Ginnie: Hi, I’m Ginnie Waters with an interview for Michael Senoff’s Welcome, Terry Dean to the program. I’m enjoyed looking at your website and learning about you and what you do. One of the things that really gets to me is you often hear about a person that has no marketing experience, no business experience, and they made it big. You wonder if maybe this is used as a marketing tool in itself. So, my question is, did you really go from delivering pizzas to a million dollar business, or is that just a way to catch people’s attention?

Terry: I really did. I was delivering pizzas to earning quite a bit more than a million on line. The funny thing is I wouldn’t want anybody to think I did it all of a sudden or I did it in one month. That just isn’t the case. That’s where a lot of times there’s I would say misconceptions about the internet and businesses is people think that’s like an instant overnight success, and I think every overnight success I’ve ever heard of is really like a ten year success that you see happening in the background. You just don’t see all the other stuff that’s going on. But, really, I did get to earning a good full time income pretty quickly online, about six months. Within about six months of starting online, I was doing about six to seven thousand dollars a month.

Ginnie: Where did that ambition come from? Did you just deliver one too many pizzas, or why you were delivering them, did you have this brainstorm, this great idea? What happened? What came over you?

Terry: Well, what really happened was I had tried a lot of different things to succeed in business before. I had tried doing several network marketing companies. My wife can attest to the fact that our basement was filled with some of the stuff from network marketing companies. I had tried to do some direct sales. I even tried to do some direct mail. I had borrowed money off the credit card to do. None of that really worked out for me, but at that time – we’re looking back all the way back to 1996, and I heard the very first stories of a few people using this internet thing to become successful. That was just something that I said to myself inside that I can do it. That’s something that I know I can do. It kind of fits me. I was never really good at direct one on one selling, but I had a talent for writing. I’m a pretty good writer, so I said, “I could probably do this.” I just got started online. We bought my first computer with the whole intention of trying to make the internet work, and it was a Pentium 75 back then which is a dinosaur, but I remember real clearly when we went in and bought that at Best Buy, the Pentium 75 computer that’s what they had. A computer monitor was like $2500 back then. So, I got it and went online and started doing some research, seeing what people were doing, and picked up some licenses to self help videos, VHS videos back then, and licensed those so I could sell them firstly, and started selling those online. That’s where I really got started.

Ginnie: Where did you hear about the internet?

Terry: I don’t remember the first time I ever actually heard about the internet. I don’t remember actually where I first heard it, but I heard like maybe a news story that I watched or maybe a magazine article. I heard that there were some people who were getting it to work, and something inside me said that this is something that I could do, and this is what is for me. So, to get started doing it. It’s kind of funny. When I started back then, there was like nothing to teach you what to do online. It was just barely being started so there was nothing out there. So, once I got on the internet, I went out and bought some material like Jay Abraham had and other direct marketers, and I kept thinking to myself reading through each thing that they produced, “How does this apply to the internet? How could I use what they talk about here online?”

Ginnie: People didn’t even have websites then. So, how did you actually start up a business, or did that come later down the line?

Terry: There were websites at the time because we got our website set up not too long after I got started. We started off with some ads on Compuserve. It was like the big one at the time, and I was using Compuserve to go into the internet. There were websites around. They just weren’t very good. I can talk about our ugly websites which we had back then which is basically just a plastered bunch of text that didn’t even match. It was pretty much what the website was.

Ginnie: You certainly didn’t have shopping carts back then, etc. Did you?

Terry: Oh, no, we didn’t have shopping carts. We actually had to take orders by the phone, first. At the very beginning, there wasn’t any automatic ordering. Life is so much easier today than it was then for this, but we had to take orders over the phone. Not necessarily that it was a good thing, but some people weren’t that scared about credit card numbers online because there wasn’t credit card fraud. Some people would still order like through email or something, which I definitely wouldn’t recommend anybody doing today because you’ll probably get it stolen because it’s not secure. The interesting thing back then is we had to go through a lot of work and a lot of it was by trial and error. I like to tell people that I really failed my way to success online. I found that everything that didn’t work first.

