This is Mike Long… and his story.

Prologue Part 1:

June 14, 2006, I register 10milliondollarday.com because I intend for the
website I’m about to launch to do $10 Million Dollars in sales in 1 Day.

Prologue Part 2:

October 3, 2006, the $14-million dollar day:

The knock came at my door at 8:15 A.M. I was still groggy and half delirious from months on end of almost zero-sleep days.

I cracked the door open and Frank Kern stood there, grinning ear-to-ear, cheap sunglasses obscuring his eyes. “Wooo! I live for this! Let’s make $10-Million Dollars!”

I could have been annoyed. But I greatly appreciated that Frank was the one of only a handful of others who really believed besides David Mills. And not just by his words, but by his actions, that we would actually do it.

I actually cracked a smile…

My partners were without a doubt brilliant. Brad Fallon, the mile-a-minute fast talker who never saw a deal he didn’t like, and Andy Jenkins, the nose-to-the-grindstone yeoman who had helped dozens of folks conquer top SEO rankings.

But the fact remained that they had only prepared for a maximum of 300 clients, while my goal was for us to transform 1000 or more people’s lives forever, and vault them into the search rankings of Google, hopefully for good.

Frank, well over 6 feet tall, his previously mushy body now ripped from months of dedicated surfing, strode through the door with the energy of a young bull.

His energy was in part due to the fact that he had sidestepped much of the “work” of this launch in favor of surfing, while I had taken the real bull by the horns…dealing with the swarm of affiliates and partners darting and diving every which way…

…It cost me more than sleep. Hopefully it would all be worth it, not just for us, but also for the hundreds or possibly thousands of members I hoped would join us that day.

Now I didn’t resent Frank one bit for not working crazy hours every day. He had his own life, his own family and his own websites going on, and besides, we needed him to be fresh.

Frank had already created a number of very successful launch events, including three separate million dollar successes, including one with his partner Ed Dale on Underachiever Mastery, an online marketing product, one totally on his own with Serializer, an online marketing training event, and one with Neil Strauss, Matt Kadish and his cousin Trey Smith on Annihilation Method, a relationship advice product.

(I’ll explain the connection between Annihilation Engine and Annihilation Method before this is all over.)

Plus Frank had created his own niche website serving up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of dog training advice all based on a steady drumbeat of event after event.

At around the same time I had been at ground zero for several very successful launch events myself. I was there for the Traffic Secrets million-dollar day was John Reese’s magnum opus, based on a brilliant set of moves that John formulated over 5-years of intense focus. And it totally changed the way folks looked at online marketing forever…

…Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula event followed for me a little over a year later, connecting the dots on a brilliant career that Jeff had enjoyed selling financial advice and helping others, including John, Frank and I with great ideas for launches. While PLF didn’t break the million-dollar mark it did bring in just under $600,000. I was there too.

And David Mills and I had built MTGInsider, a soft launched niche site for Magic: the Gathering strategy advice, where I’d honed my skills in mini launch after mini launch, collecting thousands of dollars a month, while enjoying more testimonials than customers, because so many of our prospects succeeded with our free materials, and because so many of our customers succeeded again and again.

David’s advice to me during the Traffic Secrets and PLF launches was, as was typically the case with him, invaluable.

Each of these situations were awesome heart-pounding, fist pumping triumphs that led to massive profits for Frank, John, Jeff, David and me, but also for hundreds if not thousands of clients.

Within a few hours of Frank walking in the front door of my La Jolla beach house the online marketing world would never be the same.

All together, the experience that Frank, David and I had, as well as the experience and effort of a number of other folks including Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon, John Reese, Kelly Felix and many, many others came together to create a truly magical event in the history of online marketing…

…Something that has never been duplicated:

The $14-million-dollar day.

But it wasn’t as if Frank just woke up on that bright October morning and just rolled over to my house, and then we received a $14 million dollar paycheck…

The story began years before, for each of the players involved.

As you’ll soon discover, this wasn’t a story of random happenstance, but of intense and careful planning. It was a matter of winning in preparation.

As is the case with many stories, there are a number of places that I could begin…

So Here’s the scoop…

“ Annihilation Engine.”

The Rags to riches story behind the $14-Million Dollar Day.”

(by mike long)

Chapter 1:

Shortly after I graduated from James Madison University, I started a game store that I would run for five years, called “The End.”

I started it because I was an accomplished, professional “Magic: the Gathering” player. This is a strategy card game for self-declared nerds like myself, and my good friend David Mills.

There were tournaments all over the world and I was flown in to play, where the top prize was anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. Dave and I were ranked #1 and #2 in the world, and because of my success, I appeared on ESPN2, MTV, CNN, and on the pages of Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and Spin magazines.

Click here to watch a video of me appearing on MTV:

During that time, I began to develop the beginnings of what I now call my Annihilation Engine strategy. It all started with 2 things: events and online marketing. And later I would learn several unique ways to combine the two into huge profits that made my Magic winnings look like peanuts.

“ Celebrating Success.”

In my game store, I started an “elementary Magic league”, built off of announcements that I made to the small email list I had been collecting on a legal pad in the front of my store. (an old-school opt-in!)

I charged $170 to join my 8-week league. By the time the store was around a year old I had over 100 kids enrolled in Magic and Pokémon elementary leagues.

I would also hold events every Saturday. At first only a handful of kids came. After word began to spread, I had 40 kids showing up every time. And it wasn’t just because I was good at Magic. It was also because I ran events where the kids felt really recognized and appreciated.

For instance, I would announce the pairings like Michael Buffer, the famous guy who says “Let’s get ready to rumble!” before big boxing matches, only I would individualize it to every kid.

It turned out that this mixture of teaching kids sound game strategy, combined with making each situation a really acknowledging event where excellence was celebrated boisterously in public, really worked for swelling my little crowd of followers…

By default, our brains want to be around people who celebrate our successes – especially publicly. That’s just how it is wired. Show me someone who truly celebrates their friends’ successes, and I’ll show you someone with a huge social circle.

An example of a bullet from one of the emails to my subscribers might be:

This week Don “The Rock” Norum took his first tournament win, with his Ocean Blue deck, upending Paulie “Pied Piper” Michel, and his signature Green Machine deck. Way to go Don!

(Note that now-a-days brick and mortar stores can even more easily take advantage of my email list strategy using Facebook, because Facebook has made it easier and easier to promote events to fans of your business.)

Another real world example of celebrating success is the fantasy football league Kelly ran last year. There were 12 of us in the league and Kelly was the commissioner. During the first few weeks Kelly would write an entertaining email to all 12 teams about the matchups, and the following Tuesday he would write a fun summary of what happened. It was like a weekly “event” for our league.

After week 2 he got sidetracked and stopped writing the emails. The result: several team owners really became uninvolved in the league and just kind of disappeared. The incentive of having their wins publicly celebrated (or their losses not made fun of!) was gone, so they jumped ship (this wasn’t a money league). I know for me, the emails really inspired me to want to win that much more, so I could see what he would write! I was really bummed when he stopped writing them.

Annihilation Action$:

Several times throughout this video book I share my perspective on what I’ve learned from living the stories I’m now sharing with you… “ANNIHILATION ACTION$” is where I boil down the lessons of that section into action plans and seed ideas that you can put to use in your web sites and offline business right now to give you an unfair advantage in generating profit.

That’s because I want Annihilation Engine to not only inspire and to lend insight, but also to provide done-for-you tactics and tips that you can leverage right now to get a leg up.

Our first ANNIHILATION ACTION$ focuses on Celebrating Success!

Celebrating Success:

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Recognizing Excellence in any business relationship…

I spent over a year leading up to creating this book doing nothing but heavy duty research and I came across a study that astonishes me not only because of the clear cut importance of it…but also because of how little known it is.

Here’s the study:

The O.C. Tanner company released a white paper, using research data from the Jackson Organization.

The white papers included an eye opening study where the Jackson Group surveyed 26,000 employees at all levels in 31 different business organizations of various size and profitability.

“Respondents were asked to state their level of agreement on a scale to the question “My organization recognizes excellence.” The responses by organization were averaged and grouped into four quartiles. Those organizational results were then compared with these profitability measures:

• Return on equity (Calculated by taking the fiscal year’s earnings and dividing them by the average shareholder’s equity for that year. It is used as a general indication of how much a company is able to generate given the investment provided by its shareholders.)

• Return on Assets (Being the fiscal year’s earnings divided by the total assets. This number tells us how much profit a company has achieved for each dollar of asset utilized.

• Operating Margin (The ratio of operating income to sales. Operating margin shows how much a company makes from each dollar of sales before interest and taxes.)

Here are the results for return on equity:

Here are the results for return on assets:

Here are the results for Operating Margin:

The businesses represented by the green column on the right are the businesses with the highest standards of recognition when it comes to the question: “My organization recognizes excellence.”

It turns out to be a very poor strategy to learn from failure. That’s because when we learn from failure we’re only crossing off one out of billions if not more ways to fail! And because when we learn from failure – whether our failure or the failure of others – then we NEED FAILURE to learn! How crazy is that?

Instead what we want to do is recognize success…indeed we want to obsess about success and duplicate success. That’s because then we are using a sure fire way to succeed rather than crossing off one of billions of ways to fail…and because that way we NEED SUCCESS to learn! (So our brain will actually seek out success to dine on!)

We want to recognize the excellence of others, and of our own actions. That will encourage us to act with excellence and it will draw others to us who perform with excellence!

And when we celebrate and enjoy that success we become a powerful magnet drawing the best out of ourselves, out of our partners, out of our prospects and out of our customers because the most important rule of the law of attraction is that we get what we give!

(Another way of putting this idea is an idea I learned from Lou Gerstner: “people respect what we inspect” – an especially powerful idea because we are a people too! So when we inspect excellence we respect excellence.)

Chapter 2:

“ Upside down.”

Everything was going great with my store, until one fateful day I got a call from one of our biggest distributors, telling me that we were massively behind in our payments. Several similar calls followed from other distributors.

That partner (I won’t give his name here) admitted that he had been gambling money out of our account on investments that he was sure were going to pan out for us, without mentioning them to me. But they had all gone south, all the while extending our line of credit deeper and deeper with a growing number of distributors to cover the shortfalls.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I found myself scrambling and badly in debt, and wishing that I had kept a careful eye on the books. My world turned upside down. I felt lonely and scared.

The fastest way I knew how to make money was to buy cards in America and then sell them in Japan where Magic: the Gathering was taking off like a rocket. At the same time, Pokémon was really taking off in the USA. So over the next two years I would fly back and forth between America and Japan 22 times.

I frantically bought up every Magic card I could find in America and traded face to face with Japanese store owners for as much cash and Pokémon as I could manage.

Eventually I made the 6 figures necessary to pay off my debts.

Now about shortly after I opened my store, I started to realize, as many brick and mortar business owners were discovering, that there was a great opportunity in expanding my customer base by reaching out to prospects all over the world through the Internet. After all, the low fixed costs of an online business were very appealing compared to the big cost of rent and carrying a massive inventory.

So I created two e-commerce websites for my game store – TheEndGames.com and PokePage.com. PokePage.com sold Pokémon cards, and TheEndGames.com sold Magic: the Gathering cards. They were not exactly the greatest looking sites on the internet right out of the gate, but that was something I would fix over time.

I also started selling Magic cards on eBay… by the thousands. I applied a very unusual technique that no one else was using, which I’ll let you in on shortly. As a result, our online earnings quickly trumped our offline earnings.

Things really started taking off online, and I quickly realized it was time to close my physical store because the high fixed costs and the demands the store put on my focus while actually returning LESS money than my low cost web sites…

My trouble with closing my store had always been not wanting to lose the personal connection I had with my customers, and helping them succeed. I knew that I could get more customers online than I could offline. But my concern was about how deep my relationship could be with online customers. I worried about that because I got so much joy from helping others recognize their own excellence, and expanding their skills.

I started thinking about the way my online business was growing, and started to wonder if I couldn’t flat out help more people online if I could just figure out a way to capture the essence of the way that I was teaching people in the real world…

“Mistakes.”

Looking back on things, there were three things that I would have done differently in my game store business:

I wasn’t nearly as self-reliant as I could have been when it came to buying new cards to sell. I was the best buyer for my business, but I often let pride get in the way of going to events or tournaments, which were the best place to get cards.

There was one time where I went to a big convention, and instead of buying cards, I played in a tournament. The top prize for the tournament was $15,000. But if I just bought cards the whole time, instead of playing, I probably could have made that much or even twice as much. I ended up getting knocked out in the top 8 of the event and making around $1,000. It was totally silly.

The second thing I would have done differently is that I would have gone for an understanding of how to rank #1 on Google for various top search terms that people were looking for when it came to Magic: the Gathering. I did some stuff to indirectly get traffic to my new website, but I wasn’t directly going for sustainable top rankings every day, and in the long run that was wasteful.

The only other real issue was getting angry or frustrated way too many times when it came to technical issues. It didn’t have to be hard, because the answer to every single issue I came across was the same every single time:

Google search + picking through the results and testing things + patience = solutions.

But there was a missing key when it came to getting all three of these ideas straight for me in my mind, which I’ll get to in just a moment.

My “home run attitude” hurt me when it came to refusing to work at that big convention, and instead trying to win the big tournament. When I say home run attitude, I’m talking about a hitter in baseball who refuses to make moves that will help his team, like getting walks, base hits, and bunting, because they are being single-minded and swinging for the fences.

Even though my website was nothing to write home about, it was doing a few thousand dollars a month right away, mostly selling card singles, which goes to show that because of the low startup and maintenance cost of building an online business, if you can put one foot in front of another with a website, you can succeed…

I got most of my traffic the same way we get most of our traffic today – by providing content. In this case, it was by writing articles. Actually, most of my business time was spent researching my articles and buying new cards, and figuring out how to fix various glitches on my website.

Anything that didn’t sell quickly on the site, I offloaded on eBay. I used a program called “auction works” that allowed me to list hundreds of auctions, or even thousands at a time.

Soon after focusing on my online business, I caught a VERY lucky break.

I decided to start spending some time with my father. We weren’t very close growing up. He left my mother when I was around 3 years old, and I rarely saw or spoke with him.

While we didn’t turn out to have a big feel good reunion, something very good did come of it. He had decided to attend an online marketing convention in Cleveland, and he didn’t want to fly because he had gotten a bit on the heavy side in his golden years. So he offered to pay for me to attend, if I’d be willing to drive him. I accepted, more to spend time with him than anything else.

The first two people I walked up to and said hello to were Jeff Mulligan, a cheery red headed Irishman who was a former top ad executive from New Hampshire, and Jeff Johnson, a blue eyed, silver haired, former stock market trader from Michigan, who was just starting out online.

We hit it off right away, and ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe enjoying beer and pulled pork sandwiches. Mulligan filled me in on many of the details of the strategic online marketing world that I was totally unaware of, like how it was possible to make six or even seven figures a year doing it!

Annihilation Action$:

‘Mistakes:

We want to obsess about success because that will lead us to more success. But what do we do when we realize that we slipped up? Do we want to stick our heads in the sand and ignore it? Do we want to beat ourselves up? Or is there a better way?

Yes!

When I made the mistakes I detailed in the last couple of sections, I used to make the additional error of either burying my head in the sand or swinging the pendulum in the other direction and beating myself up.

That’s when David Mills explained to me how important it is instead to realize that things are exactly as “bad” as they are and then not to add emotional bad to the equation.

Often times things aren’t nearly as bad as we think they are, and in those cases most of the “bad” that results is usually because we feel like we should feel bad because that’s such a strong idea in our culture.

Human beings have an amazing power to either magnify or minimize any situation. We want to magnify good situations by publically recognizing excellence…

We want to minimize our failures by noticing where we may have messed up and coming up with a plan of action to do something excellent instead in the future…

If we operate this way, in a positive an constructive way, then we’re broadcasting an extraordinarily abundant signal of safety and prosperity not only to our own mind but also to our mentors, our partners, our prospects and our customers. People respect what you inspect…

Chapter 3:

“ John Reese.”

But the main thing Jeff Mulligan insisted on was that I meet John Reese.

In a later issue of Annihilation Engine, I’ll focus fully on the relationship that I developed with John Reese, because it changed my life.

For now, sufficed to say that John and I hit it off . Seeing him speak at that event opened my eyes to what was possible online, even more than Jeff Mulligan and Jeff Johnson had. And John had heard of Magic, and he had a deep respect for me as a thinker right away.

I felt such a desire to see over the shoulder of guys like John Reese while they were making their moves with their web sites. But there was really nothing available like that at the time.

The best I could figure out was to take what I had learned at that event, mostly about writing sales copy, and apply it on my website and in my eBay auctions. The results were surprisingly good. I turned my auctions into mini-sales letters, including drawing more attention to my bonuses. I was looking for some way to add value to my auctions, so I created my own cards. I commissioned some paintings with a popular Magic artist and then used a local printer to make thousands of my own cards for less than a penny a card. They are still a valued collectable items today:

I made my auctions more of an event, and spelled out the value of buying from me instead of somebody else. The result was that more of my auctions closed and the bids were higher.

Then I found out that John Reese was the featured guest of a special “mastermind event” in San Francisco on August 20^th 2003. – by “invitation only”. I nervously typed out my application, almost sure that there was no chance that I would get in. But to my surprise I was quickly accepted!

That was almost as scary as getting rejected though, because now I wasn’t sure if I really belonged, because there were supposed to be a lot of online marketing heavyweights in attendance. While I had been in business online for a while, I didn’t know half as much about strategic online marketing as many of the folks there would.

At several thousand dollars for my ticket, I was sweating bullets about getting the same value out of the event that I had put into it.

I also didn’t want to get laughed out of the room when it came to talking about my business, because I knew most of what I was doing was really primitive…

By the time it was my turn to talk, I was sweating bullets. I don’t remember a word I said, just that the room was dead silent after I was finished blurting out my presentation about my Magic business.

You could hear a pin drop… until John Reese finally broke the silence:

“You’re sitting on a gold mine,” John said dramatically. He explained that I was powerfully positioned to sell an information product on how to succeed in Magic, because of all the professional wins I had. I was still in shock listening to John, but the surprises kept coming…

“Oh my God, that’s Mike Long!” rang out an Australian voice from across the table as a guy named Ed Dale was now standing and pointing his finger at me dramatically. “He’s like one of the top Magic players in the world. A total bad boy by the way!” Ed concluded. It turned out that Ed, another attendee of the event, was a big Magic fan. Ed offered me a joint venture on the spot to help me develop my first Magic information product.

