Gideon Shalwick Interview – Sure-Fire Ways To Start An Online Business & Make Money Online
I sent you guys an email a little while ago, explaining how I had just conducted THE best interview I have ever done for Blogtrepreneur, well this is it!
Another great point to make is that it is as long as it is good – me and Gideon seemed to hit it off right away, with the same views and opinions on many aspects of online marketing and business. Seeing eye-to-eye with Gideon really helped with the flow of this interview and I think the result has turned into an information packed resource for many aspiring internet marketers out there, who hope that one day, they too will be making money online like Gideon.
There’s me thinking that we would be talking mainly about video blogging and web video but it turns out that web video is just one string to Gideon’s bow – he offers advise and tips through a wide range of subjects, and although he uncovers many great tools for web video creation, he also offers some great words of advice about becoming an all-round great entrepreneur.
I know for a fact that you are going to love this interview – Gideon was so easy to listen to, which I think is half of the reason that we talked for so long. Don’t let the length of the audio put you off, and instead sit back, take notes and get ready for an interview jam-packed with tools, tips and generally useful information.
Check out Gideon at the following links:
– Gideon Shalwick’s Blog
– Rapid Video Blogging
– Gideon & Yaro’s Become A Blogger
As always, please leave your comments below – let us know what you thought of our latest guest 😉
All the best,
Luke Etheridge
“The Interview Guy” at Blogtrepreneur.com
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Gideon Shalwick Interview (Audio Transcription)
Luke Etheridge: Hi guys. This is Luke Etheridge here from Blogtrepreneur and I’m very pleased to present to you the brand new interview as part of our interview series.
This next guy is one half of a team behind the becomablogger.com, creator of rapid video blogging, eBook, and also has time to run his very own blog. It gives me great pleasure to introduce web video expert Gideon Shalwick. Welcome along, Gideon.
Gideon Shalwick: Hey, Luke, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to the call.
Luke: First of all, I did pronounce your name right there, didn’t I?
Gideon: Yeah, you did well. That’s English version by the way.
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: I made it easy for you.
Luke: What’s the Aussie version?
Gideon: It’s the same in the Aussie version, but there’s a scientific innovation as well which is totally weird, you wouldn’t be able to hear it when I say it, so I’m not even going to bother. [laughs]
Luke: OK. OK. OK. So, Gideon Shalwick, what it’s going to be for today?
Gideon: Yeah.
Luke: Thanks for taking the time to do the interview, buddy.
Gideon: No problem. I’m looking forward to it.
Luke: So I briefly mentioned your background there in the intro. But for those people out there who might have never heard of you, could you please just take the time and tell us a little bit about yourself and about your online business?
Gideon: Sure thing.
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the call. And I’m always pleased to be on calls like this because I really think there’s many people out there who are having troubles with getting started online and making some money.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: It’s not always a straight-forward process. And in fact when I was getting started with it, it was a real struggle. It took me quite some time to figure out how to make money from this thing. Before at the start of turning really well for me. But to take you back a little bit where it got started for me.
I went through the normal process of going through the education system. I went to school. I went to university and then got a job and thinking that get good money, and buy a house, get a mortgage and retire one day. And then die. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah, exactly.
Gideon: You know, that’s kind of the path that most of us are sold to when we’re at school.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: And so, I got conditioned in that way as well.
But along the way, I knew there was something not quite all right with this because number one, I felt that I wasn’t doing something that I was truly passionate about. I didn’t quite enjoy what I was doing.
It was a great job, but the education system speck me out in a way that didn’t allow me to really leverage what I was really good at, and what I was really gifted for. But anyway, I did this job and got a pretty decent salary.
The other thing that bothered me about was the day that I would stop working would be the day that I would stop getting paid as well. And while I was working, I was building up an asset for someone else. I was making someone else rich.
That bothered me, you know, thinking that perhaps I might turn 45 or something and I might want to change jobs or the company might want to get rid of me and what do I do then If the income drops or goes to zero and I don’t own my own business assets?
You know, working for 30 or 40 or how long years you have in your career, that’ll be a really tough blow especially if you have a family, and if you’ve got a mortgage and that sort of thing.
So after five years of working, I told my wife, “Tina, let’s do something different here. Let’s immigrate to Australia.” We lived in New Zealand at that time. “Let’s immigrate to Australia and start a new business.” Basically quit our jobs to start a new business. And she was keen.
And so about a month later, we arrived in Australia. Not knowing what on earth we’re going to do, I had some ideas. I looked at a bunch of opportunities. But the thing that’s stuck was Internet marketing. And the reason it looks so compelling was because the dream got sold to me. It looked easy. It looked fast. And it looked like the best possible job you could ever imagine to do one earth. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: Anyway, I created my first product and it was the eBook and made some pretty good sales initially. I had a really good, jayvee partner, who promoted for me. I got some really good sales written in the first week.
Then, my sales died down. And I made pretty much zero money from that project for about forever. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And that particular part ever since, yeah. And the trouble was that I didn’t know how to get qualified traffic to my website back then. And of course, as you know, being on the Internet, your online business cannot succeed unless you have highly qualified traffic on a regular basis. It’s just as simple as that.
And so I realized I don’t know anything about getting traffic and how to build a proper online business. And I realized that just having an eBook doesn’t cut the mustard. It doesn’t put bread on the table. And so I started interviewing some of the world’s top Internet marketers, people like Michael Sane. Actually the first interview I did was with Marc Thorner, that godfather of Internet Marketing.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So Mark Joyner and Michael Sane. I got Stephen Pierce as well. I got a couple of guys here in Australia. Brett McFall and Tom Hua. They run that the World Internet Summit.
Luke: I went to see that one. Yeah.
Gideon: OK. Cool. So they run some big stuff.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And one of the people I interviewed as well was Yaro Starak, who then later on became my business partner.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: But throughout this, I learned from these guys what it took to become successful online. But you know, I was going to sell those interviews as a membership site. That never took off and to this day, I’ve made zero money from that project.
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: But what it did for me was that I learned everything I need to know today about — well, not everything — but a lot about what I know today about online video marketing, the technical site, but then also the marketing site of online video marketing.
So they’re two different gills of fish, but they got hand in hand. And then we sort of a backdoor opportunity that opened up a bunch more doors for me.
You know the first two years that I was operating online, or the first year at least, I made no money. I actually made a lost. And it was funny because I told my wife just before we left New Zealand that if I can’t replace my salary within one year, then I really don’t deserve to earn that much.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And I was getting $54,000.00 at that time. And in that first year, I made a lost. I made a loss of about $2,000.00. So it was a real big wake up call for me that you can’t just be an employee online. You got to change your mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset. And that is the key thing.
Luke: Having said that, do you think persistence is the key? I mean, you didn’t make money for two years?
Gideon: Absolutely, yes. And I mean I didn’t make money, but I obviously…
Luke: Very small.
Gideon: … I spent a lot of it, too.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And probably spent more than I made. I didn’t make significant money in the first year. I made some, but it was not enough to have a sustainable business.
And it wasn’t really until about two years of really trying to figure out what the hell it is I’m supposed to be doing that I finally came across some systems that work for me and that I just kept on applying.
And you know now, five years down the track, I’m very successful on my business, mainly based around online video and online video marketing. I work from home. My wife doesn’t have to work anymore. She quit her job a couple of years ago.
Luke: OK.
Gideon: And I could work at home, or from anywhere I want basically, but doing something that I really enjoy and feeling that I’m really adding value to the world and that’s a big thing for me, being able to provide value and feeling that I’m giving people value for their money.
Luke: Yeah, it must be and actually fantastic hearing people’s feedback as well from the videos must be just unreal really. It must be really, really satisfying feeling for you.
Gideon: Absolutely, and you know, I think that is one of the driving forces. And you’ve mentioned persistence before and that’s absolutely key. I often think about thinking grow rich from Napoleon Hill. We talked about the secret. What is the secret to becoming wealthy and successful?
And a lot of people think it’s just your thoughts — and obviously it is — but really, I think a really key thing is persistence. It doesn’t matter how amazing your ideas are, but if you don’t implement them through persistence, then nothing is going to happen. But you know, being able to get that feedback from people once you provide them with amazing value is a really, really nice motivating fact that you keep going as well.
Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So initially, you actually went out into Internet marketing just as a broad subject. Internet marketing obviously covers, as you know, as I know, lots and lots of different aspects of Internet marketing. There’s loads of it.
So, you didn’t really know that you’re going to have enter video marketing. When did you realize that it was actually video that you’re going to be good at and that you are going to actually sort of cash in on that and that’s what your business was going to be revolved around?
Gideon: Sure. My first product was based on development product. So, I read a book on how to become successful, ironically [laughs] . And I thought I’d write this book because that’s what I knew about the most in terms of hid knowledge.
You know, I studied the subject to death, but the trouble back then was that I haven’t actually implemented much of what I’d learned. But yeah, I figured, there’s nothing that I know more about than that, so I figured I’d write a book about and so it was about that.
But I used Internet marketing those core principles of Internet marketing to try and promote that book. But it was during those interviews that I did with the world’s top Internet marketers.
I forgot to say that these interviews were all done on video. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And back then — this was four years ago, this is just off the YouTube was just getting started,I think YouTube is by the Euro back then — no one knew how to do online video properly.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And there were no courses out there. There were no guidelines, no gurus, and no one that you could go to ask or learn from. So I had to really pioneer the whole thing and figure it out from scratch myself. And I want to do these interviews differently because everyone else was to think audio interviews and quite often very bad audio quality.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: Well, it takes best to use and I wanted to do something better. I wanted to do a video and that’s how I learned to get online video – just by doing those interviews and seriously, just trying to get them online.
That was a massive challenge for me back then. Of course, today is a totally different story. You know back then, it would take me perhaps ten hours to do a ten-minute long video.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: But now, it takes me half an hour to an hour to do a ten-minute long video today depending on the kind of video, but it’s a lot quicker these days.
Luke: But it’s good. You’re probably like me, in the way that once you’ve cracked it, you know it. So therefore, it’s there. It might take you ages at the beginning, but once you…
Gideon: Yeah.
Luke: … once you actually know it, then you’ve actually cracked it, that’s satisfaction in itself because you then know that you can do it again.
Gideon: Yeah, that’s right. And if you figured at yourself, you’re actually in a really good position to teach it to others as well because you know the core principles. You know the core principles that make something work. And instead of just learning from someone else and using shortcuts, you know the basics behind it and why you need to do certain things. And that can be very, very helpful if you want to be known as an expert in your niche.
Luke: So that rings very, very well with me because I’m a self-taught designer as well, so I’m actually under heavily into yeah, web design, but I did it all purely, purely with trial and error, and I did that for about three years. And you know how tough that can be [laughs]
Gideon: Absolutely, that is hard work. I mean, just tell me, did you do the design for Blogtrepreneur.com?
Luke: Yeah, I did. Yeah.
Gideon: I wanted to make a comment on that because I think that… I really appreciate good design. And this is definitely one of the best ones; if not, the best designs, that I’ve seen.
Luke: Wow. Totally.
Gideon: Hats off, man. Hats off. Yeah, absolutely.
Luke: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that because obviously, I don’t want to talk about myself too much.
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: [laughs] But, yeah. Now, I’ve struggled for sort of three years trying to get my coding and everything all down. Actually, I understand. When something’s ring true to you, when you finally figure out how to do something that you’ve always wanted to do, how do I get that video on there, how do I get a border on that video with some buttons in it, and all that kind of stuff, and when you finally do figure that out, you know you can do it again and again and again.
Gideon: That’s right and you can do it so much quicker as well the second…. once you get it.
Luke: Exactly. Exactly. So thanks for those words. That means hell of a lot to me.
Gideon: I truly mean at that. When I saw it the first time, I went, “Wow! I need to get some tips from this guy and pull out the design.”
Luke: [laughs] Well, I’m always around, Gideon. You know that. [laughs]
Gideon: [laughs] I had a good start.
Luke: So moving on to Become a Blogger. So that’s moving on to your product with Yaro Starak. Could you tell us a little bit about Become a Blogger as a product. What does it have that other tutorials are lacking that kind of thing?
Gideon: Sure. Well, that was a project that we did yeah, it’s probably two and a half years ago now that we did that. I haven’t really touched Become a Blogger for a very long time. It’s got just running itself in the background and we’re actually planning to just close it down briefly until we’re working in an updated version of that as well. Someone else is doing it for us.
Luke: OK.
Gideon: And so, we’re launching a little bit later on the year, but can’t say much. Too much more about that, but that’s kind of more in the pipelines. But originally, Yaro and I got together. I guess Yaro was more the mastermind behind becoming a blogger. I was more of the implementing the vision at that stage.
And we wanted to create something for beginner bloggers because the fact that there were a lot of blogging courses out there, but nothing really showed people step by step how to implement their blogs, how to get it up and running, and how then to monetize it once they’ve got it set up.
And so, we decided to create these really detailed, but simple and easy to follow video specifically for beginners, so that they could go and implement these things themselves. Because we knew that that particular market, that the people in that market, they weren’t interested in getting someone else to do it for them or they didn’t think that they could get someone to implement it for them. And they wanted to do it themselves.
The point was so that you could go through them and do it all yourself. And I think we really struck a cord there with our target market. We got it just right because when we launched that within the first week, we had about 700 members inside the Become a Blogger membership site. And we had about 10,000 email subscribers within a week after launch.
And three months later, we close doors to that program for the first time when we bumped it up to a thousand paying members. So it went really, really well for us. As for me, it was my biggest success at that stage online, but I think we did really well in terms of giving people exactly what they wanted. We trust at the beginner stuff.
Luke: OK. So, really, really going towards the kind of guy that doesn’t think it’s even possible to actually making them do it themselves kind of thing, walking them through it.
Gideon: That’s right. And the way we did it was we created — it was mainly me, in terms of creation side of it, I created — the first ten videos that we made just totally free. So it’s still, to this day, if you’re going to becomeablogger.com, you’ll get ten free videos that shows you step by step how to implement your own blog.
The videos are a little bit outdated and that’s why we’re going through the process of getting new ones. But that was the cornerstone for our launch and for generating traffic and for getting leads.
And then, of course, we also had the roadmap to Become a Blogger, which is about a 65-page report that manly I wrote. And Yaro reviewed it and wrote the introduction or foreword to that. But that document and those ten free videos were really the cornerstone of Become a Blogger.
To this day — as I said, neither me nor Yaro have really touched Become a Blogger for a good year to a year and a half, other than maybe answering a couple of emails every now and then — but to this day, we’re getting between 40 and 50 opt ins for that business; still just from those videos and that free report that we have.
Luke: So it’s very handy.
Gideon: It’s handy, man. It’s about 15,000 opt ins in a year, which is pretty cool. Especially if you’ve got the business optimized, you can make some pretty decent money from that. So it was a really good and fun project with Yaro. But you know, as I said, that was quite some time ago. Now, it’s two and a half years ago that we did that. And yeah, things have moved on since then. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah, it’s good to hear though that you’re going to change it. And it sounds like, you said that somebody else is going to be working on the actual change.
Gideon: That’s right.
Luke: I mean, you’ve hit something that I was going to touch on later anyway, is outsourcing. So in effect, you and Yaro are actually outsourcing this product to somebody else to sort out for you and bring it up to date. Is that correct?
Gideon: Yeah, we’ve asked one of our long time followers if he was interested in redoing the course for us and it’s someone that we’ve known for a number of years. We’ve seen their progress. We know their work ethic. We trust them and we’ve seen their work. And we know that they can create some pretty cool looking videos.
And so, they’re all important factors that we looked at for, getting someone else to do this for us. Because the thing is, neither me nor Yaro, wanted to redo the whole course ourselves because we each have our own projects now that we’ve been working on and we just simply don’t have the time to do that.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And so, this person that’s helping us is really cool, very amazing. So he’s going to do it for us. We’re doing some sort of joint venture with him that he’ll get a share of the profits that are made from that.
Luke: That’s satisfying in itself as well that you’re helping somebody else and that’s kind of outsourcing at its best really, that it’s not outsourcing and it’s more partnership.
