[Interview] Gideon Shalwick: Essential Keys To Laser-Focusing a Project From Concept To Cash

Podcast – West Loh on Leverage, Automation and Outsourcing Strategies, 100% Free!

Creator of Rapid Video Blogging, Web Video Marketing Authority, Serial Entrepreneur

In this Interview I racked Gideon’s brain about his journey from zero to creating several successful online businesses, and his inner beliefs on the mindset required for others to do the same. We finished with some powerful strategies on how to get massive traffic from YouTube and how to avoid the biggest traps when starting out online.

In this interview you will discover:

– Gideons journey from 0 to successful 6 figure internet marketing businesses

– The 3 Keys to taking an idea from concept to cash

– How to prioritise your opportunities and put together a plan to auto-cull all opportunities that don’t fit with your mission

– How to minimise and eliminate distractions forever and see your projects to completion

– The importance of implementing the mastermind principle to get ahead of your competitors

– 3 Killer YouTube strategies that will triple your traffic

http://gideonshalwick.com/

Get Gideon’s ground breaking report on Rapid Video Blogging Here. I highly recommend and endorse it!

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Full Transcript

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West Interviews Gideon Shalwick

Speakers:
West: West Loh
Gideon: Gideon Shalwick

West: Folks, welcome to the call today. I’ve got Gideon Shalwick on the line. It’s been a pleasure chatting with him before the call and we’re going to cover some awesome, awesome topics today. Gideon’s made some serious waves in the social networking arena and has a membership site called Become a Blogger, where he’s teamed up with Yaro Starak and they’re making some serious waves online. So I thought it would definitely be beneficial for you guys here on the call today for me to pick Gideon’s brains on some of the mindset stuff that he’s worked on for with himself but also some of the techniques that he recommends and some of the mistakes that he sees in people trying to use social networking and blogging in particular in order to improve their business or traffic.

So Gideon, welcome to the call. Thanks for being with us.

Gideon: Hey, thanks West. I’m really honored to be on the call with you. I’m looking forward to it.

West: Cool. Why don’t you give us like an elevator pitch on kind of who you are, from your perspective, you’re stuck in an elevator and someone says, “Hey, tell us what you do?” What do you tell people?

Gideon: Okay. Well, I guess my backstory is that I was born in South Africa but we immigrated to New Zealand when I was about sixteen and did my education there. And I started working there for a few years as well. So I was working in New Zealand for five years. And throughout that period, I kept on thinking, ‘I want to do my own thing,’ you know. And I never really enjoyed having a job because I just felt so restricted and I didn’t feel that I was using my talents.

So one day we decided to make a move. We made a decision, my wife and I, and I told her, “Look, let’s go to Australia and start a new business.” And crazy thinking, in retrospect, that we did that because we came over here Tina got a job, I didn’t have a job and I didn’t know what on earth I was going to do. So we come over and first thing I did was started researching opportunities. To cut the long story short, I stumbled across internet marketing and that’s how I got into it.

West: Great. So you’d never actually been into the internet at all before you came to Australia?

Gideon: No. Not like other than surfing the net. My background’s in technology commercialization and engineering management. So I guess I had that sort of base, the technology background. And so, doing stuff on the internet was not too big a jump from a technical point of view, but certainly from a marketing point of view, there was a lot to learn. That’s how I got into it.

And some of the first projects I did, I got some success there. One of the projects I had was to interview some of the world’s top internet marketers and that was really something that opened the doors for me in a big way and essentially, I guess, got me to where I am today. Yeah, that’s— I’m not sure how many minutes I’ve got left in the elevator.

West: It’s a big building. [Laughs] Cool.

So in the last twelve months, you’ve had a focus on the social media. Would that be fair to say, Gideon? Like videos and audios and teaching people how to utilize very dynamic sites like blogs on how to increase traffic and generate profit. Would that be fair to say?

Gideon: Yeah. So what I’d been focusing on lately is to basically use blogging as the main tool for getting attention online and then using other social media sites—only a handful of them—to help increase…

West: The 80 20 Rule: the sites that are going to get you the biggest paying for your buck.

Gideon: Yes, that’s right. So the most recent project that I completed was the Become a Blogger project with Yaro Starak who’s my business partner. And that’s basically where we teach people using online video everything about blogging: how to set up your blog, how to add content, how to get traffic and how to monetize it as well right at the end.

But then, I guess the twist that we had with Become a Blogger was that instead of just blogging with text and images and stuff like that, we injected this—what we call the X factor strategies—which is really the social media type of things that you could do to leverage the activities on your blog. And they’re things like YouTube and video and audio and a whole bunch of other things. And that was a really fun project. It was hard work getting it all done. But I learnt a lot in the process.

