Martin Wales Interview

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Martin Wales

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Name: Martin Wales

Industry: Publicist, Online Marketing

Website: Customer Catcher

Martin Wales’ Bio: Arguably one of the hottest online strategists in the world today. Martin’s so good Microsoft sponsor him. He hosts the entrepreneur e biz radio show and the Microsoft “Your Business” show. He’s also the co-author of Guerrilla Marketing with Jay Conrad Levinson and author of Success Secrets of Internet Superstars.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys welcome to another call for the SEO method. I’m very excited today to be joined by Martin Wales. If you haven’t heard of him you’ve probably been under a rock. He is very well known online. He is an excellent online strategist. He’s been the host of the Entrepreneur E Biz Radio show and the Microsoft Your Business Show as well. He’s very big on offline marketing. He is excellent with automating systems. He’s a co author of Guerilla Marketing which is a book with Jay Conrad Levitson and also the Success Secrets of Internet Superstars.

Suffice to say he really knows his stuff and I know in a lot of the calls we’ve been talking about SEO specifically but I want to talk to Martin Wales just to round out that picture. It’s so easy to get honed in on SEO and focused in on that but there is so much more to marketing, offline marketing and so on and that is where Martin’s skill set is. Martin, I’d like to welcome you to the call.

Martin Wales Happy to be here David. I’m always excited to talk to my friends on the other side of the planet.

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s right. What time is it where you’re at? I’m 11 am over here.

Martin Wales It’s 9.10 Eastern where I am.

David Jenyns: Well I’m from the future because it is Friday here for me. I can give you the little inside that the future’s looking bright. I appreciate your time. Maybe if we dive really straight into it. I wanted to find out a little bit about, when you’re first setting up a website, whether you’re working for yourself or if you’re consulting for someone, what do you do in terms of driving traffic? I know it is a very broad question, so start wherever you like.

Martin Wales You can see the value of finding different ways that get you more bang for your buck right away. You can see the benefit of having your pre existing resources, so pre existing websites, pre existing links, powered up to help you get that site well known. The top thing that I recommend that probably differentiates me from what I would call purist internet marketers is publicity, especially the use of offline publicity, in addition to online publicity.

If you’ve got others sites, I always put the links down the bottom, so I leverage the spiders to take advantage of any pr ranking that I’ve already had before.

David Jenyns: Here I was thinking you weren’t the SEO guy. That’s a good bit of SEO right there.

Martin Wales Thank you. Now that we’ve reached the depth of my knowledge of SEO, we can go on. I understand certain things. I wouldn’t go into the algorithmic level. Basically one of the items on the list is longevity. The next would be links from other sites or well known sites and resources. If you’re linked to momma.com and no one’s ever heard of it, it’s quite different to being linked to microsoft.com. One of the publicity things that I do, and I’ll define publicity in a second, is I host radio shows sponsored by big companies. So I teach people how to get sponsors to sponsor your internet radio show, even your offline radio show or a podcast.

So Microsoft, I got them to sponsor a show. They paid $45,000 for me to be on the air in Toronto, Canada. It is the fourth largest media market in North America. They paid $3,000 an hour for me to be on the air, and I’m very pleased about that. They actually paid me too which was really cool. But I got to promote my own brand, my own websites. The site is still up where I would send people for affiliate programs. I don’t know if you’ve discussed that with your people. Affiliate programs are links that pay you commission for referring people through them.

Microsoft paid for the show but I would say, go to yourbusinesslinks.com. The name of the show was Your Business. Microsoft took the recordings from the show, put them on their site, the audio recordings. But there are links still today from microsft.com to martinwales.com or to yourbusinesslinks.com. That was at least two or three years ago.

You mentioned that I was the host of Entrepreneur Magazine’s E Biz show. Entrepreneur.com is one of the most visited sites on the planet by entrepreneurs of small businesses. They had links to the radio show; those archives remain.

One of the things you want to do is create content that stays around when you do articles online. Ezinearticles.com is a very well known; there are other ones. However, they are the leader of the pack. The reason you do that is, every time you write an article in the byline, you put a link to the site that you want to promote. The more links you have in to your site, as you know, the more relevance you have in those keyword terms. You want to tag the articles, you want to have a certain amount of keyword within the article. So certainly keyword strength and the percentages there are important. You don’t want every other line to be Easter baskets, however.

David Jenyns: The keyword density. I did want to dig a little deeper, because you talked about that idea. I wanted to explain why that was so key. When you are building links for websites, you can go out there and get 10,000 pr1 or pr 0 sites but then you go ahead and just get one link from Microsoft or Entrepreneur and if that link is going to stay, that benefit, it only takes you one of those links to get all of the same benefit you may have got from all of those other links.

Martin Wales Absolutely. When I started eight or ten years ago, really getting onto the internet, I was on it before it had pictures! It just took two and a half minutes to download a 50 kilobyte picture. To give an example of what you just said, when I hosted the Entrepreneur Magazine E Biz show, it was hosted on a station called wsradio.com. They’ve got a lot of internet radio shows on it. But they also host eBay radio.

