West Interviews Will Swayne

Speakers:
West: West Loh
Will: Will Swayne

West: Welcome, folks, to the call. And today we’ve got another very special guest, Mr. Will Swayne. Welcome, Will.

Will: Hey West! How are you doing?

West: Very well indeed. Yourself?

Will: I am fantastic.

West: Great. Now Will’s an online marketer but he has a company called Marketing Results.com. And he specializes in—well, I actually should probably let him blow his own trumpet. I’ll be more than happy to let him do that.

Today, I’m going to be asking Will a lot about his mindset, how he’s built his business and a lot of the testing and measuring stuff in which he’s a real specialist in. So make sure you hang and stick around.

So Will, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Will: Okay. Well, Marketing-Results is basically an online marketing consultancy. And we specialize particularly in the areas of lead generation and online sales funnel optimization. So the best way to explain that would be probably to tell you our unique selling proposition. And that is: as Australia’s leading internet lead generation experts. Marketing-Results uses sophisticated web analytics to precisely understand how visitors are engaging with your website, then leverage proven traffic and conversion strategies to cut marketing waste, expand your reach and effectiveness and boost online revenue by 2 to 21 times based on over 5 years of documented client results.

West: That’s a pretty cool USP, Will.

Will: Thanks West!

West: Now would it be fair to say that you have a very sort of strict criteria on the clients that you work for? I mean you wouldn’t be able to help the average mom and dad, would you? Or would you?

Will: Well, we primarily work with two types of clients:
The first are what we call our platinum clients. And they tend to be large companies and public corporations.
The second type of client we work with is what we call our gold clients. And they tend to be SMEs with a reasonable size business and reasonable size online presence. In other words, typically, they’re not micro businesses but they’re people who might be already generating some income online, they might be using Google Adwords for example and generating leads or sometimes doing ecommerce sales for their product…

West: And they’re looking for a turbo charge.

Will: Exactly.

West: Yeah, you said in your statement you help them to minimize waste. I like that.

Will: Absolutely. Because ninety nine percent of people who are doing some advertising online—if they’re using Google Adwords or any of the other paid advertising services—are probably wasting a lot of their spend. So what we do is we work out where that’s occurring and then cut it out of the process and maximize what is working.

West: Definitely. And we’re going to get into the meat of that later on for sure. But I want to get started by asking you, Will, what were you doing before you started Marketing Results? And then I’ll ask you about the process of Marketing-Results, how you saw the opportunity and how you built the business.

Will: Okay, sure. Well, prior to starting Marketing-Results…I guess, going back to university, my academic background was in Statistics and also in English Literature. I did a double major on those two, a bit of an unusual combo. Yeah, it was an interesting phase because I did that degree but then got out of Uni and didn’t really have any idea about what I wanted to actually do. And there’s no sort of set career track, if you like, for those things.

West: But you knew you liked numbers.

Will: Yeah… I do like numbers but only in the sense that numbers can be useful. So I’m very much more interested in using numbers in a way that optimize something real than just playing around with numbers on a page.

West: So there’s some hints to how you got started, isn’t it?

Will: Absolutely. Around about the time I sort of left Uni, I actually spent some time in Japan. And through a contact, I was introduced to the CEO of a mail-order company, like a direct mail company in Japan—and they were doing a bit of hiring at the time—and basically persuaded the CEO to give me a job. And this company had basically started from zero a couple of years earlier and it had a couple of products that were going very well and it really got a foothold in the market. So, I think, when I joined them they were doing about $10 million in sales.

West: Wow. That’s pretty awesome.

Will: It was pretty good. But they were growing very quickly. And I was with that company for over three years and when I left, they were doing about $100 million in sales. As much as I’d like to say it was due to my input, I think I was very much a small cog in a large and very…

West: But direct mail teaches you a lot about marketing, doesn’t it? It teaches you about emotional direct response and how to write headlines and the whole funnel and the whole process to put people through.

Will: Absolutely, because direct marketing is all about results. And it’s about learning from the market what works and managing by numbers, managing by fact rather than managing by hunches.