So that project, it’s kind of complete now in terms of content generation but now we just need to manage the process…

West: And I was just—for the listeners out there—I was just telling Gideon before we started recording here is that I’ve just completed the course and it’s exceptional in its quality and in its presentation. And Gideon’s really nutted out the very simple details and showed you step by step by step as if he was actually on your computer. So it’s never boring and it’s very entertaining and it’s very professionally done. So we’ll get Gideon to tell us more about that at the end of the call if you’re interested in looking at that.

So I wanted to ask, Gideon, what was the difference for you in being able to focus in on a project and really get some serious results? And I know one of the biggest mistakes of internet marketers is to kind of fluff around and try lots of different projects at the same time. So you obviously had a plate of opportunities that you could go to. So how did you: 1) decide which path to go down; 2) how did you set up your life in order to go and chase that?

Gideon: I think that’s one of the most difficult things for people to do online because, really, the internet—especially if you want to do business on it or even not—is really a place for distraction. There are so many things that demand your attention. You’ve got Twitter these days. You’ve got your email. You’ve got YouTube and other projects with other people through Skype or whatever. Everything and everybody wants to have your attention. And so trying to focus in an environment like that is a challenge, it’s a real challenge. And I guess what I did, something that really helped me was to really nut down on the different opportunities that I had available and to make an assessment of which ones had the biggest ability to be a success, you know, the… I just can’t remember that word that I want to use…

West: Potential.

Gideon: Potential, yeah—which one had the most potential. And then it was simply just a matter of essentially focusing my attention 100 percent on that project, working on it like a madman until it was finished, making it a success and in moving on. And that’s essentially what we did with Become a Blogger. I pretty much had a very focused approach just like that for eight months to a year. We started the project and that’s pretty much all I worked on.

West: That’s pretty powerful stuff. And I just want to reiterate to anyone who might be looking at doing some projects online, in that Gideon has chosen just one thing—just one thing—and not even two.

And I was actually chatting with him before the call and he was telling me that there was an opportunity for work on another site which is what he’s currently focusing on now, but that opportunity came up before his tenure for the content production for Become a Blogger had finished. And he actually put it aside completely, told JJ—he’s the magician—that he needs to focus. And that’s a huge lesson for people…even myself included.

Gideon: Yeah, that was very difficult to do, you know. Part of the challenge is that when you commit yourself to one project, you have to say ‘no’ to all these other amazing opportunities.

West: Anything else, yeah.

Gideon: Yeah. And that’s difficult. It’s really difficult especially if you’ve got this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and you want to try out new things all the time.

West: And especially on the internet where you get pretty much, you know, many opportunities every day and knowing so many people in the industry and having many great contacts, people approaching you all the time to do stuff.

Gideon: Yes. That’s definitely a lesson. Just to expand a little bit on what happened… when I started looking at another project, so I was running two projects at the same time—with Become a Blogger and Free Magic Live—what happened was that I had a bit of a gap, a bit of a breathing space in my schedule with Become a Blogger and I said, “Okay, let’s use this gap and get the ball running for Free Magic Live.”

Me and JJ did some stuff together for… we initially thought just for a week. But then with the results we got—because we had that week of real focus—were quite astounding. So we kind of kept on going for another four weeks or so. And while at the same time I was trying to do Become a Blogger. And it was working. It was working. We were getting results.

I was getting stuff done for both but I was getting stressed. And it started affecting my ability to perform. And what happened was it slowed me down and it affected the quality of my content. And I had to make the decision. I had to decide. What do I want out of this? Do I want to have a world class product and website and membership site or not? And so that was part of the decision. And for me to be able to do that I really had to apply that focus and say no to one of the opportunities, which, at that time was Free Magic Live. And I think the important thing was that I said ‘no’ at that time. I didn’t say ‘no’ forever. It was just a—this is an awesome project but if I want to have Become a Blogger as successful as I can make it, I need to say no to that for now, finish what I’m working on at the moment and then—

West: Absolutely. For sure. That’s a huge, huge lesson for people.

I also wanted to ask you, how did you… did you like stop accepting applications or did you like unsubscribe from email lists? And did you stop going to networking events and all these things that opened up opportunities for you? Or did you continue to keep going but just put them all in sort of a little hat for later?

Gideon: Well, I think it’s important to keep on getting opportunities into your business. I mean that’s really the lifeblood. Ideas are part of the lifeblood of your business. And if you’re a solopreneur like I’ve been for a while, it’s important to keep those opportunities coming in. But at the same time, because you’re kind of working alone and maybe sourcing out—but you’re the main man—it’s important to not get distracted.

