably know that, but he’d traveling Florida, Georgia, Alabama, calling on the women’s clothing stores. He’d have the motorhome filled with his line of clothing. He was a rep. So, he would make a percentage on the line of clothing. It’s a tough way to make a living, and you’re doing it in such a non-proactive way. You’re just doing it through the Internet.

If your fiancé called on children’s stores, and just brought the inventory in, she could probably get rid of a lot of stuff that way, probably a lot more than on the Internet.

Evan: Okay, yep.

Michael: If you want to unload that inventory, you guys may want to consider doing that just loading up your car and calling on some stores and just liquidating some of that inventory to get some of your cash back.

Evan: I guess that still leaves information products or consulting.

Michael: Let me tell you, you’ve got to be the right type of person. I like doing consulting, but I hate making appointments and going to meet people. I just don’t do it. All my consulting is online, over the phone where I’m sitting at home comfortably. I can’t stand driving to go meet people not that it’s always of waste of time. I’m not into that.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself, what don’t you want to do. You’ve got to set the parameters of your consulting business. Now, if you’re a search engine optimization consultant, for example, why do you need to meet anyone? If someone wants better rankings, they don’t need to meet you face to face, do they?

Evan: No, they don’t.

Michael: No, they’ve got a website. We’re in the digital age here. There’s no reason you need to get in your car and go meet these clients. So, all your consulting can be online from home, if that’s what you want to do. You may hate being stuck in front of the computer. How many hours are you working at your main job?

Evan: At my main job, I’m here about forty.

Michael: So, you’re fulltime. How do you see yourself breaking into consulting? Would you consider quitting your existing jobs?

Evan: I’d probably consider moving into an independent contract with my existing employer, and probably initially offering four day service a week which would free up one day a week. As opportunities progress, I guess my current employer would become just another client. It’s a bad way of putting it, but another client among my several others.

Michael: You listened to a lot of the stuff on consulting. What ideas have you had? What do you see yourself doing as a consultant? When you were listening and you were thinking about all this to yourself, what were you seeing yourself doing? Calling on any type of business, or did you see yourself niching something Internet related that you’re good at?

Evan: What I really liked about the system was working with set-ups rather than start ups and being able to actually find companies that have website that were either stagnant or were declining. I could probably go out there and find 100,000 dot.coms where the company put it up three years ago, and haven’t got a single enquiry through it. With my knowledge of being able to market, being able to the tech stuff, I guess rather than offering to do the traditional stuff like Yellow Pages, that type of thing, just work the Internet.

Michael: That would be a great way to go, and you don’t have to meet with people and it’s all on the phone, and all online, and there’s such a huge demand for it. Go look at fifty webpages, and you know 49 of them are doing it all wrong. You could have your checklist of the things that need to be done on a website that will optimize their site.

Do you know how Richard has seven different steps? You don’t have to follow that exactly, but you can have your own different steps for your SEO Consulting business. You tell the client you take them through seven different steps. The first step is lead capture, pop-up capturing, your visitors. You just make your steps, and then you charge the customer per step.

You tell them that you guarantee your work as long as they go through all the steps of your system. You customize it for your business, and if they don’t get their investment back after going through all the steps of your SEO consulting system, they get all their money back.

So, you make it risk-free. You charge them per step, and then if you’ve got websites and you’re starting to capture the data from these sits, one thing is because you know how to do it and they don’t, you could have control over that data. If you really turn on some good techniques and start bringing in a lot of data, you’re going to know if you can set up a contingency deal. You know what your work is going to produce, and if you like the person you’re working with, you can get in all kinds of joint ventures with these companies.

You’re going to have the control of the most important thing, and that’s the leads. That’s everything. You’d be in a real, what we call, toll booth position. That wouldn’t be too bad.

Evan: I’d honestly be happy to do that.

Michael: I’d be glad to sell you an HMA system. I really would. I can send you to a link for all the details. What I’ve put together – you’ve seen some of it – but, the tools I have for this, at least for the traditional consulting like what you’re hearing on the recordings, they’re fantastic. I’ve got interviews with marketing consultants on a section called “The HMA University”. You’ve probably seen a couple of them. I put a couple of them in my collection of audio recordings, but there’s a lot of interviews on the HMA University that I do just for the HMA consultants. They’re dynamic. That’s some great stuff. You know how I interview. I get all the good stuff out of them.

Evan: From what I heard, it’s been fantastic.

Michael: Good. It’s not hard. I’ll be honest with you, most of the people who have signed up haven’t done anything, and that’s just how it is in anything. Eighty percent of the real estate agents in the US or probably anywhere in the world, account for twenty percent of the business, and it’s only twenty percent who account for eighty percent. There’s a whole lot of losers out there, more losers than winners. The winners are really the people who just take action. It’s just as simple as that.

My site has had success only for one thing. I’m no genius, it’s just that I consistently took action, and that I found is really the secret of anything. Just make movement, do something, take action, make the calls.