And the reason why they were able to scale that business so quickly is because every single ad, every single publication, every single element of the business was tracked and tested. And one of my roles was actually analyzing some of that database. Because over that course, that period of time—over five years or more, prior to me joining and during—they actually built a database probably close to a million customers. So when you’ve got a lot of data like that, you’ve got a lot of leverage as well. So there was a lot of value in analyzing promotions and working out what’s the best product to lead with, what’s the best direct mail approach when you follow up, how many days did you wait before spending more money on a follow-up direct mail…

West: That’s really impressive. The attention to detail, Will, is really impressive; and just every little nuance that they’re looking at as a variable to change and optimize.

Will: Absolutely. And you know the interesting thing about that company as well is that $100 million dollars…it started with one product. They basically had a skin acre product that they introduced to the Japanese market and basically sold it straight off the page—it was sort of like a structured water; basically a fancy type of water that you spray on your face and it tones the skin—and they started off with that one product. And that just started selling like hotcakes. And then they built the backend around that. So they had a moisturizer, a cleanser, different types of masks and different things like that. So they built a line-up of skin care products but it all started with the first product. And then it was just the way that they scaled that: adding stuff and keeping those promotions running. Because once you get a company going and you’re making those sales—you know, when you start off it’s making $10,000 a month, it was great; but—when you sort of build up to even a million dollars a month or $5 million a month, it sort of gets a life of its own. And the company, in a way, it becomes a living sort of monster with a voracious appetite for more sales.

So when you’re making $10,000 a month, a 5% drop is $500. But when you’re making $10 million a month, a 5% drop is $500,000. So ramping it up and keeping the focus on results month by month and all that sort of thing, it’s a real skill; you really need to keep your eye on the ball.

West: Pretty steep learning curve, I suspect.

Will: Absolutely. And it was a good environment to be in—in a company that was going places and it was on the up and up.

West: So you got back to Brisbane and you thought… ‘What now?’

Will: Yeah. I actually came back to Brisbane—actually I never really lived in Brisbane—but when I left that company I actually went on to some consulting type arrangements. And initially, it was a very good deal. It was very lucrative…for my self. And I was doing trade consulting between Australian companies and Japanese companies. And basically we got that going. And before too long, I could sort of tell that the joint ventures or the partnerships that I was working on facilitating were not going to work because the match between the companies was not quite right. And I could tell it was winding down. And I had to make that choice to either start getting more clients in the same area or get into something different. And I made that choice to actually go into business as a marketing consultant to basically take the successful techniques of direct marketing that we were applying in Japan to regular product and service businesses.

So that’s what I did. So I hung up the shingle and started. The next question was, ‘okay, how am I going to get clients?’ And over the next couple of years probably, we actually started to focus more and more on the internet. I realized that the internet was where it was at in terms of trends. You know, if you look at trends, people are spending more online. It was highly underdeveloped and there were some great tools out there for generating traffic and conversions. And we were getting phenomenal results on the internet for clients. And I thought, hey, let’s focus 100% on the internet. And before too long, it was an internet consultancy.

West: Wow. So it’s kind of evolved over the years but I know you found your little sweet spot.

Will: Absolutely. And one of the things that I believe in very strongly when it comes to business building is getting the business model right. And it actually took probably three to four years to really nail the right business model. Once you’ve got that business model, then you can start to expand.

West: Definitely. That’s very interesting because a lot of businesses…I mean, some smart people they copy models that are already successful. But then again, you get people who try and reinvent the wheel. And it takes time. It takes time and a lot of refinement to get it right. And that’s opportunity cost. So it’s great to hear that you’ve finally sorted out and found a model that works for you.

Is it a model that, you know, it’s kind of a hybrid of certain models that kind of would only work for your type of business? Or do you think that’s scalable as well?

Will: No, I think it’s a model that’s pretty applicable to different types of businesses. But I think the nature of a successful business model is that it works for everyone. It works for the business owner, it works for the clients, and it works for the staff. In other words, you can afford to pay staff market rates, you can afford to make a bit of profit, and your clients are happy and they’re generating—in our case in internet marketing consultancy—we need to be generating a higher return for our clients than we’re costing them. If we do that, they’ll keep on using our services. So getting those three aligned is fairly tricky.

West: But once you’ve got it, then it’s milk and cookies.