“ Frank Kern.”

John had invited his close friend Frank Kern to attend the event as well.

Frank was from Macon, Georgia. He was an easygoing southerner with sandy blond hair, and he made me feel at ease because I had mostly grown up in the south, and because he seemed easy to understand and relate to.

He explained that he was actually totally broke because he had the terrible luck of having gotten slapped with a massive fine by the FTC, due to the dirty dealings of some affiliates posing fraudulently as him.

Frank explained that he had deleted his entire massive online marketing list because he had a bad taste in his mouth from the whole FTC thing. I could really understand where he was coming from because of what happened to me with my game store.

Frank said that what he wanted to do was teach happy things, like pet advice, using what he called his “Underachiever system”. This was essentially taking advantage of extremely cheap Pay-per-click advertising, at the time around $.05 per click on most terms, to develop ebook businesses for small niches, after doing smart surveying.

It wasn’t actually seeing over his shoulder and watching him build a business, but what he was talking about was basic enough that I could at least follow the steps somewhat in my head, which was really inspiring.

After Frank’s presentation to the dozen or so people in the paid mastermind group, he and I lingered and chatted a bit. “So how much are you making right now for teaching folks how to train their dogs?” I asked him.

“$37 bucks a day.” He said with a grin. “But last week it was $18 bucks.”

“I’ll check back with you and see how you’re doing on that soon.” I said smiling back.

“Please do. Now lets get lunch.” Frank replied.

The best thing about listening to Frank was probably the reassurance that if you stuck to it with online marketing, there was always a way. But I also got a basic game plan for how to develop my Magic business based on his underachiever plan.

“ Jeff Walker.”

After lunch, Jeff Walker spoke, and I was totally electrified by what he had to say.

At the first online marketing event I’d gone to, when I met John Reese, a guy named Stewart from Amsterdam pulled me aside to tell me about how excited he was about having bought Mark Joyner’s farewell to online marketing package. I knew my father had bought it too, and I could see how vibrant they both felt about the experience.

Jeff was talking about the same kind of thing, online marketing events with a real reason why people would buy. Jeff had been selling financial advice with a partner for years, and ran launch after launch.

Jeff called himself Mr. Scarcity, something that I told him I didn’t agree with. I wanted my business to be all about abundance. But Jeff was a good-natured fellow and took my philosophical objections in stride.

His point was that in order to get folks to take action, you had to have some sort of motivating force. For Jeff, that motivating force was scarcity. But I worried that such scarcity would eventually lead to burning out his list.

Where we definitely agreed was on the point of natural scarcity. For instance, with a live event, obviously at some point the sale period has to end… That is natural scarcity. Not like false scarcity, where an e-book doesn’t really need to be scarce at all because there are really unlimited copies available. Or the phony “sale ends at midnight tonight” method, which then repeats the next day.

Jeff and I talked excitedly for hours after his talk, well into dinner.

I’ll also write an issue of Annihilation Engine in the future about my relationship with Jeff Walker, and all that I learned from him, which was a lot.

But for now, it’s enough to say that from that day on, there were few people that I would talk to or learn more from than Jeff, especially over the course of the next few years.

“ Live Launch.”

Two months later, I was back in San Francisco in Frank Kern’s hotel room, sweating bullets before David Mills and I launched our first online marketing information product with Ed Dale’s help.

I already had around a 10,000 person email list from selling auctions on eBay. Ed and I had done the surveying that Frank recommended to get the ball rolling by communicating with that list. And then we’d done a tele-seminar to give folks value, leading up to the Magic state championships.

In a lucky stroke, somebody on that call had actually won his state championship and wrote in with a really nice testimonial. Several other folks on the call also did well, so even though we didn’t have much of a track record with our product, we did have good testimonials already.

“So how much are the dog ebooks making now?” I asked Frank playfully, as I looked over the final details of the sales letter Ed and I had put together for Magic Secrets.

“68 bucks a day!” Frank cheerily replied.

“That’ll buy plenty of beer!” I rang back.

“How’s the sales letter lookin?” He said as he lounged back in his chair.

“How would I know!” I laughed back. “The one thing that makes me nervous is that we didn’t figure out a way to do videos of me actually playing Magic, so I don’t think it will sell as well without them.”

“Can you play this Magic on your computer?” Frank said, suddenly serious.

“Yes sir.” I replied.

“Camtasia lets you record anything you can see on your screen.” He said.

“No kidding?” I said.

“No kidding.” Frank nodded.

“Well then I’m putting the videos back into the sales letter!” I said back, jolly again.

I wasn’t all that keen on the idea of launching the sales letter before we had the product done. But David and I were working on the book already, and Frank made the Camtasia video thing sound easy.

While Frank was ultimately dead on, and Camtasia would not only transform my Magic business and my life, I would come to regret the decision to launch the product prematurely. Especially promising video before I had actually done it, because that added heaps of pressure for no reason, and made things very stressful.

We mentioned in the sales letter that it would take months for us to deliver the whole product, which would give us some time. But that just created another deadline, or another failure condition for the project. If I had it to do it again I would have held off on the launch and perhaps told folks about the exciting preparation steps we’d taken in the prelaunch. And then perhaps I would have found a way to update folks who were interested once the product was completed and launched.

I was still freaking out when Ed and I sat in front of hundreds of seminar attendees two hours later. But Ed was grinning ear to ear, a dead giveaway that we’d at least made some sales. It turned out that we’d made more than a few. We’d made almost two thousand bucks in just over an hour, mailing just the folks who had been on the teleconference call.

I felt so alive! Not only was I starting to make good money with online marketing, but I was finally impacting people in a way that really made sense to me.

I hugged both John and Frank as soon as I got off stage, and I couldn’t wait to get on the phone with David Mills to give him the news…

Again, I’ll get more into the John Reese Traffic Secrets Million Dollar Day back story in a later issue of Annihilation Engine, but a few months later I was in Orlando hanging out with John and Frank at an Underachiever event that Ed was putting on with Frank.

“How’s the pet ebook business doing?” I asked Frank as he drove me from the hotel to John’s mansion in Metro West.

“$212 bucks a day.” He smiled as we rolled along. “How’s the Magic secrets business?” he asked.

“A little frustrating. I shouldn’t have promised video before I knew how to do it for sure.” I admitted. “The reason I had came to Orlando was to try to get help with getting the video part of the product together. I was sitting at home, recording video after video, trying to get it to work, and I just wasn’t figuring it out. John said he could help…”

“That no good John Reese knows a lot of things about a lot of things.” Frank chimed back.

I was still buying and selling Magic cards online, which was my main source of income. But getting the information product together still hadn’t quite happened. Like I mentioned before, I regretted going on sale before finishing the product more and more every day.

I spent a few more days with John after Frank and Ed’s event finished. We didn’t quite break through on getting the video recordings to work, but we made progress. John was really patient and helpful, which made all of the difference in the world.

David Mills and I completed the book, “Magic Secrets” shortly after that. The format worked out really well because David designed it. He thought through a lesson plan in advance and wrote introductions and key lessons for each topic, and then I filled in the book with several pages of examples.

“Winning in preparation.”

He based the book on “shortcuts”, the idea that whomever had the best shortcuts for succeeding in Magic had the biggest advantage because there was just so much gosh darned information to process, and more and more all the time.

One of the most important “shortcuts” that David and I used that was one of the core parts of David’s Method is winning in preparation. Normally folks teach from a technical standpoint instead: do this, do that.

But David realizes that we succeed not by making disconnected moves, but by creating a context for success. For instance, an NFL football player doesn’t just show up one day and collect a check for $10 million dollars. And he doesn’t just watch a tutorial on how to toss the pigskin around. He first has to have the context of an athlete, which includes working on his strength, speed, flexibility and agility. Then and only then, can you start talking to him about what moves he might want to make in a game.

That player’s success comes in preparation. Even when it seems like that player makes a “lucky catch”, it was his preparation and practice that put him in a position to make the lucky catch.

Because Magic is very much a mental game, again much like success with building a profitable website, David wanted to teach our customers how to think straight first, and then what specific moves to make inside of the game.

I started adopting David’s lessons more and more. Instead of trying to find the next great tactic for instant success, I focused more on winning in preparation. Getting a good amount of sleep – around 8 hours. Practicing fundamentals like copywriting. Patiently looking things up on Google when technical glitches came up. (Instead of getting frustrated or angry and maybe running off in another direction.)

I felt really great teaching based on this winning in preparation attitude, because I wanted my customers to enjoy success, and I knew it was the best way. That gave me the confidence that our product would be really successful once I finished the videos, not just in terms of sales, but in terms of helping folks succeed.

“Triple your profit.”

Shortly after that Orlando event, on March 15, 2004, Frank and I were back in Orlando for John’s first official online marketing workshop, his “Triple Your Profit” workshop. John had gathered many of the online marketing world’s best and brightest for his sold out $4500 per person event.

There were some issues with the binders that John had ordered ahead of time, and John asked me to help remake them the night before the event. At 3AM, Frank, Jason Potash, and I were seated Indian style on John’s kitchen floor, assembling binders.

“How’s the Ebook business?” I asked Frank, with a yawn.

“$385 a day.” Frank said, still chipper. “Here you go crusher. I gotta get some rest” He said handing me a binder and standing up.

“That’ll buy a lot of hot dogs!” I said with a laugh.

I didn’t sleep that night, and a massive toothache hit me that morning as I delivered the binders to John’s workshop.

Frank spotted me swooning and immediately scooped me out of the workshop and drove me to get a remedy, and then back to John’s place for some much needed R & R.

Later, I watched over Frank’s shoulder as he tweaked some elements of his ebook business, and then he sat down with me and helped me make some final adjustments to my latest sales letter.

The night, after John’s workshop was complete, John, Jason, Frank and I sat on John’s porch sipping beers, celebrating his success and how much everyone had enjoyed the event.

“I want to thank all of you guys for your help.” John said raising his bottle in a toast.

“Mikey!” John said raising his bottle one more time. “I know you really busted your butt helping me get everything together and I wanted to say thanks, so I’d like to know if you want to join me for a west coast tour this summer? I’m planning on visiting one of Yanik Silver’s and Jim Edwards’ events. And there’s a guy named Eben Pagan who’s running a killer business called Double Your Dating, and he’s asked me to look in on one of his events. I asked them if you could come and they said yes. Then I’m headed over to a Dan Kennedy event in Cleveland.”

“Wow John!” I said excited, “That would be awesome!”

“Copywriting.”

After a while, John and Jason went back inside to get something to eat and Frank and I stayed outside, relaxing and watching the sunset. In a rare serious moment, Frank turned to me, his blue eyes locked intensely but without any sort of worry or frustration, and he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it and all that we really have to do is focus on the copywriting, and that will get us whatever we want.”

“$385 dollars per day,” I said agreeing. I had been spending several hours each day practicing my writing since that first Internet marketing event, over a year before. I thought a bit more and added, “Winning in preparation.”

“I’m dead serious, that’s all we really have to do.” Frank said, nodding his head…

The thing that made Frank’s idea feasible, for us to both write and write until we got seriously good at our craft was that we had working businesses to experiment on.

One of the things that’s so remarkable about the web is there are just so many ways of getting visitors, which is the thing that I used to pay thousands a month for when I had my game store.

Now I had a business and I was in the inner circle. Of course it was a big advantage to be working with guys like Frank and John, but the reality is that anybody with a business is an insider, instead of being on the outside looking in…

Once you had a business, so long as you didn’t fall asleep at the switch, then things start to naturally snowball, as they had for both John, Frank and me. Leverage in terms of reputation with customers, prospects and other insiders, not to mention know how like the understanding of writing that Frank was talking about come naturally…

Frank could as well have been saying: “Dude, now time is on our side. Let’s use it!” But it wasn’t just true for us. It was and is true for anybody who’s built or who is building a business or even just a profit targeted website…

A couple of weeks after the event ended, John invited me back to Orlando to stay with him for several months leading up to the Traffic Secrets launch, to help manage the event. In exchange, John said he would help in completing my third Magic Secrets launch. He wanted to help me finish my product once and for all, and to get it launched properly.

I taught John how to play Magic, shortly after I moved in, and he took to it like a fish to water.

John called in a testimonial to my instant audio phone number, and I shared it with my list. A few days later, another customer named Zaf Molon, from Ottawa, Canada called in with his own story. And while the details of his story were very different, it sounded very similar to John’s call.

Soon after sharing Zaf’s testimonial with my list, I got several more testimonials, each along the lines of John’s testimonial, at least in some way.

Then I realized that John’s call was serving as a template for folks who already wanted to to thank me.

On John’s advice, I changed the name of the testimonials from “Shared Triumphs” to “Annihilation Reports.”

“The thing is Mike,” John said, “These guys don’t want to share their triumphs. They want to call in Annihilation Reports, and brag about how they trounced their buddy.”

Once I finally figured out how to get Camtasia working to record my videos, John spent days turning them into DVDs, using Final Cut pro.

The DVDs were videos of me playing Magic online, winning matches, and then talking about what I was thinking when I was making various moves.

When John was done, he commented: “Now you’ve got a product that you can sell forever.” That’s when the sinking feeling hit me. We had just put so much work into making these DVDs, but soon new cards would come out and they would make the old strategies somewhat obsolete. So really I only had a few months to sell these DVDs before they would lose a lot of value.

I realized that I had actually put myself more behind the curve than ahead of it by going with a physical DVD product. I decided that next time I would do my videos online, so things would be more easy to update.

But the product was finally finished, and I was relieved about that. And now that I was succeeding through preparation, instead of trying to make some brilliant last second move, my success wasn’t only much greater, it was sustainable…

Frank visited right as Magic Secrets kicked off it’s second big launch, this time pulling in five thousand dollars in the first few hours, and ten thousand dollars in the first day or so. “I think it’s the testimonials.” I told Frank, explaining how my sales had shot up much more than I had expected.

A few weeks later, on August 17, 2004, the Traffic Secrets million dollar day happened. I’m not going to get into the details of that in this issue of Annihilation Engine, but I will share some of the things that John had to say about that launch and my involvement in it:

Winning In Preparation:

When somebody hits it big, maybe with a new hit song, or an exciting invention, or with a hot website it often appears that it was some last second burst of inspiration or luck that was behind the success.

But in most cases success happens in preparation. For instance, what do Mozart, Bill Gates and the Beetles have in common?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers”, Gladwell, a science writer, answers that question in the section called the “rule of 10,000”. It turns out that all world masters have one thing in common: 10,000 hours of focused practice with an audience, which creates a natural “feedback loop” for reflection and learning.

In fact, everyone with 10,000 hours of focused practice with an audience in their art has ended up to be a world master, pretty much without fail. And there are a number of nice thresholds along the way…

For instance folks thing Mozart was a child prodigy – a gifted composer from the age of 5. But that turns out to be false! Mozart’s early works were the same kind of clumsy copy-pasting that nearly every beginning composer stumbles though. But it was by practicing first in front of his father, and then before live audiences as a ghost writer that Mozart became a world master.

Bill Gates got his start with programming in the 1960s, when computers were rare. In fact he spent most of his time working for free just for the opportunity to learn to program! The Beetles couldn’t even find work in their native Liverpool, so they had to book gigs in Hamburg’s red light district! But after over 1000 performances, each 5 to 8 hours, the Beetles were pretty darn good.

Now two main lessons inside of this whole “rule of 10,000” is that nobody who gets their 10,000 hours of focused practice fails to become a master, and there are also important thresholds along the way where folks get significantly better…say 1000 hours and 3000 hours and so on.The reason I find this study so reassuring is because it dispels the idea of success by luck.

Folks that you see succeeding in music, acting, or professional sports didn’t just “have it” – they spent thousands of hours of practice with feedback. The same goes for folks who thrive in business…

But there’s fantastic news for those who don’t have much experience yet in building successful websites:

1. Very few people have any experience at all at online marketing – especially getting good feedback. (There are maybe only a few dozen to maybe a few hundred or at most a few thousand real masters worldwide because most folks flake out when it comes to getting feedback because they don’t realize how important it is.)

1. The earlier you get started getting practice with feedback the better because internet marketing is still in its infancy, and it’s the fastest growing market in the world and will be for years and years to come! (So even a few dozen or few hundred hours of practice with a good feedback loop puts somebody head and shoulders above even most folks billing themselves as online marketing experts.)

1. The very best thing to do is to get freaking started because the opportunity is great and getting greater every day, and so proportionately there are actually fewer and fewer experts every day. (Especially since, because of the low costs, utter lack of competition, and high profit margins it’s so easy to get rich and retire that many of the top guns in online marketing actually retire early, constantly leaving the playing field leveled!)

Almost all of the folks that I’ve seen become successful with online marketing either cut their teeth with affiliate marketing. And even if they didn’t get started with affiliate marketing their online marketing strategy at some point or another revolved around affiliate marketing – and that includes myself, David Mills, and the guys I just mentioned, John Reese, Frank Kern and Jeff Walker…not to mention every single other successful individual you’ll read about this book!

Chapter 4:

“Mastermind.”

The next time I saw Frank was a couple of months after the Million Dollar day.

John decided to put together a mastermind with some of his closest friends. Jason Potash was there, and so was Yanik Silver, whom I’d gotten to be quite good friends with, and Dean Jackson, whom Frank had dubbed the King of Leisure.

The event was like a much less formal version of the first time I met Frank, where each of us presented ideas for where our business was taking us. This time we met in the whiteboard room in John’s pink Orlando mansion, that I had dubbed the “War Room” during the buildup to the Traffic Secrets million-dollar day.

John and Frank had gotten together and designed a software project to supercharge Frank’s ebook business, that Frank had given the code name “Serializer”. What it did was help him automate his pay per click results across a much broader variety of keywords on Google. For example, the landing pages automatically had the proper keywords inserted in the headline and sales letter, according to what dog breed the user had searched for on Google.

So Frank really only had one landing page and sales letter, but it would all be dynamically re-written, relative to the breed the user searched for on Google.

Frank’s business was now making well over $1,000 per day, and growing by leaps and bounds. I couldn’t help but look back at the progression of seeing Frank’s dream come to life.