Gideon: That’s right. It is more of a partnership and this could be a really nice launch pad for this person to launch their career or to give it a bit of a step up because what’s happened now since Become a Blogger, obviously, that was a really nice boost for my career. But since then, I’ve been able to now start doing my own stuff, separate from them as well, and building my own audience, and building my own list.
So now what we have is we’ve got the Become a Blogger business, which is about 35,000 people in that system there. And then Yaro has his own audio. It teaches about you know, whatever 100,000 people. And then, I’ve got my own audio audience as well.
And so when it comes to promotion, we’ll both be promoting it, of course, becomeablogger itself will be promoting it. And we’ll get both the promotion process from Yaro and the promotion products from me as well to jump it all together to promote this thing.
So we’re expecting this thing to be… well, at least, we’re looking forward to being even more successful in the first launch and especially now we’ve got a bunch more resources to pull from.
Luke: In that respect, do you think that once you’ve had your first success, obviously, Become a Blogger with a great success and now, like you said, it’s got 35,000 people on the end of it.
Once you’ve had that first success, do you think it’s much easier to capitalize on it with your own stuff? So do you think that obviously the likes of you and Yaro have gone off and you’ve capitalized on that 35,000 people and your view status to build your own audience, to your own places?
So basically, once you’ve had successful one project, you’re very likely to multiply that into other successes.
Gideon: Oh, absolutely. Success breathes success. I’m not sure who said that, whether it was Rig Ziggler or Tony Robins or say some something to open, guys.
One of them said that. But it’s true, you know. When you get success, a certain measure of success, not only do you gain confidence to be able to repeat it, but you also get other opportunities opened up to you; other doors open up.
So, other people start noticing what you’re doing and they want to do stuff with you or they want to support what you’re doing. And it creates this nice little snow ball effect to help you in your next project.
It’s a bit like a flywheel that you push. And in the beginning — if you can just imagine a big mass of flywheel — in the beginning, it’s really hard to get this thing to start moving. But as you keep on pushing and pushing in the same direction, eventually, it starts spinning. And you keep on pushing and pushing and pushing and after a while, this thing kind of starts spinning itself.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And that’s where you want to drive into it. I think that’s what’s really meant by success breathing success. With each success, your flywheel starts spinning a little bit better and better and better. And you start gaining this momentum that eventually makes you unstoppable.
Luke: Yeah. I think on the flip side of having a nine-to-five, you become more stable. Yeah. So it’s quite called you now know. You’re safe in the knowledge that as long as you have these followers and these guys, listening to you and buying products that you’re referring them to and all that kind of thing, as long as you have this audience, which aren’t going to run away, unless you do something else, [laughs] you really, really pull, but they’re never going to run away.
So all of a sudden, you’ve got this stability that nine-to-five couldn’t have offered.
Gideon: Exactly, that’s very true. But in that same brief, which you have to say, as well is that, lists get old and they get cold. And even though there might be 35,000 people on the Become a Blogger list, not all of them will open up our emails or click on the links that we send them. And as the list gets older, the list becomes less valuable. And that’s just how it is.
There’s nothing you can do about it because people move on. They change the email addresses or whatever. Over a two or three-year period, the list can grow old. And that’s why it’s really, really important to continually focus or have some kind of a focus on building more traffic and building more leads.
And that’s the lifeblood of your business. Without that, your business will eventually die. And I know there’s a lot of people that preach that. It’s the backend that you got to focus on. But let’s face it, if you don’t have a frontend, then it doesn’t matter how good your backend is. It’s not going to happen.
So you’ve got to do both. You really have to build traffic, build your leads, and also have a really nice backend set up before your business so that you can capitalize on those new people coming through your business.
Luke: So how do you personally build leads? Is there a strategy that you personally employ? Do you build them rapidly and how do you build them rapidly, and how do you do it yourself?
Gideon: Absolutely. There’s a couple of main strategies that I use.
One is obviously, with online video and online video marketing — that’s a long-term strategy that I use. And mostly with that kind of traffic, it’s slower growth, but it’s more sustainable and more definite. OK. And it’s long term, right. So once you get the traffic, it kind of stays there.
The other strategy that I employ is normally worth, it comes to life more with launches or when you have running launches, where you team up with joint venture partners, and you can get a lot of traffic really quickly.
Of course, getting those sort of promotions and joint venture partners is more trickier. It takes time to build up those relationships. But once you have them, you can get that much more stable traffic very quickly once you’ve got your ducks lined up.
So, it doesn’t mean that the two main strategies that I’ve been using from my traffic. So, for a day-to-day basis, the traffic building types of things are using online video and video blogging to build that at that time. But then, maybe two or three times, you might do it a launch where I get that spike and traffic to take the business to a whole new level.
Luke: OK. OK. I do hear all the time — that you’re just touching it there — that it’s obviously videos drive traffic and having videos on your website is really, really valuable. And I hear all the time from a lot of bloggers that once you start putting videos on your blog, the response is unbelievable. What benefits can video really, really bring to a website or blog?
Gideon: Well, I think it’s no secret, Luke, that video is the cool thing on the Internet right now. In Facebook is there, which is huge. But if you just compare some stats here for a minute, for the last time I looked, I think it was just before or after Christmas. Facebook just reached 500 million subscribers. And they’re probably on, I don’t know, six or 700 right now. I’m not sure. I haven’t checked. But at that same time, YouTube was sitting on a billion subscribers.
Almost pretty much twice as big. The other thing with YouTube is that they’re getting — we now say online video marketing or many mean, YouTube. They get most of the traffic. Seriously, it’s almost like why bother with anything else?
But anyway, YouTube is getting about — this is also, the last time I checked — they’re running about two billion views a day on their videos. I mean, it’s just incredible. You can’t even fathom that really to try…
Luke: I mean, I could watch ten in a day easily, all the time.
Gideon: Easily, exactly. You know, it’s the second biggest search engine. That’s also not a secret anymore. But all these things play together to point to us that there’s something huge here and it’s been going on now for the last five years at least. But I don’t think we’re peaking it.
There is this interesting report that I read a while ago. This is probably from a year ago. That suggested that the early majority, which is like pretty much the first 50 percent of the market for the UK and for the USA will be fully on YouTube and using it properly as it should be by the year 2012.
Luke: Wow!
Gideon: So what that means is that for the US and UK, according to that statistic, is that we’re not even halfway through in terms of market penetration. And what that means is, a ton of opportunities are still left.
The other that this is really interesting is that that’s for the UK and USA. What about other countries? What about places like little old Australia? What about countries like China and the whole of Asia? What about Europe? What about the UK? There are all these other countries that are lagging beyond the US and UK with YouTube and with Internet market in general.
So what that suggests, to me at least, is that now is the time to get ready for this opportunity. The opportunity is still here. And it’s still huge and it’s still growing. And it’s not like it’s a declining industry. And who knows where it’s going to grow towards?
To me it’s incredible, so this massive traffic that we had. So, that’s one major thing, obviously. But other than that, obviously with video, what’s really cool about it is that it builds trust.
For example, by the time someone gets in my email list, they likely would have already seen one or two, maybe three of my videos on YouTube or on someone else’s blog or on my blog. So by the time get on my email list, they’ve already seen me. They feel like they kind of know me and they trust me because when you see someone and you see them speaking –
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: … it is more trust that comes out, compared to just the text-based website.
So the outcome of that is that because you have got this great trust with your following, you’ve have great influence with them as well. And what that means is that people are more likely to do what you like them to do. And if it’s political, you can have some sort of influence here. But if it’s business, it pretty much means sales and increase in conversions to sales.
So that’s really the name of the game. So traffic, but then also relationship building and increasing those conversions to get more sale for your business.
Luke: Is there a way to construct your videos so that you point towards sales and how do you actually monetize your videos in itself, because obviously putting up a video just sort of saying hello and introducing an Internet market, for example, and then it really cashing in on it is obviously not the correct way to go. There’s all obviously strategy behind actually monetizing the videos itself.
Gideon: That’s actually right. To be honest, I don’t actually monetize most of my videos on YouTube. And the main reason for that is because I really think that on YouTube or for that matter, anything online. The key thing is to first give before you want to receive.
And with YouTube, the more value that you can provide in terms of education, entertainment, whatever it is that you do, the more things will flow back to you as a result. The more people would want to give you something back.
