Lessons Learned the First Time Around

Hi Warriors

Frank Mullen from Ireland here, it's been a long time!

In 2004-05 I had minor success in the IM niche with the 'Niche Database'. I was highly regarded but overall my first Internet venture ended up costing me about $130,000. I think the Niche Database took in $60-70k, and the rest was blown on software, marketing information, consulting and the development of quite a few products that were never brought to market. It's amazing how quick you can melt through the cash in this game!

After some run-ins with my bank manager (I was borrowing money against the mortgages of some properties I owned in Ireland) I had something close to a nervous breakdown and left the Internet Marketing game to go and sort my life out. I had to sell some property to pay my debts - I had inherited money after my father died when I was 13, I'm now 33.

I've decided to chronicle my journey here as a way of reminding myself what I did wrong. I'll be returning to IM next year in a completely different niche, and this is as much to remind me of my mistakes as to help anyone else getting involved in IM.

I first heard of IM in 2003 when I was an accountant, and was looking for a way of starting my own business. I found the late Corey Rudl's course and bought that, and was immediately fascinated by the concept of 'making money by teaching others how to make money'. Corey did mention his 'Car Secrets' product but there was no niche that I was interested in that I could profit from. But I did know that I was intelligent enough to be some kind of marketing guru and I think my ego had its sights set on that from day 1.

But regardless, I did set out to find a niche. The first one I thought about was to sell a course of Camtasia videos teaching people to use Microsoft Excel. But the market seemed limited - the only people who needed to use Excel well would be those using it in jobs, and they would be trained on it as part of their jobs. So I discarded that idea.

Then I decided to create a 'monster ebook package', which was one of the crazes at the time. I collected every free ebook I could find and bought loads of products with resale rights, but they never made it further than my hard drive.

In the meantime, the spending spree continued. I bought Marlon Sanders Cash Like Clockwork System and Mark Joyner's Farewell Package. I then bought Mark's Farewell Package again because there was an offer of half an hour's consulting to shift the remaining units. I didn't get to talk to Mark at the time though because already the strain of striving to be a guru was beginning to show and I broke up with my girlfriend and decided to go to Australia (we subsequently got back together and she came to Australia with me - business building was put on hold while we travelled for a few months).

In Australia the spending started again. I joined Jay Abraham, Stephen Pierce and Rich Schefren's coaching program, despite not yet having a product. That was when I realised once again that I had to find my niche. But I kept getting distracted and buying more products. It was the early days of Traffic Equalizer and I decided I was going to make a fortune with Adsense. But to this day I have still never uploaded a site with Adsense on it!

Finally I hit the jackpot. I had the idea that to find the best niche idea possible I would have to go through them all. So I bought a subscription to Wordtracker and bought myself a small dictionary. I wrote down every word from the dictionary that could have money making potential and started putting those words into Wordtracker. The result was a database of 15,000+ keywords. Instead of exploiting the keywords myself, I decided to let others do the work, so I compiled the results into a piece of software, and added some keyword research functions, ending up with the Niche Database.

My biggest mistake was early on. It was when I was in between my first and second versions and Frank Kern emailed me asking could he promote the software. It was when he was doing the Underachiever stuff. I told him the better version would be ready in a couple of weeks and I'd get back to him then. He didn't reply to me after that - I'd missed the boat.

Another mistake was committing to monthly updates of the software. I got to involved in looking for further ideas and ended up letting down my customers. At first it was fine, but then I got lazy and the updates started happening every two months, and then three.
And because the software part of it scraped Google for the ad numbers, that kept breaking whenever Google updated its pages.

I also never proved the value of the keywords, by not creating a single niche site. I did plan on entering the speeches niche and even spent a lot of money having 300 speeches written, but I never got around to selling them.

I bought so much marketing information - my inbox overflowed with emails from all the lists I was subscribed to and I was hooked in my so many offers. And I never used any of the products I bought. I also went to 5 seminars in a year and never applied any of the information. I was always looking for the next big thing, always looking to the next big guru.

I ended up having the great pleasure of consulting with Mark Joyner for a few months. But again, it was tens of thousands of dollars for information I never used.

The biggest A-Ha moment was when I read the book by Al and Laura Ries "The Origin of Brands". It explained how business products evolve in the same why as species of life evolve. For example, the mainframe computer evolved into the laptop computer and the desktop computer - these are the equivalent of the branches in the 'tree of life'. The next branch off the laptop branch are the netbooks. Business will continue to evolve, and according to the Rieses, the key to huge success is to creat the next branch instead of copying what has gone before you. Yes, it is a much more difficult process, but you will be first into the product category and will automatically be the dominant brand in that category.

Rich Schefren talks about this in one of his free reports. And he has applied it too. There was already a branch of 'Gurus' in the Internet Marketing Tree of Business, and he has created a new branch called 'Guru to the Gurus'. So if you can discover something remarkable and teach it to Rich Schefren, you could then brand yourself as 'Guru to the Guru of the Gurus'!

Another good example of this are Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. Dan came after Jay and wanted to brand himself differently. He created his own branch on the tree by calling himself the 'No BS Guy'. Genius :-)

Al Ries and Jack Trout have another book, I think called "Positioning, the Battle for your Mind" - we can see that the above are good examples of this.

At the beginning of "The Origin of Brands", Al Ries wrote that in 30 years of writing about branding, it is only now, by applying the framework of the theory of evolution that he feels that he understands branding fully.

For example, new species arise through mutation. A new characteristic creates a new species and gives it a survival advantage. My Niche Database was a mutation on previous keyword stuff (eg Strike it Niche) in that it was a much bigger database, and was also a mutation on Adword Analyzer in that it had the functionality of AA but also had the keyword data. But therein lay one of my mistakes... if I had specialized solely in the huge database of keywords I would probably been much more successful. The keyword stuff was my competitive advantage but I got bogged down in creating the software and was eventually blown out of the water by the Dowser Niche Database.

Towards the end of the Niche Database Jim Fleck contacted me, interested in buying it off me. I can't remember why I didn't bite his hand off, instead I gradually just stopped selling it and even let the domain expire.. it's now redirecting to some free IM listbuilding stuff.

So think about how you can create mutations on existing product categories so that you can be the first brand in a whole new category. New possibilities emerge all the time, eg all the businesses piggybacking on the success of Twitter.

After leaving IM I went off and studied Yoga and the Eastern Philosophies. All the study of evolution had left me dead inside and the belief that I was nothing more than a pile of dust was very soul-destroying. The Eastern Philosophies opened my mind to a whole new way of looking at life.

I've applied the mutation stuff by finding a chink in what the physical Yoga (Hatha Yoga) teaches, and I am specialising entirely in that now and should have a good 'mutant' product ready sometime next year. By the time my research is completely I won't be that far from Malcolm Gladwell's magic 10,000 hours number, so to summarise I guess I'd say that the key to massive success is to find something that needs to be improved, and drill down into that until you have mastered it.

10,000 hours is 3 hours a day for 10 years, or 10 hours a day for 3 years!!

Best wishes

Frank