3 Things I Learned From James Schramko

James Schramko typically charges a LOT for access to his advice. His mastermind group is in the tens of thousands per year, and I’m sure it’s worth every penny. So when I had the opportunity to chat with him, I knew I wanted to share some of his best pieces of advice with my listeners.

I got a number of golden nuggets from my conversation with James. I actually share more than three in this episode (including James’ secret to ranking a podcast highly in iTunes), but here were the ones that rose to the top:

Avoid anything that distracts you from your goal (shiny object syndrome)
Be patient
Spend time around others with similar goals

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More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business. It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Hey there BrightIdea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 122 at the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. This is the podcast where we help the entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses. If you are an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversion and automatically increase profits, you are in the right place.

So, what is in store for you today? Well I am going to share with you, on this very blustery day here in Boise, Idaho. We had an amazing day, amazing weekend rather, and then weather hits 70 on a Sunday and now it’s the windiest it’s been in 40 years or something. So darn it all.

But anyway, in this episode, I am going to share with you, some things that I learned in a call recently, with a fellow named James Schramko.

James, over the last number of years has built himself a very, very successful business and there were three key things I learned from him in a talk that I had. I was considering joining his mastermind group, which I think I probably well do at some point in the relatively near future. And the pre interview call with him was really, really helpful for a number of reasons that I want to share some of the details with you because I alluded to this back at episode # 119 when I unveiled my 2-year plan in building a $500,000 marketing agency, Groove Digital marketing.

So we are going to get to all this good stuff in just a second, but before i do that very quickly I get a lot of emails from people asking me, “Trent what tools do you use to run your business?”

There are a lot of software tools that I used to run BrightIdeas and my other businesses. And you can if you would like, learn more about all of those tools and if you want to support me in the show you can use my affiliate link to buy any of them and if you do I have something special for you – extra bonuses that you cannot get elsewhere. So, the way you find it all, you just got to grabtrentsbonus.com and you can see how you can do that.

So with that said, let us talk, let us jump into to this. First of all if you are not familiar with James, his website is superfastbusiness.com and he does a couple of million dollars per year in info products, affiliate income, and his mastermind group, and also has a fairly large services division with above 50 VAs working in the Philippines and I never, I have actually met James once a couple years ago at the traffic & conversion summit in Washington DC, we really didn’t have the chance to chat a whole bunch so this was a really interesting call for me, because it validated some of the things that I’ve been doing right, but also made me aware of some of the things that I need to do better.

So his business become successful because he’s done a very, very good job of attracting a lot of traffic so his site and obviously there is a portion of those people who visit his site become subscribers to give you an idea there’s a one of his products that is an affiliate for which is lead pages and I am also an affiliate for lead pages (if you’d like to use link, it’s brightideas.co/leadpages), it’s what I used to make a lot of my landing pages and opt-in boxes and so forth and it’s really good software, anyway James is the largest affiliate in the entire world for that company and he was one of the key advisers to help them really make that business get initially launched and off the ground.

So here are some of the things that he told me he said number 1 is respect to the podcast he says if you want to get rank highly in the iTunes store the one thing that helps more than anything is frequency. Frequency in other words how many episodes per week you are publishing so those of you who’ve been listening for a while know that I used to do one episode for week, and now I do an episode every single day and that is the reason why I am hoping to get my show higher in the business marketing category in the iTunes store. Because the iTunes store is really just a search engine and if I can do that of course another would get more traffic and if I can get more traffic I can get more subscribers.

The other thing that James told me is that he has four podcasts, not just one. So right now I have one; it’s Bright Ideas and for my agency I’m going to launch another one and I even toyed with launching a third one now that would be called “Ask Trent” where basically people could call in have a question leave a message for me like a voice mail. And then I would produce an episode to answer that question. So if that’s something you all said would be cool of course I’d like to get your feedback, so make sure you let me know.

So I made notes here and a couple of things that I realized in talking with James and I’m sharing this with you because if you have a business model that similar to bright ideas my hope for you is that this will be confidence inspiring as it was for me.

So realization number 1 is I am on track with my strategy; my business model is almost identical to James’, I sell info products. And I am an affiliate for some of the products that I use, I have a mastermind group and I have services division and those are the exact same four ways that James monetizes his business of course the big differences that he’s got more traffic than I do.

I realized that I needed to create more podcasts episodes – daily. I realized that I need more than one podcast, I also realized that I need to start guest posting.. I kind of loathe to guest post to be honest with you, which is really stupid if you think about it because I have done it a couple of times and it didn’t bring me a descent quite large amount of traffic, and a reason I’ve been quote unquote loathe to do it; you’ve got to create really, really great content and then typically whoever you’re guest posting with doesn’t want you to publish that content on your own site.

I am kind like a dimwit, I don’t want to write all that great content and not be able to publish it on own my blog but if you think about the logic behind that it is sort of flawed. That’s why you are writing content on your own blog because you want people to opt in and join your list. Well wouldn’t it make sense to put a really great piece of content on a blog it has a whole lot more traffic than yours does so that people can see that piece of content and say wow really like this stuff who is this guy. I want to get more stuff from him then they come to your blog and become a subscriber.

The end result is the same it’s just where you place the content so were going to start shopping some.. creating some very high quality post that are not published in on our own blog and see if we going to have some blog with guest posting them. And I realized that I needed to create what I talk about right the beginning grabtrentsbonus.com as a way to mirror kind of what is like James is doing with his and it’s one of the ways that he really helps his monetization because he offers a bonus for a number of bonuses to choose from rather for anyone who uses one of his affiliate links to buy a product.

So if you think about that well, if you’re listening to my show and you and you like my stuff and because you not even one penny more to use an affiliate links, so there’s really no extra cost obviously. And if I’m offering you something of value for free as a thank you for using my affiliate link, chances are if you like my content and you like me and you like my stuff you are going to go yeah that’s cool try on to that use your affiliate link. And enough people do that I cannot up to it a meaningful amount of income.

One of the other lessons from James is I need to avoid anything that distracts me from my goals. And as I’m sure all of us can relate to shiny object syndrome. I don’t have so much shiny object syndrome but there are a lot of things that can catch my attention maybe that is shiny object syndrome. Anyway I am trying to be more focused that’s why the post that I wrote, not so long ago on my two year plan had a picture of the word focus on the top of it.

I need to be patient, which is not one of my strong suits I always like to get results as fast as possible but sometimes things just take a while and so being patient because it’s a good thing.

And last but not the least I need to spent time around other people who have similar goals to me, which I do to the best of my ability but I think I probably could put a little bit more effort in to that. So that something that is on my list of things to do as well.

There you have that is my summary of my conversation with James and if you want to get in to the show notes for this episode go to brightideas.co/122 and if you enjoyed the value of this episode I’d love it if you would. And help me spread the word about the episode by going to brightideas.co/love when there is a pre written tweet, all you got to do is just click that mouse couldn’t be any easier. So thank you very much that’s it for this episode. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid I look forward to haven you back for another episode soon. Take care.