EBay has hundreds of millions of members, but the important thing is, eBay’s home page cycles ten times. So every time you hit the refresh page, it cycles ten times. It may have changed since. Because eBay radio was hosted on WS radio, I was second cousin if you will to eBay’s home page. My page rank was five or six out of ten.

I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how, it didn’t matter. It was five out of ten. Because eBay was linked to WS radio, WS radio was linked to customercatcher.com which was my brand. That enabled me to have a high page ranking. I rely on different ways than search engine ranking for people to find me. It’s direct relationships, direct referral, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing, all those sort of things are definitely publicity.

The online articles are great because people can immediately click. The next is online press releases. The online press releases are great because if you use a service like prnewswire.com and you don’t use the free one, you use like the $80 to $100, they have different price ranges. But if you use a minimum of $80 you can make it onto the front page of Yahoo News, MSN.

I’ve done press releases for companies and we’ve had something like 127,672 views in a single 24 hour period to our website, for $80. This is in contrast to sitting down trying to figure out what’s going on behind the Google black curtain and sand box and getting slapped and doing the Google dance and everything else. You write a press release really well, a good headline, newsworthy, helpful information, and you drive 127,000 people to click on a link.

That’s the objective. One of the things that you teach that I really like, is systems. What you really need to focus on first before you build your system is, what is the objective? Is the objective of your website to increase your credibility? Is the objective of your website to get people to sign up for your newsletter? Is the objective of your website to get people to click and buy?

Whatever your objective is, you have to work your system. If you’re building a canal for ships, it is, I want the ships to go from Lake Ontario to Lake Eyrie. So I know the direction I’m going from, where I’m going to, do I want to blast through bedrock or do I want to dig through clay that I can easily take care of? I go a little bit longer route, but I get there just the same. The objective is gained, I save a ton of money, I don’t blow up two dozen people in the meantime.

Once you know what your objective is, then you can balance off what software you want to buy, what free stuff you want to use, how you’re going to do natural search engine ranking versus pay per click. If I did pay per click to get 100,000 clicks, even if I just got it down to a nickel, you do the math, that’s quite a bit of money versus $80 for a press release.

One of the other things you can do along the lines of publicity when you do those articles is send it to a syndicater. That syndicater takes that article and distributes it to other sites for you. So it’s something you can do once and then someone else is doing the work to distribute it for you.

David Jenyns: With all these things that you’re touching on, I love the idea of creating good evergreen content that gets out there and people want to link to. We’ve talked about this before, the idea that putting out really good content, SEO happens naturally. People will start to link to you if you’re putting out those articles, if you’re using PR Newswire.

These are all things that happen naturally. Obviously what Google wants to do is serve up the most relevant results to the user and whatever the user is looking for. So they’re trying to basically filter out all the rubbish out there for ones that people are actually looking for. The way they do that is, basically when we’re talking in terms of SEO, it is natural for things to get inbound links and for those links to grow over time. You have all this good content out there.

Even though you talk about not being an SEO person, a lot of the things that you’ve just ticked off there are all part of the SEO method and what we do to get those inbound links. You’re just going about doing it by putting out really good content. I love hearing that cross over.

Martin Wales Thank you. Again to begin with the objective in mind, it needs to be evergreen content, so quality content. If you say the first version of iPhone is excellent, well they are on the 3G now, so in technology it is a little more challenging. If you’re in a niche where you can put it out, like human resources training, where it’s talking about How to Get Along with Difficult People that’s great. That’s been going on since cave man got a mother-in-law.

If you can write an article even within your industry, even in technology you can do a general article on how to pick technology. Call other customers of the software, read the industry magazines. You can always come up with this generic tip or check list, no matter what you industry is, even if you have specific information that changes over time. When I teach people radio, we have a site radiotalkshowhost.com. We give a lot of tips on how to increase the ability to make money, but also to increase your credibility and your celebrity.

Lucille Ball, I don’t know if my friends in Australia and New Zealand know who she is, but I believe she is a global phenomenon. She was a funny lady doing sitcom television in the 1960s in black and white – she’s on Blueray now. She didn’t know what Blueray was and in fact she’s passed away years and years ago. Her content is evergreen because it is funny, humorous, slapstick stuff but it stays around forever.

When I had executives on the radio show, I would say, you’re coming on the radio show, why don’t you have your publicity people, your PR people do a press release? What do corporations and companies do? They put their own press releases on their websites. You have to be smart enough to suggest it. They pay a PR company $5,000 a month to do stuff for them. I’ve now got a company paying $5,000 putting my links up on their site. The next wonderful thing about corporations is, once they put something on their website, they hardly ever change it. So now you’ve got the longevity. Now you’ve got a link.

I did an interview with the world wide vice president of marketing for salesforce.com. They were doing a big push. On their website they have a link from a press release because David Findlay is appearing on the Entrepreneur Magazine E Biz show. The last time I checked, I remember that being up three years later. They had their own publicity going. So even though it wasn’t a direct link to me all the time, the fact that they had a link there to your site means you’re going to rank higher in the search engines.

The other thing we discovered is that video ranks higher, faster. Google made a foray into video a couple of years ago and I was at a conference in London and somebody mentioned this thing called video.google.com. I had some video with me and I just threw it up. I was number one in sales and marketing for quite a long time because other people hadn’t even heard of it yet.

