How To Profit Helping People Become Famous – Interview With Laura Roeder
Make sure you look out for Laura’s cat – she features in this interview too.
This interview is a great story, which for many online entrepreneurs will seem very familiar – as it was for me.
Laura is young, but she’s not young in terms of how long she’s been running an online business. Like many people who got started online, her first “business” was freelance web design, however today she’s doing something a little more unique.
Laura has various products, but one area she specializes in is helping other people become famous in their niche using social media.
During this interview you will hear a great example of a podiatrist (foot doctor) who followed Laura’s advice and basically become that famous online foot doctor guy, leading to all kinds of cool things happening to him.
I recommend you listen to this story if you’re thinking of leaving your job so you can get a feel of how a person can progress from one business model to the next, all the while making money. You may not have your ideal business in mind yet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start one. Like Laura, who just decided she couldn’t do the full time work thing, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and make a change.
How Exactly Does Laura Make People Famous?
During the second half of this interview Laura explains how exactly she became good at making people famous, including how she uses tools like Twitter to accomplish this. She believes in the power of personality, which is something she runs her business by, with most of her clients choosing to work with her because they like her. That might seem obvious, but there’s a powerful marketing lesson in there too, which Laura subtly explains.
On an interesting side note – one of Laura’s best friends was a star for a full season of the show “Heroes” and Laura ended up helping her develop an online presence. You can hear that story along with lots of other interesting insights, inside this great interview. Just click play above to begin listening.
Laura is about to open her Backstage Pass To Twitter program, and you can download her 7-page report –
Why Being an “Expert” is Making You Useless on Twitter
(Avoid These Five Well-Meaning Twitter Mistakes)
If you want to learn more about Laura check out LauraRoeder.com.
Social Media Mistakes: Are You Forgetting Your Fundamentals?
It’s interesting as a marketer to watch how the Internet has changed over the last ten years, especially what has changed for solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.
When I started investigating how to make money online in the late nineties, most strategies were e-commerce focused, or built specifically to take advantage of the dot-com bubble.
You either set up a website to sell something physical like Amazon.com did for books, or you set up some kind of service and focused solely on user-acquisition, since most entrepreneurs were more interested in growing fast rather than making profits. The logic being you could figure out a way to make money after you built a huge user-base, but you usually get bought out way before that happens, so you exit rich, even if the company doesn’t make a dime.
I was keen to cash in on the dot-com bubble myself, though being in Brisbane Australia, not exactly a hot-bed for Internet start-ups at the time, it wasn’t easy.
I remember calling a mastermind meeting at my friend’s house to discuss opportunities. We had some good ideas, and some bad ones, but nothing really cemented together. My friends went off and started or continued their careers, while I went back to fiddling around with different web projects in my spare time.
Back then there was no blogging, or social media, or even Google. AdSense and Adwords didn’t exist yet, and affiliate programs were only just becoming readily available in different niches.
That’s why so many people had to focus on selling physical items using online stores. You could make money with advertising or information publishing, but most people didn’t have a clue how to do it. There weren’t courses or all the free information we have about these subjects today to help guide you. You had to figure it out yourself.
Fundamentals Stay The Same
As I’ve watched things change over the previous years I’ve noticed a few key fundamentals that haven’t change, namely –
Podcast: Maria Andros Reveals Her Tactics For Driving Traffic With Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.
Download the MP3 [ 58 Minutes - 53 MB]
Click Here For Instant Access To More FREE Stuff From Maria Andros
Gideon Shalwick interviewed the video marketing queen, Maria Andros, in this fantastic podcast.
Let’s state the obvious – social media is HOT right now and as marketers we are looking for ways to leverage these communication tools to further our business growth. Maria Andros was clever enough to see the opportunity early and cemented herself as a leader in the field of social media marketing.
Maria has taught thousands of people how to better leverage websites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for traffic, but not just traffic – for money as well.
It’s easy to see the potential in these sites to tap into large audiences, but do you know to convert those people into customers and members for your products and services? Maria can help you understand exactly how to do this.
Listen to this interview with Maria Andros and you will learn -
- How Maria got her start online (she worked for ten years in a completely different field before moving online)
- What are the top three social media services based on traffic growth
- How you can use your videos to get on the first page of Google search results
- How Maria begins her videos to capture attention with just one sentence
- What are “Long Tail” keywords, and how do they relate to getting traffic
- How can your Twitter bio help you get more followers
- Maria’s top twitter tips for building a huge following
- How Maria integrates Facebook into her marketing system
Maria works very hard to give away lots of great free training materials as a means to introduce herself to people by giving first, a philosophy I wholeheartedly endorse. One of the things that really stand out for me about Maria, is her focus on mindset and attitude. She’s extremely positive and motivated about getting results for other people, because she knows that will help her to achieve her goals.