Ginnie: Can you give some examples of things that didn’t work that you first tried?

Terry: Well, here’s the real funny thing. When I first tried anytime that I spent a lot of money on advertising, it did badly for me. Again, we’ll go back to that very beginning, it’s a little bit different today, but I remember real well when I first spent money for this person who was a really good designer to design a really nice web page. I had been using one of those ugly pages with graphics that were all over the place and didn’t look right. Then, I had him design this really nice page, and we stopped getting sales with this nice page. Today, it’s nicer to have a little bit of design, but back then we all had really slow modem so everything was slow to load. Most of the sites were really bad looking. So, if you had something that was really gorgeous looking, it took forever to load. Then, it like stood out from everything else. It didn’t sell. It stopped selling. It was one of my first lessons. I took my ugly webpage. We switched it out to a really nice one, and we stopped making any money. It didn’t take me long to switch that back, so that was a big mistake. Any other time that I’ve spent a lot of money on advertising, I almost always ended up losing the money. So, it’s kind of interesting. As we went along, later on, I ended up developing a membership site, and the whole point of that membership site was to show ads that I had used that worked and ones that didn’t. Anybody who was a part of it got to see the fact that probably more than half the ads I ran didn’t work, which by that I mean they lost money. I think really it gives people a good understanding that just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean things work. It’s all by testing that we figure out what works and what doesn’t in our online business. More than half the ads don’t work, but then how do I make a successful business? I just keep writing the ones that do.

Ginnie: Let me ask you something. What was the initial business? Was it selling these videotapes? Was that the initial business that you were putting ads out for?

Terry: Yes. Well, the biggest growth for me, I was doing pretty good. We’d get some ads that were working and some that weren’t. Little ones using like Compuserve – I don’t remember what CompuServe was charging back then. They were charging us some little fee. I got some of them for free, but some of them they charged fees for. What really was the biggest thing for my business was a little bit later on that year when I figured that building an email list was the key principle to earning a profit from the business. I had to build an email list and keep following up on these customers. At first, I kind of just made some sales and we didn’t do anything with people who bought. We didn’t try to capture anybody who didn’t buy, and we just made some sales and made some money that way. So, the big break through our head was figuring out, “Hey, if I give away something, I can get people to give me their email address and then I can follow up on them.”

Ginnie: What was the second thing that you had that you were offering?

Terry: At that point in time, I was still offering videos, other videos that I had, and the breakthrough was figuring out that it was based off the email list. There are a lot of people who talk about that today that the money is in the list, which is partially true because the real money is in the relationship with the list, which is building that relationship with them by now it’s content and giving them value, and being someone they can trust. That was my big breakthrough was figuring out that list was important. So, I started working with email lists. Today, we use like autoresponder systems and things like that. Back then, we had to use software. I remember originally when I first started building an opt-in email list, we were using some of the software people used for spam. They were using spam software to send out all these email lists, but in the beginning we didn’t have any of the good tools we have today. So, we had to use some of the same software.

Ginnie: What were some of the steps that you used to keep your list growing?

Terry: Well, the very first thing I did is every ad I started placing, I started placing them for the list first. I’m going to give you something free if you sign up for this. If you give me your email address, I’m going to give you this freebie, like a free report. It was just something I gave online like a basic text file in the very beginning. Now, we use PDF files, but then it was like a basic text file. We’d give it to you for signing up, and then I could follow up. Then, I could send multiple promotions. I could promote this video. I could promote that video, and basically filled my business by making multiple sales instead of just the individual one sale I made at the beginning. Now, with the affiliates, I would consider affiliates like a separate thing because when I was starting, I don’t remember having any affiliates until eventually when I wrote my own first product. We’re talking at least two or three years later for that. So, I think it’s like two more years later before I even had anything that was affiliates.

Ginnie: Is that correct that when you have affiliates that part of that motivation is to expand your list?