So when you look at my YouTube videos, in most cases, those videos provide something of high value to my target audience. It’s just not maybe valuable to everyone on YouTube. It’s just valuable to my target audience, which is important.
It’s very challenging to get to the mainstream. But if you’ve got a nice niche, you provide them with a great value, they’re going to keep on coming back. And it’s all about building that relationship and keeping people in your system for as long as possible and providing value.
Now, once you’ve provided that value and you drive people to your side and to your opt in list, then you can start thinking about monetizing. I don’t think there’s too much point in trying to monetize before that point because you’re just going to scare people away.
So once you have people in your system, once you’ve had them inside your funnel, once you’ve built up that relationship with them, the sales pressure is easy as a pie, seriously. The monetization of the process that I’ve pitched is actually super easy. But before that, you’ve got some work to do.
Luke: Call on that, Gideon. Give us some tips on that. Once they’re in your funnel, how do you monetize the guys when they’re in your list, when they’re into your opt in list?
Gideon: OK, super simple. There’s three ways, three main categories that I see.
The first one is pretty much. I created special notes on them. I can’t do it when I remember their names, so inside my report…
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: But the first one is pretty much is forget marketing. If you’ve been able to build up an audience through your valuable and the videos that you’ve been creating, then you can do affiliate promotions really easy.
I’m giving you an example. Just end of last year, because of the list and audience that I’ve been able to build up through providing value, I did a promotion for a product. And over a two-week period, all I did was send four emails. And one of the four emails went to one of my YouTube videos that I created for this promotion.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So all of that probably would have taken me, I don’t know, maybe two hours of work, maybe three hours tops. I sold plus $200,000 worth of products just from that promotion.
Luke: [laughs] Easy money.
Gideon: Yeah, exactly. In terms of return of investment for my time in there, it was huge. I think that is the value of video because my lists are not incredible big, but I can outperform other bigger Internet marketers of people with bigger lists because my conversion rates are so high.
And that’s what’s beautiful about it. So affiliate marketing is easy. If there’s someone on the call who doesn’t know what that means, it’s essentially just promoting other people stuff, and their products and getting a commission for it.
And what’s beautiful about it is that A, you don’t have to create the product. You don’t have to spend several months creating a decent product; and B, you don’t have to worry about customer service and product fulfillment, which is a huge headache. If you’ve done it in products before, you’ll know what it means.
So if you’re just an affiliate promoter, all you just do is you let free, you just promote and you collect the money. And that’s it. You don’t provide support. You don’t create the product. You just make the money, essentially.
It sounds easy. But before it is easy, you first need to build up that audience and that is a more challenging part. That’s all I’m saying. The monetization is easy.
Luke: Yes. And that’s where I think when I started out, and probably where everyone starts out. You tend to go to ClickBank, but you think you’re just getting a link from ClickBank, who, for anyone who doesn’t know is an affiliate vendor.
So they’ll give you products to promote; it’s a fantastic site. But you can get your link from click bank, which gives you a 50 percent commission or whatever on a product and you just send to promote it to anybody; you promote it on your Twitter and that kind of thing.
I think what you need to remember is that targeted affiliate marketing pays not just throwing your link out there and hoping that somebody buys kind of thing.
Gideon: That’s right. Absolutely.
Luke: Certainly, because people on Twitter aren’t the most targeted people in the world. I think your list is always going to be the most successful.
I totally agree. And just that little keyword you used at targeted is essential. You can’t just build up a general list and then try and promote every single product you find on ClickBank.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: That’s not how it works. The more targeted your list is and the more targeted the products that you promote to that list, the video conversion is going to be that. That’s just as simple as that.
But, I mean, affiliate marketing is the one, the first and I’d say the easiest first category for monetizing, what you’re doing with your online video strategy.
The second big area is essentially advertising. And this is where you can build advertising streams from you video blog or even your YouTube channel. And once again, to make that successful, you need to have a following. You know, with all these things you need to have the following. So it’s what I’m saying, once you have the following, money is easy.
Luke: Exactly.
Gideon: But since it’s an advertising model. So, this is where you have, say, banner ads on your video blog, or link ads or any kinds of ads you can imagine, or ad placements inside your video.
Luke: OK.
Gideon: Now, on YouTube, you can join the partner program and you can get paid for that. In my view, you need a ton of views to make that really worthwhile. And there are YouTubers who make nice six figures incomes from that.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: But that gives millions of views.
Luke: These are those guys that are always on the most viewed every day. [laughs]
Gideon: That’s right. The top market partners make a lot of money from that, but they get a lot of views.
But the way I look at that is that that’s a very small portion of your overall income. So these guys are making a full-time income just from the partner program. Is that your only source of income? I always kind of look at them and go, “My goodness. You could have ten times as much money coming in if you just knew a little bit about Internet marketing.
Luke: I always think that too, as well. You’re not allowed and always think at least , these vloggers.
Gideon: Yeah.
Luke: These are American guys that are obviously very good at what they do. But they need a website that makes them some serious money.
Gideon: [laughs] Or they just need a website and period.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And then some of them don’t even have a website.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: It’s just beyond me.
Luke: Just giving me a thought of approach and tell them I’ll make them one [laughs] There you go.
Gideon: I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
But I think you can even make more money from YouTube videos if you, for example, have ad placements inside the videos. If you recommend products or do product reviews and this sort of thing, that could be a more solid strategy for making money.
What’s good about these videos is they stay on there, on YouTube and you keep on getting traffic to them. So, it’s a nice way to build that passive income for your business.
Advertising is not something that I’ve done much, but I know that it’s a successful model because a lot of my friends have used it very successfully. I mean, a really good example is — he’s not quite a video blogger — but it’s Alborz Fallah from caradvice.com.au. He lives here in Brisbane as well. And their number one or main income stream is from advertising and they make a ton of money. Very, very successful. It’s either the number one or number two top car website in Australia.
Luke: Wow!
Gideon: So they make some really good money.
But once again, they’ve got their audience. Once you’ve got the audience, you’ve got the right sort of niche. You can demand people to pay you more money, to get the image or their brand in front of your audience. That’s what the beauty is of having this back of raving fans.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So second one, that’s advertising.
And then the third one, which is my favorite, but it’s definitely more challenging. And by the way, as you go through these three, they become harder and more challenging, but also, more rewarding. The third one is creating your own products and launching your own products or building them into the backend of your business.
I haven’t found another model that is more successful than that and being able to really take your business to a whole new level once you have your own products. The thing is, once you have your own products, also, it’s wonderful things start happening especially when you have high ticket products like over $1,000 type of products. That really allows you to build that funnel, your business funnel and the backend of your business is so much better. And you could capitalize on it so much better.
And the beautiful thing about having your own products is that they convert better to your own list. So while you could make some good money with your free marketing and even advertising, the conversion rates for them would be lower because I believe that it’s not you. It’s not your product. And what is your product is much more aligned with the people on your list because they trust you and they know you, and the conversion rate is just so much higher.
And also, that can really take your business just to a whole new level once you create your own products.
Luke: So, I mean, people that are listening to this might be doing this all very well and it’s a bit a lot. I’ve been to seminars and things. People say you create your own products, you know.
Just to say that is fine and obviously does create some huge returns. But how do you actually go about creating a product if you’re not really an expert in any certain sort of niche or any certain area? Would you go about outsourcing? Would you put some hard-earned money into it in order to get the returns in the long run?
Gideon: Well, there’s a bunch of ways that you can go about it. Obviously, if you want to be teaching something that you’re expert in mean you really need to be an expert in that field before you can teach it successfully and before you can have the credibility. And that can take time, resources, and money. It’s not something that happens overnight.
So, if you’re not there yet, that is not necessarily a good strategy for you. But if it is something that you want to do, then you need to make a decision about that and decide to become an expert, to become extremely good at that thing, so that you can one day teach it to other people. But that will take time.
In the mean time though, while you do that, there are other ways of creating products where you don’t have to necessarily use your own expertise. You can team up with another expert and do whatever you’re good at in and team up with him in some sort of jayvee relationship.
A really good example of that was what I did with Yaro. I was really good with video and creating video products, and Yaro was really good with blogging and making money from blogging. And so we teamed up. I created the product pretty much with Yaro as the credibility factor. And obviously, Yaro contributed to the content as well. But really, I used my skill of implementation and creating beautiful products linking up with Yaro’s knowledge and credibility in the market to make that a success.
