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As many of my long-term readers know, I went through a Rich Schefren coaching program back in 2006. The reason I originally joined was because of what Rich presented in the Internet Business Manifesto.

Unless you have been deleting all your subscriptions to Internet marketing email lists then you probably already know that today Rich is opening the doors to his latest personal coaching program -

The Guided Profit System

I wrote a notice to my newsletter about this program and I’m going to reproduce it below for my blog readers who are not on my newsletter so you can benefit from my experience with Rich’s training.

Before I do that let me be clear about one thing -

Rich’s coaching is only for a certain type of person because it’s cost prohibitive for many, HOWEVER, his resources like the Manifesto and the report he released last week, The Entrepreneurial Emergency, and the audios and teleconferences he releases, are all free and present great ideas. Yes there is a sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden sales pitch, but the core message can be taken away without spending a dime.

If the coaching program offer today from Rich is annoying you because you are sick of hearing about it or you think it’s way too over priced, just focus on what you can learn and implement from the free stuff.

For those of you in a position to invest in business coaching I give a strong endorsement of Rich’s programs. Rich is the only person I ever gave $5,000 of my money to for coaching. It’s worth it just because Rich is so generous with his personal time - you will definitely get a chance to talk to him directly if you join his program.

With that out of the way, here’s what I have to say about the Guided Profit System -

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Willie Crawford posted this photo up on his blog. It’s a snapshot he took at the Las Vegas networking event attended by a bunch of people, including myself and Rich Schefren, the target of my tom foolery in the photo…

Rich definitely didn’t see that coming and probably hasn’t seen the photo yet, but now he will .

Rich may not have noticed my joking around (he was in a serious discussion at the time so he had an excuse) but in general he’s definitely one of the best guys I know of at predicting the future and seeing the big picture when it comes to business.

Right now he’s completing the final touches on his next report, the latest incarnation of the ideas he began with the Internet Business Manifesto, which as I explained to my newsletter subscribers, is the best free report I have read - it had the most impact on my business of anything I have studied online.

If you haven’t got the Manifesto yet, now is the perfect time to download it and read it in preparation for what is to come.

Download The Internet Business Manifesto

Did You Miss The Call?

A couple of days ago I was included on a call with Rich Schefren and a bunch of his previous clients, all of whom are tremendously successful Internet business owners.

If you missed the call you can listen to the streaming version here -

The Internet Business Manifesto Teleseminar

The call was a special series of expert-only interviews, where Rich interrogated each of us by asking the following four questions -

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This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.

In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here - Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.

In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here - Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.

In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).

Starting From The Beginning

To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).

My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.

To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).

My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.

Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.

My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.

I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.

My First Taste of Success

One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players - but it did.

Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.

If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook - a reason for people to come back to the site every day - well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).

My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.

If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see - How to make money from your website using advertising.

The Empire Starts To Grow

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It’s Monday morning in Australia and I’m about to have a group meeting at my house with my team to begin work on something new.

For most of my Internet business career I worked solo - and I really mean solo.

I built my website myself, created marketing materials like flyers and posters, promoted my websites, located and managed sponsors and provided customer and sales support. The only thing I didn’t do was actually provide the services, I had contractors do the editing when it came to BetterEdit.com my proofreading business and I had writers write the content on my first successful online venture, MTGParadise.com (although I did a lot of writing myself on that site too).

It’s amazing how far your enthusiasm and work ethic can take you in business. I’m proud of my achievements as a solo entrepreneur and I’m amazed at what I did manage to get done by myself. However after about 7 years of working without any support I realized that I couldn’t keep it up for ever, plus there was another pressing reason to get help - I had reached a ceiling point in my growth. Your business can only get so big if it’s just you doing the work.

With typical timing, it was around this time that Rich Schefren came to town with his first ground breaking report, the Internet Business Manifesto. I read Rich’s report and found myself agreeing with everything he said. I wasn’t exactly shocked by the revelation as some Internet marketers were when they first read the report. I knew I was working too hard and doing too much by myself, my problem was lack of action to change the situation.

Things finally did change in 2006. With my blogging business growing and my cashflow increasing I knew I could realistically outsource tasks to other people. With a looming trip overseas I decided I to do two things -

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Most of you know that I’m in Rich Schefren’s Strategic Profits coaching group, which I pay $397 a month for. Rich is my mentor and coach and has been instrumental in helping move my business, BetterEdit.com, away from dependency on me for all the work, to building a system that now only requires I do about four hours a week to manage (yes, a four-hour-workweek - Hi Tim!). What’s really amazing is the business has continued to grow without me and this financial year (ending June 2007 in Australia) it’s set to do over six figures in revenue for the first time!

I originally signed up to Rich’s program mostly due to one reason, his Internet Business Manifesto, a free report that summed up nicely the exact situation I was in in my business (incidentally, I modeled my own Blog Profits Blueprint document based on Rich’s manifesto because I thought it was that good). If you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE take the time to read the manifesto if you currently run your own Internet business or intend to. Click here to get the manifesto.

Rich’s New Report - The Attention Age Doctrine

Rich is about to shake up the industry again starting with the release of his latest report titled The Attention Age Doctrine. Since I’m in his coaching program I have heard Rich talk about this, so I can reveal to you a little about his goals and motivations behind releasing the report.

Rich has a serious issue with the way conferences are currently conducted in our industry. He’s tired of the sales pitch, the lack of quality content and the current formula used at Internet marketing conferences. I totally agree with him and while I still enjoy attending conferences, I also hate the sales pitch and watching so many people fall for the sugar rush, handing over thousands of dollars for a package they probably won’t even do anything with.

Rich believes in disruption marketing where you enter a market with an idea or method disruptive to what is currently the de-facto standard way of doing something. He’s releasing this report as a shock to the established conference system and in typical Rich style, he’s not just talking about it, he’s actually doing something.

Rich has put together a conference called The Acceleration Seminar set for mid-July 2007, which is a pitch-free, 100% content conference, including speakers like Jay Abraham, David Kolbe and rumor has it, the four-hour-workweek man himself, Tim Ferriss (Rich and Tim have a lot in common in how they go about building businesses and have struck up a friendship recently).

Anyway, it’s not my job to sell you on this, but as always Rich has my backing given the quality of information I have received from him so far and how he has helped change how I do business online.

If you want to be first in line to get yourself a copy of his latest report, The Attention Age Doctrine, you can sign-up here (it’s FREE).

http://www.strategicprofits.com/doctrine/

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