Frank recommended that I take what he’d learned from the “Serializer” project and apply it on eBay, hitting a much broader array of keywords. So basically, selling an auction for every single card name, or at least the hot ones, regardless of whether I had the card for sale or not. Because every time, I had the chance of selling my Magic Secrets course on the back-end.

My Magic Secrets business was flourishing. The “winning through preparation” angle was coming up in spades again and again. For instance, I’d taken my conversation with Frank to heart about writing copy and now I wrote my list almost every day, in sort of a constant soft launch.

Almost every day I came up with a new angle or reason to write my list, usually based on testimonials or letters I’d gotten back from folks.

It was a lot like when John recorded that first testimonial for me, and then I’d shared it with folks on my list and gotten so many others back.

Our “winning through preparation” idea wasn’t just working for us… It was working for our customers as well, and almost every day we were hearing from somebody who had never had much success with Magic, and was finally starting to win big. Again, I would constantly share these success stories with my list because I wanted to celebrate and draw attention to the preparation that folks were putting in, and how it was paying off for them.

Another preparation breakthrough was finally figuring out how to record videos, and getting them online as lessons.

Every day that I mailed I got several more sales of Magic Secrets at $50 a pop, and my information products were finally making more money than just selling the cards.

eBay was still my primary way of drawing leads, but I’d taken an idea from Yanik and started sending out a letter with every card that I sold, offering a free trial of Magic Secrets.

I continued to drive my eBay auctions with video bonuses that were updated every week, but now I also included videos of me playing Magic in my auctions.

Many weeks I was closing between one and two thousand auctions for anywhere from $1.99 per auction, all the way up to as much as $50 for more expensive cards. But John had been right about information being a goldmine, because while I was selling the same cards as everyone else, I was getting an advantage from my information products, both in selling the cards, and in making more money per auction, because I was getting tons of people to take me up on the free trial of Magic Secrets, and around 50% of them stayed on as paying members!

“Product Launch Formula.”

A few months later, John conducted an interview with Jeff Walker for his upcoming Product Launch Formula home study course. In that interview he made mention of my roll in his launch a few times, leading Jeff to contact me and ask if I’d like to also do an interview to help flesh out his course.

The constant “soft launch” approach to our Magic Secrets business had a lot of benefits, especially the benefit of David and I gaining lots of experience with online marketing.

What was supposed to be a 45 minute interview with Jeff, turned into 2 hours. That was because David and I had put so much preparation into our Magic business that we had been able to innovate quite a bit, and we had a lot to talk about.

Something that I’ve always been grateful for, is that David and I started our first online business about something that we were already good at. Often times, folks decide to start an online business in a “hot market”, where they have little or no expertise, instead of choosing something that they are already good at.

Kelly Felix has found this to be true as well. He’s created dozens of online businesses, and he only goes into markets he is passionate about and has first hand experience in.

Because David and I focused on something that we were already good at, we were able focus more on learning online marketing, because we didn’t need to learn anything about Magic itself.

Jeff called me back a few days after our interview and asked if I’d be interested in helping him dot the I’s and cross the T’s on the Product Launch Formula launch. It was now only a few weeks away, and he said he loved my passion for marketing. He also felt that our connection from a couple of years of almost daily conversations could help me do a great job ghost writing, and to help take some of the load off of his shoulders while he handled a lot of the tech stuff that can so easily get screwed up in a launch situation.

I accepted, and quickly went to work on gathering testimonials, something that I’d helped John with for the Traffic Secrets launch. And instead of TEXTimonials, I focused on audio, to make them even more real. Nowadays I prefer video.

It’s not that easy to get a good testimonial though, because folks don’t tend to know how to give a good testimonial.

It turns out that even though it’s relatively easy to find a shoulder to cry on in tough times, it’s actually pretty difficult to find somebody to genuinely celebrate our triumphs with us when we succeed. This can be due to a lot of factors, such as jealousy.

Regardless, the skill of appreciation isn’t commonly used by folks nearly as much as it could be, thus the phrase “you don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it,” all too often becomes true!

What I’d discovered with my various launches, was that even if you really helped somebody succeed, it’s a whole different job to actually collect the testimonial for it, especially a good one.

It’s not the “umms” and the “uhhhs” that are a problem. Quite the contrary, testimonials that sound too slick and rehearsed are actually much worse because they lack authenticity.

Something that I realized is that the only thing that folks are really worried about when they are making any investment is: “Will it work for me?”

As in: will this new thing that they are considering investing time and possibly money in actually bear fruit for them, in their unique situation.

And the main way folks figure that out is by finding out if other folks who are like them are actually having similar success. That is why testimonials are so important.

But what I discovered during my time with Magic Secrets and Traffic Secrets, and what I formalized in the early days of the Product Launch Formula launch, was how to gather a proper testimonial.

Jeff had helped several marketers kick off tremendous launches, but most folks were really confused as to how to explain their results in a way that would make sense to a listener who wanted to know more about Jeff’s system.

I did two things to help. One is I recorded my own testimonial for Product Launch Formula, which I was happy to do because I had gotten so much help and advice from Jeff on our Magic business.

“The Before and After progression.”

Then I would send the audio link of my testimonial to Jeff’s best customers, to use as a template. Then I would tell them to say where they were before they met Jeff, and then explain where they are now.

Some folks have heard of recent revisions to the FTC guidelines when it comes to testimonials. But I actually welcome these changes because what they basically say is that you need to share the context of how folks are succeeding, and not just the “before and after” picture. That translates to the same thing that we’ve been doing for years, including not just the before and after, but the progression between those two points. (Which makes for a much more convincing and powerful testimonial anyway!)

The FTC also specifically says that you need to disclose when a testimonial result is not common. In other words, when its extra-ordinary. Well I don’t know about you but I have no problem saying, “Look at some of our customers and their extraordinary results with our product!” That sounds pretty great to me as a marketer.

I’ll talk more about the Product Launch Formula launch in the future, including a lot of the really smart moves that Jeff Walker made both in setting it up and executing it, and some of the moves that I made that ended up panning out. I’ll also include some of the mistakes that I personally wouldn’t want to repeat. But I mention the testimonials right now because far and away the best testimonials that Jeff had available for Product Launch Formula were from Frank Kern and John Reese.

That’s because both Frank and John had enjoyed million dollar launches thanks to help from Jeff. Underachiever Mastery for Frank, and the Traffic Secrets Million Dollar Day for John. And they both publicly credited Jeff with having helped them.

Now of course I was already close friends with John and Frank, but I decided to visit them a couple of weeks before the launch, to gather insight from their launches, and the way they saw them now.

I viewed visiting John and Frank as the best way for me to succeed with good preparation. And it just so happened that Frank’s place in Macon, Georgia, was on the way to John’s in Florida. It was a nice drive for me. I would listen to marketing books on tape along the way.

During the drive to Macon, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. “Hey Mike, this is Matt Kadish.”

“Oh hey Matt!” I said. I had met Matt when John and I visited Eben Pagan’s Double Your Dating event. He was a blogger who went by the name “Thundercat”, and he was just getting his feet wet with information marketing, about how to approach single women. We sat down for hamburgers and I drew him out the general game plan, literally on the back of a Burger King napkin.

On the call I asked him how things were going and how my advice panned out.

“Really great.” Matt said. He sounded happy. “I wanted to call and thank you for the advice. I’m actually pulling in over ten grand a month now.”

“Awesome dude!” I exclaimed. Matt explained to me how he had taken the bare bones advice I’d drawn up and added a bunch of great ideas of his own that he’d tested and figured out, and really blown his business up.

I pulled into Macon in the early afternoon, to a big brick office building that Frank rented an office from. He gave me the tour of his massive but sparsely furnished loft. (he only had a small couch, and a couple of folding tables pressed up against the wall with rolling chairs)

“Scrambler?”

We raced chairs across his floor and then after he edged me by a nose, Frank turned and said “Scrambler?”

I looked back expectantly with a smile as Frank led me out the door and down the stairs to where a brightly colored Jeep was parked. “Scrambler!” Frank affirmed, sweeping his hands towards the jeep.

We raced it all over Macon while catching up on business.

“Dog Ebooks?” I said, my now customary question on the progress of his business.

“Actually, it’s awesome.” he said with a great big grin. “Over three thousand dollars a day.”

“Wow that’s fantastic!” I said, bursting with pride. “Man I remember when it was $37 bucks a day!”

“Me too! I’m doing a lot more now with live video. That and my Serializer and…awww damn!” Frank exclaimed with his traditional impish laugh.

“How is the Magic business?” Frank asked.

“Going great. Video as well. You were right about Camtasia being great. We have almost two testimonials for every customer, so it’s pretty exciting. Not exactly three thousand dollars a day, but David and I are both pulling in several thousand a month, and we’re enjoying ourselves.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Frank said, turning his Scrambler off the road so we could do a little bit of off-roading. “How goes the Product Launch Formula?”

“I’m having fun!” I said as we hit a huge bump. “It’s kind of a weird situation because folks don’t really know exactly what it is we’re selling yet, but there’s a lot of excitement.”

“Product launches are exciting stuff.” he said as we raced past a bunch of trees.

We drove back to Frank’s house. Before we had dinner he beckoned me downstairs, where he plopped two white binders labeled “The Collected Letters of John Carlton, Volumes 1 and 2.”

“I borrowed some Dan Kennedy tapes from you a while back.” Frank said. “I lost them. Real sorry about that. Take these instead?”

John Carlton is a legendary copywriter, most famous for his exciting sales letters. Ed Dale used one of Carlton’s letters as a template for the first sales letter for Magic Secrets. “Yeah dude, this is awesome! Thanks!”

We enjoyed dinner, and then we retired to the living room with his wife India, to chat a bit before I hit the road to Orlando.

“The Game.”

“Have you seen this?” Frank said, handing me a leather bound book with gold leafed writing that looked like a bible. It said “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists.” By Neil Strauss.

“Never seen it.” I said, handing it back.

“It’s crazy.” India, a pretty blond woman who was Frank’s high school sweetheart, laughed.

Frank explained, “It’s about these pick-up artists who run around Los Angeles and they get girls like Rock Stars even though they are just ordinary dudes. It’s mainly about this weird dude named Mystery. And there are other folks in it like a guy named Thundercat…”

“I met Mystery. And I know Thundercat.” I said, totally surprised.

“Oh yeah?” Frank said.

I laughed, “Yeah, actually it’s funny, when John and I went to California, before the Traffic Secrets launch, we went to that Double Your Dating event that Eben Pagan was holding. A bunch of interesting characters there. Mystery was first and foremost amongst them. Six foot five, plus platform shoes, a big black leather duster, a top hat, and black painted fingernails. Hard to miss him. We went out with him. I’ll tell you one thing, the guy definitely knows his stuff.”

“Thundercat is Matt Kadish. He actually called me out of the blue about an hour before I got here.”

“No way!” Frank erupted in laughter. “Well my cousin Trey found this book and he was totally amazed by it. He wants to do a launch with the author, this Neil Strauss fella.”

“Matt knows Neil. He knows all of those guys. I’ll put you in touch if you like.” I said.

“That would be cool.” Frank replied.

I hit the road for Orlando shortly afterwards and stayed there with John for a couple of days, mostly playing poker and getting what would turn out to be critical advice from John on the positioning for the Product Launch Formula launch, which I’ll discuss in greater detail in another issue.

On my way back up north Frank invited me to stop back by his office for the afternoon.

I looked over his shoulder as he worked on his dog training ebook business, and I watched the dollars pour into his Clickbank account, often by the minute. It was well before noon, and he had already pulled in over a thousand dollars.

“My cousin Trey talked to Thundercat. Thanks for putting us in touch. He thinks he can get Neil to go for it.” Frank smiled up from his screen as he scanned through his stats. “Trey is actually coming by during his lunch break from the car dealership he works at. He’s doing his first launch. Hypnosis training.”

“Cool.” I said, my eyes still dizzied by the pace of Frank’s earnings. I had seen money roll in at a massive pace during launches. But it was extraordinary watching daily income like this, especially knowing the modest start it had.

Trey rolled in shortly after 12, tall and skinny with tightly cropped hair and loads of energy.

Frank pulled up a chair to the folding table where one of his laptops was propped up, and he grabbed volume 2 of his copy of John Carlton’s collected letters, opened it to a sales letter, slapped it in his lap, and put his right finger on the headline while he began to furiously type with his left hand.

I watched as Frank used Carlton’s letter as a template to bang out a sales letter in a whirl of action for Trey’s launch, every once in a while conferring briefly with Trey over one point or another.

Minutes later it was over. Trey fired out an email to his list, and his product was live. Orders rolled in moments later. “Gotta get back to work!” Trey said, glancing at his watch, and flying out the door moments later.

I sat down to write some copy for Jeff’s launch, and Frank baked some of his special recipe cookies for me. After enjoying every last one of them, I bid Frank farewell and hit the road, my mind swirling with what I’d just beheld. I was on the phone with Jeff Walker, excitedly jabbering as soon as I started driving. “Slow down!” Jeff said, I’m trying to take notes!”

(I’ll never know for sure if it was the excitement of the situation or just how tasty Frank’s cookies were, but the next thing I knew I was in Kentucky, hours off course!)

Even though Jeff Walker had done a really amazing job of planning his launch, everything started to pile up. We both worked almost every waking moment for the next week or so preparing for the launch.

“Back to the wall.”

Inching towards the launch I started getting a feeling from reading all of the incoming emails that folks didn’t have a great sense for just who Jeff really was. As I reviewed the materials we’d released I realized that we hadn’t really said who Jeff was and what he really stood for. I called Jeff and told him I thought we needed to do something.

I interviewed Jeff privately for a couple of hours, searching for his story. When we were done I laid down and relaxed and thought through what Jeff and I had talked about. His story. How he’d been a hard working corporate exec who gave up climbing the corporate ladder for being Mr Mom and trying to figure out how make a living on the net.

His story came through for me in a very clear way. I imagined that I was Jeff going through what he had gone through. And then I wrote the “Back to the Wall” report. Jeff’s most personal story told in a personal way. I cried as I wrote one part of it. That’s how personal it was. Jeff’s wife Mary and I talked over the report, because I wanted to see if she was cool with it. She told me she cried at the same part…

The Back to the Wall report and the subsequent blog contest sent an already exciting and emotionally volatile launch situation into total hysterics. Every day I worked on the launch from the Starbucks near my house and sometimes I almost wondered how everything could seem so calm there when they were in hysterics online…

(Months later when I met one of Jeff’s customers, Liz Sherwood who built a $30,000 per month income using Product Launch Formula I was moved all over again when she said that’s why she bought.)

A couple of days before the launch, Jeff called me and asked if I could weigh in on the sales letter, because he just had so much going on with the affiliates and tech stuff.

“The amazing swing.”

I agreed, and before I knew it I had John Carlton’s Collected Letters, Volume 1, opened to a salesletter called “the Amazing Swing”, and I did my best attempt at what I had seen Frank do a few days before…

Frank called me a few hours after Product Launch Formula went live. “How did it go?” he asked.

“We’ve pulled in over a quarter a million in sales so far… Maybe more. I haven’t gotten an update in over an hour. Thanks for the John Carlton book by the way, because Jeff wrote most of the letter, but he wanted a little help with the beginning. So the collection of sales letters came in handy.”

It was exciting to feel the reward for having taken a few extra steps to prepare. Focusing some of my preparation time with John and Frank a bit before the launch had really come up big.

“Killer!” Frank said. “A quarter million dollars buys a lot of hot dogs!”

“And we’re just getting started. What’s next for you?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about doing a Serializer launch.” He mused.

“How are you going to do it?” I asked.

“I’m going to fire up ye olde Camtasia, open up my stats, show folks what you saw, and say gimmie money. Then I’ll show them how I did it.” Frank laughed.

“What’s next for you, once this Product Launch Formula thing is over?” he asked.

“What else? The next product launch.” I cackled. “By the way, what’s going on with you and Trey and the Neil Strauss launch with Thundercat?” I asked.

“We’re going to do it.” Frank said. “Like you said, the next product launch…”

Annihilation Action$:

Will It Work For Me?:

The number one question folks have walking into a buying situation is “will it work for me.” This is why legendary marketer Gary Halbert once asked the question:

“If you had a hamburger stand, what one advantage would you want?”

Some folks said location. Other folks said the best ingrediants. Others still said a top marketing campaign. But Halbert told them what they should really want is a “Starving Crowd” – and he was right!

Identifying a starving crowd creates an unfair advantage for answering the question “will it work for me” because folks in a starving crowd already know they are hungry!

But once we’ve located a starving crowd, if we want to put our results on steroids, then what do we do?

I decided right away when I got into online marketing to focus on video because I realized that there were basically three ways of conveying a message online, writing, pictures and video…which is basically moving pictures.

I remembered back to my days of teaching little kids how to play Magic one at a time and how if I could have recorded my lessons that I could have taught hundreds if not thousand of folks at a time, and because of that I had a lot of motivation to get started with video.

David Mills and I had spent the better part of two years recording videos nearly every day for our subscribers and our experience had a lot to do with our contribution to the Project Launch Formula launch. David figured out nifty things like how powerful it was to answer folks questions from his email inbox on video because it showed that the questions were real and because it showed that we cared about our customers.

(Again, people respect what you inspect.)

Four big keys that we learned were:

1) To constantly be filming because it’s so easy to have something worth recording and to miss the opportunity to capture it. So every time we had something that might be noteworthy to record, whether it was a new lesson, a game that we wanted to show, or an important question from a customer, we gave the benefit of the doubt to filming.

2) To watch the videos that we’d recorded and to give the benefit of the doubt to re-recording that video as many times as we needed to so we could get it right. Often times I would personally record a video half a dozen times or even more watching it each time, being my own audience and giving myself a great feedback loop until I felt I had really nailed it.

3) We weren’t afraid to come out from behind the camera and share ourselves with the camera and therefore share ourselves with our customers. We give ourselves and unfair advantage over our faceless competition when we appear in our own videos.

4) When you’re doing live video where you’re recording your face, the number one way to screw up is lighting. The only way to find out if your light is right is to test your recordings. It’s best to film during dusk and twilight, but any time will do as long as your face is lit up enough.