Google likes fresh material as well as good material. They like fresh content. This is why blogging is so important. It all interweaves. We just keep going around in circles with the material. You do a press release, you do a video, commentary on it for a minute, you have your own YouTube channel. By the way, the number two search engine now is YouTube. Most people don’t think of YouTube as a search engine. They think of it as a toy, a place to go to in order to see the latest Leggo Star Wars. But you can go on there, and people search on there for ‘real world’ ‘business information’.

David Jenyns: Video is a huge opportunity and it’s very easy to get rankings because it’s not competitive yet. Like you said, you were doing that a couple of years ago and people still aren’t catching on yet. People are starting to but video is still a big open field. You can go and get easy rankings, easy pickings.

You talked about quite a few different things like video and press release and working with companies and getting links back to your website that way. When we talk in terms of systems, a lot of that appears to be quite hard, to create systems for outsourcing. I think the ezine articles and that sort of thing are much easier. Where do you try and implement systems into your business? Where do you spend your time, because it would be very easy to get caught up in these types of things.

Martin Wales The number one thing is to keep it simple. The shortest number of steps between the prospect and you or the visitor and the sale is best. The best is, they click once and they’re on the order form, if that’s what you’re doing. As far as a system overall, I drive people to the landing page. Even though I use video, even though I use press releases, even though I use tele seminars or webinars, or whatever it is, I try and drive people to one central place.

Focus your energy. Remember the objective. My objective is to get people to a website where they sign up for free stuff, so they join your list. That’s pretty stereotype, solid, nothing ground breaking or space age about it. Get people to a website, get their name and email. On a YouTube video on my channel, we create a channel, we have a customer catcher channel. On that one we put our videos, and at the same time, we always tell people, if you’d like to see more videos, if you want twenty free videos, go to customercatcher.com and let us know where to send them and we’ll make sure you get them. There they are.

Ezine articles – here’s an article on Top Ten Ways to get New Customers Without Spending Money. In the byline it says, this article is by Martin Wales, the Customer Catcher. If you want more free tips and tricks in marketing without spending money, go to customercatcher.com. Really you don’t want to have ten websites, you want to have one place that you’re always driving them to. So have that master mothership domain name.

When I first started, we had customercatcher.com/free. In the domain name we applied or used the keywords. I probably could have done a better job, but I was more for short than I was for keywords. My recommendation to a client would be, it’s customercatcher.com/freemarketingtips. You want the keywords in the domain name.

The system behind that is, I use auto responders and email market. So the name cap I use my private label of the one shopping cart system is thehancerybusiness.com to capture the name and email and then I send them the auto responder with a link to the video in it. Generally the plan is I help my clients more than myself. Then you put a link in the bottom of the video page. So you give them the free one or two minute video tip but on the bottom of the page is either an affiliate link or a link to a sales page on your own site.

That’s really the one core system that I use. Outside of that I use, if I’m selling a membership product, I’ve used aMember. I’m looking at new WordPress membership software right now. Really as far as the core marketing point is, it’s just driving people to a web page even if I use a classified ad in a newspaper, which I highly recommend. I actually Twittered about this today. My Twitter is martinwales as well. Classified ad is very affordable, brief, it has impact because you can test it and track it and you drive people to a web page.

If you buy a full page ad offline, it costs you $5,000-$40,000 in a well known magazine. If you buy a classified ad it can be as little as $10-$25. In a good magazine it might be as high as $125. But do you want to invest $125 in a business or $40,000? You drive them to a ‘full page’. An infinite page, of four colour, audio with video, headlines, name capture, the whole deal, and there is no risk. A sales person will not call, they’re going to a web page. So they can go to a web page, sign up for something free and off they go.

In the business section I would put: Want More Customers? Or Free Marketing Tips-get more customers. Check out the free twenty videos at the website. The system behind it is free, driving them to a page with a name capture and then using an auto responder to drip market them.

David Jenyns: From a promotional point of view, we talked about quite a few different tactics there. Maybe talk in terms of if you’re consulting with a client. Where is it that you actually start with those? Do you have a process where you go step one, we leverage off whatever we’ve got. We send any links off our own network to sites that we can do. Step two, we do some form of video marketing. How do you map out and create a system or a flow of how you’re going to promote something?

Martin Wales Great question. It’s customized each time, but essentially the general steps are, yes, take a look at existing resources. If they’ve already got a website or if they’re a franchise, for example, then there are other franchise sites. They have links off the mother ship so to speak. However, let’s just take a small independent business. They’ve had a website up online. They probably have little to no search engine ranking.

One of the most beautiful things is local search. It’s so huge. If you’re a barber shop, write barber and the city name. If you own barberauckland.com, then you’re laughing. So do it however you want to do it, so that’s an advantage. We take a look at their existing site. We look at the mistakes they make on their website. Big mistakes on the website are generally, one, the banner is too big. Number two is the banner is not named, it’s just 1-2-3. jpeg, it’s not barber.sydney.com. They don’t have the keywords in the alt tags or whatever it is for that.

But their main thing, and this is important on YouTube and when you do internet radio, search engines are based on text. Write that down. So many people get excited about video and audio, make it and put it up but there’s no text to go with it. They don’t use their keywords well in their description of the video or the audio.

