Good morning, everyone. It’s 1:30 in the morning, and I had another awesome day at Business Mastery. I’ve learned a lot today and had a lot of significant breakthroughs. So what am I going to share with you? I’ll go for some of the things that we’ve learned today, but some of the stuff you just need to be there in person, so I really encourage you to go. I know that the cost of Business Mastery—it cost me around, like, $10,000 – is quite significant, but they give you the guarantee that if you don’t feel you can make a million dollars after your first day, they’ll give you a full refund. If you actually execute the stuff that they teach you, it’s well worth over a million dollars, and the friendship from the people you meet and just being around some of these great masters and seeing what they do – it really changes your life and your business life, so I really encourage you guys to go.
So what are some of the things that we learned today? First, we went through some stuff on educational marketing. It’s not what they call it, but it’s essentially teaching you how to copyright better, whether it’s using your website, using brochures, sending out a much stronger core message to your target market with education and creative writing. So that is good, but the actual example he uses is a bit hard to understand, so I’m going to skip that part. The second part we went through is how to implement personal breakthroughs or go back to your team and follow this four-step motto which will help your team break through a lot of the self-limitation they have placed on themselves and for them to experience much greater success. I’m not going to go through this as well, but the main point is that the framework is so useful, which I’m definitely going to go back to share with my team.
More importantly Tony used life intervention to demonstrate the power of these four steps, so we as a group learned so much from those experiences. And one of the key things that I’ve learned is… Yes, Tony always talks about the key to business success: 80 percent is psychology, and 20 percent is skillset. And I guess I’ve always known that, but through the intervention and listening to what one of the participants is going through—Tony got us to all do an exercise to self-reflect as well—it actually made me cry through one of the sessions.
Like, as I was thinking about the challenges in my life that affect my business, my—ever since I’ve had my two kids, my two lovely kids, my relationship with my wife has suffered a bit and taken a backward step. And together with the stress of handling of the growth of the business, that has made more of a dent on the relationship. Like I still love my wife with a lot of passion and a lot of my energy, but in a way that she was the most important person to me, and ever since the kids and the business, she’s kind of went down in the pecking order behind the kids. And, like, going through this exercise that Tony did with us, it made me realize that I haven’t been spending as much of my focus on my relationship.
And when I think about it, I really love my wife, and I’ve always had the answers inside on how to improve my relationship, but haven’t had the moment to really self-reflect. So I guess my inner conflict that I had is I don’t know how to make her happy. And I did try a lot prior to going to Business Mastery, but yeah, Tony Robbins has helped me make a significant breakthrough. Like, now when I go to her, I’m going to have a renewed state and story that I tell myself that I love my wife and she’s going to be my number one from now on, even in front of the kids. I will always love my kids, and that’s something that is unconditional.
So yeah, like by having a good relationship with your family, with your partner in all respects of your family life, including your health as well, that is the key to success for you to grow your business. If your personal life, your relationship, your health is in turmoil, your business is not going to grow because every time you try to move forward with your business, there’s some sort of inner conflict that comes and hold you back, and you get depressed in another area. Like, you can only suppress it for so long. So I really appreciated it, that session.
The next thing Tony went through is a sales funnel or expanding on what we talked about yesterday on Jay Abraham’s three ways of growing the business. And the way you expand it is we can increase the number of leads that we have, which leads to the customers and the actual conversion rate, the frequency of the sales, and the actual value of the sales. With these five key components, if you can just increase like 10 percent or 20 percent in each one of these areas, it’d become very significant. If you increase, like, 10 percent in each area, you’d get an instant 50 percent growth for the year. If it’s like 20 percent, it’d become 100% growth for the business. So this skill is very powerful to analyse step-by-step.
After the lunch/dinner break, we had Keith Cunningham speak on stage. He’s actually a person that Robert Kiyosaki refers to in his book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. And Keith, he’s amazing. His job is to teach us how to understand the financial statements. All of us are entrepreneurs, we hate accounting, hate financial statements, and all we look at is the overall revenue and the overall net profit, and the rest we just skip over. For most entrepreneurs, financial discipline is the weakest point. But to grow a business, you need to know how to play the game, and to play the game, you need to know how to read the financial statement because, essentially, that’s your scorecard. I don’t want to go into what Keith went through because it wouldn’t do it justice, but all I can say is that I’ve never had so much fun learning about accounting. Like, can you imagine doing accounting course and having fun? Keith, he’s a funny guy, and he’s full of passion as well to help us, and he puts it in a way that’s so easy to understand and makes it so interesting, so fun, so engaging, so I really get it and I’m a lot clearer on all the financial aspects now. He’s going to continue for tomorrow morning, so we can’t wait. Just going by to Keith’s session alone can potentially make your business millions of dollars.