Chapter 5:

An idea I sent Jeff Walker March 2, 2006:

Jeff’s Response, March 2, 2006:

“Escape Velocity.”

Months passed and it was April 22, 2006. I was standing outside of the Hard Rock hotel in Orlando. Inside, Frank was holding his sold out million dollar Serializer event, where he was teaching folks how he had been making nearly four thousand dollars a day with his pet training ebook business, for months on end. I had just started writing this book…

I got a phone call. “Hey!” Said the chipper voice on the other end of the line, “I’m Brad Fallon.”

“Hey Brad.” I said back, “Nice to meet you.”

Brad said, “I was in Atlanta the other day for Big Seminar and I met some guys who you’ve been helping out with their launches. They couldn’t say enough good things about ya.”

“Oh, Foxxy and Miz.” I said, referring to a couple of really bright guys – one in online marketing and the other in online dating, who I had lended a little help to with their launches, especially with getting their case studies together.

(Both Miz and Foxxy would both bask in the success of six-figure launches just a few weeks later.)

“Anyway, the reason I’m calling,” Brad said, getting right to business, “Is that I want to have a million dollar-day launch.”

“What do you have to offer folks in return?” I asked point blank. I figured if he could be shockingly blunt, then so could I.

He said, “I started a wedding favors business about two years ago, a Yahoo store, powered by organic search from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Now we’re bringing in about a million dollars a month in sales. Almost totally based on free search engine traffic. You can find me at the top of the search rankings for Wedding Favors.”

“Impressive.” I said. It really was. “Have you ever helped anyone build a website?”

“My partner Andy Jenkins and I launched a home study course called Stomping the Search Engines. We then sold a $10,000 per person apprentice course to around 50 people. Everyone in that program has been successful with getting top organic search rankings. Many of them have built million dollar businesses.” It rolled off of his tongue as if he had been waiting his whole life for me to ask him.

“Will they be willing to be interviewed for case studies?” I asked.

“Yes. Almost all of them.” Brad said without hesitation.

“Ok. This definitely sounds interesting.” I said. “Let me get back to you.”

Brad said, “I’m headed to China tomorrow. That’s where we get our wedding favors made. So if I don’t hear from you before then, we can talk when I get back.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I said, thanking him and hanging up.

Escape velocity. That’s what it takes for a space shuttle to reach outer space…and once it happens it’s smooth sailing…

…But until then it’s rocket thrusters and massive amounts of fuel to boost that sucker into the heavens!

Like I pointed out when I was mentioning the night that Frank Kern was talking to me about copywriting and how he thought we should focus on it because it was a way of gaining great leverage, in business situations it turns out that escape velocity pretty much equals having success with a under your belt.

In this case that success was in the form of launches that I’d been a part of.

For Brad his leverage was coming from top Google rankings and the website that he’d built based on that.

That’s what was allowing both of us to make deals at what would turn out to be the highest of levels. And this deal would turn into a blockbuster like none other in the history of online marketing…

But it’s important to note, before we get into the millions of dollars earned and the thousands of folks it inspired, that it came from the humble beginnings of a couple of successes that Brad and I were able to string together.

Those smaller successes didn’t just pay the bills for each of us individually, but they acted like the rocket thrusters on a space shuttle and helped us penetrate the horizons of what’s possible with online marketing.

That’s what it’s like to be in the inner circle – instead of on the outside looking in.

And what was intriguing to me was that unlike me, Brad had accomplished his success through Google rankings – relatively unbiased and totally unemotionally and completely non-political system for showing nearly anybody in the world who was on top (and still is – myweddingfavors.com is still #1 for wedding favors!).

More on escape velocity to come!

“Neil Strauss.”

I walked back inside the Hard Rock hotel.

I spied Matt Kadish, who was hanging out in the back of the room with a very serious, slight, bald man with a devilish looking goatee, and very present dark eyes. “Neil, this is the guy I was telling you about, Mike Long. Mike this is Neil Strauss.”

“Hey Neil,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Hey Mike,” Neil said, lighting up instantly with a bright grin. “Sorry if I seem so serious. I just got off the phone with my ex girlfriend, Evelyn. She’s a poker player…”

“Evelyn Ng?” I said, surprised.

“You know her?” He said, looking shocked.

“Actually, she’s one of my friend’s roommates…” I replied.

“David Williams?” Neil said.

“Yeah, David.” I said, referring to the World Series of Poker champion. “I’ve known him since he was a 15-year old kid just getting his start in pro-Magic.”

“No way!” Neil said, his eyes dancing. I could see how he had become a world famous pick-up artist. He was fun.

“So you’re wrapped up in this whole launch thing too?” Neil asked.

“Mike’s actually the one who introduced me to Frank. He gave me some tips at one of Eben’s events a couple of years back.” Matt said, helpfully.

“No way. Thanks dude.” Neil grinned.

“No problem.” I said.

“What are you up to now?” Neil asked. “Launching stuff?”

“I always seem to be launching something.” I smiled back. “Actually, I’m working on my second book.” I said. (referring to Annihilation Engine, which is what you’re reading part 1 of right now!)

“Let me know if you want me to edit it.” Neil said instantly.

“Wow thanks.” I replied. “I think you’re a killer writer so I really appreciate it.”

“How goes Annihilation Method?” I asked them, about their latest dating product.

Neil got a pained look on his face. I felt like I had stepped on his cat…and wounded it fatally.

“Ahh… The tapes got kind of… messed up.” Matt said, referring to the recordings of their $7,000 per person workshop.

“Gotcha.” I said. As I’ve mentioned more than once in this issue, and as I’ll no doubt mention in issues of Annihilation Engine to come, so much of online marketing is about working our way past these glitches. Again, this is a matter of winning in preparation. I could see by the troubled look on Neil’s face that he was just finding this out…

I said goodbye to Neil and Matt and went over to chat with John Reese about the whole Brad Fallon thing. He said he thought I should look into it. And if the case studies were for real he said he would get behind it.

I talked to Jeff Walker after that. He told me that he thought I should double my asking price, with a wry grin on his face. It was flattering coming from somebody who had just written me a big fat check.

The more I looked into things the more I realized that the situation was ripe for something exciting. I realized from the launch situations that I’d taken a part of that there was oodles of money being left on the table for affiliates to snatch up…and TONS of value that prospects could be enjoying that they were missing out on during the current launches that were flying around at that time…

I started to think big. Really big…

Shortly after I got home from Orlando, I wrote Brad a letter about the launch he wanted to do. It was a long letter explaining:

1. If what he said was true, I thought we could build an 8-figure website, training folks in SEO.

2. I wanted 10% of the gross, pre-refund proceeds of the launch.

3. It would cost him a $10,000 retainer just for me to investigate his business to see if I wanted to get more involved.

4. The way we would succeed, if we did succeed, was through a great deal of preparation.

Here was his reply…

“The Jewel.“

A few weeks later, Frank invited me to come and visit him in La Jolla, California, nestled a few miles from San Diego.

As he and India drove me back from San Diego airport, and we rounded the hill into La Jolla, with a breathtaking view of the mountains crashing into the ocean, Frank once again swept his arm like Vanna White. “The Jewel.” He said, proudly referring to the translation of La Jolla to English.

“Wow.” I said.

Frank put me up in a beach house just a couple of blocks from the La Jolla shore. The Annihilation Method launch he did with Neil & Matt had gone off without a hitch, and sold out in record time. Another million dollar launch in the can.

We went surfing that morning to celebrate. It was my first time.

Frank came knocking on the door to my cottage the next morning. I had just gotten an email with an attached recording from David Mills. David and I had been hard at work, recording dozens of case studies with Brad and Andy’s Stomper Apprentices. We recorded them all with Camtasia, looking up each of their rankings on Google, with the person we were interviewing on speakerphone.

Then we’d ask them where they were before they met Brad and Andy, and what the progression had been after that. We’d talked to one guy who was now near the top of the rankings for “Motorcycle Accessories.” And another couple of guys who were #1 for “Sprint Cell Phone.”

I was careful to remind myself that this was one of the most important “winning in preparation” steps for the success of the launch. Even though it might not have “looked” as exciting from the outside looking in, soon thousands and thousands of people would be studying these videos with great care…

The recording David had just sent over was our best yet.

I answered the door, and Frank was as cheery as ever. “What’s up dude?” You feelin it from yesterday?”

“Ummm. Yeah.” I laughed. My whole body was sore from my first surfing experience. “Hey, check this out.”

I pulled up my laptop for Frank, and hit play on the recording David had just sent me.

It was from a 70-year old grandmother named Sydney Johnston who had built a mini-empire for herself based on search engine optimization. She had gone from just over 10,000 visitors per month when she got started, to 70,000 per month within a year.

She had top rankings for almost every “how to sell on eBay” term on Google. And she credited it all to the training she’d gotten from Brad and Andy, and to the community that had formed around it.

“That’s some serious stuff.” Frank said, whistling as the case study ended. “Do you have more of these?”

“Only about fifty of them.” I laughed, thinking of the way that David and I had been burning the midnight oil for weeks putting together these lengthy investigations.

“What are you thinking?” Frank asked?

“I’m thinking 10-million dollar day.” I said, smiling but still totally serious.

Frank looked back, totally serious, “That’s a lot of chang.”

Something big that I had learned from John Reese while behind the scenes of the Traffic Secrets launch, was that there were really two launches going on in any affiliate situation.

One launch was, of course, the launch to the prospects. Because if nobody told the prospects what was going on, then none of them would become customers.

But the second launch was the one that needed to come before the prospects ever saw the materials intended for them. I’m referring to the affiliate launch. Getting affiliates really involved.

In fact, a big part of the reason that Jeff Walker had wanted my help, even though he’s a really tremendous writer with oodles of experience, is because so much of his time was getting sunk into letting affiliates know what to do. And because of that, he ended up needing a hand with preparing the dispatches going out to the prospects.

You see, what John taught me, perhaps more than anything else during the million-dollar day, and what my experience on Product Launch Formula and other affiliate launches after that had taught me, was that affiliates are just like prospects. But instead of just being able to order once, some affiliates can effectively “order” several times, by sending out blasts to their lists…

I didn’t want to walk into the same problem with trying to do two things at one time. So I needed to bring a writer on board to help. And I didn’t know a writer who I thought was more capable of making folks get excited about a product, than Frank Kern.

Plus, I knew that many of the top affiliates respected Frank’s writing, and I wanted to arm myself with as many reasons as possible for affiliates to promote our materials.

Even though we had these killer case study videos, it would be difficult for every single affiliate to come up with great copy to support their promotion. I wanted to provide them with a swipe file that would make them feel fantastic about promoting.

“The $25,000 copywriting job.”

I asked Frank what it would take for him to write the swipe files for affiliates. He said $25,000. I think he said that because he thought there was no way that I would say yes.

(Frank also ended up scripting our videos AND writing the sales letter, all of which were tremendously well done.)

But I had already talked Brad into hiring Frank in advance. To Brad’s credit, he never blinked at the cost.

Frank and I had a blast that weekend. It was kind of like a non-stop sleepover.

He recommended that I move to La Jolla. And I realized that I was having so much fun, and that it would probably be a great place to do this mega launch from, so I agreed.

“Annihilation engine on steriods.”

Now the whole point of my Annihilation Engine is to take stories of individuals having success and to share it back with the community as a whole, not just to encourage action, but also to get more stories of individuals having success. The snowball effect.

We walked in the door, loaded with 50 extraordinary video case studies, and with John Reese’s commitment to promote. Plus, now we had Frank Kern’s swipe files and video scripts to provide more fuel to the fire. Our preparation was really getting there!

Things were already red hot by the time that John started promoting, and affiliates started following suit, sending out Frank’s swipe files. And because I could focus in on affiliates, my constant phone calls reminded them of just exactly what John and Frank were up to, and the results we were getting.

I gained an enormous amount of respect during this launch for the work of both David Mills and Andy Jenkins, who were tirelessly forging behind the scenes. David was planning and organizing the machinery of the business, and Andy was providing content that wowed and amazed our prospects.

For instance, Andy worked tirelessly on the “Going Natural” videos that we shared, putting valuable ideas on how to rank in the search engines. And most importantly, he was willing to re-shoot the videos again and again, until they were great.

And the results once again showed the wisdom of going the extra mile to get ready, because the steady stream of testimonials that poured into our inbox from the free material alone, was staggering. Every day, we got reports of several people getting ranked for search terms on Google.

Then something happened that sent the launch into a total frenzy.

Jeff Mulligan, the guy who had insisted that I meet John Reese years before, also insisted that I meet someone else, shortly after the Product Launch Formula launch. Jeff showed me the “Rich Jerk”, a new site that was taking Clickbank by storm. He told me that the guy who founded it was Kelly Felix, and that he was actually a down to earth genius, and that I had to meet him.

Jeff introduced me to Kelly in Las Vegas several weeks before the launch began. We were at an IM mastermind, that was really supposed to be a bachelor party for John Reese. But since he had broken off his wedding a few weeks prior, it had been renamed the “Back to Bachelor” party. Kelly and I hit it off in surprising fashion.

I added Kelly to my affiliate list, and after viewing our case study videos, Kelly asked if we could meet up in his office in Carlsbad.

To make a long story short, (Once again, I will discuss Kelly’s involvement and the Rich Jerk business in much greater detail in another issue of Annihilation Engine.) Kelly asked for a broad degree of latitude in promoting the launch.

I enthusiastically agreed, because I realized that Kelly had been preparing for a massive affiliate move with his Rich Jerk list, having never promoted a 3^rd party offer, and that he could put things over the top in a big way if we gave him the benefit of the doubt. I got Brad and Andy to reluctantly agree to let Kelly promote the way a “Rich Jerk” would…

“Firestorm.”

Once Kelly promoted, all hell broke loose.

The Rich Jerk had never promoted anyone but himself, and in true sarcastic style, Kelly turned what was already a charged situation into a total firestorm of controversy.

His provocative emails practically begged for Brad and Andy to fire back at him…if not sue!

We had already been getting a steady gush of emails every single day from folks excited about the materials we were sharing for the StomperNet launch (John Reese was the one who came up with the name StomperNet – about half way through the launch)…

…But once Kelly started promoting, the gush turned into a volcano of sometimes heated and other times hilarious emails from prospects. Not to mention that even though hundreds of affiliates were promoting, one out of every four visitors were coming from Kelly’s super-heavyweight Rich Jerk list!

Some accused us of actually being the Rich Jerk. Others demanded that we return fire. Still, others laughed and laughed, complimenting our orchestrated brilliance.

But it wasn’t all orchestrated. In many ways it was a grand chaos, but it was built on a foundation of solid preparation.

There were so many loose cannons involved, that nobody knew what would happen next. What would Kelly say next? What would Frank write in his next email? Where would John Reese come down on things? Oh, and by the way, what would Brad and Andy say?

But I wasn’t nearly as worried as you might think, because I knew that each player involved had put a ton of preparation into this thing. And they were all drawing off of the up front work that Andy had put in, helping his customers succeed in the first place, and that David and I had documented in our 50 case study videos.

So despite the chaos, there was an underlying foundation of preparation that was robust. And that allowed us to continue to move forward, especially under David’s watchful eye, as he managed our business moves.

By a lucky stroke of fate, Frank and Ed decided to have one final Underachiever event in San Diego. And one of the guest speakers was none other than John Carlton.

Frank and I sat down with John in the secluded speaker room and asked him for his advice. I used Camtasia on my laptop to record the three of us rapping about what the exact copy should be, and I transcribed it.

That ended up being our video book that went out to prospects, plus our testimonials, almost word for word.

That video book was tremendously popular. Now, I mentioned before that it was lucky that John Carlton was there, but we were also in a position to capitalize on that luck because of the great case studies we had, because we had Frank working on our side, and because Andy, David and I were prepared to bring that video book home.

“Tipping point.”

Right before our original intended launch date, Brad and Andy decided to put the launch off for a week at John Reese’s recommendation. Frank then announced through his “swipe file” broadcast that we had postponed the launch for a week, for a “cooling off” period, during which he would actually explain what the heck was actually involved in a membership for StomperNet.

This is where David Mills made a chess move that set into play a chain reaction that turned the tables and made everything go totally berserk.

I had long since figured out that Kelly was actually just a really funny guy who was trying to sort of pick a “war of words” with Brad and Andy. And I complained to David incessantly that Brad and Andy refused to mix it up, instead preferring to take the high road.

Then one night, David sent me an email with something brilliant. He had made a post on StomperBlog.com with a video where he hit back at the Rich Jerk on behalf of Andy and Brad.

Now the funny thing is that during much of Kelly’s distinguished online marketing career, he had gotten the majority of his leads through search engine optimization.

In fact Kelly’s first online business, a credit repair website, had ranked #1 for the monster search term “Bad Credit” for 3-years running.

But David did a little bit of digging and realized that he had caught Kelly with his pants down, for the moment at least.

John Reese had mentioned a couple of times that there might be a smart way to “swing back” at Kelly, but that the approach would have to be strategic…

Here’ was David’s email to Frank, Brad, Andy and me:

David had noticed that Kelly’s Rich Jerk business was so reliant on Pay-Per-Click advertising, and especially affiliate traffic from Clickbank, that Kelly had gotten lazy with SEO, and didn’t have much in the way of Google rankings to show for his 8-figure website empire.

David made a video exposing that fact, and firing back at Kelly on his implication that the Jerk knew more about SEO than Brad and Andy.

David’s video was an instant cult hit on our Blog, drawing thousands of views and loads of excited comments overnight.

John Reese seized upon the brilliance of the idea right away and suggested that we “pile on” to it as much as possible…

“Granny vs. the Rich Jerk.”

Less than a day later, we went live with a video that set the Internet on fire.

Sydney Johnston, the eBay granny, recorded a video based on David Mills template, where she lambasted the Rich Jerk for having not only worse rankings than Brad and Andy, but in fact worse rankings than her!

The result was like a howitzer shot at short range.

Within hours, traffic to StomperBlog.com exploded to the highest numbers yet.

Again, from the outside things looked like chaos, but really it was a matter of a number of threads of careful preparation being drawn together…

Hours later we sent out this swipe copy that Frank wrote to affiliates, who picked up the ball and ran with it:

Just over a week later, Frank Kern banged on the door to my La Jolla beach house.

Launch day.