And you could do something similar. The skill of product creation itself is actually really easy to learn and you can pick that up very, very quickly. There’s text products, for example, which is super easy. You just type something up in Word Press pretty much or you have an interview with someone and transcribe the thing. Get it into Word Press; turn it into PDF and voila! You’ve got a text product; maybe slap out some pretty good graphics. Super easy. Audio products are just as easy means you were creating a product of some type right now with this interview.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: You know, that’s an audio interview for you. It’s got a higher percent of value. A video, of course, is a next level up. The tools we have today are just so much easier than four or five years ago when I got started and it’s much more affordable too, that you can create some pretty damn good-looking video pretty quickly at a budget that you can afford as well.
So, in terms of product creation, learning the skill of creating it is just around the corner for you. It’s not difficult to create the products. The difficulty is in getting that credibility factor and getting the audience. But for that, you can team up with other people if you don’t have that credibility or that audience.
Luke: Right. Right. OK. So you just mentioned that you can create some pretty amazing videos nowadays. Well, personally, what do you use to create your own videos, or resources that you use? Or what microphone do you use? What camera do you think is the best that little ones that you’ve been using? What screen capture software do you use?
Gideon: OK. I’ll tell you what I’m using, but before I tell you, everyone listening to this needs to realize that each different application on the Internet almost requires a different set of tools.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: So it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve that will tell you what kind of tools you need to use. Especially when it comes to online video, that’s very, very important.
So for my purposes, that I’m using it for, which is creating videos really quickly on YouTube mainly and this often also create products, video products. The main tools that I use for that now is a Canon 60D Camera. Now, this is a DSLR camera.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And that’s what I’m saying. I’m using it for specific purpose. It’s not the best camera for all set of actions.
For example, you wouldn’t use that for recording seminars, for example. And it can only record to 12 minutes at a time. So for YouTube videos, it’s perfect. For product videos, it’s a little bit more challenging because you’ve got to break your videos up into 12-minute slots, but you can overcome that. But it’s a great camera and the quality of your videos is just awesome. And if you got to look at my YouTube videos now, you’ll see that it looks really good. The quality is awesome. You can get that nice data field.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: The microphone that I’m using at rest of the moment is a Sony wireless microphone. It was about $100 microphone. So, it’s a more expensive one, but it allows me to be wireless with a microphone and move around with a lapel microphone, but you can get away with a $30 microphone as well with it. It’s got a four-meter cord. It’s called an Audio-Technica lapel microphone. You can just scrap that from Amazon. It’s like $30 and it does a great job.
So that’s what I’m currently using in terms of camera and microphone, and the computer that I use now, or that I’ve been using for the last three or four years is an Apple Macintosh computer.
Luke: That’s preferred as a Windows?
Gideon: Oh, absolutely. The day that I switched from PC to Mac, my productivity for video work increased. It sounds unreal, but I wrote about ten times. I measured it one day.
Luke: Same here with design.
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: I the same last year.
Gideon: Yeah.
Luke: I made that switch to Mac and my design is ten times quicker.
Gideon: Ten times quicker. And it’s not an overestimation. It’s not an exaggeration.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: You know, I’m looking here at my desk. Now, there’s four Macintosh computers just sitting on my one desk. It’s not four screens. It’s actually four separate, different Macintosh computers. [laughs]
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And so, that doesn’t even count my other Apple devices.
Luke: Exactly.
Gideon: So, I’m a bit of a Mac fan boy now.
But it’s because of the results that I’ve been able to get. So I use Macs now for all my video work. I still do the editing for my YouTube videos. That might change very soon and the reason why I do it myself the most because it’s so quick. You know, it’s that quick.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And I don’t do any fancy editing for my videos, but the next stage is to outsource that part to say, the Philippines. I’ve got some workers in the Philippines that will take care of that for me. But the process will be a little bit longer there because I got to get the files to them. And it’s not as quick as if I can just do it myself.
But the software that I’ve been using on my Mac is ScreenFlow. So use it for both screen capture videos and my normal videos as well. It’s just beautiful for editing and super easy in the results you get is just beautiful.
But for those PC people out there, PC users, really cool PC software I recommend there is Sony Vegas Studio HD. It’s about $40.00 and it does a great job. If you want to learn the export settings, you can find that on my blog at gideonshalwick.com. There’s a tab there that shows you all the export settings for free. Seriously, it took me months to figure out the right export settings for my Internet, but there’s my shortcut there for you. Yeah.
Luke: Perfect. Fantastic. I mean, you just mentioned screen flow. Have you ever used iMovie? It comes with a Mac – what’s your views on iMovie?
Gideon: IMovie is great. I think it’s really great for beginners if you just want to really simple stuff. The trouble I have with iMovie is you can just pretty do one — what’s it called? — a track or one track on your timeline for both the video and audio.
And if you want to do some more fancy things like add some more images, or add an extra track for audio, say you want to have both your voice, but you also want to have some music there, and maybe some other sound effects, that’s really difficult to do in iMovie; unless they’ve opt that at the recent version where it’s really easy to do.
But in screen flow, you can have like a hundred tracks if you want to. And it just makes it easier and more flexible to create great-looking videos. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with iMovie. It’s free, of course. It comes with Mac. And if you can use that successfully, then it’s not a problem.
Luke: OK. OK. Going back a little bit — so thanks for those products there because I think that’s one of the main things is people… they’re not handed that information. They have to search for it on the Internet. And there’s too many products out there. And hearing from somebody that’s actually used them for years, and actually tested quite a few products, it’s quite good to know what you personally think.
Gideon: I do. More recently, I haven’t been testing software programs because obviously, I found the solution that is just amazing. It allows me to create videos extremely fast and extremely high quality.
But before that, I went through a terrible process of trial and error where I literally went through, I don’t know, it feels like I’ve gone through hundreds of software programs, video editing programs.
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: I was trying to find the best damn thing. And I spend a lot of my time on that. And I was terribly frustrating and most of it was spent on PC, to be honest. Once I go to Mac, the process was a lot faster.
But the best piece of software for most people that I found, for most people’s needs at least, is the Sony Vegas Studio HD that does a fantastic job. And it’s affordable, too. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on it.
Just want to make one more point about that in terms of cameras and camera selection. A couple of really great cameras, if you don’t want to use something like the Canon, which is by the way, it has a pretty steep learning curve. And it’s not an easy camera to use.
So an alternative to that, if you’re doing online video specifically, is either something like the Flip Ultra HD camera, great little camera. The trouble with that one is that it doesn’t have a external mic jack, which is pretty handy, but it records great quality video and it’s super simple.
An alternative to that is the Kodak that I aid of course, which is fantastic little camera. A similar video quality to the Flip, but it has a nice external mic jack that you can plug an external microphone into like a lapel mic. It also has a little SD card slot, which means you can pretty much put any size card in there and record video for as long as the card can hold.
So the Kodak would probably be the better choice. That will give you some more flexibility. But both of those cameras will work both on PC and Mac. They’re great online via cameras.
Luke: Yeah, of course. You got to be sensitive to people’s budget sadly. You can’t go recommending an $1000 camera just because you know that you can afford it kind of thing.
Gideon: Exactly.
Luke: You obviously are very sensitive to that because your audience will range from very, very wealthy people to people who really haven’t got the money. That’s great to get just that $30 mic. I think so.
Gideon: That’s right. And what’s interesting about it is that like I said before, it really depends on what you’re trying to create or what you want to use it for.
I mean, some people would sometimes spend like $5,000 on a camera that where a Flip camera would have done just as good of a job; which is like $250.00.And so, that have a total overkill solution for something that wouldn’t require that.
I’ve actually just written a report that I’m about to release soonish. That it takes you through that process of matching up the kind of camera you need for your particular solution. And it’s about five different categories that you need to look at, and I think that will help people a lot because I get that question a lot: what is the perfect camera? And there’s no one answer. It really depends on the solution that you want to use it for.
Luke: Yeah, depends whether you’re outside, inside.
Gideon: Exactly.
Luke: If you’re doing things with a longer range and all that kind of stuff.