Terry: With affiliates, it really is. They’ll help you expand your list, but probably the biggest motivation for me with affiliates is the fact that I now can generate sales without sending anything upfront. I’m only paying them when we make sales. When I buy advertising or like if I buy advertising on Google, pay-per- click, I have to pay for the ad whether it makes me any money or not. With affiliates, I’m only going to pay them if they make me money. They get a share of the sales.

Ginnie: Do you share your list with affiliates? To tell you the truth, I’m ignorant about that fact.

Terry: No, you do not share your list with affiliates. You don’t share your list with anybody. At times, you’ll send out an email to your list telling them about possible affiliate programs or telling them about somebody else they can subscribe to, but you don’t ever actually share your list with any other business.

Ginnie: What are some other assumptions do you think that people have about selling on the internet that may be myths?

Terry: Well, probably the biggest myth is, “All I have to do is put up my website and the product, and we’re going to make a lot of sales.” That is such a big myth. More than anything, it really comes down to giving some value, giving it away for free. You’ll hear some people talk about the fact that there’s a statement out there called moving the free line. What that statement basically means is that people are giving away more for free. They’re giving more value upfront before they sell something, and they’re doing that to build a relationship with people first and then to sell. We buy from those who we know, like and trust. So, we build those relationships with people before we offer them something to buy. So, one of the big myths people have is they can just put up a site, sell a product and make a lot of sales. Well, another big myth that’s out there – the problem is the biggest myths surround what people think that it’s going to be so easy. I’m just going to place this one ad, and it’s going to make them so much money. As I mentioned already, the fact that with me, whenever I ran like a big ad or spent a lot of money on advertising, usually it did poorly for me. So, I quickly developed into the attitude of doing little small, low risk advertising where I’m spending maybe $100 or less on an ad, and then if it works, I keep building it. So, a myth that comes in here is some people think that you need a lot of money to start your internet business. My experience with this is actually been the opposite, that if you have too much money coming in your internet business and you’re willing to spend too much money, you’re just going to end up losing the majority of it. So, for most people, I tell them to spend some time getting them to study different material, and then come in with a low investment, test everything, each step along the way. What I mean by that is when we’re testing each step along the way, many times before I want to pick a product to sell, even before I get to that point, a lot of times I’ll want to do a survey of people where I might go to a forum, or I might run a small ad on Adwords, and I’ll direct them to a survey page asking them what they’re actually looking for before we look for a product and develop a product for them. So, I’m talking about we go each step along the way assuming we really don’t know ourselves, and that’s kind of almost backwards position. The best way to be successful online is assume you don’t know anything. What I’m talking about more here is the overall strategy where we build our business based on what our customers tell us they want. So, even somebody who is a creative type, somebody who loves to be creative and doesn’t like to get into all the details, I would still tell them to go visit a couple of discussion boards online or forums online where people are just talking and discussing and put up a simple survey, asking them a few questions so that you can get information back. Even call up a few people that you know are in the market. No matter what the market is, let’s say I love training dogs and so I’m thinking about creating something about training dogs or selling something online about training dogs. I would definitely get on the phone at the very minimum with some people who have dogs and we know that they want to train the dogs, so I can ask them quite a few different questions so I can clarify in my own mind exactly what they’re looking for and what it is that they want. That’s what I’m talking about even on the bottom line basis. We can get much more advanced where we have tons of surveys and we’re running all the pay-per-click traffic to it, and we’re doing all types of advertising, and we go in and intensively do the numbers on everything. We can do all that, but at the bare minimum, on the creative side, we’d want to get on the phone with at least a few people who are the exact target market for what we want to sell, and we get their feedback. You’re listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Ginnie: What are your services now that you’re offering?

Terry: Well, what I actually personally do is I create and sell products online. In addition, I do coaching. So, I’m one of the consultants that consults people on marketing. I do that more than anything because I find it very enjoyable. Another reason that I do it isn’t really for the money because if I actually look at the numbers and looked at it very hard on the numbers only, my time is better spent on my own projects than it is on consulting and coaching. But, doing the coaching allows me to know all the questions people are asking, and those questions that my clients ask become more generic of nature. So, it’s not specifically to them, but those questions end up becoming products that I create to help everybody else. So, it’s a very strong basis there of even though the actual time spent in coaching comes with almost that survey nature of being on the phone with people that I just mention and how important it is for the customer research and knowing what to offer clients is my purpose to coaching more than anything else. But, if you were to ask me how I define myself, the names that I use, I call myself an internet business coach.