When we do an interview on Customer Catcher radio let’s say, we make sure we write an abstract that’s a two to four sentence paragraph that has the keywords for the interview but also hopefully keywords related to what we do, which is get more customers. So, ‘today we talk to Alan Parsons about how to get more customers using color graphics. Then next week we’re going to talk about Suzy Q about how to get more customers using audio files.’ Each time that you post it you get the keywords in there and it’s text.

So even though the audio is great and it’s a twenty minute interview or even an hour long interview, search engines cannot read that. So many times I see people put content on their site that’s just not findable, it’s not searchable because it doesn’t have a text that linked to it.

A big mistake here is that people put pictures on their website. Say you’re at a conference, David, and you meet some famous person like Zig Ziglar. You want to put a caption underneath the picture, ‘David meets Zig Ziglar and talks about how to get more customers’ in the caption. Even when people do a Google search on images, they’ll find you.

David Jenyns: The first two steps being obviously leveraging off what resources you’ve already got. Then you want to look at your own site, do whatever on page optimization you can which would be both SEO and also from a conversion point of view when you’re talking about the banners and things like that. Once they’re leveraged off what they’ve got, they’re cleaned up so that when the user hits that site they really do start driving some traffic. You’re getting some benefit which takes advantage of what you were talking about, what is the focus of what we’re trying to do here? Why have you got this page up? We’re not just building a site for building a site’s sake. We want it to generate leads or we want to go straight to the sale, whatever the case may be.

Once we’ve done that from a promotional point of view, where do you move from there?

Martin Wales Really from a promotional point of view, when you create a website, just like any other marketing event in the past, it’s an event. So you launch a website. So that is in effect an excuse to talk to people. It’s an excuse to talk to partners, joint venture partners. The number one way to get people to your site is joint venture communication. Whether it is an email blast, whether it’s a joint venture tele seminar, whether it’s in a newsletter, whether it’s articles, really it comes down to a bunch of questions.

The first question I ask in this evaluation is, what can we do for free? It doesn’t really cost you anything to call somebody you know who has a list of two million people and say, we’re launching a new site and we’re giving everyone a free Taco if they go there. That you can essentially do for free. Generally we want to do something that doesn’t cost us any money.

I work with a site called free-ebooks.net. They give away free e books. They have thousands of e books to give away. You can go to that site and upload an e book for $20. That site gets twelve million hits a month. It gets 360,000 unique visitors. It gets 1200 – 1500 subscribers a day. Find a high traffic site and then put your free stuff there. You know the big stadiums where they play football and soccer and whatever else?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Martin Wales Ostrich races? The concept here is, I call it the hot dog theory of marketing. It cost $350,000,000 to build the stadium. It cost $150,000,000 to buy the football team. It cost $70,000,000 a year to market the team. It cost $2,000,000 to market this weekend’s game. You know who I want to be? I want to be the hot dog vendor who makes $1200 a day selling a $2 item that the customer does most of the work for and builds and customizes it for themselves and it’s low risk, low inventory.

When it’s all said and done, I attach my cart to my van and drive away. The hot dog theory of marketing is put your low, cost free stuff in the path of marketing that others have spent millions of dollars on. Is that a clear enough analogy?

David Jenyns: Yes, I think getting in that slipstream of what someone else is doing is good. One thing we do along those same lines is if you look at, depending on what products you’re promoting, who’s about to launch a book, who’s about to launch a product, what are you seeing on the news and then you’re going for it. People are eating up this offline media and where do they go to find out more? They go online and they search for those keywords.

A lot of times these new breaking trends people aren’t necessarily optimizing for. So you can leverage off all these big boys that are out there marketing it and be there when the user is searching for it and then hopefully your solution can solve that or you point them onto a way to hopefully solve their problem.

Martin Wales That is an excellent point. What you really need to do is recognize when you’re looking at keyword searches for example. So Michael Jackson’s death got a lot of coverage and so on. Because I teach internet radio and I teach to create content that lasts a long time, I put it in my Twitter Radio Money Coach (that’s my Twitter for the radio stuff we do.) It said ‘Michael Jackson is immortal, because he created quality content that’s going to outlive him.’ You need to create quality content for your radio show.

On average, when I post a Twitter, I’ll get two to three people follow me. When I did the Michael Jackson one or I do one that’s around keywords, not necessarily directly related to industry so the music pop industry isn’t necessarily directed to the internet marketing talk radio podcasting industry. But by linking them with a current event, you get the people who are looking for that anyway, finding you.

So I may want to buy a photocopier, but my family all eats pizza. If I come across free pizza coupons sponsored by Canon or Xerox or Ricoh, you can still get customers. That’s what I call seed marketing. It’s not like the home run, but if you consistently, everyday, do something it has results. If you go to Twitter, right now the trending topics are she looks good but he looks good but flash forward Kanye West. If I was attracting customers, I would say something like I would never hire someone like Kanye West to be a spokesman for my company. This is a risk.

Some people say, get a spokesperson. If you don’t feel comfortable on TV or video online, get a spokesperson. What are the risks of a spokesperson? He may be an idiot and get up on the stage at the Emmys and interrupt somebody’s acceptance speech. He may be accused of a crime. So you tie in your tips to the current event keyword and that will drive traffic to your site.

