Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

How My Partnership With Gideon Shalwick Generated A Quarter Of A Million Dollars In Under 12 Months

When I first started this blog the Internet was younger and many of the current big success story online companies had only recently risen to dominance.

I was fascinated with the background history behind the companies that featured heavily during the dot-com boom, some of which survived post the bust like eBay, Paypal and Amazon.com, and others that had fallen far from their glory days, like Napster.

I read biographical books that covered the people behind these companies and enjoyed hearing how the initial concepts were sparked and what path led from idea to multi-million, sometimes even multi-billion dollar companies.

You can read reviews of some of the books in the archives of this blog, including the PayPal Wars, the The Perfect Store – Inside eBay, Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money and All the Rave – The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster.

Two People Are Better Than One

I can’t remember where I read it first, but somewhere I recall hearing that many really successful companies, both offline and online, were started as partnerships. Two people, for all kinds of reasons, are able to achieve more than an individual.

The stories behind some of the big Internet success stories reinforces this idea, as is the case with Google, Microsoft and Apple. There are two founders who drive the vision behind the company, taking it to good performer and beyond to where most companies never go, to industry leader and even cultural phenomenon.

On a smaller scale, many of the people I interview in my podcasts on this blog often are part of a two-person partnership of some kind. One person may be in the limelight more than the other, but behind the scenes, there are two, who complement and motivate each other to get things done.

Up until 2007 I was a solo-entrepreneur, and I liked it that way. I read this fact about partnerships resulting in big success stories online as interesting, but it wasn’t compelling enough for me to run and find a partner. I had no interest in sharing my profits, or needing to negotiate with someone else to decide what to do. I enjoyed my independence as the only captain steering my ship.

Of course there are success stories of individuals creating massive companies too, so I wasn’t concerned that my desire to work alone might hurt my potential for success.

Despite my lack of intention, I have managed to find myself in a successful partnership that will very likely dominate the direction of my business for years to come. It’s worthwhile explaining how this happened, and what it has done for my business, so you can decide whether a partnership could benefit you too.

Random Strangers

One of the wonderful things about life is that you never know what’s coming up next. The only constant is change. This can be a terribly frightening idea if you become attached to something for fear of loss (relationships, objects, places, people, life itself), but also wonderfully liberating because it means whatever you don’t like about your life now will change, it’s a guarantee.

In some circumstances what appears as the randomness of change means you are completely oblivious to what comes next on a conscious level, so when it arrives, it’s a surprise. This idea can make you live in a permanent state of excitement or of course fear, depending how you look at life.

I had no idea that in 2007 I’d attend a typical pitch-fest Internet marketing event, which for all intents and purposes wasn’t anything special, except I met my future business partner there, Gideon Shalwick.

Many people have asked how Gideon and I met, so here’s the story in brief…

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I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.

These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.

Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -

• You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
• You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
• You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
• You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients

Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.

My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.

The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.

Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions

I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.

The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.

So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.

First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities

One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.

Here’s some examples of how you might do this -

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Back in August of 2005 I wrote an article that outlined what a typical day in my life was like. I linked to the post in my about page as I see it as a subject people are very interested in – what’s it like to live each day when you make money from the Internet?

You can read the original article here – A Day in the Life of an Internet Entrepreneur (August 2005)

I wrote that article after just over half a year of blogging and it represented what my life was like at the time. Now, four years later, things have changed and it’s time to update what a typical day in my life is like in August of 2009.

My Business Is Different

At the time I wrote the original day in the life piece, my main business and income source was BetterEdit.com, a proofreading service I started and built up over several years.

One of the major roles I performed to maintain the business was controlling the email communication system, connecting each proofreading project with an editor and providing customer support. This role was literally the main “work” in my life back then, taking several hours per day on average.

I eliminated the email management role when I hired an assistant, my good friend Angela, who to this day is still in charge of the day-to-day operations of BetterEdit and is also admin manager for my current business too. If you’ve ever sent me an email, chances are you have communicated with her.

I still have to deal with email of course, but the time pressure is no longer there and I only deal with emails that are about things only I can deal with. About 80% of my email is filtered away by Angela, meaning I never see it. She either responds with the appropriate template we have set up, or answers using her knowledge of my business and her supreme customer service skills.

If you want to know more about the systems we use to handle customer service, you can read the articles here

In 2007 I sold BetterEdit, leaving me to focus just on my blogging and information publishing enterprises. I also sold off all my non-blogging related websites, narrowing my focus to the aspects of my business I really wanted to grow.

I Don’t Do The Same Things Anymore

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Warning: At the start of this video is a special introduction from someone who, well, doesn’t share some of the same values I do, so please be warned – he’s a bit confronting and his language is a little rough around the edges.

After the intro from my guest, I take over and present a simple lesson with the help of some expensive tuna fish. Press play to begin watching…

I recently made a purchase of a rather expensive tin of tuna fish, which triggered a thought in my mind regarding the high prices people are willing to pay for certain items that can be obtained in other formats for much cheaper, and why they are willing to spend more. I use the example of premium tinned fish in this case, but the principle can be applied across almost all product and service categories.

I’ve never liked competing based on price because as a small business owner I don’t have economies of scale that you enjoy as your business gets larger thanks to efficiencies in production or resource use.

The pricing model I’ve always sought is some form of unique perception in the marketplace, which results in the possibility to charge a premium price for a specialized level of service or insight. This is an outcome that is very attainable for information publishers, as what you provide is unique to what everyone else provides, even if you are talking about the same thing.

Watch the video for more details. I apologize in advance if the humor in the introduction doesn’t gel with you!

I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the very first email list I subscribed to was David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating free newsletter. At the time I didn’t realize David D. was a nom de plume (fake name) and that the real person behind the newsletter was Eben Pagan, who I would later come to know as a leading Internet marketer.

In more recent years I’ve studied Eben’s work extensively, however it was my experience on his alter ego’s email newsletter all those years ago that I count as one of the most beneficial in my own career as an Internet marketer.

The reason why the Double Your Dating email newsletter was so valuable to me was because it was the only time I can remember studying an email list from the frame of two very important perception points in a completely “raw” state of mind -

1. As a customer who was suffering the pain that the newsletter purported to help cure
2. As a newbie Internet marketer studying how to make money online

When I first subscribed to Double Your Dating I was a young single guy struggling to figure out how to meet and date girls. I subscribed because the sales copy “spoke” to me. The benefits struck an emotional cord with my own desires. It was as if this person understood where I was coming from and where I wanted to go.

Like many young men at the same time as I was looking to gain experience with women, I was also looking for ways to make money and establish myself as a business man. In this case, the Internet was my chosen landscape to build my fortunes and I was studying what those who already had made money online did to build their wealth.

Given Eben Pagan created one of the most effective (and substantial – each email was MASSIVE) email marketing sequences in existence today, the foundation for a twenty million dollar dating empire, I had happened upon one of the best resources to study, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

Unfortunately in some ways, from that point forward as I became more familiar with Internet marketing, I found it increasingly difficult to fully engage with any online studying materials because I was constantly analyzing the “how” of what they did (the meta-analysis), rather than engaging with the “what” of what was being taught.

The Customer Avatar

I’ve been going through the recordings of Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude training, a high level coaching program for entrepreneurs who want to take their business to greater success.

One of the fundamentals that Eben teaches is to truly understand where your customer is coming from. This is not just knowing the needs and wants of your ideal customer, but understanding who they are, how they live, who they associate with, what their general attitude to life is – AND, more importantly, what are the underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take.

To facilitate a deeper understanding of your customer, Eben teaches a concept known as the Customer Avatar.

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