He is one of the country’s most respected marketing experts and has taken home almost every advertising award in the world for his creativity. Siimon Reynolds built The Photon Group from nothing, to 50 companies with 6,000 staff and a value of $500m on the ASX, making it the 15th largest marketing group in the world.

He speaks with Jack Delosa about marketing, money and why people fail.

“What are the reasons people fail?” I ask Siimon as he sits across from me in a black Mercedez.

“Well there’s a stack of them…” He says laughingly, “and I’ve experienced most of them.”

Although he’s built one of the largest and most successful marketing groups to come out of Australia, Siimon remains intimately connected with what entrepreneurs in the start-up phase must do to stay ahead.

His overall message is clear, “Pick one thing and become the greatest in the world at it.” Siimon illustrates the importance, particularly in the early stages of business, of knowing your core business activity and sticking to it. “There’s so much competition, unless you specialise and unless you focus, why should anyone go to you?”

Although SME’s and corporations can diversify into other markets, Siimon argues that that’s not how they got there. “What happens is that we see successful companies and see that they do many things, but what we sometimes don’t realise is, how they became successful is they owned one niche and they became an expert at it.”

While building The Photon Group, Siimon went from a two-man band, to owning over 50 companies, most of which were still in the growth phase of their business.

He talks about the importance of business owners not only focusing on one thing, but being efficient in the way they develop their model. “We get stuck having meetings, talking to staff and doing emails, all this peripheral stuff that is not actually generating new income.”

“70% of your time within the first year of a new business should be spent on sales and marketing. And that’s not the case, the research shows that 11% of a business owners time is spent on sales and marketing. But that’s the stuff that keeps you alive.”

Siimon indicates the keys to marketing are what he refers to as “recency and frequency” and that by systemising, and wherever possible automating the way you market to prospective clients you will create a cash-generating machine. All it takes is focus and discipline. “Often it’s the recency and frequency with which you have contacted a client that gets you that client. It gets you on the short list and gets you top of mind and this makes them want to ring you or go and buy your product and service.”

By automating this frequent contact with your target market, Siimon explains that you will remain top of mind for the client.

While in advertising, Siimons’ companies would contact prospective clients 16 times a year. Most of these contact points were automated, and some were managed by a person who had it diarised to contact prospects each and every week.

“We moved from people hearing from us once a year, to people hearing from us 16 times a year. And that’s everything from articles that were useful, phone calls, presentations or inviting them lunch or sending them gifts or sending them books or giving them a birthday card.” A move which obviously paid dividends, “What happened was that numerous times we’d be put on short lists for big accounts, simply because we had recently contacted them when they wanted to look for a new ad agency.”

For small business owners Siimon explains the importance of applying this strategy. “Have a calendar of contact points, so that you know that over the course of 12 months you’re going to be hitting your target market, this many times and in this many ways. And diarise it.”

You can follow Siimon at www.thefortuneinstitute.com.

Technorati Tags: Anthony Robbins, Business mastery, Siimon Reynolds, Tony Robbins

If you’ve been on my newsletter list for the past year (or more) then you know I’ve got through quite a personal transformation…

In early 2009, I had moved from Florida to California.  I spent about 12 months there and then decided I wanted to go somewhere else.  And I decided to do it in a bit of a ‘dramatic’ fashion…

I decided to get rid of everything I owned (things) and just travel the world out of a small backpack with just my laptop and a few days worth of clothes.  I called it my MINIMALIST ADVENTURE.

I travelled to 3 different continents over the next several months, and technically I’m still on that trip — although, I got a bit burned out on living out of a small bag (and not having a home base) and so I decided it was better to set up a ‘home’ and then travel to and from there, and of course acquire some more clothes and normal stuff to be able to enjoy myself a bit more.  But I’m still going to keep things to a minimum and not acquire tons of things like I had in the past.

I’m back on the east coast and happy to be closer to my family.  But here’s my ‘point’ to this message today and what I’ve learned from my little ‘experiment’…

During the past several years, as I’ve talked about many times before, I failed to release many new marketing products.  Even ones I mentioned were in the works ended up fizzling out when I either changed my mind or got distracted with other things; such as working on unrelated business ideas.

I started out with a ‘bang’ back in 2004 when I released “Traffic Secrets” (that most people know me for) and then after that (I am willing to admit) my popularity pretty much went downhill from there because I did a poor job of releasing a lot of new stuff — I’ve made it known how much I hate product creation, and that had a lot to do with it.