Will: Well yeah. I think once you’ve got it, I think you have to keep your eye on the ball especially if the market changes and stuff. But you’re pretty much right. Once you’ve got a model, you can then put your foot on the accelerator and start scaling it. But if your actual model isn’t working and fires are erupting all over the office every five seconds, then you can’t actually grow because you’re all the time putting out fires.

West: Definitely. Definitely. So let me start…I like to talk a little bit about mindset in my calls, Will. Just when you were looking at kicking it off and getting your first few clients, were there any self-doubts, you know, your own head talking down on yourself and disbelief that you wouldn’t be able to make it? Was there any point in time where you didn’t believe in yourself or didn’t think it would work?

Will: It’s an interesting question. There was certainly, you know, during the early days, I basically hung up the shingle, ‘okay, we’re going to do some marketing consulting now.’ But it was like, ‘Mmm, okay, how am I actually going to get clients?’ I never lived in Brisbane before. So I’m here in a new city, don’t have any contacts, there’s no one I went to school with or people I’ve worked with before. It’s pretty much a cold start. And that was a…

West: That’s daunting.

Will: Yeah. Yeah, it was daunting. And I think, for probably the first couple of years, we actually started getting clients through the internet. Because I’m a firm believer in the fact that push-style marketing is costly and ineffective and generally draining. So going out there and doing cold calling or even advertising and different things, if it’s done the wrong way, it’s a huge waste of money.

And we started a sort of a pull-marketing approach where we were putting out information. It just actually took a while to crystallize. It might have taken up to year before we actually had opt-in reports and things for people to opt-in to in the web. But prior to that, it was putting up a website, having some sales copy on that and using Google Adwords to generate traffic. So certainly getting started, it was a bit of a grind. It was a grind and in the first, say, couple of years there was definitely a sense of, okay, I’m putting a lot of effort here and the returns are not there, but there was definitely a sense of ‘this has to work.’

West: It’s a must.

Will: Exactly.

West: And you had the vision in mind all the time. So you were grinding it out but you knew what you were working towards. It wasn’t just a daily head bang on the wall.

Will: Exactly. But I think having said that, there were certainly doubts. Yeah, there were certainly doubts that came in and it’s just like, look, is this my highest and best use? Would I not be better served by going into an established company and applying my skills into a certain area, if they’ve got something that needs leveraging or optimizing I’ll come in and I’ll do it. And I’ll be adding, you know—it’s a big company—adding a lot of value? And wouldn’t it be easy to do that for a nice take home salary every week rather than grinding it out and wondering where the next lump of cash to pay the bills is going to come from?

West: Yeah. So what kept you going then? What kept you getting out of bed and faring along building Marketing-Results?

Will: I think it was definitely a belief in the vision of creating tangible results for clients. And I think we were…

West: You genuinely knew you could help people too, sounds like.

Will: Absolutely.

West: From your own personal results.

Will: Absolutely. Yup. And we were having some success stories. The issue was…well, one of the issues was, I think, that we could have done with more clients to have more success stories. So the clients we were working with were doing really well but it was always a matter of adding more clients. And that was certainly one factor that was fairly tough and had to be negotiated.

So basically I had a belief in the doctrine of improvement and basically going, okay, all we have to is apply our own strategies to our self and increase by ten percent every month or whatever and in the year’s time we would have doubled. So we basically doubled the business every year for like five years.

West: Impressive. Wow. And at what point—because you’ve obviously started as a one man team, right?

Will: That’s correct.

West: Did you get to a point where you thought, ‘I need to get an office, I need to get some staff…’ how did you decide at that point when the workload got to a certain point or when you reached a certain amount of income levels in your business? What was the decision making process there?

Will: Well I actually moved into an office in town, in Adelaide Street at the center of Brisbane. Reasonably soon after incorporating—it might have been three months or something—I was initially working from home and just sort of getting set up, really, because you incorporate and then you like, mmm, okay, well, I don’t even have a business card yet. So, you know, there’s a lot of stuff you start doing. And eventually, it was like, okay, right, ‘this needs to be professional. I need to have somewhere where I can go, a dedicated workspace.’ So it was about three months before I actually got an office in town.