Ginnie: Can you talk about cutting through the internet marketing noise? Would you explain that a little bit?

Terry: What I mean by that is when I first started, there was like nothing online. Nobody knew what they were doing, and they were all just randomly guessing. It seems that was what the case was. No matter how ingenious someone says that they are at the beginning, we were all just guessing and some people got it right at the very beginning. Today, go online, there are thousands of products out there that talk about making money online. There’s thousands of products out there that talk about how to generate traffic or how to do your website. I talk about the fact that we have to cut through the noise of all of this basically information overload to find the real gems and what’s really true. I’m an avid reader. I read a lot of books. I buy ebooks. I watch videos. I’m a strong studier. Just recently, I went through two or three ebooks that I had purchased, and I didn’t finish have the first few pages because I knew by experience that quite a few things they were saying weren’t true. So, it’s kind of, we’ll say it’s cut me off. That was part of the noise that was going on that we have to watch out for. My advice to people listening to this is to pick a couple of experts maybe no more than two or three that give good value, give good content to them, give them good advice, and then go through. Buy their products. Get their information, and follow the systems they provide. Here’s what I’ve seen is a major failure. I’ve spoken at seminars and workshops where people have come up to me and I’ve talked for a while. I ask them what they do online, and the answer – well, I don’t do anything yet, I’m just getting started. Then, I take it a little bit deeper and this getting started has taken them two years. They haven’t done anything yet, and that’s because they jump from this system to this system. They go to this seminar, to this seminar, and they get all this information. They’re trying to load themselves up to understand everything about the internet. I don’t understand everything about the internet. I don’t know every single tactic that you could possibly use and that’s because we can’t handle them all or even deal with it all. What people need to do is cut back and focus on information from a couple of people. Follow the information that you’re taught, and do it not jump here or there, and the reason people jump here or there is they keep getting the promise something else is easier. Everything is so easy. People present the pay per click as so easy or building a list as so easy or generating affiliates is so easy. Well, I can tell you that none of it is easy what I define as super easy, but when we say something is easy, I will say this. Running an internet business today is a whole lot easier of a lifestyle than back when I was delivering pizzas. So, its all a comparison there. You’ll never hear me say that the internet business is hard because delivering pizzas in the pouring down rain and not getting any tips is a whole lot harder.

Ginnie: When you have an idea that isn’t completely unique, are there people that have already been there and done that? Can you compete with that?

Terry: You most definitely can. I’m forgetting the main name right now, but there’s an individual who just came into the dating market in the last few years, and his whole site is free. So, everything is free on the site. Basically it’s a match making service that’s totally free. With his site, he basically makes all his profits by selling advertising on there. He has AdSense on there, and he sells direct advertising as well, and so we’re talking about a multi-million dollar site. He probably has some team members, but it was primarily ran by himself. So, he came into that huge saturated market that you just talked about and he did a little bit of moving the free line to start giving away for free what other people were selling and built a huge business model out of it as a little individual entrepreneur without a whole lot of budget to start with.

Ginnie: Sites like that would only have so many legs, so how many people could put up free internet dating sites.

Terry: It would depend on the subject. Other people go into more of a niche of it. You might find some out there who are using like Christian free internet dating site or somebody else who is doing another specific group. To learn more about Terry Dean, go on over to his website KillerMarketingCoach.com. For more information, go to KillerMarketingCoach.com.

Ginnie: You were talking, Terry about, and it’s great advice how many people spend so much time trying to learn something and they never actually do. Who were some of the people that were your gurus, that you learned from?