I ended up working on a lot on non-marketing stuff during those years; I built a large content network of sites (driven by articles and syndicated content) and worked on some software projects.

But during the past 4-5 years or so something else happened that affected everything I was working on…

I GOT SEVERELY BURNED OUT.

I used to be a “marketing junkie” and maybe you are too.  I used to read everything about marketing (online and offline) I could get my hands on.  I read Advertising magazines, Direct Marketing periodicals, bought all the new marketing books, you name it.  I lived and breathed marketing.

And what used to be a “fun” topic for me turned into something that I had lost my passion for. I felt like my creativity and the ‘fire’ that fueled me as a serial entrepreneur since I was about 10 (when I ran a BBS and other little businesses) was fading.

But then one day I really started to realize ‘what’ the problem was…

TOO MUCH NOISE.

And this is the same premise as to why I decided to do my little Minimalist Adventure…

I was spending 10-15+ hours per day online.  Reading, researching, and communicating with people.  I was getting over 3,000 emails PER WEEK, and was involved in all sorts of ‘networking’ stuff with social networks, etc.

I quickly reached over 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook… over 25,000 ‘followers’ on Twitter.  I was getting hundreds of “direct messages” on Twitter and Facebook in addition to all the emails that hit my inbox every week.

The Internet truly is like drinking from a fire hose.  And I think it’s just becoming a bigger fire hose everyday!

To say I had personally reached ‘Information Overload’ is an understatement.  I had very little time to actually THINK and to be creative.  Basically, I was becoming a data zombie — like most people are today.

So I Decided To Make Some MAJOR Changes…

If you’ve been on my newsletter list for the past year then you noticed many of them…

1.  I deleted my Twitter account.

I came to the realization that using Twitter just wasn’t that profitable for ANY of the projects I was working on.  It was becoming more of a ‘chat’ service than anything and had me wasting a lot of my time.

2.  I deleted my Facebook account.

Facebook had me logging in many times a day. (Like most people are doing right now.)  It was like “Extended Email.”  Just another place people were bombarding me with messages.  And to be honest, I was spending a lot of my time filtering through information about tons of people that I didn’t care about.  I don’t mean to say I didn’t care about the people, I mean I didn’t care to see every ‘update’ that they were taking their kids to soccer practice, or how their dog just puked on their rug, or that they were excited that their husband was finally taking them out on a “date night” etc.  I’m sure you know what I mean.  Facebook is really the “TOO MUCH INFO” system of all systems.  It exposes you, at least in my opinion, to too much info about people’s lives.

3.  Several months ago, I left all the ‘mastermind’ and ‘brainstorming’ groups I was a member of.

I used to have regularly scheduled phone or Skype chat sessions, usually multiple times a month.  I had a little ‘brainstorming’ setup with a friend of mine that was in the software business (not marketing related) and we’d do a call together every other week to talk about our latest projects, what our bottlenecks were, and to encourage each other to keep staying productive (or helping solve problems).  But I realized this was taking up a lot of my time and after a few sessions, there wasn’t a lot to keep talking about.  So I decided to stop doing them, and my friend understood and actually was feeling the same way.

I was also a member of a mastermind group that mainly communicated via email — like an email discussion list where one person could post something and everyone would get it, then someone would reply and everyone
would get the reply, etc. etc.  This was a very influential group with some of the top marketing ‘gurus’ but it also included some other major infoproduct publishers – from fitness, real estate, stock trading, relationship
advice, etc.  The members in the same industries would try and support each other with cross-promotions and JVs, and the entire group would share test results and talk about their business goals, challenges, etc.  It was tough making the decision to leave this group, but it was just another thing adding to my inbox load as well as just being another ‘pipe’ of information that added to my overwhelm.  So I resigned from the group and everyone understood as I was moving on to other things in my life and was trying to ‘downsize’ everything I had going on.

4.  I changed my email address.

I just couldn’t take the amount of email I was getting.  It was just too much.  It gave me so much stress it wasn’t even funny.  Maybe you are dealing with the same thing?  So basically I declared “email bankruptcy” and just changed my email address.  And I only gave my new email address to my family, close friends, my employees & outsourced workers, and other ‘mission critical’ people. I still get ‘some’ emails from people that I had to contact for something (and they saw my new email address) etc. but overall I have greatly reduced my email load.

Today I get less than *20* total emails per day.

And considering that 50% are probably from my Mom (Mom, I do like your emails!) I don’t get a lot of email from that many different people.  And I’m glad.

AFTER ALL OF THESE CHANGES, I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER.