And I had a good friend in Brisbane who was sort of on the back-end of a Uni course and had quite a few of tech skills. So I sort of started by employing him on a part-time basis that goes ten or fifteen hours a week sort of thing just to handle the tech component remembering, of course, that we weren’t really doing highly technical work at that time.

So yeah, it was really just, ‘look, I need some support. I can’t do it all by myself.’

West: Definitely. What I like is the distinction between getting dedicated workspace because I know a lot of potential internet business owners and marketers are working from home but it’s so easy to get distracted. I mean, you know, someone knocks on the door or the phone rings and they’re asking about something completely different or if they’re living with other people in the house, it’s just very hard to demarcate work and play. Even just surfing online, just between work and play sites, it’s just…

But having that dedicated space I thing is a breakthrough for people can take that leap, then they almost force themselves and make it inevitable that they do gain focus and therefore increase their chances to succeed.

Will: I agree.

West: So I want to talk now, Will, about the nitty gritty of what you do in your business. Now you do a conglomerate of tasks. But if we cut—I guess to the meat of it—and say a company comes to you and says, “I’ve got a website. I’ve got my products, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” what kind of things do you look at to be able to tell them what needs to be done? And what are the most common things that you find or mistakes that people who have businesses online aren’t necessarily doing or are doing? That was a like a 25 par question there, Will. I hope you can answer it.

Will: Sure thing. Well, in essence what we basically do is we make more money for our clients online. So typically they’ll have a website or online channel and it’s producing results x. If they’re generating leads, they might be producing 50 leads a month. If it’s making sales, they might be making $10,000 a month. What we do is we apply strategies to take those 50 leads to 200 leads or 300 leads and basically multiply what they’re doing and reduce the average cost per lead at the same time.

West: Can you give us maybe an example or a case study of some of the things that you may have done for a client in the past?

Will: Yeah, sure. I mean in the small business space, we’ve worked with many different companies and all sorts of different industries. Going back a few years even, we started working with CustomizedStickers.com and they were a reasonably substantial online business selling bulk stickers on business to business (B2B) basis. And we took their business in the six figure revenue per year to well over seven figures. So it was like an 800% increase over a period of about eighteen months. So we’re talking multi-million dollars in sales per year all over the web.

West: What were some of the strategies you implemented for them to help them really take that leap?

Will: Well, what we sort of do is a combination of analytics and testing.

West: Do you mean Google Analytics or just analytics in general? Analyzing.

Will: Well, Google Analytics is one tool that can be used to see behind under the hood of a website, if you like. But we use others of course as well. But yeah, using analytics…in other words, some objective tools to judge what is actually happening on a website, not our own subjective view on what’s good and what’s not but actually look at the sales figures and go, “Yeah, that works; that one didn’t.” And we combine that with direct marketing savvy or direct marketing techniques. So we’re talking copywriting, we’re talking plenty of traffic generation strategies—Google Adwords management, SEO (search engine optimization)—and a number of different strategies as well as conversion testing.

So in the case of Customized Stickers, we basically took a look at their website, helped to really define and really nail their USP.

West: That’s important. That’s really important.

Will: Extremely important. It’s the foundation.

And developed a USP or a position statement for them which was: ‘Full-color stickers at a one-color price.’ They were actually doing something different in the market, had a slightly different printing process and they can actually produce a really high quality sticker with optional extras like UV protective coating and very good sticker stock. And they’ll throw in free artwork as well and do that for the same sort of price as your regular printer was doing like a one-color and then they charge you extra for every color and then they’d say, “Okay, there’s going to be extra 100 bucks extra for artwork, etc.” So they actually had a very good offering.

And then it was building some high-converting sales copy around that. So basically totally going through their old website with a blowtorch and rewriting the high-converting copy that really made that compelling case to buy the stickers.

And then a lot of the rest of it were sort of looking at their traffic generation strategies. I mean, they do a lot of work or they invest a lot in Google Adwords. So I was looking at what’s working, what’s not, setting up appropriate tracking, working out where spend was being wasted, writing and setting up new ads and testing new ads that were producing a greater result for less money.

West: Just for the change of words.

Will: Exactly. Through the change of words, landing pages and all sorts of different elements, and basically just iterating the process: trying to develop better and better ads, trying to tap into better and better keywords, cut out things that weren’t working, put up new offers, put up new sales copy, test headlines one against the other…

West: So it’s a very comprehensive process you took them through.

