Michael: Hi, it's Michael Sennhoff with Michael Sennhoff's Hard Defined Seminars.com. The title of this interview is called, The Best Business Risks to Take on the Internet. It's an interview with legendary marketing expert, Joe Vitale. Twenty years ago, when websites and connections were first formatting, Joe Vitale didn't think anyone would ever be able to make a dime off the Internet. In fact, he wrote an article about it and had it distributed online. The response was incredible and many people wanted to hire him. He quickly realized how wrong he was. That very article was making him money off the Internet. He also realized that e-products were one of the best things to happen to business. With no shipping or printing costs, no warehousing or overhead, the margins were incredible and the possibilities endless. So in this interview, you'll hear how easy and cheap it is to take risks on the Internet, especially if you have a little guidance. Joe Vitale is the perfect guide. You'll also hear a simple five-minute exercise that will help you discover the niche that's right for you. You'll learn how to turn your expertise into a quick special report to kick your Internet action off. You'll learn, two, can't miss ways for making yourself stand out on the Internet. You'll learn exactly where to go to send out press releases for free. You'll learn inside secrets of how to form joint ventures and exactly how profits are usually split up. You'll learn how to get a small but extremely profitable sliver of a completely saturated market and make money even if you're just one in a million. You'll learn why the jury is no longer out on how effective affiliate marketing can be and Joe takes it all on. No matter how bad your situation is right now, you know it's temporary. Joe says his overnight success took him 23 years to accomplish. But with the Internet and a little know-how, you should be able to condense that time to a fraction. Joe says it's possible to do it in as little as a month if you're really motivated. In this audio could be the perfect motivator. Now let's get going.

Raven: Hi, this is Raven Blair Davis and I've teamed up with Michael Sinov's hard to find seminars.com.

Joe: People said it's inspiring to hear that at one point in my life I was actually homeless. When I was in Dallas in the late 70s, I was really struggling. I was homeless. People will say what kind of car did you live in? And I'll think car? Gosh, it would have been so much nicer to have had a car. I didn't have anything. And when I migrated to Houston, I was in virtual poverty for many years. As I was struggling, I wanted to be an author. I was working on myself. I was writing things, writing plays, writing books, writing articles, trying to make a living at it. And it was not easy. My overnight success, if you call it that, probably took me 23 years to achieve. I had to learn a lot about myself, about what I was capable about, how to make money. I had to work on my self-image. I had to work on my beliefs. I had to work on my level of deservingness within myself. What I do today is teach people how to collapse that time so you don't have to take 30 years to get out there and make your own life and make your own living doing what you love. Maybe do it in 30 days. It does not take a long time. What people really need is some guidance. They need the information. They need a little bit of belief in themselves. They need a coach or somebody to urge them on. But the reality is I don't care where people are listening in their world right now. I don't care what kind of job they have or what kind of job they may not have. But that's only temporary. That's where you are in this moment. Just like I was homeless at one point. I was in poverty for the longest time. I turned it around. Now I have bestselling books. I'm in five or six different movies. I do television appearances. I've got a car collection. I've got a guitar collection. I live a luxurious lifestyle. This is a guy who lived from the west. [unintelligible]

Raven: [unintelligible]

Joe: [unintelligible] thing that is coming from your intuition that tells you what to do next. But before you can have a plan, before you can follow your intuition, before you can take inspired action, you've got to be coming from your passion. If there is any one secret to my success, any one secret that I hear from very successful people, it's that they do what they love. They do their passion. Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss. I say follow your enthusiasm. Follow the thing that really excites you. Just by transferring it over from a pastime or a hobby or doing it out there on the streets and do it on the internet. That's where the gold is. There's gold in cyberspace. I tell people to watch Donnie Deutsch on TV at night. He's on, I think, five days a week and I've been on his show once. One of his things that always shows up, he has said there's never, ever been a successful person on his show who didn't get their riches from following their passion. That's a no-brainer. You don't want to work for your living. You want to go and play for your living. And if you play for your living, it comes from your passion.

Raven: What exactly is internet marketing?