And so I did have a measure of culling, you know. For example, all the emails that I subscribed to—I use Gmail as my only email program. And what was cool there was that I could set up a really nice filter. They would just put all my subscriptions into one folder so it wouldn’t even go to my inbox—and so that had given me flexibility to go back to it if I wanted to, just check things out once a week. But it didn’t distract me. It didn’t distract my normal inbox. So that’s one of the things I did.

West: Tell me some other things you did to minimize distractions.

Gideon: The other thing I did was just pure focus and just applying discipline to say no to stuff and to just get real on the content and the information and the work that I had to do to make this project a success and essentially not do anything else.

I’m a great believer in setting an overall goal or an overall intention on what you’re trying to achieve. So for Become a Blogger, for example, was to have a successful membership site with members going through it and amazing content that people would want to tell all their friends about. So that was the over arching goal for that. But then for my day to day activities, I always had a to do list. And what I would do is I just have a handful of things that I told myself that I wanted to have finished by the end of that day. So I write it down—I just use paper at the moment.

West: Primitive.

Gideon: I’ve used different approaches. And I’ve actually decided to go back to paper. I have two little notebooks. One I use for collecting all my ideas for things I need to do. I call that my Master To Do List. Then I have a separate little notebook where I only use that for the daily tasks. So everyday, I create a new one for that one. And that’s for the daily one.

West: And that’s been working for you?

Gideon: It works for me. And I’m not saying it’s going to work for anybody else but it’s something that I’ve been playing around with the stuff for ages. And it works for me. And I know that it also depends on your personality type. You may be more flexible with mind maps or just doing it all on your mind. But whatever works for you, you’ve got to have some kind of a system to help you stay focused.

And there are three things I believe you need to spend your time on if you want to be successful with stuff. If I remember it right, this is from Rich Schefren. I heard about this ages but I’ve just been applying it to the letter. And the three things are:
Product Creation. This is for solopreneurs like the stuff I’m doing and what you’re doing as well.
Marketing.
Scaling.

Anything else is a distraction. And that’s all related to, well, I guess, to have even a more focused approach, just to relate that to just one project. So for Become a Blogger, focus was there:
1) To get the product out.
2) To market it and getting distribution.
3) Which is more what we’re doing now, is to start scaling what we already have; just to leverage what we already have created there.

So that’s really what’s worked for me. And certainly, it took effort. I enjoyed the process but it still took effort that required me to have that focus and to say no to other opportunities.

West: I want to ask you quickly here, Gideon, when you wake up and you don’t feel like doing the work that you’ve assigned for that day, how do you get yourself back on track?

Gideon: You know, I don’t get many of those days.

West: Wow. And the secret of that is choosing to do something you really love and be passionate about it.

Gideon: I think that’s definitely part of it. So if you can… I mean, before all of this, I think a huge requirement is to make sure that what ever you’re going to be doing, that you’re actually enjoying the process of doing…

There are two levels of enjoyment here. There’s the enjoying the process or actually doing the thing that you’re doing. And then there’s also enjoying the outcome of the thing that you’re doing.

Now what’s great about the enjoying the outcome is that it’s something that you can look forward to. But the problem with outcomes is that they don’t last very long, you know. Once you’ve bought a car, a new toy, for example, it’s only cool for about a month or whatever. I mean, I kind of 9look forward to the next new car or whatever or the next new toy. And it’s kind of the same with the projects I found—for me, in any case—is that I look forward to the end result but once it’s there, it kind of wears off and I now want to jump on to the next opportunity, the next project.

So that’s why it’s really important, I believe, to also enjoy the process of the work that you need to do and that’ll help you really look forward to it. I mean, I probably work— I don’t count how many hours I work every week but I normally get up…well, in the winter it’s been a little more slack but getting up at 7 or when the sun comes up. But in the summer I’ve been getting up at 6 o’clock and I get straight into it.

West: So you actually don’t even have time to sit around and procrastinate. By ten past six, you’re already pumping.

Gideon: Look, you can ask my wife. I kind if jump out of bed in the morning and can’t wait to get into it because I enjoy it so much. I enjoy the process.

West: Yeah, it’s awesome. And I can actually tell that when I’m going through—as a member of your program—when I’m going through it I can tell that you love this stuff. When you’re telling us about, you know, the latest plugin or the latest how to do stuff, you’re telling us about your set up, your technical gear…it’s awesome. And they can definitely feel that as a member of your program.