David Jenyns: That is the same thing with PR. PR 101, when you’re coming out with a press release, you tie it something that is already newsworthy and that is the way you get attention to your press releases. As I’m seeing it now, the first thing is, see what resources we’ve got, we make sure we optimize on page and clean up what we can. Then we look through our own networks for JVs and looking for what’s easy and also leveraging off other sites that are in line and maybe complementary for what we are doing.

I’m imagining when you’re working for a client, the first thing you’re doing is going through all this brainstorming and mapping out a strategy and writing down, here is what we’re going to do next. What is it after we’ve gone through this easy low hanging fruit stuff, what is the next step?

Martin Wales Actually there is some more easy low hanging fruit. Would you like to know what it is?

David Jenyns: Ok.

Martin Wales It’s hidden resources. Very often you sit down with someone and they say, we’ve been buying this type of advertising, we’ve been doing a newsletter to our clients, whatever their general list of things is. Most of the time the biggest mistake people make is, they rely on only one or two channels of marketing. So they’ve been doing direct mail for a long time and they haven’t really leveraged the internet. Or they are on the internet but they’ve never done a postcard marketing campaign.

There are things called hidden resources and that is where I will ask them, who their relatives are or who are the people they know? Where have they spoken before? They’ve spoken somewhere at a trade show last year but they didn’t videotape it. They didn’t even audio record it. The next thing in the hidden resources is their customers. Very often they don’t use testimonials effectively, they don’t have a capture method for testimonials.

The next thing we do is, look at the hidden resources where they already have processes in place. Say they install curtains in people’s homes. They do house calls and they measure the windows and they install curtains. But they don’t take a flip cam with them or train their installation people to have the person stand in front of the newly installed curtains and say, I just had Bob’s Curtains in my house and they took off their shoes at the door, they cleaned up all the wood and plaster shavings before they left. Not only that, I have a beautiful set of curtains and it was a great price.

You capture the testimonial in the moment. They’ve already got somebody on site, they’ve got a happy customer, and maybe they send around somebody after who does an inspection but that person at the inspection doesn’t ask one more question. Would you mind calling this special 1800 number and leaving a testimonial or better yet just have something in their hand, a voice recorder and record a testimonial. Give them $20 off to show your gratitude.

So that is just adding one more step to existing processes.

David Jenyns: When you talked about some of these different stages, you had the existing resources, you’ve got reviewing their sites, also the possibility of JVs and also some of those hidden resources. I know there is a little bit of overlap there with a few of those different areas, like the existing resources and also your hidden resources as well. When you’re working with a client are you looking to get one or two of these tactics per category and implementing it? What I’m trying to figure out is, how do you actually start with a person?

At the moment we’re just listing a whole lot of tactics and the first few stages were really clear to me and I’m just wondering how you evolve from there?

Martin Wales Essentially it brings us full circle back to the objective. First we set the objective. We want to get twenty more leads a month for a company, let’s say. That is their objective. Next is the strategy. The strategy is the high level big picture. We want to get twenty leads but we want to do it with pre qualified people who already have money in their pocket, have a preconceived notion of their pain and respect value. The strategy is to target those prospects. The tactics are then the things, well what do those people read? So I’m going to go in this newspaper, I’m going to go in that magazine, I’m going to get quoted in that magazine, I’m going to go on this website. So that’s tactical.

I know you’re drawing the road map sort of thing.

David Jenyns: This is good. We mapped out the way you work through it, so when you get to the tactics point of view and you know obviously what your objectives are, obviously you’re going for the lowest hanging fruit first because you’re looking at hidden resources and existing resources on where to tackle first. Once you start working on those, do you just pick out one or two things or are you firing as many arrows as you can?

Martin Wales Yes. In the military, when the United States invades whatever country they want to take over, they throw everything at it. They bomb it from up high, they shoot cruise missiles from the water, they do everything that they can to just obliterate the place before one human even sets foot on the place. It’s safer, it drives the industry for them to build more bombs to make more money for the Vice President. Not to get too political. It’s the maximum use of available resources.

Yes, but you do need to prioritize. Here’s the key. Where most people fail is, once they start implementing tactics, what they lack is leverage. The leverage comes from something that you’ve already mentioned, automated systems. If I can set it up and then go away, it’s good. I’m stuck on military analogies. If I set up a trip wire over here, I can go away and leave that and if someone comes along when I’m not there, wham!

If I can set up satellite websites, landing pages where people can come in, that’s the idea. You have core keywords and you have secondary and tertiary keywords where people are looking. I might own a retail store but someone’s going to type in brown shoes and someone’s going to type in kids’ clothing but I still want to drive them to my main retail site.

But on the internet I want to type in brown shoes and I want to land on a page that says brown shoes. That’s what I call the 7-11 strategy. 7-11 is a big chain of corner stores usually with gas stations that sells bread and milk and convenience goods but they charge you double. But it’s a real estate play. Do you want to be the great big department store, the old imperial Darth Vader store built in a great big mall? You’ve got four floors and escalators and try to drive everyone to that place and hope they find what they’re looking for amongst all your stuff.