Joe: It's doing business online. Probably all of your listeners have been educated enough and experienced enough. They've got a computer. They've been looking around online. They know what the internet is. They get emails from other people. Maybe they're even on my mailing list. Maybe they're on your mailing list. So when they get an email from you or they get an email from me, we are marketing to them. We're sending an email message to them, which is like a sales communication. We're informing them of something. Maybe we're asking them to buy something. But that's marketing and it's taking place on the internet. That's the tiniest example. I mean, you can go and look at a giant presence on the internet with Amazon or eBay or Yahoo or Microsoft, any of those. You know, they started as nothing, too. Even Amazon, everybody thought it was a joke to try to sell books online. Well, look what Amazon has been doing now. Go from the big level of it and go to a smaller level of it and find that there are individuals that are selling cookbooks online. And those cookbooks are nothing more than e-books. An e-book isn't a printed book. It's like a text file. It's like a PDF file. People buy it online. They read it online. There is a tremendous amount of money being made from people that are buying and selling e-books. That alone is internet marketing. There's so many aspects of this. I can go in all directions and talk for hours. The possibilities are endless. I began as an internet skeptic. You know, I was living in Houston at the time and I was writing a monthly marketing article called Marketing Matters. I was writing it for DBA magazine, which I don't think is around anymore, but it was pretty popular in that time period of the mid-80s, early-90s when people started talking about the internet and everybody was confused about it. But they thought, you know, there's rumors that there was gold in cyberspace and these streets were paved with gold up in the invisible airways of the internet. When I was writing this column, NASA down in Galveston invited me to come down for a tour of the internet. So I went down there and they showed me a big computer sitting in a room and on it was a picture of the globe. And they said, we can tell the weather anyplace on the planet because we're looking at the planet on the internet by satellite. And I laughed out loud because I thought, you can't make any money knowing what the weather is over the internet. This is silly. And I wrote a column really blowing the whistle on the internet and saying, you can't make money on the internet, this, that, and the other. So I was an internet skeptic. That same column was distributed on the internet. People started writing to me saying, I like the way you think. What are you charged to write a sales letter or do a promotion or an advertisement or write a booklet or whatever? These people were coming to me by email. They were reading my article online and then coming to me and I suddenly realized I'm making money on the internet. The rules were a little different. You build relationships first on the internet and then you can profit from them. That was my first taste of internet marketing being profitable. I later wrote one of the first books on internet marketing called Cyber Writing, which is long out of print because it came out in 93 or 94, something like that. But let me tell you, you know what the turning point was for me with the internet? When I came out with my first ebook, and again an ebook is like an invisible book. It's a book but it's only a text file that people buy online and they download. I had a book called Hypnotic Writing. A friend of mine, he was doing pretty well on the internet by the name of Mark Joyner. He said, let me take a book by you and let me sell it online. I was so skeptical. I said, nobody's going to buy an ebook. I like real books. I want a whole book. I like those printed books. Who's going to buy an ebook? So I told him no for two years. When I finally said yes, take this book called Hypnotic Writing, see if he can sell it, he put it up. He wrote a sales letter for it at HypnoticWriting.com. I went and read it. It was so powerful, I wanted to buy my own book. Well, he announced that thing and we sold 600 copies of that ebook overnight at $30 a pop. I got up in the morning and I had made a tremendous amount of money while I was sleeping. This is the beauty of the internet. There was nothing to ship. There was nothing to print. There were no fulfillment costs, no warehousing costs. People would pay online and they'd get a download link. They'd go and download the book. It was instant gratification. I instantly got their money. They instantly got the book. It's a beautiful feeling. And there are people that are just like your next door neighbor. They're just like you. They're just like me. And they go online with an idea. Let me tell you this really great story. There was a woman who came to me several years ago, this young lady from Austin. She was very desperate. She wasn't making any money. She was living off of her parents' money. She heard that she could make money on the internet, but she didn't know where to begin. So I asked her a few questions. I said, well, what do you like to do? She said, well, I'm into fitness. I like to run. I'm into cooking. I'm into health. I'm into the guitar. And I said, well, tell me about the guitar. She says, well, I taught myself how to play. And I thought, wait a minute. How did you teach yourself how to play? And she went on to say, I taught myself how to play in one weekend. And I said, that is something other people will pay to learn. I encouraged her to write a little e-book on her method. I said, teach people how to play the guitar in one weekend. And then I coached her on how to put up a website. And she put up a website with a major headline saying, you can play your favorite song in one hour. You can learn how to play the guitar in one weekend with my new method. And then I told her how to promote it. She started promoting it. Now this woman who was skeptical, unknown, didn't have a clue what she was doing, got a little bit of coaching from me. She goes online and she's making hundreds to thousands of dollars almost instantly. And here's the punchline on this story. Somebody who bought the book liked it so much that I want to buy the rights to it from you and sell it myself. He offered her $10,000 for the rights to her e-book. Remember, she was broke. She didn't have lunch money. She's now making money on the internet. That's just one example of numerous stories of people just like you and me and your listeners that are going online and they're cleaning up. The beauty of the internet is that it's so easy to take a chance. It's not like you're going to go and build a business and open a store and take out yellow page advertising and print flyers and mail out sales letters. That costs a lot of money to open a brick and mortar retail type store or to do any direct mail business from your home. But if you go online, you can open up a website and start doing business from next to nothing. So that's the beauty of the internet. You can open a business, take a risk, and if that one doesn't work, open another website. I have at this point hundreds of websites. Not all of them are equally valuable. One or two of the websites just keep bringing in the cash even while you and I are talking. I'm making money from some of these websites. If people go to my main website, they'll see it's a portal to all kinds of other websites because I have all my products there, I have audios there, I have books there, I have digital materials there, I have a blog there, I have a video blog there, I have a podcast there, I have a photo section there, articles that are free, how-to information. That's just one example of what a website can look like. But a website can be dedicated to one simple product. Somebody listening might be good at gardening and maybe they've grown the best tomatoes or the best watermelons or the best pumpkin and they can have a special report on how you can do that too and they have a simple website simply designed to sell that one product. This is the magic book. When people talk about living in a time of wonder, of magic and miracles, this is it and it's online because there's no shortage, there's no scarcity. Even if there's competition, if you want to come out with a, I don't know, a Polish cookbook and you look online and there's 5,000 other Polish cookbooks, that doesn't mean you can't sell yours because online there's so many people trying to buy so much stuff. You don't need the entire market to come to your door to make money from that. You just need a small sliver of that market to come to your door.