Terry: Jay Abraham was probably the biggest one. I really learned a lot of stuff from his information starting out like I said originally I went through and studied all his materials, listened to what he provided, and I went like step by step through, “Okay, what can I apply to the internet. What would work here on the internet?” Some did. Some didn’t of what I learned from him. He was one of the really big ones for me, and another one back then that really was a strong influence on me was Bill Myers. Bill Myers was such a strong influence because he talked a lot about the lifestyle he had, and he was someone that used to live out in the country also. I’m here in Indiana because I like the rural lifestyle. I live on 18 acres and on my street, there is one mile here that has only four houses.

Ginnie: Is it a family business? Are there other members of your family, your wife perhaps, involved in this as well?

Terry: My wife actually helped me for quite a long time. For seven of the years, she helped me and she was the assistant, and she got quite good at designing the website. Right now, she doesn’t help me as much because her dream’s would’ve been in the medical field. She is currently in school. She’ll be graduating in a few months for being an RN.

Ginnie: Will she take that to the internet as well?

Terry: Probably not at first. She prefers to be out of the house. She’ll probably work at the hospital.

Ginnie: Talk a little bit about the use of video on line, how that’s changing the face of the internet.

Terry: Well, if you actually look at the stats, you’ll see that YouTube has more searches than Google nowadays. So, people are searching for the videos and YouTube has really become the king of video. So, right now, with my own business and with some client businesses, we end up generating a lot of free visitors through placing videos on YouTube. Sometimes, it’s a simple, like in some of my products, I sell DVDs. I have a set of blogging DVDs, and I have like six clips I pulled out of those DVDs that I give away on YouTube. YouTube generates the most traffic for searches for those subjects. People are watching the video, and then at the end of the video, it shows my website address and people end up coming to my website and purchasing the DVD set. So, it generates a lot of free traffic for me. That’s one side of videos. We can generate visitors for free by posting good content on the video sites such as YouTube. That’s just one of them. There’s lots of video sites out there that are popping up everyday. They’re just the biggest and the best at the moment. The other side is on the conversion side. I found more and more that by doing a video clip, even it’s what we call a talking heads video, which is kind of like a webcam or camcorder shot at your face and your shoulders and you’re talking about the subject, will often improve the conversion and sales on our website, and it’s kind of funny. You can sometimes hire a really expensive copywriter, and they might improve the sales. You add the video, and often you can again improve the sales. Of course, the best case scenario is to have that expensive copywriter write you a script for the video that you do on the site. I have a few products and clients that we do most of their selling just with a video on a site and sometimes as simple as doing like a PowerPoint presentation on video. They talk about what they offer. They give some information that will help someone, and then they sell what they offer from the video, almost like they were just selling it one on one in person. They do it through the video without much text on the site at all. Video is becoming a big part both from the traffic and from the conversion on the site. The really beautiful thing is most of the video tools aren’t that expensive either.

Ginnie: Is this one of the products that you sell how to do this?

Terry: I do not have a product that just talks about video. I talk about video in the overall conversion and traffic area in my internet lifestyle system, but I don’t have a separate product that is just about video.

Ginnie: We’ll talk a lot about social networking, and if you know how to do it and you’re in it, maybe you’re twenty years old and you get it. But, there are a lot of people that are a little bit older and they’re just looking into marketing and they have to shift gears and get with it. It’s a little bit more difficult. You just don’t put a video, or do you, on YouTube that’s a talking head. Who would go to it? Who would find you?

