Shortly after I sold my business to my former partner I had was in a transitional period in my life and didn’t know exactly what avenue to pursue with my online marketing career.

I knew that I wanted to continue this gig and frankly dreaded the thought of ever going back to work for anyone. Although I know I make a great employee that everyone loves, I had fallen in love with making my own hours(even though sometimes those hours were all night)

I am not now an offline marketing consultant and focus on businesses in Dallas, although I obviously could help any local business anywhere.

Lessons Learned and Learning of Offline Consulting

One of the initial problems for me was finding the clients and secondly SELLING them my services.

I have since learned quite a bit about my strategy that was totally flawed, but I was led to believe it was easier than this by many of the training programs I was following.

The problem I found was that all of these marketers share testimonials of their students that did “5000 dollars in 3 months” and other similar scenarios.

I would like to believe that this is true and very possible, but what they fail to share with you is that these success stories are very RARE(if not a lie).

Some of these people already had networks of people they could tap and immediately get a couple of clients. In other instances these individuals came from a background in sales and thus presenting their services comes with some ease.

And in other cases some of these people already had years of marketing experience and just turned their efforts to local businesses.

These people were not people like I was and had no sales experience and a small network. I would imagine this is true for a most people that get into offline marketing.

Now things are different.

I have built a huge network of people and businesses. I have compiled a pretty large list of successful marketing campaigns for myself as well as for my clients.

And I am finally able to set up processes and procedures for my business.

I can now sit across from a potential client with confidence and offer my services because I know I can help them in this rough economy.

This was not possible in 3 months. IT IS VERY POSSIBLE for some people. I have met a couple of them. I know some of them and call them friends, but I now know they are the exception.

Best yet, I don’t feel like a failure because I was not able to do the same. That was probably the worst feeling in the world.

Finally, take everything I just said as it applies to Internet  Marketing Training as a whole and multiply it by 100.

The headlines you read and the claims are in many cases BULLSHIT! Don’t believe them. Don’t waste your money! I have. Many many times.

If possible immediately close out the tabs on those sales letters, and popup, popunders, chat screens offering dollar trials.

There are some legitimate people that you can learn from. It took me awhile to find them, but they are there. I will share as I have time. In some cases they will be affiliate offers, but they genuinely are good people and good training.

I realize that I may have totally strayed all over the place in this post, but what I typed up is what ultimately came out, so that is all I have for today.

To your success,
Teevee

PS
I still do affiliate marketing. But I am sure you figured that out already.

I super excited about my new baby! Sometimes I feel like such proud father.

In the last 3 years or so I have literally created and launched over 60 sites (all in wordpress) and over 200 installations of WordPress in some way or another.

My very first site was designed from scratch in HTML and Dreamweaver. Hold on, I think I am going to cry. Sniffle.

I still have that site on my hard drive right now and look at it from time to time just to remember how far I have come. And to remember how far technology has come.

Once I found WordPress I became an instant addict. In fact I was real close to buying the domain WPCrackAddict.com and WPPimp.com because I feel like it sometimes. No worries though… I opted for WPProphet.com instead.

I have my limitations though. I am by no means a programmer, in fact I lean more toward designer. And I have never wanted to get too deep into the code.

Numerous clients have been trained by me on how to best use their site once I was completed designing and implementing their brand new spiffy site. I have done this over 20 times.

Then it CLICKED!

Why don’t I just create a membership site and give them access to the beginners level for free as clients! YES!

And then I thought to myself, “Self, you’re an expert dude and could create a very robust site”  (Yes I talk myself like this)

I even went out of my way to buy wptraining.co. I felt like such a champion. YAY!

Fast forward to yesterday(over a year later) and finally decided to put this bad boy together for myself…. and now wptraining.co is not so smart.

I am sure many of you SEO and Marketing peoples were shaking your head when you read that.

It wasn’t a smart idea and it was pretty clear. So now I have a better domain name that tickles me with many ways to market it and stand out from the crowd.

Whew! It’s been a wild crazy 36 hours since I originally launched it but is still obviously closed. I will launch it once I have a couple of levels and

When I originally launched this site it was with the intent of doing some affiliate marketing with it.

I wanted to recommend those products that I felt had benefited me in some way to my mental learning as well as to the technical execution of my marketing.

You see to the left a list of products that I am recommending. I have used them and believe in them. I will make a commission from them if you decide to use them.

My reviews are genuine and I can tell you that without a doubt I have used them extensively and believe in their quality. In some cases I even have come to know the developers of the product.