And the last part of today, we’ve got a SEO lady called Heather Lutze who talked about SEO. As you guys know, I run a online marketing company, and one of the things that we’re really good at is SEO. We’ve been ranking number one for “SEO” in Google Australia for the last 5 years or so and we’re proud of ourselves in what we do. We’ve optimised hundreds of websites and we’re always on top of the game. So what Heather went through was pretty, I would say a really good presentation. SEO is kind of hard to explain to people, but she explained it really well using analogies. She explained it in a way that is really easy to understand and engaging for the audience and gave a lot of useful tips on what to do.
But one thing that I have to share with you guys that everyone needs to watch out for, not just with this particular session but in general, there’s a lot of educational seminars that teach people about SEO, how to use SEO to grow your business or how to start your business and create residual income using SEO. Like, I can set up a website for a cheap price, and then using SEO to get that website up and running, and from there, I’m going to put a product on it, maybe like an Airbook or something similar, and then people would start going to my site and buy from me, and I wouldn’t have to do anything. I would just have to do the work once, and the income would keep pouring in every single day. So that’s the pictures that are painted by most people. SEO is easy and all that.
And there’s a degree of truth to it if it is maybe five years ago. Five years ago is when we first started SEO and things were completely different. That’s when Google first started. I will estimate the number of businesses in Australia that had a website optimised then as less than 5 percent.
And PPC, Pay Per Click, Google AdWords. I remember in 2006, my client was telling me for a keyword in 2005 it cost $2 to $3 per click. In 2006, it cost $5 per click. My client was telling me , “Hey, Gary. $5 a click. That’s really expensive, you know.” I said, “Yeah, but at the end of the day, what you need to think about is not how much it cost, but for every single dollar you spend, how many clicks are you actually converting into a lead? So essentially, what is your cost per lead? Are you tracking the number of people clicking through you via Pay Per Click ads? How many are actually calling you guys? Are you tracking your phone calls? Do you have a software that tracks it? The people that makes an enquiry on your website, did they send you an email or do you have an enquiry form that you actually track the number of inquiries as well? Can you Google Analytics log where the source of the inquiry comes from, whether they came from SEO or PPC or from other sources?”
So this is really important for people to understand. So at the time, my client’s saying, “You know what? It cost like $5 per click. That’s really expensive.” I said, “You know what? It is, depends on which perspective you’re coming from, but it’s going to get a lot more expensive, and the best strategy now while it’s still, like, generating a positive return on investment for your business, the cost per lead is still relatively low, yes, it may cost you like $200 to get one lead, but for every single client you sign up, you get, you make $2,000 in commission. So it’s more than paying for the lead that you get. So while it was still cheap, none of the big bangs were competing on Google AdWords so the price wasn’t inflated yet. So get in early, get a bigger market share so when the big bangs start to jump in, you have the budget to compete or you have the market share that maybe you will be less reliant on PPC. Maybe your SEO would have been a lot better, and you can use other forms of marketing as well.
And now, reflecting in 2010, 2011, like that same keyword, can cost like $20 to $25 per click. Every time someone clicked on your ad, it cost you $20 to $25. Now, compared to $5 in 2006, it’s like five times now in, like, five or six years. So for Pay Per Click, using that as a guide, and online marketing in general, it’s got a lot more competitive because a lot more people are doing it. Same for SEO, like, five years ago or six years ago, it’s no way as competitive. You used to put a few keywords in in a title, manipulate the content to have a bit more of the keyword, register a good domain name with your keyword, and bang, your website will come up towards the top of the first page of the search results, and it’s just as easy as that.
But now it’s a completely different ballgame. I will say, if I have to estimate, around like 30 to 40 percent of the professional business website in Australia have had SEO done. So you’re not just competing with other websites that have no SEO. You’re competing with businesses that may have spent like tens or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on their SEO strategy. And if you don’t know how to analyze whether it is achievable for your website to get on the first page for that particular search term because they don’t teach you that. They’ll tell you, “Oh, aim for the longer tail keyword.” Yes , that’s a strategy, but there are some long tail keywords that are very, very competitive. “Buy plasma TV Sydney” is a specific longtail keyword but even that is very, very competitive. If you have a small website, and you’re just doing the SEO yourself, I can pretty much guarantee you that you don’t even have a chance to get on the first page of the search results, let alone on the top part of it. Like, you’re not even close, maybe not even within the first five pages. That’s how challenging it is these days to get on the top of the search results.