But then, you spoke on it quite a bit is YouTube. How did it go, I interviewed it a while ago, a video expert guy? And he swore blind not to host on YouTube. He was dead again as hosting on YouTube and you shouldn’t do it and you should host it your own site.
Gideon: That’s probably on Dave Kaminski, right?
Luke: I wasn’t going to name drop. That’s fine. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it’s Dave. Dave said that yeah, do it on your own website, create your own video, hosting platform.
Gideon: Yes. I just interviewed Dave on that as well and he got some really valid reasons for it. And I love Dave and he’s got some really awesome material, please check out his stuff. In fact, I promote his video, “Creation Course.” And I think it’s, from what I’ve seen, it’s probably the best one that I’ve seen online.
Luke: I want to know about it.
Gideon: Yeah, he’s a master at teaching and with the video stuff, there’s no one that I found better.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So, I really take my hat off for that.
In terms of using YouTube for hosting your videos, just go to the point that Dave was making about that and if I understood this right this right, hosting your own videos on your own server has the obvious benefit that you own it and you control it. So, there’s definitely a lot of benefit in that.
The problem with that approach is that — well, it’s not a wrong or bad approach, it’s just a different approach for a different purpose — it’s a good approach if you want to control everything and you want to keep everything inside your website and don’t traffic with another site like YouTube. That’s fine.
But when you look at YouTube, it’s the second biggest search engine in the world. They get two billion views a day. That’s hard to ignore in terms of traffic and lead generation. I’m not aware of any other video source on the Internet or in the history of time ever to be able to provide you with another opportunity like that to get traffic and to build your leads.
Now, I think the fear that Dave talks about, which is a valid fear, he’s right. If you’re only hosting your videos on YouTube, if they decide to cut your account for whatever reason, your traffic can go from everything to zero overnight. And that’s a valid concern, but you can work around that. And the way to work around that is to realize that you don’t own your YouTube channel, YouTube does.
Luke: Still that is his point. His main point was that they own it.
Gideon: Yeah, they own it, so they control it. But you can leverage the traffic that they can provide you. And if you can use YouTube to get your traffic to your site, and then you can convert that traffic into leads, you then own those leads.
Luke: Yeah, once they follow you, then you have that guy hooked or that person hooked.
Gideon: Exactly. So the way I do it is in terms of lead generation, in terms of traffic, one of my main strategies is to use YouTube, but I use it for traffic generation, for lead generation. And once I have leads, when I deliver my products, they’re all hosted on my own servers. So all of that is then hosted on my own servers.
So it really depends on your strategy here. I would look at YouTube as mainly a traffic and lead generations strategy, but we do that if you have to keep in mind that YouTube owns it.
Now, another insurance against, say, YouTube cutting you down or whatever is to not only upload your videos to YouTube, but at the same time, upload your videos to other video showing sites as well. So that if YouTube does cut you, then at least you can use your other video showing sites.
And another thing that I suggest you do is if you’re really scared that you might lose your channel for whatever reason is to upload your own videos at the same time to the Amazon S3 server as well so that you have that as your own backup on your own server. So that’s a really nice way around the fact that YouTube actually owns your channel.
Luke: OK. So always have that backup plan in mind and obviously don’t use it for products.
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: Don’t host your products, really eyes on there.
Gideon: No, you can, but I think you just need a backup strategy as well because you know, I think if you keep to YouTube’s rules and their terms of service, then you don’t have anything to worry about especially once you become a partner, they look at after you.
But, you know, you got to play by their rules. And when you play by their rules, I don’t really think you got anything to worry about. They’re pretty big player in the market. They’re not going to go anywhere soon. But have that as a backup strategy to have your own videos hosted on your own server and other video showing sites.
But the bottom line for me is that you got to go with the people. Like from this a Dale a while ago, and it’s such a simple mind hack to think where do the people go? Where are the people? Where do they hang out? And currently, it’s on Facebook and on YouTube, and on Twitter.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: Those are three big guns. And if you don’t have that as part of your traffic generation strategy, then well…
Luke: You’re missing out.
Gideon: … you’re missing out. And I’m not quite sure where… I know with Dave. He’s a master at podcasting and he gets a lot of traffic just from podcasting, which is amazing. But I’m getting traffic from that as well, on top of everything else.
So, what I’m saying is that use that, but also, ask yourself why not use something like YouTube as an extra traffic to your site.
Luke: Yes. So, always have it as a part of your plan. So it’s as simple as I always think. So it’s simple as walking to a hole, with nobody in it.
Gideon: Yeah.
Luke: And trying to tell people about your product where you’re not going to get any results or anything. You don’t just have anyone. But if you’re going to walk into a room full of people, there’s much more chance for success.
Gideon: That’s right and you know, I totally agree with that. And Dave, if you’re listening to this, I think the whole podcasting way of getting traffic is 100 percent by the plan. I think we just have different approaches to it. So I don’t think it’s a right and wrong approach. It’s just they’re just different and they have different purposes. So, I think you got to view each one in that way as well.
Luke: Good. Well, thanks for clearing that out in your own eyes. It’s good to have a contrast of opinions and things on the blog. It’s always good to be slightly controversial and go against what somebody else thinks and…
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: … I do like to poke in that kind of direction as well. So thanks for giving us your views in it. I saw it from that. I know that we’ve been going for some while now. I don’t want to keep you too long, so don’t get mad.
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: So what advice would you get to somebody who’s quite shy and doesn’t want to get in front of the camera and thinks that they’ll never do it kind of thing and that it’s not their bag and what advice would you give them?
Gideon: OK. There’s a couple of strategies there. Well, there’s probably three that I can think of just right now.
The first one is to team up with someone else who does like being in front of the camera and perhaps, you could become the camera person and the video marketing person. And the other person is more of the star of the show.
I mean, I kind of did that with JJ and the magician. That was a test project that I had with him where he was the star and I was the video marketer. I mean, I don’t mind being in front of the camera myself, but I wanted to have a really nice guest and it was JJ. And that worked really well and he just absolutely shined in front of the camera and did a fantastic job.
So just because it’s video marketing, it doesn’t mean you have to be in front of the camera. You can get great success by being the video marketer and getting someone else on the camera for you. That’s one way.
The other way is to — what was the other way, the second way? Sorry, a blank there for a second. I’ll go to the third way, which is to basically commit to learning how to become good on camera. And it might be fearful or strange at the beginning, but it is doable.
Not everybody is good in front of the camera at the beginning. In fact, I would even say that pretty much, everybody sucks in front of the camera at the beginning. If you look at some of my first videos, they’re pretty horrible. And I look at them and I cringe.
But I leave them on there because I want to show people that if you look at the videos I have now and compare them to the videos that I have when I was getting started, they start a contrast between them. And it’s because I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve been able to get better, I’ve been able to build up the skill and become more confident in the skill of being in front of the video camera.
The other thing that you have got to realize is that when you see yourself and hear yourself for the first few times on video, it looks and sounds horrible to you.
Luke: [laughs] Yeah, that does, doesn’t it?
Gideon: Yes. And I have some theories for why that is. In terms of the reason why you look strange to yourself, let’s tackle that one first because you look strange and you sound strange to yourself. Let’s look at the look one first.
If you think about how we view ourselves, so how the picture we have of ourselves in our mind’s eye might bit especially in the Western world, where we have mirrors, is that you have a mirror image of yourself in your head. Because when you see yourself, you see yourself in the mirror like mostly.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: In the morning, you brush your teeth. You see yourself in the mirror. It’s a mirror image of yourself. It’s not a true image.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: Now when you see yourself on a video, it is a true image of you.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: It’s not a mirror image. So it’s actually a mirror image of the mirror image in your head.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: If that makes sense.
Luke: It does make sense. Obviously, nobody is symmetrical as well.
Gideon: Yeah, exactly.
Luke: We are, many people like us.
Gideon: [laughs] Maybe George Clooney.
Luke: I don’t mean it. Mean what you want, anyway. [laughs]
Gideon: That’s right. Nobody is 100 percent symmetric. And it’s because of that that when you see yourself in the video, it’s different to the picture that you’re used to seeing. And then your subconscious mind saws it wobbly and it doesn’t know how to deal with that and it just goes, “No, that’s not me. It kind of looks ugly. And I’m not going to accept this.”