For example, I have become pretty good friend with David Walsh. His little product , Source Control, really shook my brain when it comes to oursourcing and made me rethink my strategy on how I hired and trained my virtual assistants.

I now am on board with him and any product he creates. He is a mad man with genius quality execution.

I will also be creating review videos inside the products sharing my insight and in some cases may be sharing the inside of these products and how they function.

My favorite toy right now is WPTwin. It virtually will allow you to clone your wordpress site, all the plugins, theme(s), settings, and EVERYTHING else and restore it somewhere else.

Just last week I launched 3 sites in one night. It was truly unbelievable and gratifying that a product does what it was designed to do!

So be on the lookout and until next time… KEEP HUSTLING!

I have been finding my way. My path.

This online marketing journey has been a very interesting thing. AND HUGE!

Since I last wrote I sold my first company. The same company that allowed me to get an education and get my StreetMBA degree.

It was a mutual agreement. My partner, Brad, offered me a nice payout. I was no longer contributing to the company. My tasks were more on the technical side.

I developed the site front to back. And this was before wordpress was near as powerful as it is today. I learned HTML and installed amember. It was a crazy long night, I still remember it like it was yesterday.

My daughters were laying beside me. Asleep. This long night, and many others that followed, allow me to do things with them that I could only dream of before.

Since the sale, I have struggled to find myself. My identity in this marketing world.

I went on to find out that my passion is in the nuts and bolts of marketing. The SEO. The site building. The relationship building. I am not so much a product creator…. at least not yet.

I am not a Local Business Online Marketing Consultant. There is a ton of benefits to this, yet also a ton of new skill sets that I have had to learn.

Outsourcing is still part of my business. It has to be. There is no way I could possible do it by myself.

There is so much I have learned in the past 2 years, but especially in the past 12 months that I have been wanting to share. Unfortunately I couldn’t share them on my personal site and then remembered that I had this site and it would be a perfect place to write and share.

So stay tuned.

I have been wanting to post more on this topic and this little video came across my facebook wall.

If you still want to learn more take a moment to go check out John Jonas live webinar on Facebook.

John Jonas Facebook Webinar

I plan on on posting more real soon. But I came across this and had to share.

My business has really shifted in the last several months to very interesting place and plan on sharing how I now use outsourcing as a means to accomplish my tasks.

I no longer have my phillipino, but she is anxious to come back on board… and I am anxious to rehire her.

More on that soon.

I am heavily pushing myself to outsource the tasks that I truly don’t want to do.

So I had a new local business client that I just picked up recently and needed a site completely designed and coded in wordpress. If you aren’t sure why wordpress, remind me to write about that topic soon.

My graphic design skills are above average and have made some decent money in the past designing sites and graphics for other clients, but I wanted to start NOT doing it.

So I went to odesk and posted that I needed a designer (and coder in one if possible)

Immediately I started to get bombarded with applications. The prices ranged from $2-30 an hour.

I stayed away from the cheapest and the most expensive. However I found myself hovering around 4-5 dollars an hour. There was one particular applicant that had very little experience on odesk but his work was amazing from the Phillipines.

I looked at his portfolio and was blown away. He was a young guy and inexpensive. I decided to take a chance on him.

This by far has been my worst experience outsourcing to date. Let me explain.

The kid (as I began to reference to him) was obviously talented. But something that was made obvious was that he seemed to lack any type of understanding on how important communication was.

He would go days without any communication nor work on odesk. He would then get on and do some impressive work and not respond to any of the previous emails I had send him.

I got sick of it and fired him. I don’t know about you, but I hate to give bad reviews even when they deserve them. But I did.

He emailed me within 15 minutes and said he was sorry but did not know there was a deadline. GOOD POINT! I had never told him the deadline. I was very flaky in that regard. DAMNIT!

I still needed this project completed and he already had shown me the work. I told him I would create another project and hire him with the understanding that he would keep up-to-date on his progress. He agreed.

Needless to say… I FIRED HIM AGAIN!

He literally went a week without working on the project. He initially gave me some good feedback but then fell back into the same pattern.

LESSON?

Clear deadlines and expectations! From the outset I will make sure to let anyone I hire my policies on communication and progress. One day of failing to follow through on this will lead to immediate termination.

I did this immediately with the next person I hired. The project was completed in 2 days and saw immediate results once I made my new hire.

It is finally complete and I am a happy man. This by far was my worst experience outsourcing, but ultimately just have myself to blame.