Gideon: Yeah, it’s certainly important. Now I also like to say that there are times and there are activities that I’ve had to do and I’ve had to go through that weren’t necessarily enjoyable at the time. And that’s where the outcome would be a motivation for me to just push through. So that’s what I’m saying—you need both. You need to be able to enjoy both process plus the outcome.

West: For sure. But for the most part, you love what you’re doing. That’s a really good thing.

So you were telling us about the three areas—product creation, marketing and scaling. Now the beautiful thing about what you’ve set up, Gideon, is that you’re exceptional in—I know for a fact—product creation. But you’ve surrounded yourself with a team or people at least in your network, who are exceptional at the other areas or can help you in the other areas. So tell me about how you see the three areas working—using Become a Blogger as an example—from the team that you surrounded yourself with and the people that you’re working alongside.

Gideon: Definitely. You know, I think that’s one of the key things that I found so far—and also from all the books that I’ve read about other successful people—I mean, Bill Gates is probably the prime example of this. He surrounds himself with people that are more intelligent than himself and that’s really what makes the business grow and what makes the business successful.

And in the case of Become a Blogger, what was really amazing there is that I partnered up with Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. And what’s amazing about the project is that we both brought to the table something that were valuable in itself but when put together, had this amazing synergy to be even more valuable than it could have been separately.

West: On it’s own, yeah.

Gideon: Yes. So what I brought to the table was my ability to create products, my ability to explain concepts simple and easy using online video and also the whole social media knowledge that I’ve been building up over the last few years. And what Yaro brought to the table was his strategy brain and the distribution that he already had access to through the contacts that he built up in the industry over the last few years.

So with that kind of marriage of those kind of skills, it was just amazing to be able to put them together and to have an amazing synergy that came out of it. I believe that’s definitely a key.

It comes with its own challenges you know. I think, with any kind of partnership, because you have more than one brain involved, there’s a measure of coordination. And I can’t stress enough the importance of communicating regularly and honestly with your business partner because I have had partnerships before or relationships before where the communication perhaps wasn’t as great. And it would break down.

And it was exactly like what Napoleon Hill talks about in his Law of Success. In one of the chapters he talks about the mastermind principle. And one of the key things for a mastermind to work successfully is to have these masterminds working together in a spirit of harmony. He probably uses those words, I don’t know, about a hundred times in that same chapter. And he goes, “I’m saying this again and again and again…

West: It must be important.

Gideon: If you don’t have harmony within this relationship, whatever you want to do, it’s not going to work. So that’s absolutely key. And for that, you need to be talking to each other constantly and you need to be open with each other. And as soon as something comes up, you need to bring it out in the air and talk it through.

West: Definitely.

Gideon: I have found another way of doing it.

And you know, that’s tough, because you have two or more people that have their own agendas and have their one own directions and their own desires and their own goals that they want to achieve. And what you’re trying to do with working together like this is to try and merge those so that both parties can benefit from it. And so it’s important to keep that balance and keep those communication channels open. But if you can pull it off, I mean you can have amazing results.

West: Yeah, definitely.

Gideon: The results that Yaro and I got with Become a Blogger is, you know, it’s been both of our most successful products online.

West: Yeah. It’s been incredible. Even the marketing process itself has been really fine combed, detailed and very methodically approached. And I’ve seen a lot of other marketers present it to their audiences. And of course, Yaro’s done up sales from his programs and really utilized his traffic…so he’s contributing from other aspects. And you guys are obviously ready when people are wanting to come to you in order to be able to take advantage of it. So that’s certainly a really good lesson for everybody looking to partner up with somebody.

And I’m sure you also did a big, kind of analysis in working with Yaro. You weighed up the pros and cons of your business partner potentially and you guys get along really good just a friends. I know that because I play golf with you guys and you guys can chat for hours about stuff. Time just flies away when you guys are hanging out with each other. So you enjoy each other’s company, you like each other as well. I think that’s important as well.

Gideon: You’ve got to be able to get along with the person that you’re working with because for something like this, it can get quite intense and you’re going to be in each other’s faces for…

West: There’s pressure. And there’s time pressure. Yeah. Cool.

So Gideon, can I ask you—taking a bit of a gear change now—looking at social networking as a marketing tool. In probably the last one or two years it’s really, really taken off especially with Facebook and a lot of the other sites. But what are your views on how it’s grown? And then what are your views on how people need to start utilizing it in order to build those websites or their online or even their offline businesses?

Gideon: You know, I think the whole social media movement is an amazing movement. It’s an amazing thing that we’re seeing.

West: It’s not just another fad, is it? It’s here to stay.