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: So of course, other people don’t see that way because they see the true image of you. They don’t have the mirror image of you in their heads. So when they see you on your video, you just look normal to them.
The second thing, actually, that’s one thing to realize, you don’t see yourself when you see on video, or at least you see a picture, but you’re not used to it. Your subconscious mind is not used to it. The second thing, with your voice.
Luke: [laughs] This is when you [unintelligible 67:56] .
Gideon: And it’s a weird one. When you listen to yourself, it sounds weird, doesn’t it?
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And when you think about when you speak, where does the sound come from? Or where does your ear get that sound from?
Luke: In your head, just kidding.
Gideon: It’s coming from inside your head.
Luke: It gets [inaudible 68:17] from your head and…
Gideon: Exactly. And sound waves travel at different speeds through different mediums. So for example, sound wave travels through a solid material, so much faster than it does through air. OK. And it also sounds different. I’m not sure if you used to play this game when you were a kid. In the swimming pool, you try and have a conversation with someone else under water.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And you have to scream pretty loud that you even try and get some sound through. [laughs] And you wouldn’t be able to hear it very well, but sometimes you could. And it’s because the sound travels much differently under water than in air and sound is very different. And it’s the same when you hear that sound inside your head.
Now, when you listen to a recording, of course, that sound is coming from outside of your head. And once again, to other people, it just sounds normal. But to you, it sounds different to what your subconscious mind has been trained to hear. And once again, it throws a wobbly. And it goes, “That’s not me and that sounds weird.”
So, both in the visual and auditory aspects, your subconscious mind throws a wobbly at first. Now, the way around that, I believe, is to retrain your subconscious mind. And the only way that I’ve been able to find doing that successfully is to keep on watching and listening to yourself over and over, and over. And it sounds weird and sounds almost eccentric, but that’s not the purpose.
The purpose is to retrain your subconscious mind and to look for ways where you can approve. That’s an added benefit. But the bottom line is to retrain your subconscious mind, so that it realizes that, “Hey, the image and sound that you used to have is actually the wrong image and sound.” You need to retrain it to see the true picture of what it is.
And once you’ve got that retrained, then you’re much more accepting to your own videos and your own productions. It’s quite amazing once you get over that hump that you can just create a video and you go, “Ah! It actually looks good. I actually accept this.”
Luke: I do look like that. That’s what I do. I’m not saying any sound. [laughs]
Gideon: Yeah, exactly.
So that’s the second thing. It’s pretty much. And the first strategy was to get someone else. The second one is just to get over yourself.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: And to train yourself to do it. And I’m trying to remember the third one.
Luke: We did that second choice of out. [laughs]
Gideon: Yeah, I think the third one was… I can’t relate. This doesn’t sound 100 percent right, but maybe it’s something along the lines of instead of doing visual videos of you on the camera, you start off with screen capture videos.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So your face is not on it. And so that made you a little bit more easier to swallow.
Luke: That’s a bit right. My tactic is go down the recording so do audio. Get the voice in your head. Get your recorded voice OK with your conscious mind first, then we can work on the visual later on. So that’s… I had to do it with blogtrepreneur. I had to put some video up there because I think it will work very, very well on that.
Gideon: Oh, absolutely.
Luke: Especially for like interviews and even just tips and getting them transcribed and because you can always hit two birds with one stone in that respect where people might hate videos. But if you offer them the chance to read your video, then you’re going to satisfy everybody.
Gideon: Absolutely.
Luke: You’re knocking everyone out.
Gideon: That’s right.
Luke: You want to basically appeal to everybody. That’s one thing.
Gideon: Well, you got to be careful with that as well because you can’t be everything to everybody. This is your sure fire way to file, but I know what you’re trying to say. You want to be able to create all the right mediums, so there’s many people as possible within your niche can absorb your material and go through it.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: So you don’t want to unnecessarily cut out that part of your audience. But it’s also important to know your audience and know what their preferences are.
I’ll give you an example of this. The first time that Yaro Starak had a video on his blog, his audience went nuts sitting. You know, I hope you’re not going to do video now forever and we hate this blah, blah, blah. We can read through text posts so much faster than a stupid video.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: Whereas with my audience, they prefer not to read.
Luke: They’re dry and they don’t want to see the shower.
Gideon: [laughs] Exactly. But I don’t think it can hurt if you’re doing a video blog to also add the text transcripts on your videos. In fact, that’s what I do for all my videos. My current one right there doesn’t have a transcript just yet, but that’ll happen because I’ll upload it on the weekend. It will happen on Monday.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: They’ll get transcribed by my team and add it as a result.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah. Lastly, I’ve got a question that will take you back a little bit. How long was it since you’ve actually jacked in the job, that kind of that lifestyle? Is it many years?
Gideon: Well, you mean, when is the last time I had a job?
Luke: Yeah. A nine to five, where you worked for somebody.
Gideon: That would be about five years ago, so when I had a job back in New Zealand. And it’s funny that there’s probably two answers to that. That’s when I quit my job. It was five years ago. That’s not when I made a full-time income.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: And that’s not when I had the right mental attitude for running my own business. It took me some time to retrain my subconscious mind to not think like an employee, but to think like an entrepreneur, and a business earner and a business builder. It’s a very, very different mindset. And it probably took me two years to recondition my mind for that new challenge.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah. So what I want to do is take you back to, obviously, the horrible days of working for somebody and if basically, you lost everything, I’d like to say it’s pretty much, the tough word is impossible.
But you lost your business and you lost your products and you’re list than everything that basically came with working online. And you had to start again, so you had to do everything again. What would you do differently? What would you do to make your success quicker? Would you do anything differently as well?
Gideon: Yeah, I think the first thing I would do is figure out what my hedgehog concept is. And I’m not sure if you or our audience is familiar with the hedgehog concept. It’s from a guy called Jim Collins. He wrote this book called “Good to Great.” Amazing book. It starts off a book by saying, “Good is the enemy of great.” And I just love that.
And he did a bunch of research to figure out what was it that make companies great? And he come up with five principles. And one of them was the hedgehog concept. And it’s basically from the story of The Fox and The Hedgehog. The fox, essentially, he tries a bunch of different strategies to catch the hedgehog. But the hedgehog is only good for one thing; he just rolls up into a ball and the fox can never catch him.
The analogy is that there are two types of people in the world: there are foxes and there are hedgehogs. And a hedgehog type of person is, he or she has been able to find that one thing that they can be extremely good at and that’s the focus. Whereas the fox has this SOS problem there; Shiny Object Syndrome. [laughs]
Luke: [laughs]
Gideon: Where they jump from one thing to the next. They jump from one course to the next. They never really become good at one thing. And there’s a way to find out what your hedgehog concept is. It’s the intersection of three different things. The first thing is what you’re truly passionate about. And there’s a bunch of things that we are all passionate about in life, you know. In your life, like I know there’ll be a certain number of things that you’re passionate about.
Now, there’ll also be in your life, a second circle, which are things that you’re skillful at. Where they’re designed for example, like the specific skill to do something as Jim Collins talks about it where you can become the best at or one of the best at in the world. OK. So we have arranged the different skills that you would have in your life. So that’s the second circle, your skill set.
And then the third area is what you can make money from. As Jim calls it, your profit per X. You know, profit per leads, profit for customer, profit for membership site, profit per product, profit per your hour of time. You need to figure out what that is.
But basically if you can find where these three different areas intersect, if you can imagine like a Venn diagram where these three circles intersect, right there in the middle, that is your hedgehog concept.
So it’s something that you’re passionate about, something that you already are or could become one of the best or the best at in the world. And you can make money from those as well. Where you have those three things intercepting, that’s your hedgehog concept.
So, if I was just starting out again, I would try to figure that out as quick as possible. And you know, this is not something that gets talked about at school or at a university or anywhere. I was just really lucky that that book got recommended to me quite some time ago.
So I would become very clear on that. Now, that takes time. And so, while you’re doing that that might not bring in any money for you. So you need another capital strategy while you figure that out.
And a really amazing casual strategy there is to become a consultant. So you need to become good at something like creating websites or finding other people to do their work for you to create the websites for you, for example, or figuring out a kind of service that you could provide for people where you can provide some sort of consultancy, so that you can get that immediate cash coming in while you build your business.