Will: It is comprehensive. And a lot of people, I think, are a little surprised that the number of areas that we kind of dove into…

West: Listen, I think for a typical business owner who’s flat out trying to just keep their business running, they are not going to be anywhere near the level of what you guys are at in terms of their online marketing. So to have you on their team would be a godsend to a lot of these guys. And yeah, it will be immeasurable, the value that you add to their online component.

Will: Yeah. I mean you get to a stage in a business—every business owner gets to a stage—where they realized that they can’t do everything themselves. And I think when you start up, if you’re a one-person operation and you start up and you’ve got a very small budget perhaps and you maybe get a website put together for a low price and you’re just kind of making the sales, you’re doing all the work or you’re delivering whatever you’re doing and you might not have excess money, sure. Learning something about Google Adwords and doing it yourself is probably the thing to do. But if you hope to grow at all or if you hope to scale what you’re doing…

West: To ‘exponentially’ grow.

Will: Exactly.

West: Which is what our mentors, Jay and Dan Kennedy and all those guys are about.

Will: Exactly. If you want to get places fast and you want to leverage your time and actually free yourself up to run your business, then you’ve got to make some changes. And that’s why I think there’s a space for us in the market or why our customers come to us.

West: Definitely. I appreciate that case study, Will, because it really—for me—crystallized the process. Even a small to medium business can do that, but even your moms & dads who are starting out or the people who are just looking to get online is for them to be aware of how really successful online business works behind the scenes. It’s not just whack up a website and you can make and rake in the cash. It’s a process of testing and measuring and continually refining and that’s what all the top guys are doing behind the scenes. I mean, they don’t tell you that but they’re doing it, would it be fair to say?

Will: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a fair comment. And let me tell you about a couple of blasé I have about online marketing and optimization. The first is that any website design company can knock up a website. There are a lot of people with technical skills out there who can put the images and they can put the code online. But actually making a website sell is an entirely different process. I mean certainly when we started, there were a ton of people out there who had a website that hadn’t made any sales. So they were grateful to be making sales on their websites. Now, I think, five or six years later there is more of a generally held belief, I believe, that yeah, websites actually do need to make money. And I think most people in the business community now, actually, they’re aware of the fact that there’s a difference between a pretty-looking online brochure and a sales and lead generation machine that runs for you all the time. So that’s one thing.

West: That’s a good thing.

Will: Yeah. So the other belief I have about online marketing is that it’s essentially an integrated process. I mean we specialize in online so that’s all we do. It’s not quite true but ninety percent of what we do is online and we don’t work for clients in a purely offline capacity at all. So they need to be doing some online stuff with us.

Then you’ve got your specialist online who just do search engine optimization or just do Google Adwords or just do conversion tracking. And I think there is a place for that. And some of these companies are very, very good at what they do. But I think, where we add value is by actually integrating these factors because, you know, you can do some search engine optimization and you can rank well for certain keywords and get to the top of the search engines, but in order to do that, if your site looks a bit like a ransom note because you’ve got so many different keywords jammed in there and font sizes and colors and all sorts of different things and it doesn’t actually convert because it’s built all around search engine rankings and not round conversion, you’re not actually going to achieve the outcome which is generating leads and making sales.

West: So you might get maybe a ton of people actually coming to the site but wouldn’t know what to do or they’ll just leave once they get there.

Will: Exactly. Now equally, if you focus too much on conversion and you’ve got no traffic, your conversion rate might be 50% but you’re only getting 1 visitor a month.

West: That’s half a person. That’s no money at all.

Will: That’s right. [Laughs] In our particular case, what we do is we really integrate these strategies and bring a high level of skill to each area but really fit it together.

West: Now that, to me—like if I was a medium-sized business owner—that would be really attractive to hear. And if you gave me a card and told me that, I would want to talk to you.

Do you ever have problems telling people, conveying what you do to potential clients who you know could use your help but they are not able to absorb what you do in a flash? Is that ever a problem for you?

Will: Well, let me tell you about the way we actually do our own marketing. The entire process is built around pull marketing. So we publish a lot of high quality information on our website and people come to our website and opt-in to start receiving information on online lead generation.