Terry: Well, you’ll put on sites that you already have. You’ll end up putting it on YouTube, but if you’re using the keyword phrases that people are searching for, you can end up getting quite a bit of traffic in just that way, just by putting that up and using keywords people search for. What I mean by that is for someone – I guess this kind of hits there because it works so well – in the dog training market, all they had to do was put up videos about different kinds of breeds of puppies, and by putting like golden retriever puppies and things like that, you’ll find seventy, eighty thousand views of something like that, of people wanting to find out more about that, that want to see that, and end up viewing that on a the site. So, sometimes, it’s just having the right keywords that people are already searching for, and for that you’ll find that at the same time, the things they’re searching on YouTube are the same things they search for on Google and the other search engines. So, really the best keyword tool – there’s extensive ones that you can buy – but I like the free one best which is the Google keyword tool. To find that, somebody just needs to go over to Google. Type in “Google Keyword Tool,” and Google’s page is going to show up first – surprise, surprise – but, they’ll show up first, and you can type into different phrases, and you can see how many different people are searching for something on Google. You’ll find on the video sites, it’s going to be pretty comparative. People are searching for many of the same things. So, that’s really part one is coming up and figuring out what people are already looking for, and then part two, is I most definitely do put it on my sites. I run a blog, a WordPress blog, that’s basically on my site. Anytime I’ll post a video, I’ll post it on my blog as well. So, that really comes into a lot of traffic generation strategies for the blog. It’s funny with the social networking, I think there’s a lot of popularity for the social sites, but in reality I spend a lot less time with the social sites than I do like on my own blog or on some videos or things of that nature than I would ever spend on Facebook. I spend almost no time on Facebook for example because my tests, most of those social sites the only ones that have been real profitable is Twitter.

Ginnie: Tell me about Twitter. I keep hearing about Twitter. Tell me a little bit of how that works.

Terry: It’s a place where you can connect with others. It’s almost like someone understand what blogging is. Blogging is like writing an online battery of content and videos, whatever you want to put. You control it. You place it. Twitter is like a mini version of that because you only get 140 characters. So, you get to write these really short paragraphs, or like this little sentence of content, and where Twitter has its biggest benefit is when you start following other people in your market and you can send replies to them or you can send direct messages, if they’re also following you and you use it to connect with other experts in your market. Really looking for stepping up and providing content because that’s kind of what works best on Twitter is when you’re giving resources. If you’ve got a good video that you could put up, you post it. You’ll often find that if it’s really good content, some other people will do what they call ‘retweeting’ which means they post that little link also to all of their audience, and it’s like what we call viral. So, other people will post it for us. So, Twitter is kind of a subject on its own, but really with all those sites, it’s really the only one I found and really proven to be profitable itself. So, you don’t see me on Facebook. I don’t doubt that I probably have more than a thousand friends, but I’m rarely there.

Ginnie: You’re talking about selling products. You have a newsletter I’m sure. You’ve got teleseminars. You’ve got blogs. You’ve got Twitter. You’ve got affiliates. You’ve got a family. What’s your routine day like? Do you have to break this down so you can keep everything organized and straight, or do you just sort of deal with things as they come?

Terry: I definitely have a schedule of what I’m doing. If I just did things as they come, I’d probably spend all day on a forum or something, or spend all day visiting Twitter and reading whatever everybody had to say about stuff. My normal day is I’ll get up and I like an early worker, so I’ll get up fix breakfast and be at work by about eight o’clock in the morning. The first thing I’ll usually do is I’ll go through and answer some of my email coaching clients. If some clients who pay for coaching by me by email only, so I go through and I’ll replay to all of them, answer questions, sometimes look at their sites and things like that. Then, I’ll check to see if we have any comments that I need to approve on the blog, and check Twitter and usually make like a little post or promise a couple of people. I don’t spend more than five minutes there. So, we’re probably talking for this early session about an hour for that part. That’s if I have a bunch of clients who like need different views of things to review their site and look at that. I might go a little bit longer for that part. So, that’s the basis there, and then usually, what I’ll do is I’ll have sections that I really break up the day. For phone coaching clients, I schedule those on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, so all my phone coaching clients are Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. Usually Thursday afternoons are often interviews. I schedule interviews or teleseminars or something on Thursday afternoons. Then, mornings are often me writing projects or working on a product such as a DVD. Now, my videos, here’s where the real beautiful things – most of my videos that I’ve produced like the free videos I put on YouTube and stuff come out of the DVDs I product.

Ginnie: So, you’re repurposing the material that you already have.