OK. So this is just a short time, cash flow strategy, so that you can clarify your hedgehog concept and start building your business. So the idea is that you get that cash coming in and you reinvest that back in your business as you’re trying to figure out exactly what it is you’re supposed to be doing and the exact area that you want to focus on.
Luke: So you’re almost moonlighting on your online business or whatever it is.
Gideon: Right.
Luke: So you’ve got something that pays the bill, and then you’ve got something, which is your long-term strategy.
Gideon: That’s right. Exactly.
And I think consultancy is one of the easiest, quickest ways of making some cash online. It’s a limited way because you’re still charging at your time, which is similar to having a job. But it’s a little bit more leverage because you’re in control and you can decide on how much you want to charge and which hours you want to work.
But it’s really just to glorify jobs though, but at least, you can work in an area that you enjoy, and demand the pay that you think you’re worth. But that short term strategy just to get the cash wheel coming in and just start building your own business.
In the next thing hour due is once you have your hedgehog concept clarified is to really focus on that. I have this absolutely laser focus on your hedgehog concept. And perhaps this is best explained by an example. My hedgehog concept is my first circle in terms of passion is I just absolutely love teaching. I love providing people with information that make their life better.
Luke: Well then, that’s obvious actually. [laughs]
Gideon: [laughs] Yeah. And you know that’s…
Luke: An hour later or after we started this interview, it’s quite obvious…
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: … and we do appreciate it, honestly.
Gideon: Yeah, it’s both a pro and a con, you know. I took a lot and it can be a pro and a con. [laughs]
Luke: No. No. No. I don’t usually think of that because people are loving this kind of thing. These interviews are the kind of interviews that I was looking for when I started out. So…
Gideon: Fantastic. I’m great.
Luke: … great.
Gideon: So to my example, teaching is in terms of my passion, right?
I have many other passions too, but this happens to be part of my hedgehog concept; the teaching side of it. In terms of my skills, over the years, I’ve been able to build up and develop the skill of online video marketing. All right. So, there’s two levels to that; there’s the technical side, but then, there’s also the marketing side of online video marketing.
So, both of them are skills. And what I told myself when I developed my hedgehog concept is that you have to believe this. You really have to believe it within yourself that you can become either the best, like the number one person in the world, or one of the best in the world. You have to believe this in your heart of hearts. Otherwise, it’s not the right area. You got to find something else that you can become the best at this thing.
So for me, it’s online video marketing and the technical — not so much for technical side, but the marketing side of it. That’s more of the hedgehog side of it for me. And then in terms of the profit side, that’s something that you could clarify over time. But at the moment, it is profit per lead for my business.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: But it can very well be profit per product or profit per membership site, or profit per hour of my time. Now, depending on which one I select, will tell me how I will be spending my time. For example, if my profit per X is profit per hour, I would want to make sure that each and every hour I spend on my business is super leveraged.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: So if I just want to spend one hour a week on my business, but make some amount of money, the way I’m going to operate it is going to be very different too if my profit per X’s side is profit per lead.
Luke: Yes.
Gideon: And if it’s profit per lead, it doesn’t matter how many hours I work in a week. My effort is going to be to try and make as much profit I can per lead. And then the different strategies that I use in the way that I spend my time is going to be very different.
So that’s my example. So, it’s teaching online video marketing and figuring out how I can optimize the money that I can make from each lead to compose into the business or that comes into the business.
So if you can then really hone in on your hedgehog concept and really focus on that and that becomes your thing on the Internet. It’s only a matter of time until you’ll hit breakthrough point.
So until you hit breakthrough point, you’ll have to do some consultancy work to help get that cash flow coming in.
Well once you hit breakthrough point, that’s when your little flywheel will start spinning itself and the money will come and start approaching you for interviews. They’ll start approaching you for joint venture partners, etc., etc. and the business will just snowball. And once you get into that point, it’s a wonderful place to be in because then you can just kind of sit back and keep on pushing in the same direction and it becomes a lot easier.
Luke: Brilliant, brilliant answer. I asked that question pretty much to every guest that we have. I’ve never had an answer anything like that.
Gideon: [laughs]
Luke: They pretty much just sort of laugh or say that never happened, that kind of thing and then just give out a very short answer actually.
Gideon: OK [laughs]
Luke: But that’s perfect because that strategy, just that last answer you’ve given actually is what a lot of people are looking for. They want to know how they can start because they don’t think they’re worth anything yet. They think, “How can a person like me…? I’m not skillful at anything.” Well, you are, but you need to find it first. Everybody has a skill. Everybody has some kind of skill in it.
Gideon: That’s right.
Luke: It’s like if you’re a carpenter, what types of business have I got being online? Well, through a website on DIY, do a blog on DIY and training, and you could train people how to be a carpenter and what comes with that.
So people need to realize that they can convert their, say, offline skills into an online skill. So I like that answer. Very, very good.
Gideon: I think just one thing alongside that to mention is that no matter what you do, you need to become a good marketer.
If you want to get business, you need to learn the principles of marketing. There’s no way around it. Even if you may not be doing the marketing yourself one day, you need to understand it because it just absolutely infiltrates everything else you do with your business.
And so, as you do your develop your hedgehog concept, also learn about marketing and online marketing and just basic marketing principles. And what’s interesting about marketing is that everyone on the planet thinks they are an expert. And the reason we think we are experts is that because we are bombarded by advertising.
Our generation, we see so much advertising on television, on the Internet, on the radio, on our cell phones, on our mobile phones. It’s just all around us. So it’s natural to think that we are experts at marketing because we’ve been exposed to so much advertising. But the problem is that that’s a false conception.
Learning the true scale of marketing takes time and you need to know the meta-principles. And of course, “meta” means what’s behind. You need to know what is behind these advertisements. What is the thinking behind it? What is the psychology behind them? Why do they sell? Why do some ads work, some don’t? Why do some marketing strategies work and some don’t?
And there’s quite a bit to it and you need to study these things. And that’s a cool thing, you can learn them. There are learnable skills. And you need to do that alongside learning about hedgehog concept.
Luke: Yes. Yes, very, very good points made. And I do think that there’s a lot people that claim to be an expert out there. And like you said, it’s very full sometimes.
Gideon: Yes.
Luke: You said many times the results as well behind YouTube. You can’t approve that you are an expert or that kind of thing.
Gideon: Exactly, that’s a true measurement. It’s looking at someone’s results. So if you want to learn from someone, go set a topic, make sure that they are getting results in that particular topic that they’re teaching from. So you complete like that as a test.
Luke: You get favorite detail to get YouTube views and their videos got ten views.
Gideon: Yeah, that’s right.
Luke: So they say “I can teach you how to boost your YouTube views.” And then you look at their view count, they got ten.
Gideon: Yeah [laughs] .
Luke: So it’s exactly the principle.
Gideon: But sometimes you got to watch because sometimes, they might not have results with their own channel, but they’ll be able to get it for other channels.
Luke: Yeah.
Gideon: [laughs] You’re right. In general, you go to watch that.
Luke: Thank you very much for doing the interview today, Gideon. It’s been definitely our longest interview.
Gideon: OK.
Luke: But probably the most contentful interview, so don’t get that like a twist to that. This is pretty fantastic. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for the whole time we’ve been doing interviews. So I wouldn’t worry about that.
Gideon: Thank you.
Luke: So thank you so much and I’m sure our readers would have actually loved it.
Gideon: Absolutely. Thank you so much and all the best to everyone else listening to this and if you haven’t reached that success yet, it might just be around the corner for you. So just keep on pushing.
Luke: Exactly. Everybody else, please comment on the interview. Let us know what you think of Gideon. I’m sure Gideon will part back in and have a read of your comments. If there’s anything that he wants to respond to, he will do. I’m sure he will, aren’t you, Gideon?
Gideon: Absolutely. I’ll let you know the link once it’s up-linked and I’ll have a link and labeled it from my interview’s page.
Luke: Perfect. Perfect. And I’ll come back to you as well after we’ve stopped recording. So, good speech to get in and I wish you all the best in the future. And I thank you so much for providing one of the best interviews that we have.
Gideon: Thanks, Luke.