Gideon: Well… you know, two years ago I had a chat with someone and I said, “Look, this looks like something that’s quite amazing. And he told me, “Well, it’s only just a fad,” and I said, “Well, I’m not sure.” It’s been going for awhile now. And I don’t see the end of it in sight just yet and we may still be at the beginning of the curve, of the bell curve. That’s my view of it at the moment.

And the reason I say this is because the whole social media movement, it’s only been possible really if you are online. And so as we are seeing more people getting online around the world and as we’re seeing the whole broadband thing and the internet connections getting better and better around the world as well, that’s only going to…

West: There are still millions of people who aren’t even online.

Gideon: Exactly. And so I think we’re still scratching the surface. I mean, look at YouTube. Look at how far it’s come in just the last three years. It’s just amazing. I don’t want to make any predictions but I can only imagine where we would be in ten years time—given that everything will still exist in ten years time, you’ll never know what’s going to happen in the future, right—but the way and the direction that YouTube is going, for example, right now, to me this is the future, this is the present and the future. And television is still valid. But certainly, things like YouTube and the whole way that the internet is developing is a huge thing. So if you’re not in it already, I encourage you to definitely get involved and become part of the conversation.

West: Definitely. And so in terms of marketing for, say, online and offline businesses, do you see it as a huge advantage if, say, two people were looking to achieve the same outcome and one was utilizing social networking and the other one was just trying non social networking techniques?

Gideon: It probably depends on your business. I mean, if you’ve got a bricks and mortar business, the type of audience… and currently hangs out on social media sites, your business might not appeal to them. So in that case, social media may not be the way to go for you and you may need to stick to other methods, just normal internet marketing methods or offline marketing. But I think there still is a place for that as well. For example, say if you’re a plumber here in Brisbane or an accountant here in Brisbane. If you set up a blog and you start submitting valuable content to your blog…

West: Yeah, people are going to come flocking to you.

Gideon: Well, if you optimize it for—just for example—the keywords in ‘plumber in Brisbane’ or ‘Brisbane plumber’—I haven’t done the research on that—but my guess is that if no one else is in that space, you’re going to kill it; you’re going to kill it in terms of…

West: Whenever anyone types that in, right?

Gideon: Yeah. You come at number one if no one else is…

West: Yeah, on the free searches; not the paid ones.

Gideon: That’s right. So that’s free traffic for you that’s coming to your blog. You may not get millions of views. But hey, I mean if you’re in Brisbane…

West: It’s very targeted.

Gideon: Yeah, it’s very targeted. So if you get the whole of the Brisbane audience and you’ve got a way to turn that traffic into paying customers for your offline business, then that’s one of the best things you can do. It does require effort.

The way I look at social media and the whole social media movement is that it’s this living organism. It’s not just the internet. It’s not just technology and this dead computer sitting in front of you.

There’s this amazing video on YouTube if you type in, I think, ‘Web 2.0,’ it will probably come as one of the top results but it’s about—if you type in ‘web 2.0’—The Machine or something like that. And it shows you the development of social media and what it means. And it talks about how this whole web 2.0, social media thing is really…it’s a machine but the machine is us; we are the machine.

And so when you think about getting into social media, it’s not just about setting up a website and thinking that’s it. It’s about getting involved and becoming a living member of this organism that’s developed over the last few years. So it’s not enough just to set up a website and thinking that’s it, that’ll get traffic. You’ve got to get involved. You’ve got to get involved in the community and start letting people hear your voice and having a conversation with people.

West: And that’s where the internet’s evolving to, isn’t it? Users are getting active. They like posting comments. They like posting on different forums. That’s how things work online these days and that’s the way it is now. There’s no such thing as a static website anymore.

Gideon: Yes. And you know, I really love Seth Godin’s a little book on Tribes. I’m not sure if you’ve read that, West, but it’s an amazing book. And he talks about developing your own tribe online or anywhere. But online, currently, it’s just so easy because we’ve got all the tools out there and all the people out there. So all you’ve got to do is go and lead. You’ve just got to make the decision to lead and get people to start following you as a tribe. And at the moment, I can’t think of any other better way than setting up a blog and starting to use social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to start building your own little tribe. Once you have a tribe you can do amazing things.

West: Definitely. And that kind of forms the foundation for whatever you want to do: if you want to brand yourself, if you want to profit, if you want to launch a product or whatever. Once you’ve got that tribe, a lot of things become possible.

Gideon: Absolutely.

West: For sure. Now I just want to ask a really quick question, Gideon. For the people who are listening on this call who may have neglected or don’t know what the term ‘social media’ is, Gideon, could you give us your kind of casual, simple, basic term of what social media and social networking actually means?