West: Do you actually develop all of that content yourself or do you have someone who helps you out there?

Will: Um, a lot of it I’ve actually developed myself.

West: Cool. You know it’s high quality then.

Will: Well I hope so. I guess I’m very particular about getting the highest quality stuff out there as I can. And I know there are benefits to outsourcing some things but there comes a time when you really got to kind of put your seal of approval on certain items. So yeah, I would say I do that myself and, you know, we publish reports, audio programs, mind maps and cheat sheets to help people optimize Google Adwords and Analytics and all sorts of things. So we give away plenty of value at our website. And that’s basically the carrot—if you like—to attract people who are interested in these fields to us, get them to opt-in. And we basically give them education and information. You know, we give them lots of valuable information so they want to keep hearing from us and also explain how we can help them like they’re this type of company, they’re in this situation and how we can help them and basically explain why would you pay a dedicated team thousands of dollars a year to manage your online website when you could just go and hire a bloke out of Uni for 20 bucks an hour or whatever. So we need to explain the value of what we offer and then explain how we’ve benefited clients in the past and the sort of returns on investment they get. And when people go through that process, that’s when they can understand the value. And that’s when people basically come and inquire with us and say, “Look, I can see what you can do. I like your materials. Here’s my situation. Where do I go next?” We basically end up having a very consultative discussion about whether we’re a good match and how we can help and give them some ideas. And if they’re happy to proceed on that basis, that’s how we actually start new client engagements.

West: So they’re very warm at the point where you even talk to them.

Will: Extremely warm. And the basis of what we do, it’s all about generating red hot leads because a lot of our clients as well, they might be experts at what they do but they’re spending all their time cold calling people or a third of their time cold calling and a third of time trying to sell to those leads and then a third of the time actually doing what they do. Whereas what we say is, “We’ll handle the lead gen for you, see if you’ve got lead gens coming into your inbox all the time and you just do what you do ninety percent of your time and close red hot leads for ten percent of your time.”

West: It’s a much more attractive proposition.

Will: Exactly. I feel like I haven’t really answered your question, West. Remind me what the thrust of your main question was.

West: No, I think you’ve answered it pretty well. It was just going over some of the processes, I guess, taking us deeper into how you get clients. Because it can be potentially complex—what you do—and I think the way that you’ve actually told us… it takes time is basically what I got out of it. You don’t get on the phone with someone for twenty minutes and give them a big sales pitch and expect them to go with you. They come on board because you’re adding value and you kind of attract them through that. They stay on board because you provide more value. And then at the point where they’ve convinced themselves through the information you provided, then you start talking and they’re already really, really hot in terms of setting the relationship. Yeah, that’s a far cry from how many people try to generate business.

Will: Yeah. And I think the initial thrust of your question actually was do I ever find it a problem to explain what I do quickly and get people to understand what I do and come on board and stuff? And I think the answer to that is ‘Yes’ and ‘I don’t.’

West: That’s the five second answer.

Will: Yeah, it is hard to explain exactly what we do and in a cocktail party, over your ten second stadium pitch or whatever you want to call it. And that’s not the way we acquire clients. So when I do meet people, expand a little bit what I do, if they have some interest I say, “Look, well, why don’t you go and sign up to our website.” And I know that they need to go through the process of understanding what we do and how we help them, the tools we use to get to the level of education where it even makes sense for us to have a conversation. Because if they’re not at that level, it’s like—with no implied lack of respect or whatever—but it’s like an undergraduate speaking to a Physics PhD. The difference in perception and knowledge is so different that they don’t mesh. But once you train up the undergraduates so that they have at least a Masters Degree, then you can actually…

West: I love Will’s metaphors.

Will: I just made that up.

West: Thanks. It makes perfect sense because not only are you saving your own time but you’re saving their time as well. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting each other’s time.

Will: So the way we’ve grown our business is one, through retention. So basically, people that start using us keep using us. That’s one strategy.

The next one is through attracting people to the website through various means, educating them over a period of time and having those warm leads come in.

And the third strategy is referrals from existing clients.

West: Cool. Thanks for the summary.