That’s how a lot of people build their websites. They only have one, what I call, store front, versus having these satellite sites where people can come in through different doors. That’s leverage; it doesn’t cost me any more versus 7-11. Every two blocks it costs them more in real estate. Online it doesn’t cost us more to have more landing pages. A big mistake people make, is just having one core site without having satellite sites or landing page sites or back doors or whatever you want to call them. Really it’s about taking leverage between the tactics.

Let’s say you get invited to go speak somewhere David. Do you pre market it? Do you tell your list you’re going to be there speaking? Do you have the people who invited you, do you help the people with their marketing? Do you give them the copy to put in their newsletter and on the website, rather than letting them write about you? When I’m invited to speak somewhere, I want to fill the room. I don’t want to leave it to chance they might fill the room. Do you at least audio record it? Do you video record it?

Even if you’re going to take an excerpt from it but you don’t plan to make a product. But I can take out at least thirty seconds where I was brilliant for a minute even by accident. You want to take that. Now I can put that on my website. Now I can put that on YouTube. This is where most businesses don’t suck every drop of juice out of every opportunity.

Then I do a press release that says I’m going to be there. I call everyone in town that I know and say, do you want to do an interview live and in person because I’m going to be in your city? Then once I’m done, I put out a press release that says, I was in that city. You send a list to your list saying, if you’d like an excerpt or an audio or a transcript of the talk I gave in Sydney, then send me an email.

David Jenyns: That sort of stuff sounds hard, even though we talk about leverage there, that sounds hard for an outsourcing point of view. That is you in there, getting your hands into it. Is that where a big part of your time is? Certain things can’t be outsourced.

Martin Wales You can get a virtual assistant to do that for you. That’s sort of a combination of traditional publicity with online stuff. Let’s look at someone on the internet, someone who doesn’t want to go anywhere, someone who doesn’t want to leave the home office, doesn’t really want to do anything.

Let’s say you’re on a tele seminar. A lot of people phone in to tele seminars. They sit there and they wait for it to start and then it starts. People say, introduce yourself. So people say, Hi, this is Bob from Texas, Hi, this is Mary from Queeensland. Do you want to be from Queensland, or do you want to be Hi, this is Martin from customercatcher.com? It’s a verbal driving people to your site.

I know you like doing the search engine stuff. I’m saying while you’re there, this audio is going to be online later if they give the replay. If they provide the transcript, then your website is stated in the transcript. Even when people convert it to a pdf, that link is usually live from the pdf to the transcript.

I’ll show up to educational events and ask a question. Everyone stands at the mike and says, Hi, this is David from Australia. No, you’re David from theSEOmethod.com. So you’re from your website. That’s just a small example of just taking a different thinking pattern and getting leverage out of a tactic. I have the automated systems in place for the people to sign up to get their free videos and so on all from that same domain name.

I want to get back to your outsourcing question. Most people when they have outsourcers, train them every time when they get a new outsourcer versus recording it with Camtasia, saying this is how I build my websites, this is how I think, giving people an idea of your personality when you outsource to site designers for example, or educating people about the system that you use. Here’s how to get into my shopping cart, here’s how to do email marketing, here’s the type of template we use. Educate them about your systems with a system.

That’s how McDonald’s basically made its millions of dollars. They documented everything better than anybody else.

David Jenyns: That is a big thing we talk about in the SEO method. With the stages you go through, having that documentation down and that’s really where we get that key leverage is because you can just plug someone else into it and even if that person drops off the perch for whatever reason, you’ve got that system recorded. It’s very easy to plug someone straight back in.

I see a tremendous amount of leverage there. The areas I’m trying to find out more about are things like, we were talking about getting links from Microsoft or Entrepreneur or something like that. They are high leverage because you’re leveraging off the business they have already built. To line something like that up, is still very much, you need to do it.

Martin Wales Here’s an example you don’t need to do. If you can get someone who can write a basic article for you, or a basic blog post, do you think they could write a letter to the editor? If they comment on a new product, write a letter to the editor, they post on the forum, or the blog provided by that site. It doesn’t have to be you. If they have some generic knowledge of your industry, anybody can take some of your industry documents or transcripts from your tele seminar, a piece of your article and then Google and find sites that have forums or blogs and then post to them.

Posting to blogs you can outsource fairly readily. There are certainly spam ones where I get, ‘gee, this is a great blog. I hope you keep posting from coylids.com.’ It’s not that difficult to make a real comment on comments that are already posted. John Reese, from nowincome.com is famous for his Traffic Secrets. If you’re on his mailing list, he sends out a link to his blog and says, hey what do you think of my new pet squirrel Rocky? You write in and say, hey, I’ve never heard of anyone who actually had a pet squirrel anymore, so good luck to you and Rocky. MartinWales customercatcher.com.

You can have someone outsource that with your signature file for helping you to get customers: twenty three videos at customercatcher.com/free. It’s my signature file but I said, hey, good luck with Rocky the squirrel. You can outsource that.