After listening to the video, if what Maria talks about resonates with you, you can opt-in here for some more free videos from her –
http://socialmediatrafficblueprint.com/
A big thanks to Gideon as well for arranging and conducting this interview.
Enjoy!
What Is The Right Way To Grow Your Twitter Following?
I sent an email out to my newsletter before I went into launch mode for Membership Site Mastermind that was promoting the virtues of Twitter. I was hoping to introduce some new people to Twitter and increase my followers with the enticement of a behind the scenes look at the launch I was about to do.
Here is the first part of the message I sent out –
Twitter is a service that lets you communicate with other people using up to 140 character messages.
The best way I can describe it is like micro-blogging combined with instant messaging.
You’re not going to “get” it until you try it, so I’ll stop trying to describe how it works and you just go use it.
You can sign up and begin following me from my Twitter page here (it doesn’t cost anything) –
Go to that link, click the “Join today” button and then begin following my updates (or “tweets” as they are called).
You can then start sending messages and following other people too.
If you want more help, see the video from Gideon Shalwick on how to use Twitter –
Why Should You Care About Twitter?
Twitter is another contact point with your audience and as such can help you in all the ways that knowing other human beings is beneficial.
You can use it to…
- follow important people in your industry
- influence your tribe
- send traffic to your blog or website
- sell your products and services
- sell other people’s products and services
- keep up to date with friends and family
- participate in the conversation
- become famous
- and more…
Although hesitant initially, after Twittering for fun at first, I started to realize how incredible Twitter is for business too.
Simply put, you can’t afford not to use this tool if you want to stay current and be a participant in your market and not just a consumer or observer.
Participation leads to insights, which leads to you developing a more intimate knowledge of your industry, and more importantly, a more direct influence over the important people in your industry, namely –
- Other experts/mavens
- Your audience
To put this into practical perspective, I use Twitter to send traffic to my blog posts. I use Twitter to promote affiliate products (I’ve done thousands in sales already). I use Twitter to stay connected with other top Internet marketers and to connect with my people – my followers.
It’s a great tool, but like all things requires work to get going, so you should start now.
What was interesting was the feedback I received after I sent this email.
Dominate Your Market: How Self Contained Communities Create Permanent Barriers To Entry
Some of my early readers may recall that I was a Magic: The Gathering card player as a teenager. No, that’s not dungeons and dragons or role playing or anything like that. It’s closer to poker combined with chess with a little bit of lord of the rings story telling thrown in. It’s a “mind sport” as far as the PR people at Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces the game, are concerned, although I’m not sure that’s the most accurate label.
Whatever the case, “Magic” as we call it, is a serious game for some people, and besides the first two or so years where I played for fun, most of the latter years in my career as a card gamer, were about trying to win tournaments.
Tournament Magic is big, with millions of dollars given away in a pro tour that travels around the world. Some guys even play the game professionally as their full time job. I never won big money as a gamer (my highlight was representation on the 98 Australian national team at the World Championships), but I did get to visit Japan, Singapore and the USA thanks to gaming. I look back on those years as a lot of fun.
Magic Cards Are Money
Magic cards, like baseball cards, are collectible. Each card has a value, and for a long time I made my lunch money by trading and selling the cards I won at tournaments. As a typical entrepreneur, I often enjoyed the business of running a little card shop as a teenager more so than playing the game itself (unless I was winning a tournament of course!).
Wizards of the Coast (let’s just call them “Wizards”) made some very smart moves with Magic. It became a serious cash cow for them.
In case you are wondering how they keep the cash coming in, each year Wizards produces new cards so the pool of cards people play with at tournaments is constantly cycling over. This makes the playing field very dynamic, but it was also a brilliant business decision as they keep making new cards that players need to purchase in order to stay up to date.
It’s fair to say that effectively, Wizards produced a new form of currency, at least within the realm of their customer’s universe. As long as the cards have value to players of the game, they can print money simply by printing new sets of cards.
Wizards Goes One Better
I thought that Wizards had a good thing going already, but when the Internet came along, the did something really clever – they ported Magic over to the virtual world.
Online Magic is pretty much the same as offline, or real world Magic. You challenge people from all over the world to a game, you can play in tournaments to win more cards and cash and you can buy and trade cards virtually with other people.
The kicker is that the online digital cards have roughly the same value as the physical cards. You can buy packs of cards for the same price, but instead of receiving little pieces of cardboard with pictures on them, you receive digital cards with pictures on them that are stored on computers.
In other words, Wizards can now print money online, with the cost of production and distribution drastically reduced. All I can say is that is one heck of a good business model.