Okay. Well, I’m going to take a little shift and there are a couple of other really cool questions I want to ask you. First one is, what advice would you give—just from your knowledge of online business and the internet marketing environment now—to people who are looking to get online and start a business, just some general words of wisdom and what would you say to them?

Will: Well, I think there’s probably two answers to that based on whether people are looking to start a purely ‘online internet marketing style business’ or whether they’re starting a website to actually drive business for their products and service company that they’re starting.

West: Okay. Interesting. So first thing, maybe get clear on what you want.

Will: Exactly. Get clear on what you want. If it is a product and service business you’re starting and you need a website that will produce results, then I would suggest building your website around the customer. So basically, it’s not what you want or what you want to sort of like to see but what your customers would want to see.

West: That’s awesome, man. ‘Begin with the end in mind.’ –Stephen Covey, Seven Habits

Will: Absolutely. Secondly, on that website, to have basically a compelling sales presentation in the form of words. In other words, sales copy about what you do and how you can help.

And the third part would just be to not ignore the traffic part of the equation. Because you can have a brilliant website, but if it’s getting no traffic, then you’re not going to win basically.

So probably, the number one tool for most product and service businesses as a traffic-generation tool would be Google Adwords. So I recommend doing some advertising on that but getting educated first or getting help first from someone in the know. You can buy ebooks and things on how it works and how to optimize. And there’s plenty of Google Adwords consultancy out there and that’s a big part of our business as well. Because if you know what you’re doing, you can really, really mop up. If you don’t, you can crash and burn.

West: Well, you can lose a lot of money. So Google can eat things up pretty quick if you’re an amateur at it.

Will: That’s right.

West: That’s really good advice. Now I understand, Will, you also spent sometime in Japan as you mentioned before. And you’re into the martial arts.

Will: I am indeed. I have to say that yeah, as I got busier and busier, I had sort of less time to—

West: That’s cool. You have dedicated a large percentage of your life to the martial arts and I’m fascinated by it and wondering how or if the lessons you learned in Japan or the cultural influences maybe or even in your martial arts training, how that has influenced any part of your life or the way you do business.

Will: That’s a very interesting question, West. I haven’t given much thought to that. But I think one interesting thing about the martial arts, I mean I sort of started out in karate…if you know anything about karate, basically, there aren’t that many moves. I think there’s about twelve core techniques—punches and kicks and things like that. And the white belt that goes into the karate studio on the first night is essentially doing or attempting to do exactly the same techniques as the 80 yr old 10th-blackbelt master who’s been studying karate for seventy five years. They’re exactly the same techniques. And the only difference is the strength, the power, the focus, the technique that goes into it as well as the mindset qualities, I guess.

So I sort of believe in working out what the core techniques of your—you know, no matter what sphere of your life it is, if it’s business or even relationships or health and fitness—working out what those core competencies are that you need to master and then really focus on the honing your abilities in those core techniques. You don’t have to do five hundred things well; you just need to get really good at those things and work out how you can make yourself 1% better in each area everyday.

West: For sure. That’s great. Because I mean, essentially, you only need one punch to knock someone out, don’t you?

Will: Exactly.

West: If you work on your technique and master that and do it well, you’re going to be much more effective than someone who’s tried to master a hundred different punches just a little bit.

Will: That’s right. And fifty half strength punches will be less effective than a one hundred percent punch.

West: Now those are awesome, awesome and really applicable to internet business and something, that I admit, I’ve fallen victim to in the past as well: doing too much and not focusing my efforts. So thanks for bringing that in.

So I guess on that note, I mean if people are interested in learning more about you, Will, do they just visit your website? I mean, let’s say you’ve got some potential prospective clients who’ve really resonated with what you’ve said today, would the best thing to do is just pay a visit to Marketing Results.com and sign up for your newsletter?

Will: I think that is the best way to get started. Yup. You can take a look around if you like what you see, you know, opt-in and start the process there. If you go there and it’s not for you, then that’s fine too.

West: Definitely. Definitely. Beautiful. Well thanks for your time, Will.

Will: You’re very welcome, West. A pleasure to speak to you as always.

West: I understand you’re heading to Japan tomorrow. So have a great trip and say hi to all the iron chefs for me. [Laughs]

Will: Thank you. I will do that.

West: Cheers.

Will: Cheers, West.