Raven: Hi, this is Raven Blair Davis reporting for Michael Sinoff's Hard To Find Seminars.com. How do you make yourself stand out?

Joe: Yeah. Like a cut above the rest. Yeah, that's a great question. There's several things to do to make yourself stand out and you definitely want to stand out. One rule of thumb is simply do something different. That's it right there. Do something different. So if everybody else is just putting up a plain website, maybe on your website you can add a little bit of an audio or you can add some more photos or you can add a little video clip. You're doing something different. Keeping in mind, and I don't want to confuse people, but there's search engines out there out there and cataloging all the different websites. And so if you put content on your website, content meaning good information, the websites will be registered by the search engines and you'll go up in status. So if somebody goes to Google and they type in gardening or they type in Polish cookbook or they type in puppet socks for kids, you will be more likely to come up higher in rank so that people will find you. But I also believe in thinking out of the box and sending out news releases. This is one of the things I learned from writing about P.T. Barnum. I did a whole book on the great circus promoter and he was one of America's wealthiest people and he attributed most of it from doing big things but also befriending the media. He would let the press, the newspapers of his time, know what he was doing and they would write about him which would send traffic to his circus. Well the parallel today is you do something on your website, you come up with something unusual, you do something a little different but then you tell the media and you tell the media online. You go to a service like prwebdirect.com and you can send out a news release. You can send out a basic news release for nothing, no charge at all. You can send out some that go to more media, to more newspapers and so forth for maybe a hundred dollars and if the media does a story on you, they are freely sending new people to your website. So this is another thing that you can do that anybody can do to bring more traffic to their site when they are online.

Raven: Let's start with a little bit about joint ventures. What would you share real quickly on that?

Joe: That's a great question. Joint ventures is part of hypnotic marketing and even publicity which I just talked about is part of hypnotic marketing and this is all stuff you can do online. A joint venture is when you find somebody else to do a partnership agreement with. Let me give you a real quick story, a real quick example. [unintelligible]