“Wooo! I live for this!” Frank called out at the top of his lungs, as we pressed send on our launch email, and opened up the cart for business.

That day, our launch URL convertlinks.com, came from out of nowhere to become the 134^th most visited site on the Internet.

Months of preparation were coming to fruition, and the 14-million dollar day was in session. And Internet marketing would never ever be the same…

Annihilation Action$:

Escape Velocity:

I’ve fielded tens of thousands of questions from folks trying to get started building successful bootstrap sites. And by far the #1 question is: “What’s the best way to get started.”

I’ve thought long and hard about that question, and it’s taken me years to come up with this answer:

The best way to get started building successful websites is to gain escape velocity and to be on the inner circle, instead of being on the outside looking in.

(Escape velocity is what rockets and space shuttles need to reach outer space…and it requires an enormous boost of extra energy…but once it happens they can float around in space with little or even no effort at all! Being successful on the web is a lot like that!)

That’s because insiders get two key advantages that folks on the outside looking in don’t get.

1. Insiders have a way of accumulating useful data, ideas and strategies that are then easy to integrate in their sites, rocketing their results upwards because insiders see the world differently through their past successes.

1. Insiders can easily swing cash making deals that folks on the outside looking in can’t get because insiders want to make deals with other insiders because they know that there’s value to be gained from other insiders.

Every player involved in the $14 million dollar day, all of the major players like Frank Kern to John Reese to Kelly Felix, to Brad and Andy to David Mills and me were all had escape velocity and were insiders. And so were the other important players including affiliates like Jeff Johnson, Brad Callen, Cody Moya, Mike Filsaime, and of course including the folks that David Mills and I conducted case studies with who already had enormously successful businesses online like Sydney Johnston, and Michael Gelblicht who had built 7-figure businesses using SEO…

And because they were insiders each player involved already started out knowing how to accumulate understanding and integrate building blocks into their business. And they knew how to swing cash boosting deals.

Now I’m not trying to take anything away from the success of the $14 million dollar day. It’s an event that may never really be surpassed. Before things even got started Brad and Andy had to help dozens of folks succeed past their wildest dreams in building Search Engine based business successes. And then David Mills and I conducted exhaustive and probing interviews with those folks delving into their markets and their websites, recording the results for everyone to see…

It took extraordinary effort from Andy Jenkins in creating content, and from David Mills in managing the launch. Frank Kern created a fantastic and extraordinary email and video marketing campaign for prospects that thrilled and delighted…and that helped create an earth shattering pulse of sales. Affiliates like John Reese and Kelly Felix largely set the tone for the launch leveraging their mega brands and leading other affiliates by the dozens to follow.

I personally worked over a thousand hours putting together the affiliate situation, and crafting a “done for you” series of emails and videos – using Frank Kern’s “swipe files” as building blocks – for affiliates to take them by the hand and lead them step by step.

(John Reese earned over a million dollars in gross pre-refund affiliate commissions! Kelly Felix, Brad Callen, Jeff Johnson, Cody Moya and Mike Filsaime all piled up six figures in gross pre refund affiliate commissions! Mike Merz’s affiliates accounted for millions in affiliate sales with his extraordinary affiliate wrangling. And dozens of other affiliates piled up four and five figure affiliate commissions. And all in the span of just a few hours of sales!)

Plus tens of thousands of prospects benefitted from the kind of information usually reserved for a high dollar online marketing course totally free. And while not everybody who bought StomperNet found that it was what they were looking for, I’m still contacted today by folks who got their start with StomperNet and who are grateful that we put things together, which is always a humbling situation…

Now somebody might say to me, “Um, ok, but Mike aren’t you sort of putting the cart before the wheel? I mean don’t you need a successful website before you can get escape velocity and become a true insider?” Surprisingly there is a hidden way to gain escape velocity and to become an insider even before you build a successful website.

And it’s a great strategy because it’s actually much easier to gain escape velocity and become an insider first and then to use the additional leverage and momentum to build a cash spouting web site second…much better then trying to bite everything off in one chunk with building a cash positive web site without first getting escape velocity and becoming an insider! So how do you gain escape velocity and become an insider?

We want to have a way of accumulating understanding in the same way an insider does because it’s critical to have a crystallization point around which our success can build.

The way rock candy is created is kind of a funny thing. You can have a glass of super saturated sugar water and it will be 100% liquid. But then if you dip a string with a single crystal of sugar on the end of it, whammo, you get rock candy because now all of the rest of the sugar has a point to coalesce around!

Creating escape velocity is much the same. The waters of the online marketing world are already super saturated with prospective customers ready to become buyers.

All they need is a crystallization point.

In the same way your mind probably already has loads of ideas and creativity floating around like the super saturated sugar in the water that makes rock candy. But what you need a crystallization points to get the reaction started!

The Crystallization Point: Escape Velocity Done for You! Kelly Felix, David Mills and I decided to create an extraordinary training, support and most of all done for you situation for you to gain escape velocity becoming an insider and there for cash spouting web site creation success. We wanted to have all of the above steps covered not only for training purposes, but then because we care about your success, we went one step further to create a situation that’s truly done for you so you can focus on one thing: gaining and enjoying escape velocity!

That’s why we created Bring the Fresh: Full Disclosure Money Making Shortcut, our free traffic training blueprint powered by Google (plus EXACTLY how to CONVERT traffic into sales) and loaded with done for you advantages.

Listen, if you’re reading this now it means that you already own Bring the Fresh. But maybe you want even more…

Done for You Unfair Advantages:

• Free Traffic! We realized that folks need an unfair advantage when it comes to getting visitors to their sites. That’s why we’ve opened the door to our secret vault of shockingly simple methods to get Google drooling over your web sites and sending thousands of cash ready prospects knocking at your door.

• Celebrating Success! After spending years cultivating and leveraging a culture of success, we’ve created a culture of success that you can share with your new prospects and customers so you and your prospects and customers can enjoy the thrill of what it’s like to have excellence recognized. And then because we care about your success we went one step further and created a done for you solution for you to celebrate success and the financial benefits from that celebration with your prospects and customers! And you get our support and focus and to interact with our Bring the Fresh private Yahoo Email group where there are hundreds of detailed posts every month where our customers exchange their results, ideas and support along with Kelly and me.

• Mistakes! After years of studying success and navigating our way past the mistakes that halt progress and frustrate folks we’ve developed a bullet proof set of step by step blueprints laying out exactly how we get the results we enjoy for you. Then because we care about your success we went one step further and created a special earnings program where the heavy lifting is done for you so you can focus on getting going while you’re gaining escape velocity.

• Winning in Preparation! After years of painstaking preparation that’s led to over 31 million dollars in brand new bootstrap web site success we’ve taken even more time to create the exact preparation that you will need to succeed. Then because we care about your success we took things a step further and created a done for you situation where you’d get to take advantage of our preparation and share it directly with your prospects, that we’d help you find, turning them into cash paying customers!

• Will it Work For Me? After years of helping thousands of prospects answer this question with a resounding YES! (And with those prospects pulling out their credit cards and becoming paid customers!) we’ve created a will it work for me system for you to leverage in your web sites. And then because we care about your success we’ve created a done for you situation

• Escape Velocity! We created all of these advantages for you and then we went one step further because we care about your success to create a done for you situation because we wanted you to gain escape velocity so you could become an insider and then you could easily enjoy success with building cash spouting web site after cash spouting website!

Kelly and I have enjoyed hundreds of thousands of free ready-to-buy visitors to our sites in just the first few months of this year using this exact same system.

But who else has this worked for?

Here are just a couple of the folks who have used Bring the Fresh to get top rankings on Google and laugh all the way to the bank:

• Mike Swanson: Mike started Bring the Fresh with almost no search rankings. Within a couple of weeks of joining us he started getting on page 2 and even page 1 of Google. Now he has had a several month stranglehold on the #1 spot on Google for the search term: Oil Stocks. And he’s also currently ranked #8 on Google for Stock Trading, which gets 4 MILLION searches per month according to Google, and costs just under $15.00 PER CLICK for Google’s sponsored results!

• Mario De Almeida: Mario is a 23 year old affiliate marketing Rookie. In January he started using some of our Bring the Fresh tactics to boost a video he just posted up Google’s rankings. In a few days the video was on page 2 and 3 for some big search terms. Within a couple of weeks it was the top ranked video and ranked #3 overall for Mystery Method, a search term that gets nearly 2 MILLION searches per year!

• And there are literally hundreds of others enjoying the same kind of results because Bring the Fresh is so easy, and yet effective!

For getting started we think there’s no better way to get free or nearly free traffic on Google and YouTube.

• Bring the Fresh shows takes you step by step through our exact Google powered free traffic and show you how we’ve powered over $31 million dollars worth of sales mostly based on free traffic from Google, YouTube and affiliate.

• How to get started making money? We take you through our exact step-by-step affiliate marketing blueprint to select keywords to power your websites and the right hand-picked closed affiliate program for you. And then because we care about your success we have created a done for you set of unique markets and keywords for you to enjoy with your already SEO’d in advance web site so you enjoy the advantage of having a Starving Crowd already ready for you!

• Then we provide step-by-step and even done for you instruction on EXACTLY how to CONVERT your new visitors into CUSTOMERS like so many of our Bring the Fresh members are already doing for affiliate marketing or for your own products and services!

It’s all happening,

Mike Long

P.S. Feel Free to hand this video book to a friend. Affiliates usually contact me at my personal email address: mikelongmagic@gmail.com

P.P.S. But wait! There’s more! Frank Kern and I filmed this video about our conversion strategy for the 14-million dollar day :

P.P.P.S. Travis Sago and I filmed This Video About Free Traffic:

Edited: October 10th, 2011

Back from Affiliate Dot Com Vegas Event

Hey everyone, just back from Vegas and Mike Filsaime’s event. It was my first event in quite a long time (at least 2 yrs).

As usual, I didn’t go inside the actual seminar room for long (maybe 10 minutes total), because I don’t like to get sidetracked with notes about what other people are doing, knowing there is a missing key component that will be pitched at the end for $2k from each speaker. I already have enough ideas on my plate as it is.

One bummer was that I stayed at the Venetian, and it was a $50 cab ride out to no man’s land where the M Resort and the event was. I didn’t know it was gonna be so far away, so I only attended on Friday. But while I was there, I had lunch with George Brown and Tom Miller. Tom has some amazing Facebook software I’m really looking into. I’m probably going to do a webinar with him about it because its just so killer. I’ll talk more about it once I’ve used it a bit more. It can get very black hat, but Tom’s been using it for about a year now himself, and just recently he started selling the software. It creates tons of accounts, gets 5,000 friends on each account, and a bunch of other crazy stuff. One post on a newsfeed to all of the accounts and instant sales of a Clickbank product. He updates it almost daily, to avoid ever-changing facebook codes. It reminded me of the days back in 2006 when you could make a killing on Myspace with bots. Obviously, if you aren’t comfortable with blackhat stuff, just skip it.

Aside from that, I got approached by dozens of people that want me to promote “the next big thing”. When I ask for specifics about how well it was working for their customers, most had no answer other than “good”. No specifics. No shining star case studies. Kinda bummed me out. But they were quick to tell me it converts well, which is classic IM.

I also met a few people who said they got started with the Rich Jerk a long time ago, and that now they had very successful businesses. I got a little emotional about it! Especially this guy “Gunner” from Germany. He seemed very nervous to approach me, and when he told me his story and how he went from nothing to 6 figures a year, providing a nice life for his family… man that was a really cool moment for me.

Anyway, Friday night I took Georgy Boy and Tom Miller and BringTheFresh.com super-member Rick Rivera out to Tao for George’s birthday. Mike Dillard stopped by, as well as Bryan and Ryan Tate (cool guys). Fun times.

Saturday I was wiped and didn’t even leave my room. Didn’t answer the phone or check email. It was awesome. Note to self: blackout shades are amazing. Apparently I missed a night of debauchery at Club XS. Oh well.

Sunday I took my girlfriend sight-seeing, as it was her first time in Vegas. This included dinner at my favorite restaurant in the world – CraftSteak at the MGM – owned by Tom Colicchio of Top Chef. Amazing stuff there.

Then Sunday night was THE night. The affiliate appreciation event where Mike Filsaime rented out half of the club “Lavo” at the Palazzo hotel. It was pretty nuts. More alcohol than anyone could ever consume, but I stayed sober enough to talk to a lot of IM’ers. I met tons of new people and reunited with others I hadn’t seen in years. I was most impressed by Rich Schefren. I sat down with him for at least 30 min and he really blew me away with how he is providing value to his customers. I was shocked that he actually cared – pretty unusual these days.

All in all it was fun. A few key conversations made the whole trip worthwhile. Same thing for Rick – he made a lot of good connections.

It just goes to show, the money and “secrets” are never from the seminar, but from the conversations that take place outside. Especially at the bar. So don’t ever feel like you’re not welcome to attend anyone’s event, just because you don’t have an invitation. Nobody cares, and one solid connection or conversation can change everything.

I’ll probably be back in Vegas in January for Affiliate Summit West, and then Wash DC in March for Yanik Silver’s Underground seminar. (again, not buying tickets to either one, or listening to any speakers) Let me know if you’re gonna be at either event, and if there’s any synergy for us to hang out or chat.

Edited: November 26th, 2010

Prelude to a Rich Jerk… Who is Kelly Felix?

There have been some nice posts inside my membership website at BringTheFresh.com where people are introducing themselves, telling us a little about their backgrounds, etc.

I really like that, so I decided to include something about myself in the members area, and I’m reproducing it here on my blog. I may have gotten a little carried away, but hey, it’s basically my whole life story!

It’s where I come from, how I began marketing online, how I created the Rich Jerk, Bring the Fresh, and made tens of millions of dollars in the process. So if you have 15 minutes, check it out and feel free to comment.

This is about as transparent as it gets…

Who I Am…

For the past 10 years, I’ve tried my best to remain a mysterious, behind-the-scenes, Internet marketer. Throughout that decade I’ve had several six, seven and even eight figure businesses.

During that time, I created an Internet marketing company called “The Rich Jerk”, which sold the # 1 eBook on Clickbank.com for several years. It was a great experience overall, and I learned so many lessons about running a big business. I was also fortunate enough to meet a lot of interesting people, many of whom I’m still friends with today.

But to understand how and why I’ve achieved such great success online, I think it’s important to start from the beginning and mention a few personal things that I’ve rarely shared with anyone…

Okay, here goes…

First of all, I grew up on a farm in a very small town called “Roy”, about 100 miles outside of Seattle, Washington. We had a mule, a horse, 2 donkeys, a miniature bull (only 32 inches tall), a llama, a goat, geese, peacocks, pigs, and chickens. I made money as a child by selling eggs to the local town folk. A dollar a dozen!

My dad was a parts manager at a Chrysler dealership and my mom was a print model and actress in commercials (I always got a kick out of seeing her on TV). To this day I have no idea what the purpose of our farm was, or why my parents purchased it, but we had one nonetheless. If that weren’t strange enough, we also lived amongst many wild deer…and they would follow me home when I got off of the school bus, and I would feed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my backyard right out of my hand – I kid you not.

Anyway, enough about the farm…

At the time (1987), my mom was always good about buying me the latest Nintendo game when I got straight A’s in school. I turned this into my first business venture. I made money as my elementary schools’ lone entrepreneur; I had the Nintendo games that other kids’ parents wouldn’t buy for them. Then I would rent my games out to the kids for $1/day. I basically ran my own Blockbuster inside the school!

When I was 10 years old, I used my first computer. It was 1988. I was in a gifted program in my school with one other kid named Chris Meyers. We both apparently did well on an IQ test. So once a week, the two of us were bussed to a larger school about 30 miles away. I always felt a bit strange about having a whole bus for just us.

At the gifted school, we were surrounded by the smartest kids from every school in the district, and to me it was a bit intimidating. I felt smart, but these kids were exceptional.

There were around 20 of us or so. We would come up with inventions, advertising campaigns for fictional companies, play quiz games, solve puzzles, etc . We also had access to a few Apple 2E computers and IBM PS2’s. The whole situation was like a playground for brainiacs. The teacher used to tease me because I was never really interested in anything in the class except the computers. I always had to be pried away from them.

One day we were asked to write a letter to someone influential in the world. I wrote to Bill Gates. I thought he was the coolest guy in the world because I was obsessed with computers. Being a bit precocious, I warned him to watch out because I had plans to take over his company someday. I never got a reply, but my mother still has a copy of the letter and I get a laugh out of reading it every now and then.

Back on the farm, things began to go downhill, and eventually I found myself in the midst of a nasty divorce/custody battle. I recall several visits to a mental institute to see my mother in a straight jacket. She was not coping well with the situation, to say the least. That was rough. But over time she got the help she needed. And eventually she met someone else. And when she did, I had to make a choice of who I wanted to live with – my alcoholic father, or my mother and her new husband who were being relocated to a place I’d never heard of – Mobile, Alabama.

I chose Alabama, and unfortunately I’ve only spoken to my father a handful of times since then.

I was a teenager now, and down south I quickly learned that being a “white boy” was going to cause me a lot of problems. In order to get by, I did a complete 180. The straight-A student became a rebellious, fight for my life kind of kid, frequently having issues with violence, drugs, and the police. I went from farm living to having guns pulled on me a few times. And I was no stranger to juvenile hall. I think the 7th time was finally my last. I still often wonder how I made it through those years alive.

I didn’t realize it at the time but we lived in poverty. It was the early 1990’s and our house cost $20k. Dirt roads and dirt yards. I worked at least 20 different jobs throughout high school – Kmart, carpet cleaning, making bagels, washing cars, pumping gas, fast food, etc. But none lasted very long, as I had developed a problem with authority.

When I was 16, I remember purchasing the only infomercial product I’ve ever ordered – by Don Lapre. He claimed to “make millions using tiny little classified ads.”

Here’s the commercial that convinced me to buy:

I eventually returned the program and got my money back, but it did spark an idea. I owned a book about how to make a cable tv descrambler (which would get you free cable), using a few supplies that could be purchased at Radio Shack. I re-wrote it into a short manual with pictures, had some printed up, and sold the plans in the local newspaper using my own little classified ads. I ended up breaking even and eventually gave up, but I was amazed that someone had actually mailed me a money order.