Gideon: Okay. I think there’s probably a million different definitions of it but essentially, to me, social media is a bunch of internet technologies that’s been created, that allows us as human beings to interact with each other.

West: Yes. So user generated.

Gideon: And user generated content. So for example, YouTube is probably the best example of this. You can submit your own video. In response to that, people can write comments about your video and you can have that live interaction with people from all over the world. So YouTube is 100 percent user generated content. So that’s a great example of that.

With blogging is another one. You can submit your own posts. You can comment on it and you can have that conversation.

To me it’s all about conversation and making your voice known in the social media world.

West: Definitely. And regardless of whatever niche or market you’re in, that concept still applies. For example, you were taking that conversation now into the magic arena and people keep coming back because they’re getting to know the magician and they’re getting to like what they’re learning. And it’s an ongoing thing. It’s an ongoing relationship. It’s not just a one quick YouTube video ‘that’s great, I’ll go and impress my friends now’ and never come back.

Gideon: Yes. Now look, I was telling JJ the other day that um, you know, what we’re doing with FreeMagicLive.com at the moment, right now, is actually historical. I mean, we are—not just the website itself—but also from a wider context. We are making history here, West, with the kind of stuff that we’re doing. And three years ago, we couldn’t do what we’re doing right now. We couldn’t get 2,500 people looking at our video in one day from all over the world.

West: Yeah. Wow, that’s powerful.

Gideon: It actually boggles the mind. I mean think about putting 2,500 people in one room watching your video, all come together to watch your video in one day. If you try and visualize…

West: Every single day.

Gideon: Yeah. Well, at the moment we’re getting between 2,000-4,000 views on our videos on YouTube.

West: That’s awesome.

Gideon: That’s awesome, you know. We’re loving it.

West: And this is a new project for you guys, right?

Gideon: It is a new project. Four months.

West: Yeah, okay, four months. So that’s pretty impressive.

And the other beautiful thing is that these techniques are usually free and they’re available to everybody, is that correct?

Gideon: Oh absolutely. I mean look, I’m still blown away by things like YouTube. Naturally, I’m more a visual person. So something like YouTube and videos, naturally, I’m more attracted to that sort of stuff.

So maybe YouTube’s not for everybody but what’s great about YouTube in particular is that it already has an audience. It gives traffic. There’s heap of traffic there. So all you’re doing on YouTube essentially is you’re leveraging the traffic that already exists there. You don’t have to build it up yourself, it’s already there. So all you’ve got to do is make sure that you provide amazing content.

West: Yup.

So I’m curious Gideon, how are you—and I’m going to try and get some free information for the listeners and myself here—and that is there are millions of people who upload videos on the YouTube. But in your case, there’s a purpose to it. And I think there’s a plan, if not already completed, very much in works on how to monetize that traffic. So how do you guys get more hits? What kind of activities do you do on YouTube to attract more viewers and to make it more viral?

Gideon: Okay, before I tell you what that is, before I give you some of those tips, let me just give you the overall strategy here that you want to achieve.

Essentially, when JJ and I got together—JJ approached me first—he said he was keen to do something aligned with magic and he was wondering if I could help him out. And after we talked for awhile, I said, “Okay, well, let’s do this together. And I’ll do the internet marketing stuff and you do the magic.”

So the strategy we decided on was, essentially, a lot of this I learned from Yaro Strak. But what I’ve been doing is something combining what I’ve learned from Yaro in the blogging world and combining with what I know in the social media world. And also then added to that, I’ve combined what I already know and what I’ve learned from it, just a pure internet marketing world. So there are three things that come together with this.

So the strategy here is that we set up this blog, FreeMagicLive.com, and the emphasis there is simply to provide and overdeliver on free amazing content. So about twice a week, we send two videos to YouTube and we embed those two videos on our blog. And then basically we drive traffic that we’re getting from YouTube back to our blog. And so we’re building a list through our blogs. If you go to our blog, you’ll see we’ve got a list building mechanism in there where we collect people’s contact details.

So the whole point of this whole exercise, of course, is to provide value and, of course, is to get exposure. But the side effect from this, which is really what we’re driving towards, is to start building a list, to start building our tribe and to get people to follow us. So it’s almost five months we’ve been doing this. And then remember there were a month and a half where we just left it, we didn’t do anything with it because I was busy with become a Blogger? We’ve been able to build a following of close to 2,000 people on our subscriber list. And we’re getting between 300-600 hits a day on our blog and we’re getting—like I said before—between 2,000-4,000 hits on our videos on YouTube a day.

West: That’s insane.