Terry: Yes. So, I take that stuff there. Same thing with emails and blog posts. They’ll come out of something I’m writing, like something I have a clients with is once we start talking about blogs and it’s like, “Wow, I have to produce all this content.” What I’ll tell them to do is just start writing a book. Write your book over the next six months, and because it’s a book, it’s a low cost item. People will be quite willing to purchase that print book even if you revealed all the information for free in the blog just because it’s simpler and it’s a better tool. So, that’s how they can create all the blog posts is just pull from the book that they’re writing. I do that a lot with my content like a DVD. That sixty minute DVD, it’s quite likely I’ll have pulled maybe three different clips totally fifteen minute out of that I gave away for free on the videos. You can see you’re repurposing all the content that you create in other areas, and then in my business a lot of the promotional strategies, I still do like the Adwords because I enjoy it, and I see it’s good research, but a lot of these other promotional strategies are done by interns in my business, which means it’s done for me for free, and we’re talking like strategies that going out and making blog comments, going to forums, building relationships with others, even posting some of their own videos. A lot of those projects are done by interns.

Ginnie: With so many coaches out there, and with so much information, how does a person sift through it all and find a coach that’s going to work for them? What questions should they be asking? What should they be looking for?

Terry: The very first thing they should look for is when they get to websites, they should be looking to see if the person’s providing them a lot of information for free on the site. That’s the very first thing – not the sales copy, not real hard sales copy, “Buy my stuff or the end of the world will happen in five minutes,” or that you’ll make a million dollars this year. I guarantee. That kind of thing. So, look for that first as you’re looking for content and value. The second thing I would do is I would then take that person’s name, put it into Google and start looking to see what other people say about them. Are they happy with them? Do they have good experiences? If that person also has a blog, you can look through all the comments to see sometimes what people will be saying about them or not. In some more known blog comments, my tip there is not look for all those comments to always be about how wonderful they are. They probably deleted any of the bad ones. Look for someone that are a little negative too, but they leave them on there. See what other people are saying about them. I would just buy like a low cost product first. Buy something cheap they sell. Don’t go out and grab a $2,000 package first. See if they have something low cost they offer that you can try out.

Ginnie: Well, when I think of coaching, I think actually having a person I can talk to. Rather than listening to something that gives me the information that I can read. So, let’s address finding the person that you can talk to, which is going to end up costing more money, I would think, but you’d get a lot more value from it.

Terry: It would, but even in that case, I would try buying one of their products first. If they offer any products, I would buy it first because I’d want to make sure it was somebody I would get along and it’s a system that I can follow. What they’ll teach me will probably just be more advanced than what’s ever in whatever materials they have. Personally, I’d be looking for what they sell first. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising and copywriting, go to Michael Senoff’s

Ginnie: Do you still do this? Do you still buy other people’s products or follow other gurus and keep up to date with what’s going on?

Terry: Oh, I definitely buy other products. It’s kind of funny, when you’re getting started, a lot of times, you’ll buy everything and you buy a lot of high cost items. A lot of times now I buy a lot more low cost items from all different variations because I’m not looking for any one big system. I’m just looking for like one little tip I can use in my business, but I buy a lot of products and a lot of different information still to start with. That’s the reason I’m advising people to start with something low first. You’ll see very quickly with just one little purchase whether that person gives a lot of value or not in a product, then you can go into and possibly get them for coaching. For coaching, I’d really go after somebody who doesn’t make me do a long contract. I’d want somebody who is like shorter, not signing for a year, sign up for a month with them.

Ginnie: Then, see how that goes, and then for you personally as a coach, is that something that you find that you want to follow up with them and see how they’re doing, and maybe even work with them later if it’s a good match.

Terry: It’s kind of interesting. Right now, talking to people who come to me for coaching, sometimes I’ll tell them that I can help them, and let’s go and sign them up for a month and let’s try out the coaching. With all my coaching clients, no matter how long they’ve been with me, I have them month to month so they can cancel any month they want. At the end of any month, they can cancel. Also, what other people come to me, and I don’t think they’re in the right place, or they are like too basic at the very, very beginning. They don’t have a website or they don’t have any of that knowledge – for some of them, I end up suggesting them to purchase a product for now, and go through one of my products. Then, we can go back around to coaching. They could possibly be a potential client in a month or two.