Around that time, my stepdad was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Unfortunately there’s no cure for this disease, and it’s very painful. Surgery after surgery, and more pills than anyone would ever want to take in a day. We had some good times watching his favorite football team, the 49ers, but they became few and far in between as his condition worsened.

One night I came home and found him very drunk & angry, stumbling around yelling. This was an often occurrence, as alcohol was his only escape from the pain. But this time was different. He was an ex-cop, and this time he had his 9 millimeter Beretta in his hand, and he put it to the back of my head. I instantly ran as fast as I could to my room, slammed the door in his face and locked it. I called 911 as he banged on my door. Seconds later I heard a shot. I slowly crept out of my room to find my mother crying on the floor and my stepdad laying there lifeless. He had taken his own life. I remember it like it was yesterday.

You may be wondering why I’m mentioning some of these things. I don’t bring them up for sympathy, or to show you how hard I had it. This isn’t a pity party. I realize many people have had it much, much worse. But I think it’s important for you to see where I came from, and to see where I’m at now…because basically anything is possible. As cliché as it sounds…it’s true.

Fast forward a few years to age 19. I was going to college at the University of South Alabama, majoring in computer science, and failing miserably. When I was supposed to be learning C++ code and Novell Networking, I tended to play around with Windows 3.1 and get online to explore the coolest thing I’d ever seen – the Internet. It was 1997 and it was the first I’d ever seen of it. Writing 12 pages of C++ code that would calculate a phone bill didn’t seem very interesting to me. Why not just use a calculator? But I always wanted to be around computers. They fascinated me. The only PC I had ever owned was my stepdad’s old IBM PS1, circa 1984. It had 256kb of RAM. All I could do was run DOS, play the text-based game, “Escape from the Titanic”, and eventually upgrade to 512kb so that I could play “King’s Quest”, which came on 5 ¼ “ floppies!

At around this time, the strangest thing began to happen – as I continually accessed the Internet during classes, my perspective began to change. I realized there was this huge world out there that I knew nothing about. All of these websites from all over the world, and I was talking to people on IRC (internet relay chat) from the U.S. to China. I began to feel like I was possibly meant for bigger things than small town Alabama had to offer. Absolutely none of my friends had any real interest in ever leaving. It seemed their highest aspirations were to work at the local paper mill, or the Pepsi distributor, or in construction. I found that so odd. At the same time, I had no idea where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do – I just wanted a REASON to leave. And just about any reason would suffice.

So this is what happened:

I’m 20 years old. I’m sitting at home watching “Dawson’s Creek”. And I had a huge crush on Katie Holmes. I wondered how I could meet her…until…voila! It came to me – I needed to get on that show.

Now I had never been an actor. Never considered it. Nothing. But I instantly wanted to be an actor…so I could meet Katie Holmes. Makes sense right?

The next day I called u-Haul and soon I was headed to Los Angeles – la la land. I didn’t know anyone there, or what the future had in store. But I had a u-Haul with all my earthly possessions, a 92 Toyota Celica in tow, and $5,000 in my pocket, which my mother gave me as a parting gift. I’m only guessing, but I’m pretty sure it was everything she had.

A buddy named Dennis L’Orange rode with me. Actually he drove most of the way while I slept. And when we finally arrived, there was a problem. You see, I had used “ye olde” Internet to rent an apartment in Los Angeles, sight unseen.

What I failed to realize was what part of town the apartment was in. It was $500/month, which was 3 times the cost of an apartment in Alabama, so I assumed it would be nice. But as I walked up to the building and brushed my way through a gang of unsavory characters to get inside, I felt sensory overload. The smell was almost unbearable. The “manager”, who was apparently drunk, led me up to my new apartment. I didn’t even get inside. The door next to mine was open, and the resident was repeatedly punching his female companion in the face while he screamed obscenities. That was enough for me. I quickly exited and found a cheap motel an hour outside of LA. My friend decided to take a bus back to Alabama the next day. He had had enough.

That night I felt the most alone I’ve ever felt in my life. I was a young kid in Los Angeles and didn’t know a soul. I had no clue what I was doing. I remember listening to “Mayonnaise” by the Smashing Pumpkins on repeat as I cried myself to sleep.

Over the next month I stayed at the Wilshire Motel in West LA until I found an apartment I could afford that was livable. On move-in day a really nice guy saw me trying to lift my refrigerator up the stairs and offered to help. If not for him I probably would’ve had major back problems my whole life! His name is Fernley Phillips. He went on to write several movies in Hollywood, including “The Number 23”, starring Jim Carrey. We still talk every now and then. I’m so proud of him and his success. We used to go to McDonalds together on 25 cent hamburger Tuesdays and load up. We were so broke. We also frequently snuck into theaters for double features.

Fernley introduced me to a woman named K Callan, a famous Hollywood writer/actress, who then introduced me to her acting agent Martin Gage. Martin signed me on as a client for the following reason: He was openly gay and thought I was cute! LOL. Hey, whatever works – as long as I wasn’t required to, ehem…do anything in return. Now I was one step closer to Katie Holmes!

I started going to Santa Monica College and taking acting classes, because I figured if I was going to be auditioning for TV and movies, I should probably know a little bit about acting right? I also started taking HTML classes as well because I still had a burning desire to understand how websites were made. I was majoring in theater with a minor in computer science. Interesting combination?

Over the next few months I crashed and burned dozens of auditions for shows like Gilmore Girls, Touched by an Angel, That 70’s Show, the movie “Dude Where’s my Car?”, etc. I was going up against guys who had done this their whole lives, understood the industry, and had booked major roles before. I was very intimidated, and I actually developed an anxiety disorder. I would throw up before every audition…

Then one day I got the call – I was officially auditioning for Dawson’s Creek! How crazy is that? Less than a year prior I was sitting at my house in Alabama watching the show, and now here was my chance to meet Katie!

Now I’d love to say that I got the part and my dreams came true, but… in reality I was a terrible actor. I had no idea what I was doing, and the casting director didn’t hesitate to remind me of that fact. Sufficed to say, no Katie for me.

Now with my dreams a bit dashed, I went on to stink up another 50 auditions or so for various shows/movies such as the lead role in Spider Man (Tobey McGuire’s part), the lead role in Star Wars (Annakin Skywalker), and many other roles I had no business competing for. I’ve gotta say, my agent, Martin, was really awesome. He got a complete unknown into all of these huge opportunities. I think I got around 60 “no’s” before Martin finally sent me packing. No hard feelings, I just wasn’t making him look good, OR making him any money. After all, it’s a business.

Now I didn’t know what to do. I landed an administrative job at a small investment banking firm because acting wasn’t paying the bills, and my $5k from mom was long gone. My job was basically to set up the faxing software to spam fax businesses all night, every night, promising to take their private company public for $100k via a reverse merger into a public shell, helping them raise capital, blah blah blah (we would later be investigated by the SEC). This glamorous job also included perks like cleaning the owner’s house, his car, doing his dry-cleaning…that sort of thing.

But one day while I was dropping off some things at his house, I noticed something. His tax return was laying out on the kitchen counter. I admit it, I looked. And my jaw dropped. He had made $374,000 in the last year. It was amazing to me because I obviously knew people made that kind of money, but this time it was up close and personal, and I could see it and touch it.

This simple event re-invigorated me with the desire to get out there and put a lot more effort into the things I was passionate about, because I wanted to be as successful as my boss. You’d think I would just decide to be an investment banker and follow in his footsteps to get rich. But I just wasn’t passionate about investment banking. I was passionate about 2 things – acting and websites. And I would no longer settle for half-assing either of them.

This was a major turning point in my life, and what I was about to learn over the course of the next year has shaped my professional and personal life ever since.

The first thing I decided to do was figure out the best possible way to gain an unfair advantage over other actors. They obviously had several advantages over me – whether it was more experience, a better resume, a better look, more confidence, more connections, etc.

So what could I do to figure out EXACTLY how to book auditions over them?

I needed to get direct access to the people who were the decision makers for every acting job – the casting directors.

Almost every actor tries to get an “in” with casting directors, but they do it by sending gifts, or postcards informing them of a show they just booked, or by sending pictures with clever packaging. But since everyone was doing it, and only a few were successful, I was suspicious of those tactics.

Then it hit me – I needed to be in the room during auditions, not as an actor, but on the other side of the camera as the casting director’s assistant. That way I could get raw feedback about what other actors did in the audition room, and perhaps more importantly, what the casting director says about them after they’ve left the room.

However, I quickly found out that casting assistant jobs weren’t exactly easy to attain. First you have to intern as an office “gopher”, basically getting treated like garbage while you tend to each person’s personal needs. Then you work your way up slowly over time. So it would take a major time commitment, and I would have to be willing to work for free.

But I was willing to make the commitment in order to get the answers that I needed. And, I figured that even spending time as a gopher would probably allow me to chat with the casting directors occasionally, or overhear their conversations from time to time. I needed to get inside their heads any way I could.

After applying at several offices, I finally got “hired” as an intern at the office of Victoria Burrows, who had been the casting director for The A-Team, 21 Jump Street, MacGyver and about 100 other shows/movies. I was stoked to be in the company of such a legitimate casting office!

Long story short, I didn’t stay employed long enough to become a full fledged assistant because I couldn’t handle being berated every day by the other assistants. BUT, I did stay long enough to get the feedback I needed. You see, occasionally the assistants would be busy, or unavailable, and the casting director would need someone to “read” with the actors who came in.

A reader simply reads the lines of the other characters in the script that the actor is supposed to be talking to. This was EXACTLY what I wanted, and I was more than willing to be a reader anytime they needed it. I actually got to read with many people who I recognized from other shows. They weren’t big-time A-listers, but they were “working” actors. Guys like Peter Graves, who has done tons of movies, and Kristoff St. John, who has done 700+ episodes of the Young & the Restless.

Actors would come and go, and some would really be great, and others not so great. And to my surprise, the best actor in my opinion almost NEVER got the job. After they left, Victoria would say things like “ Wow he seems like such a nice guy”, or “That guy reminds me of my father”, or “Wow that woman really seemed like she was having a bad day”.

It finally became clear to me what they were looking for. They weren’t looking for good actors. They were looking for someone who already “was” the character.

In other words, they don’t want to see someone come in and “turn-on” their acting ability. They want to see the character come through the door. If they want to cast a bratty kid, they want to see a bratty kid come through the door, and when they inevitably talk to him and ask him questions before the audition even starts, he should answer like a bratty kid would. So ultimately when he leaves the room, they would be thinking, “Wow, what a brat!”… “He’s perfect.”

Once I realized this, I quit the job and sought out another agent. I ended up signing with an agent named J Michael Bloom, who was pretty well known. I just sent in my picture, got a call, went in for a meet and great, and he said “What the heck, I’ll give you a try.” I felt pretty lucky.

In any event, now I was ready to audition with my new found knowledge.

The result:

I booked my first 6 auditions. I did a national Hot Pockets commercial, 5 episodes of a show on MTV called “Undressed”, small parts on shows like Young & the Restless, 7th Heaven, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Power Rangers, and a few other shows on the Sci-Fi channel. I felt like the king of the world.

Here are some of my gigs (I wasn’t the greatest, but I knew how to get hired!):

But what I also realized was that although I enjoyed getting the parts, actually working as an actor wasn’t my cup of tea. 6am call times and 12 hours of sitting in a trailer waiting to say 5 lines was miserable to me. And I felt like I never got to do the part how I thought it should be done. Directors will have you do it their way, and the version that actually airs may be one that you absolutely hated, weirdly enough. The whole thing just wasn’t fun for me. I only enjoyed booking the part, and getting the satisfaction of being the one they picked, not doing the job itself.

During my hot streak I was up for a major role on a soap opera called One Life to Live. It was down to me and 2 other guys, and they wanted to fly me to New York to “test” for it. Testing is when you actually go on the set and film a real scene, so they can see exactly how you would come across. It paid $2k a week, which might as well have been a million dollars to me at the time.

At exactly this same time, I had done something equally amazing to me – I had my first website making money – $300/month. And I’ll tell you exactly how I did that in a moment. But because I was succeeding online (even on a small scale), and because I was quickly losing my interest in acting, I decided to turn down the soap opera. I also called my agent, thanked him from the bottom of my heart, and let him know I was quitting the business altogether.

My heart just wasn’t in it anymore, and the website was much more exciting to me. And Katie Holmes was engaged or something anyway.

So here is how I created my first profitable website:

After I made the decision to deeply investigate how to become a working actor, and I began to see success, I decided to try the same thing with websites. In other words, I would create a website about something I was passionate about, but also look much deeper, in order to get the raw feedback and knowledge necessary to set myself apart from the rest, just like I had done with acting.

At the time, one of the greatest struggles in my life was bad credit. I had several maxed out credit cards that I couldn’t pay back. Many had already been “charged off”, which means the credit card company wrote it off as a loss, and subsequently reported that on my credit report. A charge-off is terrible for your credit score, and I had several of them. And according to my credit report, they would remain there for 7 years, making it nearly impossible for me to get any other credit card, loan, etc. during that time.

I had FINALLY gotten my own computer, so I was able to spend a countless amount of time online. And I typically found myself looking for a solution to my bad credit. I had heard of credit repair, but didn’t really know what it was exactly. So I investigated everything I could find on the subject.

Most websites simply made claims of what they could do. For example they would say they could remove a charge off for $500. But I wanted to know HOW they removed it. It seemed like a closely guarded secret.

I finally came across the most pathetic looking website I had ever seen. It was completely amateur, and was selling an e-book on how to repair credit yourself. This was the first time I had ever heard the term “e-book”.

The one vital thing about this website that struck me as odd was that the bottom of the site had a visitor counter that said there had been 70,000 visitors to the site. This completely blew my mind. I started doing the math. In my opinion this guy HAD to be making a decent amount of money. (Keep in mind that this was before I knew counters could be faked, etc., so I believed what I saw.)

It was shocking to realize that a website so pathetic looking could get so many visitors and possibly be making money selling a do-it-yourself credit repair e-book. I bought the book and it basically told people to write letters to the credit reporting agencies denying/disputing everything. Not exactly great content, but he was probably making money nonetheless.

After taking a few HTML classes, I was sure that I could make a website that at least looked a little better than this one. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to be able to create a REAL do-it-yourself credit repair guide, with REAL examples and step by step instructions. And I wanted them to be backed up by PROOF.

So what better way to do this than to use myself as an example?

And instead of relying on the countless ebooks and services out there, I decided to go straight to the source – The Fair Credit Reporting Act itself. (FCRA)

I wanted to read the actual law, and see exactly what was true & false.

The document was over 100 pages, and I read the entire thing. While reading it, for some reason I got the feeling that very few people had done this. In any event, I narrowed my focus down to 2 sections – both regarding how & when negative items must be removed from a credit report.

At the same time, I also discovered that there was a similar act called the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and I read it completely as well.

The FCRA applied to the laws that the credit reporting agencies must adhere to, such as Transunion, Equifax, and Experian.

The FDCPA applied to the laws that must be adhered to by debt collectors, such as banks, credit card companies, etc.

Both clearly spelled out exactly what steps that the agencies and banks were required to take when a consumer disputes a negative mark / debt as being not entirely correct.

Without going into too much of the boring legal details, let’s just say I discovered a loophole.

According to the FCRA, all disputes must be handled within 30 days, and according to the FDCPA all disputed items must be marked on your credit report as “disputed” within 30 days, by the debt collector. This is regardless of whether or not the dispute is valid. A dispute is a dispute, no matter what. You can dispute the fact that you have a mortgage, even if you have one!

So here’s what I did:

I disputed all of my debts – all 11 of them – credit cards, phone bills, etc., anything that was on my credit report as having had a late payment. Since I knew they only had 30 days to investigate, I sent all of my disputed certified mail with signature required, so I would get a receipt of exactly when the dispute was received.

Here was another key – not only did I send the disputes to the credit reporting agencies, but I sent them to the debt collectors themselves as well, since both were covered under separate laws. I figured this would increase my chances for one of them to screw up and not perform their legal duty within the 30 day allotted time.

So here’s what happened:

All 11 of my debts/late pays/charge-offs came back as “verified” by the credit reporting agencies, and lucky for them they did it within 30 days.

BUT, the debt collectors themselves did not mark my debt as “disputed” on my credit report within 30 days. I made sure to get my credit report on the 31st day after they had signed for my certified letter, and sure enough NONE of them had complied with the law. They were now in violation of the FDCPA and liable to me for damages of $100-$1000 per offense.

Now that I had the upper hand, and I had the evidence, I contacted each of the creditors and offered to NOT file a lawsuit against them, in exchange for them permanently deleting my record from my credit reports. Not one of them budged.

So I went down to small claims court, paid $20 per case, and filed a lawsuit against all 11 of them for violating the federal law (FDCPSA).

Now I mailed a copy of the lawsuit to each of the creditors, again offering to drop the suit in exchange for deletion. A handful of them caved. Not only that, but some of them removed my record AND paid me for my trouble. American Express actually sent me $1,000 and an apology!

Now there were still a handful of creditors left that were willing to go to court. So we did. I was as nervous as could be. I knew I had evidence in my favor, but they had savvy lawyers who may try to confuse me or the judge with a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo.

Amazingly, just before the cases were heard, all but 2 of the companies approached me and offered to remove everything in exchange for dropping the case! I was thrilled. I guess they just wanted to see if I would actually show up.

The 2 remaining stubborn companies were ready to battle it out in front of the judge. They argued that the debts were in fact mine, and that I simply disputed it because of the loophole, and that I had acted unethically. My argument back was that whether or not I acted unethically, I had exercised my legal right to dispute anything on my credit report, and they had simply broken the law by not abiding by the procedures clearly laid out in the FDCPA.

The result:

I won both cases, which included removal of the negative items and $100 in damages from each!

I was elated. I was 11 for 11. I found a loophole and exploited it to my advantage, all while acting in accordance with the law. It was an exhausting, frustrating experience, but I had prevailed.

Of course I knew that my actions weren’t exactly ethical, but if we’re going to get into an ethical debate, perhaps we should consider the fact that credit card companies blatantly market their cards to naïve 18 year old kids who have no idea how credit works. And how the introductory interest rate can go from zero percent to 33% overnight. Kids can quickly get into trouble this way, resulting in serious consequences, such as 7-10 years of bad credit, which will cost them thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest during that time.

I still think they should teach this stuff in school, but perhaps that is a discussion saved for another day.