I’m now 100 times more creative than I have been in the past 5 years.  I have less stress and most importantly I spend a lot less time on the computer.  I never realized how much I was using the computer everyday. It’s actually a pretty amazing thing to only be online a short amount of time each day. Go figure.

And as many of my long-time customers and subscribers know, for over 2 years I’ve been “in motion” of following a lifelong dream… to be in the Video Game/Entertainment business. I’ve talked for years about making games and working on other ‘fun’ projects.  It’s a much different business than an Internet publishing business, but I really enjoy it — even, though, the new company has been slow with generating revenue (we’re getting there, though.)  That industry has really changed in the past few years.  You still need some capital to build a business there, but you no longer need $20MM to create a ‘console’ game for the Xbox, Playstation, etc.  Small indie developers are finding success with iPhone games and Facebook too.  I’d love to create the next “Angry Birds” or “Doodle Jump” but we’ll see.  For those that don’t know, the 99 cent game “Angry Birds” on the iPhone/iPod Touch has now generated over $10,000,000 in sales!  I think that includes their $4.99 version for the iPad too.  But it’s amazing especially when the game has barely been out for one year. And they’re already talking about leveraging the game into possibly a cartoon and other merchandising opportunities.  And that’s just ONE game idea.  I have tons of them.

I now have a little ‘Game Studio’ in the Philippines, and setting that up and my experiences with it is what really motived me to do my “Outsource Force” class earlier this year.  I really think it’s a HUGE component to building a scalable business — leveraging labor costs and having others grow your business for you.  We’re also now in a position to do contract work where we build games (and other apps) for other companies — another
great opportunity. The demand for iPhone apps and other mobile application development is HUGE now. (And growing.)  In fact, it’s one of the fastest growing industries in the world. So I’m looking forward to our future.  This is a really exciting time in history — the ‘shift’ from desktop computing to mobile computing.

The outsourcing advantages are common sense really. Steve Jobs isn’t assembling iPads in a factory somewhere.  In fact, Apple itself doesn’t really build many of their own products. Almost all of their products are manufactured in China now.  It just makes the most financial sense.  We live in a Global Economy now and as a business owner you need to tap into all the resources at your disposal to have the best chance of survival.

So I’m spending most of my time on this little game/apps company now.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m now spending only about 10% of my time on this marketing business,and I’ll probably shut it down within 6 months — all my employees are in the process of moving over to the new company and I just have less and less time to spend teaching.  While I do love teaching (and of course all my great customers) I ultimately love being an entrepreneur myself. And I’ve made it no secret that I never wanted to be a ‘guru’ anyway.  Just not really my cup of tea.

* I’m still working on the TS2.5 update that all TS owners will get for free.  You’ll get an email when it’s done with download instructions. (Thanks for your patience.)  Aside from that I won’t be producing any new marketing products.

I recently signed a ‘brokerage’ agreement with Sedo, one of the top domain name companies in the world, and they’re in the process of selling my income.com domain.  They’ve listed it at $1MM but think they can sell it for more.  We’ll see. I want to use the additional capital to build the game/apps company.

THE BIG ‘TAKEAWAY’ FOR TODAY…

I know my ‘moves’ aren’t the best for everyone, but I do challenge you to think about minimizing your communication with your online ‘friends’ that you connect with on Facebook, Twitter, and via email.  They very well may be taking away from your life and your business rather than adding to it.  We really do only have just so many hours available to us in a day, and it’s really hard to reach your goals if you spend a large percentage of your time “communicating” and “researching” and not “doing.”

Yours For Online Profits,
John Reese

Technorati Tags: Anthony Robbins, John Reese, Tony Robbins, traffic secrets, traffic secrets 2, ts, ts2, ts2.5

I really wish that I attended, but I had scheduled in the Ultimate Success Summit with Tony Robbins and Sir Richard Branson. Anyway, Chris gives us a good insight into some of the content and value that the speakers presented over the weekend.

Below is a review from: http://www.fastwebformula02.com.au/

The Fast Web Formula Workshop

The first Fast Web Formula Workshop was held in Sydney on March 5-7th 2010. James Schramko along with his team consisting of Peter Parks who provided tips on how to garner free traffic from articles, Dean Hunt who with his invaluable insights provided methods to be applied to create a buzz and generate interest in product and Kerry Finch, an expert on the techniques of creating content and maximizing traffic for websites.

In addition, market researcher Steve Ovens imparted his knowledge on the best research methods prevalent and Kyle Tully enlightened the audience with useful tips on licensing and leveraging their product through local businesses.