Ginnie: That was going to be my next question. I’m glad you brought it up about being too basic. If you just talk about focusing and how important that was, and if you do say, “Well, I’m a camera man. I shoot video, and I know there’s a place for me online. I know online video is big, but I’ve got my camera and I’ve got my skills, but I don’t really know how to apply it to the internet.” So, I want to come to you, and can you help me do that? Is that too basic, or do they have to come to you specifically and say, ‘I don’t even know what the question is?”

Terry: Well, if they came and they said they had a camera and they wanted to go basic, probably the first thing I would end up telling them is go through some of the information on my blog. I would tell them to go through that very, very first thing, and then potentially, probably for most people, I would push them towards the Internet Lifestyle product that I have. With that, the real reason is because I want to get the whole system that I follow in their hands, because if they come to me for coaching and we’re really deciding on doing a one on one relationship with coaching, I’m going to be taking them through that system. That’s what we’re going to be doing. I’m just going to be applying it specifically to them. So, it’s really in their benefit to make sure that’s the system they want to be following because there’s a lot of ways to succeed online, and is my way the best way? It is for me. It is for some people, but it’s really not for everybody.

Ginnie: You’ve seen huge changes, and I really appreciate you sharing so much of that with us. Isn’t it that it changes so fast? Where do you see yourself in the next ten years?

Terry: In the next ten years, I see myself with websites that are pretty much all videos still. The whole internet is going to be pretty much a video. I’ll see that we’ll probably still be using methods with email and Twitter. It seems like everybody wants to get rid of email all the time, but it never goes away. They have other variations of it, but it never goes away. You’ll still see me living a lifestyle business like I do today. Here’s the funny thing. A lot of people focus on more money, more money, more money all the time. Sometimes, that means they focus seventy hours a week. Me, I work more like 30-40, and I get kind of grumpy about it when I’m working more than thirty hours a week. I work better at a lower level because I have more time to be creative. You could probably still see me doing the same thing – selling the same products, coaching clients and most products by that point will probably be online videos as well.

Ginnie: Do you ever feel that there’s going to be an end to the products that you’re able to come up with, that you’re able to find?

Terry: For there to be an end to products I can come up with means there’s an end to everybody’s problem.

Ginnie: Well said.

Terry: I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point where people don’t have problems they want a solution to.

Ginnie: Is that where you see the internet’s greatest gift?

Terry: The internet’s greatest gift is really an advantage here – this is kind of something that people haven’t talked about lately, but we’re going to see it more and more in the future. I think the internet’s greatest gift is we can advertise and we can market to a worldwide audience at very low cost, which means we can do things like what I’ve been talking about – providing content and providing a value to people – even before they buy a product, something that was never possible before. Could you imagine setting up a brick and mortar business, and telling people that you’re initial strategy is to provide a lot of free content and get free subscribers to show up? You’re going to be out of business in a month or two, if that’s your only goal. You might be able to give away something free, but you need to sell something really quick, or could you imagine somebody using a lot of direct mail, which is expensive with the postal increases all the time, and sending out tons and tons of free DVDs constantly to build a relationship and really help people before they buy. So, a big advantage that the internet has given all of us is we can be of value and be an asset to people even before they buy or even before they spend any money. By doing so, we build a relationship where they will spend money to go to a deeper level.

Ginnie: What about some of the downsides?

Terry: The downside, the only real big one is since we have a worldwide audience, we also have worldwide competition, which means you just can’t come on and be a “me too” business, which is what a lot of people try to do. They go, “Well, I’m just going to come on and sell my products.” Like we talked about the dating services earlier, “I’m going to come on and I’m going to start my dating service like the other 150 of them that are out there.” It’s not going to work. So, you have to figure out how to be unique and how to be a little bit different and provide more value than the other people. Again, the advantage is you have so much lower expenses and lower costs, so it comes easy. I think a real issue here, which really isn’t a disadvantage to me, but it is a disadvantage for a lot of people out there is the low cost of doing business online, worldwide competition of businesses online means that for like local businesses, brick and mortar businesses, if it’s possible to buy what you sell from someone else or somewhere else, you can be in trouble.