All I knew was now I had “the goods”. I had 11 case studies showing that my methods clearly worked, and I had more than enough knowledge to write a competent e-book about it. I also had the ability to create a decent looking website to promote it, since I had taken a few HTML classes.

I hope you can see the two parallels of what I did in both acting and with websites; I went deeper than the rest of the crowd and got real-life, raw feedback, and used it to my advantage.

I wrote my entire story into Microsoft Word, including a step by step guide. I then converted it into a PDF file, and now I had my first ebook. I was officially a published author… well at least self-published.

I made my first website at http://www.CreditProvide.com using a very basic WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website builder that came with my hosting plan.

You can check http://www.archive.org to see how it looked in 2001. I wasn’t exactly an award winning graphic designer.

But what I did was learn “enough” to make it look decent.

I wasn’t the greatest copywriter in the world either. But again I did “enough” to make it compelling and different from the rest.

When I’m working on a project, I’m a firm believer in being able to do at least one thing great, and being “good enough” at everything else required to complete it. In this case, I had a great product (the ebook), and very mediocre programming/designing skills, copywriting skills, and marketing skills.

I think it’s important to note that I also didn’t hire one single person. No outsourcing at all.

I had been reading WarriorForum.com for months (this was 2001). I learned how things worked -how to sell the book through a merchant account and how to promote it using Google Adwords. That was about the extent of my knowledge at this point. I wasn’t anywhere near being ready to tackle SEO, affiliates, banners, etc.

I started off slow, simply using Google Adwords to target cheap long-tail keywords related to credit repair, and I began spending $300/month, which resulted in $600 in revenue. A profit of $300/month. I was absolutely ecstatic. It was working. People were buying my stuff because it was flat out different than everything else. I answered every email inquiry myself and was genuinely glad I was helping so many people in financial trouble. I received so many emails from people thanking me. It felt great.

After a few months I had gotten up to profiting $600/month. And that was exactly equal to my rent. I now had an online business on autopilot paying for my living expenses. That was so amazing to me. Unfortunately I just didn’t have the cash flow to go bigger yet, and I also didn’t realize how much bigger I could go, if at all. I was actually pretty satisfied at $600/month. But that was all about to change very soon.

One fateful day:

I checked my inbox one morning and I had received an email from a company called Virtumundo. They had seen my site and said they were interested in sending an email out about it to their list of subscribers. In exchange we would share the sales 50/50. I had no knowledge of this type of thing but they were willing to do everything, so I said sure! I asked how many people they would be sending it to. They said 12 million… and I couldn’t believe it.

The next day:

I knew that the email had gone out. I went about my day and in the evening I checked sales, hoping to see a spike. What I saw still sends chills down my spine.

Total sales for the day: $90,000.

I was floored. If my math was correct, this 21 year old kid had just made $45,000 in one day. I really can’t describe that feeling and do it justice.

From $600/month to $45k profit in one day. I instantly knew online marketing was the life for me!

Virtumundo would go on to promote several more times over the next few months, and I felt like a very, very rich young man.

Now that I knew this was possible, I scoured the internet looking for other companies with lists to market to. I made a few more deals with similar companies and before I knew it, I had a $250k company on my hands. I bought my first brand new car – an Audi A4, and a 1 bedroom, 600 square foot condo in Tarzana, CA for $78,000.

I had received a lobotomy in marketing. I now realized how much money was out there for the taking – and all the while I was helping people who were desperate. It was win/win situation, and it became addictive. I wanted more.

Now I wanted to learn SEO and get my site ranked highly for more traffic. More, more, more.

At the time, getting a link back to your site that was from a PR9 (PageRank 9) website was like the holy grail. It was almost impossible because only a handful of sites had that status. Sites like Yahoo.com & Microsoft.com. And good luck getting a text link from them! It was nearly impossible. They just didn’t offer it. But if I could find a way, I knew it would instantly make my site a PR8. And as a PR8, I was almost a lock to be # 1 for my most coveted keyphrase, “bad credit”. There were over 100 million competing websites.

One day I was reverse engineering another website that ranked # 1 for a credit related term. Their Google PR was 8. I researched where they were getting links from and found out that one was from FoxNews.com, which was a PR9. And low and behold FoxNews.com had 8 text links on their home page. I immediately inquired with their advertising department and they told me one of the 8 spots was coming available soon for $2,000 / month. At that price I only had one question – “Can I send you the money today?”.

That was an unbelievably low price for a PR9 link. I immediately negotiated a one-year contract with the option to renew, and locked in my spot for a year.

30 days later, I was # 1 in the world on Google.com for “bad credit”. This resulted in revenues on average of $20,000 per month. I can only imagine what the revenue would have been if I really knew how to monetize my site better!

Over the next 3 years I remained # 1. I was on top of the world. I left that site on autopilot and created about a dozen other websites that sold various ebooks about anything I was interested in. I learned about www.Clickbank.com, getting affiliates, and how to do better at Google Adwords.

I built these sites up to maximum profitability and anytime the sales started to slip due to competition, I would sell the sites on eBay.

One of my sites was ForeignPharmaciesOnline.com (which no longer exists). I had been taking anxiety medication ever since my auditioning days, and it was expensive, even with insurance. So I researched foreign pharmacies that would provide medicine to people in the USA without a prescription.

I scoured forums, chat rooms, etc. where people would report on the legitimate companies that would not only send them the meds (more than half just took your money and sent you nothing), but also those that actually sent you REAL meds – meaning they were still in the original manufacturer’s packaging, not a zip lock bag filled with God only knows what.

I bought from several of them myself. And those that turned out to be legit, I asked if they would be interested in letting me be an affiliate. To my surprise, several of them were willing to give me 25% of all sales referred.

Not only that, but I realized that a list of legit, SAFE overseas pharmacies would be worth money itself.

So I made my website a members only site where you had to pay $19.95 for access to my updated list of overseas pharmacies. Now I had a front end (membership sales), and a back-end (commissions from people buying the medicines).

I advertised again soley on Adwords. The first month revenues were $180,000 and I spent around $90,000 in advertising. Another big winner.

Unfortunately I got into the game too late though, and only enjoyed this run for 4 or 5 months. It was 2004 and the government began cracking down on sites that had anything to do with getting medicine without a prescription, even though all I was providing was information – I wasn’t actually selling pharmaceuticals.

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry doesn’t like when people can get their stuff overseas for 10 bucks, when they can charge $100 for it in America. So they lobby to the government, and somebody important finds extra money in their pockets. And the next thing you know I’m being strong-armed by the government to take my site down. They kept shutting down my hosting accounts, merchant accounts, sending threatening letters, etc. Even though I wasn’t breaking any law whatsoever.

And they had gotten to Google too. No more ads about foreign pharmacies were allowed.

So once I’d had enough, I sold the site to someone for $100,000. It still had value because it had some good organic rankings in Google, and that was still allowed. It also had value because a new owner could re-incorporate the company/website in a country like Gibraltar and not be exposed to U.S. government pressure.

I sold the site on eBay and openly told prospective buyers of the risks. Oddly enough, someone who lived 2 blocks away from me ended up buying it. His name was Ryan Kaltman – and that’s how I met the guy who would later become my right hand man at the Rich Jerk company. Ryan later told me that he made his money back on the site, but ultimately gave up on it because he was getting threatening faxes, and he was becoming very paranoid anytime he saw a black towncar drive by his house! LOL.

Another site I had around the same time had made about $900,000 in the past year. And once the sales started slipping due to increased competition, I sold it on eBay for $379,000. That was in 2005, and the sale generated a lot of buzz in marketing forums. Everyone tried to figure out what the site was and who owned it (I had kept the URL private during the sale and only shared it with the buyer). The site was www.TopSiteReviews.com (it doesn’t exist anymore but again you can check it out on archive.org to see what it looked like).

With all the buzz, I wanted to parlay that into something. I was encouraged by many people to become a “make-money guru”, basically teaching people how I had been so successful online.
The only way I would agree was if I could somehow be completely different than everyone else, and I also wanted to keep my anonymity as much as possible.

I found all of the other gurus so funny – such as Tom Vu and Don Lapre – how they flaunted their success.

Check out an old infomercial from Tom Vu here:

So I decided to create a caracature of them, in an over the top, mean, Howard Stern-like character who shoved his success in your face and looked like Leisure Suit Larry.

His name: The Rich Jerk.

This “love him or hate him” character created a HUGE buzz because he was so unique. And the ebook was pure gold at the time, if I do say so myself, because I actually showed proof of my businesses and what I had done. The character may have been ridiculous, but the material was the real deal. And the earnings and testimonials were legit.

According to my research, one of the most respected online marketers was Yanik Silver. I sent him a copy of the ebook and asked him to look at the sales letter, and to consider giving it his stamp of approval. He replied that he didn’t think this thing would fly.

I was a bit deflated, but I went forward and approached another marketing guru – iconic marketing legend Gary Halbert. I spoke with Gary on the phone and told him my whole story. I was so nervous. Sure I had been successful, but this guy was a legend. And being judged by my peers was nerve wracking, especially after Yanik had already given it the thumbs down.

Gary not only liked the whole thing, but he also said he would give it the first and only G.H.S.O.A. (Gary Halbert Seal of Approval). You can see what he wrote here:

After Gary vouched for the me, the forums went nuts, tons of affiliates jumped on board, and sales went through the roof.

$10,000 a day in profit was common, and I had another big winner on my hands. But this time, I wanted to take it to a whole new level. And over the years, through many joint ventures, it became a multi-million dollar behemoth.

Unfortunately though, after several successful years, the old adage “more money, more problems” came around and bit me. I had brought on partners, family members, etc. And the situation became far from optimal. Unbearable really.

Without going into too much detail, I took a back-seat and let others run the show how they thought it should be run. And the rest is history. It’s still chugging along to this day, but I am minimally involved at best. And aside from that I cannot legally comment.

The family situation didn’t mix too well with the business either. I had gotten married in 2003 to a girl I met in an acting class. I brought her parents on board as 2 of my partners at Rich Jerk. Long story short, I’m a divorced dad with two awesome kids.

Now I have decided to “give it another go” at teaching online marketing. But this time, anonymity be damned! And by the way, I don’t call people losers anymore either, LOL.

I’m just me, doing my thing, trying to help others better their lives financially and creatively, so they can spend more time doing the things they love.

I admit, running the Rich Jerk company, I actually became quite a jerk. I lost respect for money, people, customers, and even myself. I went on ridiculous spending sprees for things that don’t matter in life. I rented out the Playboy Mansion for $250k for one night, lived in ridiculous homes, had a garage full of ridiculous cars, and spent money like it was going out of style. And it was all just an ego trip.

I cared more about money and possessions than I did about the things that really matter, like the people who care about you no matter what. The people who stick by your side. Not even necessarily family, because some family members can flat out be no good for you. I’m talking about the people you would probably think about most if you were taking your last breaths.

When I finally couldn’t accept the person I had become, I made my great escape. I sold all of the fancy schmancy stuff, and moved from LA down to a sleepy beach town in San Diego. I called up my friend Mike Long, who has had his own share of ups and downs, and asked him if he wanted to start over with one thing in mind – helping people.

I had always gotten a lot out of my conversations with Mike, so he flew out from Virginia and we decided to just start recording conversations between us to see what would happen. Four months later, Bring the Fresh was born!

And now, we couldn’t be happier. We get testimonials every day from people who have gotten their first site to # 1 in Google, and received their first paycheck from it. People are digging in and changing their lives.

And we enjoy chatting with our customers often. While we’re not necessarily the big dawgs on the porch anymore, we feel like an Indie band with a nice core group of people along for the ride. People who appreciate us, and who we appreciate in return. We chat with our members daily, whether its by phone, skype, email, etc.

But before this starts getting all mushy, its not all snowflakes and dandelions.

We’re nowhere near the smartest, coolest, nicest, richest, or best internet marketers out there. Sometimes we make mistakes. We get frustrated. We make bad decisions. We’re just normal people, and we’re teaching the simple stuff that works for us, the best way we know how. And we’re learning from our members just as much as they’re learning from us.

While we love to stay positive and encourage our members, its ultimately up to them to make the choice to dive in 100% or not.

If you’re in, awesome!

If not, we’ll be here waiting for ya.

Come by any time and check out what we’re up to. And feel free to contact me. No guru here. You WILL get a reply.

And by the way, if you made it this far, you are a ROCKSTAR. I really appreciate you taking the time to read this entire post, and I hope that it has helped you or motivated you in some way.

Best,
Kelly Felix

BringTheFresh.com
kellysfelix@gmail.com
Skype: thekellyfelix
My Facebook

Edited: October 1st, 2010

Guest Post from Mike Long

Hey everyone!

Wow this Blog post has taken on a life of it’s own! Not just here but all over the net in forums, email blasts, tweets, other blogs…

So I decided to add some clarity that i think will help everyone, especially since a lot of the new replies coming in are from folks new to our little community here who might not have as much context on what this community is all about…

First off, I am Kelly’s business partner, so I am biased. But Kelly’s earned my trust through years of honesty, value and integrity, which I have witnessed first hand.

I also want to thank all of the folks on both sides of the debate here for the passion that’s gone into each post because I don’t think there’s a single person here posting out of spite…

As in: I sense the palatable desire here for industry wide integrity, and Kelly and I both applaud that motive.

So even if you think I might be jumping on what you’ve said as you read my lengthy post here, it’s NOT because I’m trying to humiliate anybody.

The primary distinction that I thought might have been missed is that this:

Kelly’s Blog post on his site is about an evolution in the way he does business and nothing more…

Some folks might have, again understandably, gotten the impression that since Kelly was in a very reflective place when he wrote that Blog post, that he was admitting to rubbing his hands together greedily like Monty Burns, the iconic corrupt nuclear power plant owner from “the Simpsons”, and cruelly extorting helpless customers for every penny they were worth with an evil cackle, and then clubbing baby seals for fun or whatever 

The reality of the situation, and I’m going to give you my take from what I personally witnessed behind the scenes, was that because of the Rich Jerk persona there was necessarily a layer of outsourcers or employees between Kelly and many of his customers, preventing him from getting live feedback on how they were performing ESPECIALLY when it came to his coaching floors and also somewhat with JVs.

(Though of course that’s always somewhat the case with JVs…the best you can do is carefully research the offer and then follow up with your customers to find out if they are getting results…and nobody I ever met researched as much as Kelly, and I personally worked with hundreds of top affiliates…then after the research and the promotion, you make a decision as to whether to promote again or not based on those results. Kelly did this and the times when his customers weren’t getting value he refused to promote again…even when threatened by his former JV partners with refusal to pay Kelly’s outstanding affiliate commissions…if you read between the lines here you’ll know who I’m talking about, and you’ll remember that unlike most top affiliates Kelly avoided repeating his errors with unscrupulous JVs.)

As far as the coaching floors were concerned, I personally traveled to Las Vegas with Kelly several times as he spot checked the phone sales floors to make sure that they weren’t turning into “Boiler Room” situations…and he repeatedly secret shopped the sales floors as well (oddly enough he would make up a fake order and insert a phony name along with his cell number so that the salesman wouldn’t know, and he would listen to their “pitch”).

When he found abuse, just like with the JV situation, he would fire the phone coaching sales floor and start from scratch.

That said, as he mentioned in his Blog post, Kelly was still highly dissatisfied with the outcome in too many cases, and was constantly bothered by his lack of direct 1-on-1 feedback with his customers.

He was totally sure of the value of his Rich Jerk ebook because he had personally seen so much success from it both in his Rich Jerk forum and from customers he spoke with one on one. But he started to realize that the disconnect between himself and the coaching situation BECAUSE the Internet really is such a golden opportunity for folks to build legitimate organized businesses, and there was no reason not to take things to the next level…

While Kelly didn’t have authority to “pull the plug” or call all of the shots with the Rich Jerk situation, because there were other investors, who together could assert majority control over the business, he did work very hard to assure quality…and in a move that I greatly admired, when he realized that there wasn’t any way for him to bring things up to the standards that he envisioned, he silently bowed out of major involvement and began anew with a blank slate to help evolve the way Internet marketing is taught…including creating a personal one-on-one situation between himself and his new clients.

This evolution with Bring the Fresh removed all of the barriers for Kelly to get raw feedback from his customers, and put him in a position to provide not only encouragement but an “over the shoulder” walkthrough of the live businesses that he’s currently building for his customers.

We’re now very proud of the success that our new customers have had…for instance one of our newest BTF customers now boasts the top ranking for a search term that has 22,800,000 pages and an average PPC price of $5…after 3 weeks with us!

(And that’s after the same customer bought a prominent $800 per month SEO training program that only allowed him to pick up a few longtail keyword terms.)

Kelly is very proud for the success that his Rich Jerk customers had, and all of the appreciation he’s gotten because of it.

On a candid note it’s been a joy for me to be Kelly’s close friend and business partner.
Kelly’s not just a smart and funny business mind, but he’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and he’s a loving and playful father to two joy-filled kids.

He’s also the most raw and honest person I’ve ever known…

…The first time I ever talked to him at a party that somehow turned into a JV mastermind 5 years ago, I asked him how big his list was…and he said “Who cares, everyone lies anyway.”

I was hooked on the spot!

…But that said, it’s very understandable to me when some folks mistake his raw honesty as being the actions of a man on death row who only has a short time to live and wants to make his peace! But I’ve actually found his honesty to be so refreshing once you get to know him that now I can’t imagine life without it.

(Besides, what’s wrong with living like you were dying?)

One thing for folks who haven’t gotten to know Kelly just yet:

He’s got a sharp wit and he’s a true sarcastic.

As in: the Rich Jerk was a joke. Kelly didn’t think he was better than anybody else. He was poking fun at all of the Tom Vu clones out there on the Internet.

Undoubtedly some folks will read this post and still feel riled up, and I accept and respect that.

Kelly’s sense of humor isn’t for everyone…and everyone who ends up loving Kelly as I love him doesn’t necessarily start off that way.

I also think that it’s hard for some folks to accept that Kelly’s Blog really is “off the cuff” and that he didn’t plan any of it, including the post that has so many folks feelin’ froggy here today =)

My point is that what individuals are seeing with Kelly is an evolution and nothing more.