The Workshop aimed at providing start-up tips for online businesses through ingenious strategies and tactics helpful in gaining a strong foothold in the online business. The speakers addressed the audience from a couch which helped the discussion to flow in a comfortable direction with views and thoughts expressed back and forth.

Each participant was required to submit a website, salesletter or a marketing campaign for review by an expert panel. Opinions were shared and tips to improve were exchanged by the panel. Events such as these tend to garner the stereotypical audience, but the Fast Web Formula Workshop brought along unique changes in the outlook of the crowd such as- Instead of a usual underwhelming response from the fairer sex, an equal presence of both the genders was on display.

This led to a unified and holistic participation for the speakers and audience alike.Half of the audience was over the age of 35, which highlighted the trend of many successful professionals desiring to switch over to a self-owned business.

James Schramko

James Schramko is a highly successful Australian internet marketer who quit his high paying professional job to apply his knowledge of online marketing strategies. He has achieved remarkable success and has developed strong strategies which have led to him being one of the forerunners of the industry. James has with great effect identified profitable niches and products which cater to those niches.

He has used his strategies and created products and delivers traffic generation services to an exclusive clique of private clients. These products have permitted him to tap into many top internet marketers businesses where his services are in prime demand. James has successfully sold millions of dollars worth of products and services on the internet and has established himself as a leader in providing the most cutting-edge techniques often way before the mainstream market conceptualizes it.

The Fast Web Formula Workshop 2

After the runaway success of the first Fast Web Formula Workshop, James Schramko and his team are back again with a new and improved version this September 10-12th 2010 featuring industry leaders for the first time ever. The new speakers include:

John Carlton- Amongst the World’s leading copyright writers, Carlton’s presence lends a lot of credence to the quality of the program

Ed Dale- Creator of the 30 day challenge and an expert online marketer. Kenny Goodman- nicknamed the ‘domain’ master for his expertise on investing in them will shed light on his experiences.

Brian Johnson- Strategic Profit’s CEO, Johnson will explain high end leveraging systems and its application for businesses.

Leanne King- The ‘WordPress Queen’, King will highlight the effective usage of WordPress strategies in businesses.

Lynne Terry- A full-time online marketer, Terry will elucidate how her career spanning over 13 years has provided her with the ‘dream life’.

The Fast Web Formula Workshop 2 will help businesses keep their marketing staff up to date with the latest techniques and will also assist in promoting a better in-house marketing. Furthermore, online marketers keen on taking their business to the next level will profit with the experience and strategies of the experts and will be in a better position to provide clients with the latest and best service available. Another benefit is for offline marketers who are seeking to establish their presence and hence, bridge the gap of online marketing in their business.

Conclusion Online Business is a relatively new concept and there is much money to make in it. However, not everyone who tries his hand at internet business is successful in terms of profit. An online business if followed with grit, determination and sincerity along the lines of the proposed techniques and strategies, will lead to an assured success.

An instantaneous response and direct feedback is probably one of the best benefits any participant may derive, one may gain from a workshop such as the above. Questions can be posed and quick replies will be received. Brainstorming can be done, not only with the marketing experts present, but also with the other participants, which will create invaluable perspective. With a whole lot of participants from different country’s present, networking is also an inevitable outcome.

Technorati Tags: 30 day challenge, Brian Johnson, Chris Pambos, Ed Dale, Fast Web Formula, Fast Web Formula 2, james schramko, john carlton, Kyle Tully, Leanne King, Lynne Terry, online business, Sir Richard Branson, sydney, Tony Robbins, ultimate Success Summit

The real purpose of doing this challenge was because I didn’t think it would be possible. When we were in the USA last month (july 2010) we were on our last 2-3 days and we had to budget hardcore to get through the US properly, I had a chrisp, green Australia $100 bill and I said to Sheree, do you think we could last for 30 days with this one note the both of us eating? We both didnt think we could and being a subscriber of Tony Robbins, one of his mottos is “if you can’t, then you must!” so we decided to make it happen. It has been full of ups and downs and such a crazy adventure but we have made it and although I personally have put on some extra pounds/kilo’s from the damn high carb diet, I feel like I really have achieved something and I hope that I (I should say we) have been able to inspire you to step outside of your comfort zone and do something you think you can’t do.

Peace, love and lollipops.

Technorati Tags: 30 day challenge, 30DC, Anthony Robbins, Global Poverty Project, Live Below The Line, Tony Robbins, Video Marketing