Gideon: And I think it’s all just coming together and using all these things together in unison that is helping us to have this sort of overall effect.

But just to give you some more, I guess, down to earth strategies for things you can do to help you get more views on YouTube in particular, I mean the underlying emphasis here is to provide amazing value upfront for free. If you look at our videos and comments that we’re getting on our videos…

West: People are blown away by what you’re giving.

Gideon: They love it and they interact with it. A lot of people can’t believe that we’re giving it away for free. It’s all part of the strategy, you know. We give it away for free—of course to build the relationship—but also to make them part of our tribe. So that’s the underlying thing: just to provide amazing content upfront.

In terms of getting more views, there are a lot of things you can do in terms of keyword research to help optimize your videos. So if you can find popular keywords and add those keywords as the terms inside your video title, also add them inside your description when you write your description and also in your tags for your videos. That’s very important.

And there’s this one great thing that I picked up from Julie Perry and the podcasting guy—I just forgot his name; it’ll come back to me—Julie Perry, basically what she said was that when you write your description for your YouTube videos in your description area, you can go nuts there. Create that content as if you’re creating like a blog post where you’re writing in a natural voice, you’re creating natural content. You’re not trying to fool the search engines there; you’re just creating natural content. As a result, your keywords will pop up in there in any case. And in the end, that’ll help you get picked up by searches inside YouTube and later on, searches inside Google as well. So that’s one thing.

Title, description and tags are just essential for that.

West: It’s amazing how many people neglect those, isn’t it?

Gideon: It is crazy. I’m still amazed. Looking at some videos, I see that…

West: It sounds fundamental but not many people do it.

Gideon: [Laughs] You know, it’s just one small thing that you can do to help drive traffic to your sites. Just add your URL. Remember to add http://…

West: In the description?

Gideon: In the description area, right at the beginning, the first thing.

I’m still amazed at how many people are not using that. And it’s just free traffic, people click on it and they come back to your site.

So there are some simple things you can do. That’s what I said before, I think we’re really just still scratching the surface with this stuff. There are some amazing potential here that…

West: That’s powerful. Tell me your thought on Facebook real quick, Gideon. Do you use it much in your marketing activities or is it just more of a personal thing for you?

Gideon: At the moment, it’s just more a personal thing. I haven’t focused on Facebook too much. I know that some people have had some good results there. But once again, I’ve made the decision to focus on one thing, whether it’s hitting me on some other fronts—I’m not sure because I haven’t tested it—but the focus that I have at the moment is just on YouTube and building the audience there and getting active inside the YouTube community.

Instead of spreading yourself thin over all these social media networks and video sharing sites, why don’t I just focus just on YouTube and get really involved there?

I’m not sure if you’ve read a book by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm.

West: No.

Gideon: Now I’ve read this book because I was in the technology world before I got into internet marketing. But what he talks about there is when new technology companies start up, normally the first people that are their customers are the innovators and the early adopters. If you know the penetration model, those are the first two people. And what happens then, after you run out of those customers—innovators and early adopters—the early majority which is the big part of your market, they don’t want your product just yet because there’s no social proof yet, you know. And so that’s where a lot of hi tech companies fail, they fall into this chasm in between the early adopters and innovators and the early majority.

And so the strategy that you need to apply there is what he calls the Beachhead Strategy, where you’re essentially tied at one big player: the early majority. And you do everything you can just to get the attention of that one player, get them to start using your product. And once you’ve got them on board, then you can start telling everyone else in the early majority saying, ‘hey look, this big dude, this big company is using my stuff.’ And that is like a domino effect. And so that’s the thinking behind this.

So with the YouTube strategy, I’m looking at YouTube as our beachhead strategy. And so we’re using YouTube as a beachhead strategy there to just focus all our attention on there. Once we have a mass of following on there, then we can start moving out to everything else and spending more time with other things. That’s basically what we’ve been doing and it’s working for us really well.

West: Wow. Sounds like a very exciting journey, Gideon, because you’ve also meshed your love of video and multimedia with your love of magic. You’re a big fan, aren’t you?

Gideon: I love magic, yeah. As a kid I was really into it. Then I got distracted, unfortunately. But it looks like I’m getting back into it.

West: So you’re a bit of a magician yourself, are you?

Gideon: Well, by heart I am. And the difference between the great magicians out there and the ones that are not…it’s practice. So if I really want to do this, I really need to get…

West: It’s focus, mate. You’ve been talking about it all throughout the call.

Gideon: Exactly.

West: Awesome. So I’ll finish up by asking some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making, Gideon, from all the students that you’ve had and all the people that have come through your program. I’m sure there’s been recurring barriers that people continually hit. What kind of advice do you give to these people when they come to you for those?