David Jenyns: The things that you personally outsource for your business. So let’s say when you’re working with a client, what sort of processes do you have in place for your system? There are lots of things that you can outsource. It’s not possible with twenty-four hours in a day to do every tactic under the sun, so when you go through that process, what things are you doing? Certain things you’re going to need to do. You’re going to sit down with a client, you’re going to need to talk objectives, strategy and map out the tactics. Then when it comes to the time of implementation, we talked about some of those tactics.

Obviously to try and do all these things in one go all at the same time is going to be quite heavy going unless you have some heavy duty systems in place. Which ones do you implement?

Martin Wales Do I personally implement or how do I?

David Jenyns: Yes, personally implement or even when you’re working with a client. How do you go from, here’s what needs to be done, to getting it down without you necessarily really being in there in the real world. Yes, we can go ahead and do blog comments. Is that something you actually do when consulting for a client?

Martin Wales Whenever someone asks you, as a customer, can you do this, the answer is always yes, how much money do you have? It depends. On a higher level, if the person has a website but they have no free offer or free report, I’ll often interview them. I had a health care company who taught doctors how to not cut off the wrong leg, using an air safety checklist.

David Jenyns: That’s important.

Martin Wales Oh yes. Something like 90,000 people a year are killed in the United States in hospitals by medical mistakes every year. That’s like a 747 Jumbo crashing every day. If a Jumbo crashed every day, the place would be in an uproar but because it’s someone’s Grandma in a little hospital and they get a shot with ten times the dose that they need and they get killed, it’s not news. But 90,000 people a year get killed by medical errors.

One, I train them on how to say that. They would go round saying, well, 90,000 people get killed in the United States every year, and everyone says, well there are 500 million people, that’s acceptable odds. Contrast that with putting an image to it, a Jumbo jet crashing every day. Oh gracious, the horror! because we’ve ridden on planes.

On a higher level, I’ll work with them on the strategy. I’ll create an audio where I interview them. Hi! Welcome to Healthcare Matters. Today’s show is focused on the mortality rate in hospitals across the United States. This is totally unnecessary. With us is a special guest and expert Bert Steveharden who is the owner of the company and knows all this stuff. I interview them. Now they have a free audio to give away on their site.

That kind of thing I will be personally hands on because it’s fairly strategic, it’s something that’s creating media, so I’ll be on the video or on the audio with them.

However, once we’ve made the number of audios, and you can make twenty to forty videos in half a day, easy, no script, no nothing. They already know the information, they just need to be cued. So I’ll help them with that.

Then for anything else, the systems, like the video placements, the YouTube and all that, I’ll have subcontractors that I outsource to. Their role is really just to put in the keywords, the meta tags and get it distributed and they’ll use a tool like Traffic Geyser from my friend Mike Koenigs. I find a tool. I usually have two or three that we’ve tried. There are quite a few things that go bust. We’ll go through suppliers until we find the right ones.

Everyone who is doing this outsourcer thing doesn’t want to hear that sometimes it doesn’t work. Eventually what happens is, the cream of the crop rises to the top. Over time you eventually find one to three suppliers in the area that you want that you keep under your wing and those are the people you subcontract to if you’re offering services.

So I’ve got a great web designer. He can have a blog up in twenty-four to forty-eight hours for my radio show clients. He just turns it around. He knows how I work, he knows the system I teach to people. They need a PodPress blog, they need a banner, they need a footer, they need a two or three column blog and here’s what goes on it. There’s a pattern to it. Once you’ve got a relationship, we just give him the pattern and there are just things you can’t work around, like experience.

I’ve worked out several projects. I say, remember what we did with that guy in New York, do that again, only this time make it red. So any time you know you’re going to duplicate something for someone, use your own experience as a template. That is the best thing I can say there. There is no easy answer. There is no God coming down from heaven with a golden finger touching people’s websites.

David Jenyns: I think you gave as good and as close as you can get, which is that idea of building the virtual team. You’ve got a web guy, you’ve got someone who helps with your off site promotion stuff as well. You’ve got a few key players who’ve been skilled up in particular tactics and some of those tactics were the ones we talked about. It sounds like you’ve obviously got a video guy, someone doing some sort of article or writing related stuff and then after you’ve mapped out that strategy, you just talk to your team and say things that need to be done.

Things that you need to be involved in are things where it’s really at the top end working with the client generating the content. Then it is going to be distributed out through the different media, be it taking the videos that you do and getting transcripts done and positing them out as videos or posting the videos themselves. I’m assuming you’re involved as well in the make over of the site. That sort of stuff is hard to outsource.

From there you’ve identified what your objectives are. You pick off what those low hanging fruit, easiest hidden resources are and go for those methods? Is that pretty much on the money?

Martin Wales That is pretty much on the money. I can go now. Bye! That’s a great summary. We get so busy and running around, but you get me in a creative mode here. I come back to mind maps. I often use mind maps because it is popcorn thinking. But really, I’ll stress again, it comes back to the objective. We get so caught up in the process. Which software do we want to use? It’s not even serving your objective, it’s creating more work and you’re spinning your wheels.

David Jenyns: To shift gears, because we talked about how do you go about implementing some of this online and off line publicity to drive traffic to the sites. We talked about some of the mistakes people make, new people make. One of them is that they don’t use leverage. Are there any other really big mistakes people make? If there are one or two little golden nuggets you could drop in someone’s lap, where do you see a lot of people going wrong online?

