I want to tell you a little story and then I’m going to share the ONE THING that I wish I’d learned earlier in my life, the one thing that made the biggest difference to my success.
When I started online it was 1995 and I was pregnant with Phoebe who is now 22, and the guy I bought my laptop from said “you can plug a telephone wire in there and connect to the internet”
“What’s the internet?” I said.
“It’s just started and you can talk to people around the world” he answered. I thought “….that means I can market our dance music record label to DJ’s around the world”. Just 12 years earlier dance music had gone global with the arrival of cable tv and dance music videos playing MTV in bars around the world.
So I bought a book called “HTML For the Worldwide Web” by Elizabeth Castro (still in print but don’t buy it, we hire people for $10 an hour to do that stuff now). I made a website for our record label but I hadn’t figured out how to get people to buy our records online yet.
Within 3 years I was making £1000 a month from my first online business, ArtistManager.com which matched up aspiring artists with managers globally, being invited to pitch my idea to the producers of Dragon’s Den and then other potential investors in the Atlantic Bar & Restaurant, just as the first dot com bubble was bursting in 2000. My £1000 a month kept coming though, as I was bootstrapping without investors now.
In the USA clever people like Marlon Sanders and Frank Kern had figured out that you could use email with direct mail marketing techniques to get people to buy things online. The spam started. You still had to send a cheque into an address or get called to give your credit card details to a real person, but that soon changed. People were making fortunes online very quickly.
By 1999 I was signing up for a distance learning class with Coach U and they still sent me a huge box of stuff (even though all their classes were by webinar and you could download and print the PDF’s yourself). We were still valuing physical products over information in those days. I went to Las Vegas to see Thomas Leonard speak and met Chris Barrow and Guy Levine there; all three marketing their businesses entirely online and Guy now owns an award winning Digital Agency in Manchester.
Information Publishing, Distance learning, Ecommerce and Porn all pushed all the technological boundaries and in Silicon Valley Google, Facebook and Twitter had yet to be born but their founders were certainly making their way to college there.
I’ve seen one change after another, one new software after another and I’ve ridden the changes and tried all the softwares, keeping some, abandoning others and I’ve also helped market hundreds of other businesses online, mentoring business owners or offering ‘done for you” services.
I worked with people with all different kinds of businesses, from cataract curing doctors, to world famous cement experts, to fertility specialists. Throw in your regular sprinkling of consultants, coaches, authors and “real world” businesses plus a few property and stock-market investors, I quickly learned “How To Market ANY Business Online”, the name of my third book. Get yourself a copy of “How To Market ANY Business Online” free by clicking that link.
22 years later, I’m still making a full time living online, while living most of the time in Greece; a dream 25 years in the making. I had to go through a bereavement to be brave enough to do that, but being able to earn a living anywhere there is an internet connection certainly helped.
My daughter Phoebe has her own YouTube channel accelerating fast towards 22,000 views and she got her first social media freelance job from that, she also hires out her video editing skills, all learned from YouTube videos naturally.
Nelson is a DJ and music producer himself, and ironically has just set up his decks and DJ’ing is having a vinyl revival!
So…what’s the one thing I wish I’d done earlier that would have grown my success faster? I wish I’d invested in joining online forums & Masterminds, going to more events and paying mentors to help me.
I had two small children for most of the period 1998 to around 2010 and for much of that I was running a hotel as well of my coaching business and for some of it, I was a single mum.
It was not lack of money necessarily, but lack of time and ability to get away and stay for 4 days in hotels around the world, plus flying time and jetlag recovery time.
Looking back, I can see that this is the one thing that held me back because while I wasn’t there, the boys (with wives to look after the kids) and the single girls were Masterminding, getting one to one advice and help, making strategic partnerships and moving further faster than I ever could trying to find out everything at home, on my own.
Now I often travel to events because it’s not about what you learn, it’s all about how you meet. In between, I’m a member of several high level online Mastermind groups, often having paid thousands of dollars for the training product that gave me entry, and some I pay a monthly or annual fee just to stay a member of.
Why do I do that? Why do you need to do that too?
Because the relationships I make and the wealthy of knowledge I get to call on in those forums is PRICELESS!.
The internet changes fast. Right now we are going through a massive revolution as big as the change from internet 1.0 to internet 2.0, when we moved from static brochure type websites to content driven blogs and social media dominating business online.
Right now, we are all seeing a massive shift from desktop to mobile devices, even the grannies are all on iPads – mainly because they can pinch to make everything bigger.
You can pinch to make the BUY button bigger!
That’s huge. That’s a game-changer.
As is the change I see in my grown up kids – neither of them is using email unless absolutely forced. They get messages through Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and expect companies to communicate with them there.
That’s even bigger.
In two and a half years, Phoebe will be in the biggest buying demographic online – the 25 to 35 year olds.
How are you going to sell your product or service to all those millions of young adults if they are not opening your emails?
I know how. I have future-proofed my business.
While most businesses don’t even have a website that captures leads, let alone a coherent social media plan, I’m years ahead and ready to sell to my young adults and their millions of friends globally.
If you want to be ready too, you need to join my Clicks & Leads Academy today.
Find out more here http://ClicksAndLeads.Academy
Join a lively community of people from singing teachers to Norwegian train enthusiasts who are all learning how to reach their customers, all of them, from 18 years of age to 80.
Enjoy the ability to reach out anytime, anyplace, via my handy mobile App, that connects you to our community and to ME specifically.
Get your questions answered, your doubt quelled, feedback on your products or services or marketing or ads, pretty much instantly. Even if you have a personal or financial question, I’ve got you covered with a private coaching area just for this.
I’m there to help, no matter what your business is, no matter what your background is, no matter how experienced or how new you are to all this.
If my daughter Phoebe can get her dream social media job within 6 months of making some YouTube videos on makeup, what could YOUR business do?
Click here to find out more but don’t delay, as the site fills up, the membership fee rises, as they say “delay is increasingly expensive”!
http://ClicksAndLeads.Academy