Here’s another thing I learned, believe me I love to procrastinate. I’ll do anything to avoid certain things like the details of my site or proofreading my site or calling on customers, but I have learned if I’m not going to do it, I will pay somebody to do it. And, Elance, you’ve heard of Elance, right?

Evan: Absolutely.

Michael: That is your worldwide work force to hire anyone within hours to do anything you want, and do it cheap. You can get labor out of Indian, English speaking people, not that you want to take advantage of them, it’s still good money for them. People here in the US are really complaining about it, but I love it.

You hear Armand Morin, Armand and them developing software for nothing. You’d pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to software programs where you are and where I am.

Evan: I used to be one of them, well, I guess I still am one of them. It pays the bills.

Michael: It sounds like you’ve got a lot of skills. You really do with the Internet. You should never go hungry. With knowing what you know with the website and search engine optimization, you could probably work search engine optimization for the rest of your life. But, I’m sure something with the Internet, there’s going to be such huge changes, who knows? It moves so fast.

Evan: I guess the marketing coupled with the tech – I think wherever it goes, I’ll be there because that’s my love.

Michael: I love this stuff, too because it’s almost like going to the casino. It’s like easy money. I don’t mean it in the negative way, but when you can look at a business that’s clueless and has no idea what they’re doing and they may be succeeding in spite of themselves – let’s say they’re mailing out 50,000 letters a month, but they’re making money with it. But, they have a bulk mail Indicia on it, or they have an ugly, sticky label for the address or they don’t have a headline on their letter. These things, these ideas and these changes could just double, triple, quadruple a company. If you show them how to do that, you can get a piece of the action if you set it up right.

It’s such leverage when you can go into a business and have all the intimate knowledge of the inner workings of that business, and you’re just asking the questions. Business owners are so wrapped up, they can’t see the business for what it is because they’re so emotionally involved.

So, coming in from a fresh look being outside looking in, you see where the money is, and that’s why I called it the HMA – Hidden Marketing Assets. It’s like going on a treasure hunt. You’re looking for these hidden assets in the business, and you’re going to uncover them and you’re going to turn them into more money for the business. But, they can’t see them. They need someone to come in and look at them.

Evan: I’ve got the same issue with my website. If I develop something, I’ll need someone like yourself to come in and say, “Well, fix this.” But if I look at someone else’s-

Michael: It’s easy, isn’t it?

Evan: It is. It’s like one level of abstraction. It’s a subjectiveness.

Michael: You’re absolutely right. It’s so much easier for me to look at someone else’s business and give advice and come up with good solutions than it is for my own because I’m too close to it. That’s why people need consultants. They need outside expertise.

Think about the HMA. If it’s something you want to, I’ll be glad to help you out the best I can. I was on the phone with Richard today. He was even telling me if you ever get into a jam or a problem, or you’ve got a question, I’ll have him call you. He’s willing to help all the HMA problem as much as he can as well. But, there’s so much great content on there. There’s a lot of content. It will take you probably a month to go through everything. But, you just keep going through it and keep going through it.

It’s a process not an event. You get out there and you start making some calls, and if you’re not going to make the calls, you pay someone to make the calls. Get them on Elance and I have a whole training on that.

Evan: It sounds like a lot of fun.

Michael: Has this been helpful?

Evan: Yes, it has.

Michael: See if you can move some of that inventory from your clothes. You’ve got to get some of that cash back. At the rate you’re going, it’s going to take a long time. You don’t want to lose that investment.

But, be supportive of your fiancé because she loves the business. I understand where you’re at. You just help her out the best you can. But, you know where the real money is. It’s in controlling your own product, or being able to consult and get a piece of someone’s business by using your consulting expertise and getting an ongoing piece of it, and setting it up right. I think the HMA stuff will help you do that.

Evan: Excellent. I will have to talk to her.

Michael: Well, talk to her, I’ll take this recording and I’ll get it converted. I’m not going to edit it, but I’ll just convert it and I’ll upload it, and you can download if you want your girlfriend to listen to it or if you want to relisten to it. So, you’ll have it.

Evan: Sure, that will be great. I really do appreciate it, Michael. It’s really given me a lot of direction when I really wasn’t to clear where I wanted to go.

Michael: No problem. You’re young. You’re only 26. You’ve got plenty of time. You may as well get going on the right path now and the right path is doing something you like and that you’re passionate about that you want to be paid good for it. You don’t want to live for peanuts. Life is a lot nicer when you don’t have to worry about money and that you’re doing something you love.

You’re trying for a baby, and let me tell you. If your girlfriend does get pregnant and you have a kid, your life is really going to change. Then, you’re really not going to have time.

That’s why you need to do it right now before you have your kids because you’re going to be tempted to stay in that job because you’ve got a kid to support. You’ve to go for it now before the baby comes.

Evan: All right.

Michael: All right, let me let you go. I’ll email this to you. It’ll be about 24 hours, and we’ll talk later. Just shoot me an email. Okay?

Evan: Thanks Michael, bye.