Gideon: I think we flash the focus thing. So that is the number one thing: get focused. Get rid of all other distractions and just work on one thing and get it done. Get it done and then you can move on to the other things. Make something successful first.

The other thing, especially if you’re doing stuff online, there is always a technical component there. And if you’re not a technical person and it frustrates the hell out of you, source it out. Get someone else to do that for you. And that will give you tremendous leverage. That’s going to cost you a bit of money but if you don’t want to hire someone locally which may be expensive, you hop on to a site like Elance.com or Guru.com and get someone else to take care of the technical stuff. There are people hungry to do that work for you. And so that can help you speed up your process.

West: Definitely. Now just out of curiosity, do you actually outsource any of your really technical stuff to other people or you actually handle…?

Gideon: Absolutely. And at the beginning I did it all myself. Even with Become a Blogger, at the beginning I did a lot of the graphics myself and I set up the blog and all the technical stuff at the website. And while I could do it and it was kind of fun in a way because I could see the results of my work, it really slowed me down. And that’s probably why it took eight months instead of three months to get everything done.

At the beginning, that slowed me down. But as we progressed and as we started making some more money from it, we started sourcing more things out. And it is a bit of a challenge finding the right person to help you with that but I think the point is you’ve got to go look for them. And if you can find someone that’s really good, make sure you…

West: Hang on to them.

Gideon: Hang on to them, yeah.

West: Couldn’t agree more. Definitely. You know, I have fallen in the same track myself. And things definitely opened up when I started letting people do things that I wasn’t good at. And I really found that it wasn’t that expensive, really, because in some of the developing countries, people work for not a lot of money and work hard for you.

Gideon: I know you’ve done a lot of outsourcing before so you’re a bit of a master that maybe I should interview you.

West: I’d be happy to shed some light on that for you, Gideon. Any time.

So Gideon, we talked so much about what you’ve done and people are looking to find out more about your membership programs or check out some of the techniques that you shared, where can they or how can they find out about you?

Gideon: Well I think, probably the first site that I would recommend you go to right now is GideonShalwick.com.

West: What’s GideonShalwick.com?

Gideon: Well at the moment, it’s about three days old. It’s my latest one but I think I’m going to be using it as a hub for everything else. The subheadline that I have on there is just ‘the behind the scenes of a serial online entrepreneur.’

West: So Free Magic Live is going to have a bit of a competitor or a bit of a second, you know…?

Gideon: Well, this is the thing with this website, which is really cool, is that it doesn’t require much of my time. I discovered this magazine technology called Screener.com—I’m not sure if you’ve seen it.

West: No, I haven’t.

Gideon: But what I’m doing there is I’m creating 5-min. videos in response to questions that I’m getting on Twitter. And all I’m doing is I’m creating these videos. It seriously takes me 5 minutes to create. There’s no preparation for it. And it takes me another minute to get it processed, everything uploaded—because it all gets done automatically—and then embed it into the blog. So it’s just amazing.

I don’t view this as a distraction. I view this as just an ongoing thing as my personal voice so that people can see what I’m getting up to behind the scenes.

So what I’m planning to do there is to answer people’s questions. If they’ve got a question about online marketing or online video marketing or social media or blogging in general, I’m going to be answering questions there using these little 5 min videos. So that’s just kind of a fun thing that I’m doing on the side. And if it’s 5 minutes or 10 minutes a day, it’s not a big issue; I don’t see it as a distraction.

West: Definitely. So are you going to be putting any recent video footage of your golfing game on there, Gideon? I need some tips on being able to beat you.

Gideon: [Laughs] Look, I think I need some tips from you, West.

So that’s GideonShalwick.com. Become a Blogger, we talked about that as well: BecomeABlogger.com. You can see what we’re doing there. There are a lot of free information that teaches you how to blog. And if you’re interested in magic, FreeMagicLive.com. So those are the three main ones to check out.

West: Awesome. So that’s really, really interesting and powerful stuff. You know, I talk to a lot of successful people and many of them have their hands in a lot of pies. But I think what we can learn from Gideon is that focus, really, is king—in his case, at least. And I think and honestly believe, truly, that that is one of the keys to successes in online, offline or any venture that you take on.

So on that note, I’m going to thank Gideon for providing us with some awesome content today. Thanks Gideon!

Gideon: Hey, thanks West! And thank everyone else for listening this far and I hope the information has been useful to you and that it will help you to become successful online, because if you can have a successful online business, it just gives you huge benefits and huge leverage. So I’ll be really happy if the content that I provided you today can help you achieve that as well.

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