We’ve been in business online for a collective 20-years, which is pretty good for a couple of guys in their early 30s, and as we experience new things we try to integrate them into our business and into our lives…

A final example has nothing to do with online marketing, but with diet:

I know one guy who springs back and forth between eating loads of sweets and potato chips and sodas and such, and trying to go 100% raw food with diets…and unfortunately when he tells me he’s on a diet I kind of get the feeling in the back of my head “here we go again.”

Kelly, by contrast, has always taken relatively good care in his diet ever since his early days as an actor.

But he also continues to evolve his diet slightly every year towards more raw veggies, fresher more humane food, and cutting down on processed foods with lots of salt, sugar and the like.

The result is that when Kelly brings up a new recipe he’d like to try out, it usually lands on a plate in front of me within a few days…

That’s a good parallel for the way Kelly operates in business, and it’s one of the big reasons why I’ve chosen to partner with him and not with other folks who have offered to work with me.

The last thing I’ll say is that, in the interests of keeping things down to a dull roar so folks can zero in on the many other valuable tasks for building their business, like generating traffic through the free SEO methods that Kelly’s shared in his earlier posts on this Blog, I invite you to write me or call me personally if you have questions or concerns because while I’ll certainly answer you in public here, it might help a bit to keep everyone focused on providing value to their customers in the online businesses they are creating with the help the members of the extraordinary community that’s crystalized here.

=)

It’s all happening,

Mike Long

mikelongmagic@gmail.com

858-699-2747

Edited: March 13th, 2010

Follow Up

This is a follow up to my last post. Wanted to make sure people got a chance to read it, since it was buried in the comments.

——————————

Thanks everyone for your comments. I hung myself out to dry a bit, and it appears lots of people were more than willing to get the broom out and beat me a little… LOL. Especially on Warrior Forum!

No hard feelings here though. I feel good about my decision to begin a new chapter, and I also still feel good about the value I’ve provided over the years via the RJ ebook itself, and the RJ forum – I’ve heard so many good stories about JV’s developed there.

It’s the outsourced coaching decision that irks me, and the email promotions of a few things that turned out to go widely unfulfilled, such as Stompernet and Pipeline Profits. I feel like I stuck my nose out for those guys and they just didn’t deliver on their promises. And that reflects poorly on me. But ultimately, it was my decision to promote, and I take responsiblity for that. I regret those promotions now, but unfortunately no one could have predicted the outcome.

I also regret that the coaching, whether it was a $1k plan or all the way up to a $10k plan, may not have been worth it. I simply do not know, and perhaps I never will. I was told that buyers would receive in-depth coaching from Terry Dean’s materials, but ultimately I don’t exactly know what was delivered. That’s because the deals that most marketers like myself strike with outsourced coaching work like this:

Someone buys a low dollar info-product/ebook. The customer is then referred to as a “lead”. Leads are sent weekly to telemarketing rooms in Vegas or Utah. The telemarketers call the leads and sell coaching packages anywhere from $1k-$10k. Coaching buyers are then sent to a 3rd party coaching fulfillment center that does calls and webinars with the customer. What I feel guilty about is passing the customer off to 2 organizations I didn’t control – the telemarketing firm and the coaching firm. I literally have no idea if the coaching was worth the cost. I made several trips out to the telemarketing floors to make sure they weren’t promising the world, but while the cat’s away, who knows what they said. I only know I got 30% of the sale, and anyone could refund at any time, and many did.

But most of all, I deeply regret taking my customers for granted, and poking fun of them with other big-shot marketers. My ego was out of control, and that disgusts me.

In hindsight I wish I would have kept everything in-house, or on a tight leash with quality control.

I wish I would have put a stop to the corporate greed that occurred with all of the owners/partners, myself included.

And I wish I would have valued my customers a LOT more.

I’m still very proud of the RJ brand I created. I entertained, and helped thousands of people better their lives financially.

But for the past 2 years I’ve been in a different place. I haven’t accepted one dime from any RJ sales in the past 2 years.

And I’ve been working extremely hard on my latest project “Bring the Fresh”, because all I want to do is make sure that it over-delivers tremendous value. So far, so good.

I’m not looking to cleanse my soul here. I’m not looking for praise, or to stir up controversy, or to strategically “position” myself as some great guy. I’d just like to publicly apologize to anyone who lost money based on my actions, and I’d be more than happy to provide free lifetime access to BringTheFresh.com for anyone who got coaching, Stompernet, or Pipeline through RJ (whether or not you think it was a good value). Simply send me an email at kellyandmike (at) bringthefresh.com

Say what you will. Be suspicious. Be mad. Be happy. Be anything you want. I feel lucky that anybody even WANTS to read what I write.

I definitely have a lot of work to do on myself, and I’m going to continue doing that my entire life.

Best,
Kelly

Edited: March 12th, 2010

Happy New Year! (It’s all happening)

Hey guys, sorry it’s been a while. For the past few weeks I’ve been filming a series of pretty intense interview style recordings, covering  everything I’ve ever done and learned online over the past 10 years, good and bad, as well as what I’m working on now. Nothing is off limits, and everything is as transparent as possible.

I have about 2 hours of material left to cover, then I will be releasing the videos as a product in mid to late January. This will be the only internet marketing product I will ever release. Of course I will add many additional videos to it over the remaining years of my career as I learn and develop new methods, but they will be free to all members.

Feel free to make suggestions here on my blog about what material you would personally like included, and I will make sure to get it in these last few videos before we go live.

Now back to the Google Sniper method I mentioned in a previous post. I’d like to clarify exactly how I use Market Samurai to find keywords/domains for SEO purposes.

Market Samurai is pretty much the coolest software I’ve ever used. It includes much more information than I would ever need or use to evaluate a market/niche.

The only 4 variables I really care about in Market Samurai are:

1) Searches – I set the minimum to 100. This is the number of times the keyword/phrase is searched for per day.

2) SEOC – I set this to 100,000. This is the number of competing website for the keyword phrase. In other words, it is not “broad” match but “phrase” match. Obviously the lower the better. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between 100,000 and 30,000. If you find a keyword with under 30,000 I can almost guarantee you will get the # 1 spot if you use the backlink techniques described below.

3) OCI – I set the minimum to 50% – this is the percentage chance that these searchers are typically going to pull out their wallet for what they are searching for. I’ve tested this with MANY keywords and found that it is typically very reliable – some of my best converting keywords are listed as 84% OCI

4) Match Type – I always set this to “phrase”. This shows you the real picture of how many people are typing in the exact keyword phrase, rather than the default “broad” match, which shows how many times the word or phrase is included with other words you don’t have any info on.

I’ll also go over getting backlinks one more time as simply as possible.

For information on what kind of site to create and how to create it, check my previous post here.

The backlinking process below has worked for authority sites of mine, as well as simple 2 page Google Sniper type sites. One of my authority sites currently has 124,000 pages indexed and 2,000 backlinks using the simple system below. It gets 1,900 organic visitors every day and is growing steadily as Google continues to index 4,000 new pages per day. I’m detailing everything about this site in the video interviews I mentioned above.

I use the following sources/software for backlinks:

1) SEO Trackbacks – This is the software I use to get backlinks from blogs. I usually set it to 20-40 links per week.

2) The Link Juicer – I use this program to get up to 10 links per day. It’s a conglomerate of about 20,000 aged and unique social bookmarking and content accounts where your links will be dispersed randomly with varying anchor text and descriptions. It also has a 30 day free trial.

3) Angela’s Links and Paul’s Links – These 2 link sources send you a PDF file with instructions on exactly where and how to get 80 fresh new links every month from PR5 to PR9 sites. The pages themselves do not have the same pagerank as the homepage, but they still carry weight based on my experience. I use someone from GetAFreelancer.com to create 100 of these links to my sites every month for $30 per month. So you don’t even necessarily need to join Angela or Paul’s services to benefit from them. The guys on GetAFreelancer.com typically already have access to the links.

4) The Ping Machine (free) – Software allows you to paste all of your links to be pinged as well as all of the ping services you would like to ping to. Make sure you ping the URL’s of every page that contains a backlink to you. This basically notifies Google that it’s there, so you don’t have to wait for them to find it.

5) I make an RSS feed of my backlinks (I do about 20-25 per feed) using html2rss.com. I add the RSS feed to FeedBurner, making it look like http://feeds.feedburner.com/my-site). Submit the new Feedburner feed to various RSS aggregators out there. You can do it on your own, or use software such as RSSbot.

6) I use Bookmarking Demon to social bookmark the RSS feeds. You can use it to individually bookmark your backlinks, but after a while you will have so many that doing the feeds instead becomes much more efficient.

That’s it. Welcome to good rankings and free traffic (AND free money).

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I previously mentioned that I purchased Wordpress Mage and was testing it. I’m sorry to say I was not impressed, and decided to get a refund of this $1200 product. I found the tutorial videos quite lacking and not up to date. Many times I was forced to search the forum to find answers to my problems, which was quite a task in itself, and it didn’t always result in me finding the answer I needed. Sure I could’ve relied on customer support, but I literally had dozens of questions and didn’t want to go back and forth waiting.

As a 10 year online marketer, if I’m having trouble with the software, there’s a good chance a lot of others are too. And for $1,200 I’m not looking for frustration. And did I mention that my Ebay Publisher Account got banned? Yeah, not good. Especially when my other projects are working just fine without all of the hassle. This is just another example of why I believe doing sites right (and under the radar), and spending a little more time on them is the best route.

Be sure to let me know of any questions or material you would like covered in my videos! Thanks!

Kelly

Edited: January 2nd, 2010

A BIG Thanks…

I’d like to dedicate this post to those of you who have taken the time to submit comments here on my blog, as well as those who have contacted me via Twitter, Facebook, and direct email.

It means a lot to be able to not only hear this stuff, but to be able to reply… as myself.

I’m going to do my best to personally reply to each person. If I’ve missed you, feel free to give me a shout, and we’ll chat for a minute via gmail chat or email or something. My personal email is kellysfelix (at) gmail.com.

I especially love to hear your success stories. Here’s one of my recent favorites:

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Submitted by:

Scott Walker

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This has to be insanity, is this the rich jerk?

Alright, let me tell you a story that you may enjoy. Many years ago I was doing law work just gotten out of law school times were tough and money was low (very low).

I’ve always been an internet fan and was typing in rich people’s names into google (donald trump, robert kiyosaki, etc) and I saw an ad not to buy their stuff from so I clicked on it – it was a rich jerk ad, and I bought the program, the coaching, the whole nine yards.

It changed my financial life. I never became a millionaire like you but I did pretty damn good and make a comfortable living to this date. Anyways, I was on twitter and saw tweet about the rich jerk and i landed on this blog – then I saw the first post where you talked about being him – this is seriously insane.

I don’t know if you read these comments or if you’ll even ever get my comment here, but I salute you for putting out such value. You’re book for a hundred bucks has gotten me 1000x+ ROI and I would’ve gladly paid more for it and feel like I still owe you something.

Do me a favor, if you ever read this comment or somehow get it just reply here (I’ll keep checking) so I know that my voice was heard and a big big thank you to you.

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Hey Scott, I got your message, and I appreciate it more than you know. You don’t owe me anything. A comfortable living is a great thing. And I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt and taking a chance on my advice. Keep on keepin’ on my friend.

I will be adding another post in the next few days clarifying a little more on my own interpretation and use of the Google Sniper method, because I’ve received several emails about a few things I wasn’t specific enough on, or that I omitted altogether. Things in Market Samurai such as PBR and SEOC, as well as a few other topics.

We’ll talk soon.

Kelly

Edited: December 17th, 2009

Truth Be Told… (part 1)

I just Googled my own name. As usual, all I could find was blog after blog claiming that I am a scam artist, bankrupt, a bad person, a baby seal clubber, and the Devil incarnate.

To be honest with you, I’ve known this stuff has been out there for quite some time, but I’ve been “unable” to do anything about it… until now. I’ll go into more detail a little later.

It definitely makes it fun to explain myself when I meet new people and they Google me, especially when discussing potential business deals. After all, what would make someone feel warm and fuzzy about doing business with me more than dozens of reports of me being a shady internet marketer?

So I’d like to address the rumors, and explain what’s really been going on. Because nobody else is gonna do it for me.

Well, where should I start? Let’s go with the basics first.

1.) I am not a cartoon character. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am a real person.

2.) I am not a 40 year old, tanned Italian guy with a six-pack. Sorry ladies.

3.) I do not drive a yellow Lamborghini. While I’ve had my share of 6 figure cars, I currently only own one car – a Range Rover. It makes it easier to haul my 2 children around (when I don’t have them locked in the cellar). Yes, I’m a single dad.

4.) I do not have a harem of young ladies in my life. Instead of filandering around the Playboy Mansion all day and night, I prefer to have monogamous, long term relationships. I know, I know….BORRRING.

5.) I became a millionaire (on paper) at age 24, and have done quite nicely ever since. But I definitely don’t have enough money to buy anything I want. I do not own a jet, a boat, dozens of homes, or a submarine.

For most of the past 2 years, I was living in a $3.5 million dollar mansion in Bel Air, CA. I had $500k worth of cars in the garage. And I can tell you, I honestly thought they would make me very happy. It turns out, they didn’t. I felt very UNHAPPY, and attracted a slew of new “friends” who were more than happy to hang around as long as I was paying for everything.

Sufficed to say, a couple of months ago I sold the cars, ditched the house, cut-off the friends, and moved back into my San Diego house. It’s about half as nice as the Bel Air house, and I’m much more comfortable. I wake up every morning knowing I’m exactly where I want to be. Who woulda thunk?

6.) Contrary to popular belief, I do not enjoy ridiculing people, per se. However, I do enjoy making fun of stereotypes. For example, I’ve written dozens of emails that people may have found degrading to women, homosexuals, the autistic, african americans, etc. And yes, those emails still make me laugh. And that was my intention – to entertain. Much like Chris Rock would. I hope I succeeded in that.

I have many friends who fit the exact characteristics I’ve made fun of. I like to poke fun, and sometimes I take it to the extreme. I have been known to laugh at someone else’s expense – like when someone in a Youtube video gets hit in the head by a wiffle ball bat or something. In the right context, I think that’s funny. Sorry.

7.) I don’t party Rich Jerk style. I’ve been to my fair share of shindigs and had some really good times. However, I don’t stand on tables, order 10 bottles, or “make it rain”.

8.) I work – a LOT. I’m not on vacation all day, every day. I did take about a year off not long ago. I got extremely bored and it was unfulfilling.

I enjoy finding new marketing tactics, and testing them out. I like pay-per-click, SEO, getting backlinks, discovering new niches, and constantly checking my rankings and stats.

I’m not really in pursuit of the 4 hour work week right now. Maybe the 15-20 hour work week? I currently work about 40-50 hours per week. In 2006-2007 I worked around 90-100 hours a week and got burned out.

In other words, you can make a ton of money online, but it will likely take a lot more work than you think. Because you may become addicted to it.

Another thing I think it’s important to remember is that you’re always just one person, one deal, one email, or one website away from changing your life. But instead of swinging for for the fences, why not just go for basehits every day, and before you know it you WILL hit a homerun or at least score a LOT of runs in the process.

9.) I don’t come up with “big ideas” very often. Instead, I learn small tidbits of interesting info pretty much every day by reading forums and blogs. Even from people I don’t necessarily like. I don’t copy exactly what they do, because that’s what everyone else does. I prefer to take their insight and tweak it in some interesting way that no one else has thought of. You just have to be able to sift through the BS, and avoid getting sucked into a marketing funnel, unless of course you want to be sucked in so you can study what they’re doing exactly. I highly recommend reverse engineering anything you think is interesting and potentially profitable, and hopefully that has a low barrier to entry.

10.) I’ve burned bridges with a lot of “top” marketers. I tend to tell people what I really think about them. And it got me a bit of a bad reputation amongst the whole IM guru crowd.

In the end it kind of ended up helping me, because a lot of those guys like to talk to each other all day long, go to seminars, do webcasts, podcasts, teleseminars, and just generally celebrate how wonderful they think they are.

And they never call me for anything, which leaves me lots of time to work, play video games, watch a movie, grab a bite, head to the beach, or do absolutely nothing. 

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Well, that rounds out the top 10 basic things I want people to know about the real me for now.

Next time, I’ll be getting into the super secret stuff I’m not supposed to tell anyone about.

And immediately after that, I’m going to lay out a perfectly simple, step by step plan that you can copy to achieve lots of top 10 rankings in good ole’ google. I’m still amazed at how easy it is.

The videos and case-studies are near completion.

Take care,

Kelly

Edited: November 17th, 2009

My Transparent Life.

So this is my blog.

I’ve decided to make this site for several reasons:

1) I want to help you.

I’d like to share free internet marketing tips and tricks that I learn from time to time, that have helped me make a decent living working from home. I hope you can benefit from my testing, failures and successes. Free videos and reports are in the works.

2) I want my life to be transparent.

Having a transparent business is one thing, and I’m happy to do that, but over the years I’ve felt an ever-increasing desire to share my thoughts and life with anyone who is interested enough to read it. Maybe its a selfish endeavor, for my own therapy’s sake, like a journal, but nonetheless its what I want to do. I want people to know the REAL me. I don’t think many people really know, and I’d like to change that. And it’s my blog so I get to do whatever I want.

3) I want a feedback loop.

I want to hear from others – what you want to know, what you like/dislike about internet marketing, what you think about life, love, me, you, your dog, whatever.

4) I wanna talk about what I’ve really been doing for the past 2 years, including everything you ever wanted to know (or didn’t want to know) about the Rich Jerk.

One thing is certain – this blog will be geared towards TRUTH & UNDERSTANDING. I will likely be sued, flamed, etc. And I’m okay with that.

I am not interested in appearing cool, rich, smooth with the ladies, or anything else. Because I don’t consider myself any of those things (except rich in understanding). What you see is what you get.

And by the way, I will try to provide as much free, useful, interesting information as possible with regards to making money online, with very few affiliate links. I will only recommend things I use on a regular basis, and there aren’t many.

So….let the blogging begin. My 19 readers are going to be so happy!

Stay tuned for a post in the next few days explaining A LOT.

Best,

Kelly Felix

The Maybe Not-So-Bad Guy

Edited: November 11th, 2009

This blog coming soon…

I wish I was a little bit taller. I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good. I would call her.

Edited: November 3rd, 2009