Martin Wales There are still some very internet marketing 101 things going on, like there is no offer, no call to action on the site mainly around an opt in box, whether you use a squeeze page or an opt in box. The biggest mistake is it’s below the fall. The other biggest mistake I continue to see is in the copy and that is that the information is more about the company than about the benefits that the visitor will get from buying the service or the product that you recommending or talking about or sell.

Other than that, the big one that I mentioned in the new media is not having text to go with non text media. So search engines cannot find you if you’re using a lot of audio and a lot of video. I’ve seen a lot of video blogs with a lot of great information but there’s no good headline or summary of that information, it’s just, hey, check out my latest video post. People aren’t sitting down searching, ‘hey, video post.’

Number one I still see is the keywords people choose are still the solution and not the pain. So if you’ve created this new invention and you expect people to be searching for it, that won’t work. The most basic example is, people type in headache or migraine, they don’t type in paracetamol. I continue to see that on keyword selection.

David Jenyns: Keyword selection is one of the most important things and one of the first places, at least when you get to the point of building your website that you need to focus on. It’s important to figure out the point at which your clients, the cycle they have, the point at which they’re about to be in the buying part of that cycle. How do you get in front of them and then find those keywords?

We talked about researching long tail keywords. Let’s say they’re going after a particular camera or something like that and you go for the specific model number because that is a buying person. Similarly, if someone has a problem with a headache, what is it that they’re typing into the search engine at the time of them having a headache?

Martin Wales Right. How do I turn down this computer monitor’s brightness?

David Jenyns: The other thing I’d be interested to find out as well is you’ve definitely had a lot of years experience. Looking back now, it is that age old question, if I’d known what I know now… where do you see some of the key points in your development online, where you identify, when I did that, I saw a huge impact? One or two points that you can look back on now and say, that was a key thing for me to do.

Martin Wales I would say that the best online deals are made offline, is the biggest thing that I learned. The internet and websites is the delivery tool, but the people that I met at live events and networking enabled me to make the most money in my business and my career.

So you shake hands and see eye to eye offline and then you implement the online automated system together online. I would meet someone three to five times around the world. I spoke at the X10 seminar on the Gold Coast in Australia several years ago. Someone I’d met there I met in Los Angeles and just by being there you had credibility. Even if you weren’t a speaker on stage, which I was, you were dedicated to educating yourself in the industry. There were subconscious things like you could afford to be there.

Just by meeting that person, having a meal with them and so on and there are people I’ve met offline three to five times at different seminars. The first time I met them they were like, who are you? Stay away from me, security! By the time you’ve met them the fifth time, they’re saying, wow! You should hire this guy. He’s great at marketing. That’s led to a $500,000 contract over six or seven years with one client. It’s lead to that single JV tele seminar where we did a mailing and did $167,000 in sales off a seventy-five minute tele seminar.

All those ‘immediate riches’ that people make on the internet are made by traditional business practices: shaking hands, trusting each other, building relationships and saying, ok, hey, let’s do it. Then you pull the trigger, and all of a sudden manna falls from heaven.

David Jenyns: Yes, that age old thing of an overnight success usually takes ten years. I usually like to finish up most of the interviews by asking something about mentors.I know you mentioned Mike Koenigs over at Traffic Geyser, and he has a great service over there and is one of the people that you respect. But are there any other people in the internet marketing niche that you keep an eye on, that you like to watch what they’re up to?

Martin Wales I’m on too many people’s lists. There is the rat pack where I look at Talman Knudsen, Mike Fulsame, Frank Kern from a personality point of view. I think Yanik Silver is the steady work horse. He’s got great copy. I just try to look for trends amongst them. There’s no real one, hey, there is the superstar. I sort of pick and choose from what they see and make it my own, making it congruent with who I am and my character and what I do.

Frank Kern’s done a great thing of just creating character. There’s Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy’s not an internet marketing guru, but he’s allowed other people around him like Doug Glazer, with Yanik Silver’s help, to turn his analogue business into a digital business with membership sites. I like just watching people transition over time.

Definitely using the trend of using email to drive traffic to html sites or websites, whatever they’re coded in, it doesn’t matter. But using email to drive people to websites is the most important thing. Whether it’s through Twitter, or other social networks, Facebook, whatever it is linked in is actually pretty strong. Most people ignore that from the professional business point of view.

So really I just watch for the trends. I look at the subject lines in emails and just try and keep a pulse on it rather than say that’s the absolute best thing and I’m doing exactly that.

David Jenyns: I think you’re definitely someone people will want to keep an eye on, so if people want to find out more about you, Martin, where are some good places to look? You mentioned Twitter and maybe a primary website.

Martin Wales The primary website I mentioned, if people want some freebies they can go to customercatcher.com. There’s a video series there. If you’re interested in internet radio and podcasting and how to make money from it, then go to radiotalkshows.com. That’s pretty well it. I came to chat with you and spend some time with you. It’s been fun, stirring my brain into the evening here. I appreciate your energy and enthusiasm, and most of all having me here and letting me share with your friends.

David Jenyns: Perfect. Thanks again Martin and we’ll talk soon.

Martin Wales Alright, take care now.

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