So these people teach you what to do to build up your website, and they make it sound so easy that, “Do this SEO, and somehow, your website is going to come towards the top of the search results.” Because actually, it’s become so much difficult that you could be just be wasting your time.
What we’ve actually done with our SEO is we’ve taken it to a new level. Before, we needed access to your site, we needed to change this, we needed you to constantly add content, we needed to change names and tagging, we need to get access to your CMS, your FTP and put codes in here, change content, change the structure of the site. And it’s all good, but it’s a lot of work. And there are clients that would be like, they just don’t have the time to constantly engage in any content and talking to developers and getting all this stuff done to change the site structure.
So the current method that we’ve got now, we don’t even need the client’s involvement and we can do all the SEO for you. You just sit back and relax. Imagine that you have cleaners coming to your office, and you have to micromanage every single thing they do. How much time would that suck out of your business? SEO is one of those things. If you can get someone to do it for you that has a good reputation, it will save you a lot of time and stress. You don’t need to be an expert in this area. And by you learning a bit about SEO, sometimes, is more dangerous because—I’ll give you the analogy.
I remember in school when I had just finished Year 12, I went up to Queensland. And one of the things you could do is hire a moped, which is a little motorbike for you to drive, and all you need is a driver’s license for you to rent it. I knew how to drive a car but had no idea how to drive a moped. And the person that rented the bike out gave me like a few minutes instructions—this is how you turn it on, this is how you change direction, this is the brakes, any questions? I didn’t have any questions because they seemed to have taught me everything that I needed to know or at least the basics. And so I started driving it. Within the first corner, I underestimated the brake, and, bang. I crashed it, fell, scraped my leg, and there’s a little bit of blood on it, but there wasn’t too much damage on the bike, so I picked it back up.
And my friends wanted to continue to go, and I didn’t want to be a party pooper, so I picked up the bike and kept going. After, like, just 200 meters, my friend goes, like being, like, young and not really thinking, my friend said, “Hey, let’s have a drag,” and we go, “Okay.” Well, just peer pressure, just going along with the flow, “So, let’s have a drag race.” So being in a drag race, and me being a very competitive person, I wanted to win, so to win, you accelerate quickly, right? Well, wrong. It is right to a certain extent. Well, I didn’t know that if you accelerate quickly, the bike will lift up, and you do a wheelie on one wheel, left, right, left, and bang. I fell and really hurt myself and fully scraped my knee even further and blood everywhere. What I didn’t know is when you accelerate, you needed to lean forward or the bike might just spin on one wheel. And nobody taught me that because I was given only the basic instructions.
But without the advanced instructions, it got me into a lot of trouble. The bike, after I crashed it, it didn’t move anymore. It stopped working. That’s how much it was damaged. And luckily, I was only around 250 meters away from the place that I rented the bike, so I was able to push it back, with my knee all bleeding and stuff, and ended up having to pay something like $5,000 in repair costs. And geez, I thought it was a negative experience for me. Like, if only someone had said: “Unless you have a proper license, we’re not going to let you rent this bike because it’s going to be very dangerous for you.” Or “If we’re going to let you on this bike, you need to go on this training with someone that can supervise you.”
So same thing applies with SEO and PPC. Like, I’ve heard the advice tonight saying that, someone asks a question, should you do PPC, and they said, “Yes, you should definitely do PPC”. Or actually, the question is, “Should I do PPC if I’m ranking on the top for the organic?” And the response is, “Yes, you should do PPC because it’s a different thing from SEO. You can get leads from PPC, and you get leads from SEO.” But that’s not true – you should only do SEO or PPC or any form of marketing if it’s providing a positive return on investment. If you’re not tracking your conversion, if you don’t know what is the cost per lead, if it is not making you money, forget about branding because nobody looks at it as branding, for a small company anyways. It’s not very effective. There are other better ways to market for branding purposes, such as using remarketing and stuff. So you need to be very careful of doing PPC and SEO if you have only a little bit of knowledge. That’s probably the most dangerous situation you can into.
But enough about that and getting sidetracked … Tomorrow, Keith Cunningham is going to get back on stage, and I’m sure Tony will have a big session to wrap up the last day, so I can’t wait. It’s almost 2:00 now. I’m going to try to get some rest for another 9:00 start tomorrow. So hope you guys enjoyed today. Leave me any comments if you have any questions, then I’ll be more than happy to share with you my experiences. Bye bye!