A Brief History of Internet Marketing

Howie Schwartz PodcastInterview with David Ledoux

Howie: Hi everyone, this is Howie Schwartz and I wanted to introduce you to David Ledoux, who is a very good friend of mine and also an amazing marketer who you may not have heard of before today, but you will be very comfortable with his work and will want to follow very closely his lead and what he’s going to be talking about.

If you haven’t listened to a call with me in the past, my background originally is in the video game industry and I’ve spent half a decade or so developing video games which was a lot of fun, but way too much work. Then I moved into the venture capital industry and was working also with entrepreneurs and small business owners. For the past nine years I’ve been working full-time in internet marketing and I’ve had the opportunity to coach thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners on how they’re managing their marketing online and how they’re growing six and seven figure businesses with a focus on Web 2.0 and traffic strategies.

So I wanted to introduce again David Ledoux; he’s from Toronto, Canada. We wanted to talk about really his view in the marketing industry. So last October David actually travelled to my home in Connecticut and we had a lot of fun comparing notes and brainstorming where the marketing industry has been going. For us it was a great opportunity to get to know each other. We’ve been involved in some other programs together online and had a chance to exchange emails, but really it was in October was the first time we got to spend some one on one time together. So David, I wanted to thank you again for joining me on the call and I look forward to learning from you today.

David: Yeah Howie, I’m thrilled to be here.

Howie: Excellent. So what I wanted to also do was see if we could talk a little bit about the beginning. What I mean by that is we all start as entrepreneurs and we sometimes don’t think of people in the marketing industry as an entrepreneur. We think maybe they’re a little lazy, maybe they’re just hanging around and working from home. But to be able to be in internet marketing or to really market any concept online, you really do need to have the mindset of an entrepreneur and I wanted to learn a little bit about your start and also what your opinion is of the entrepreneur mindset within marketing.

David: Oh, wonderful. Well if we’re going to start at the beginning, Howie, let’s go back to 1987. At the time I was attending the University of Toronto and I was attempting to get into medical school. My aspirations were to be a dental surgeon and unfortunately that year I had spent a lot of time in athletics. I was the University of Toronto new college male athlete of the year in 1987 with letters in hockey, soccer, water polo, and football. That year I got a fifth letter that I wasn’t so proud of and that was a “D” in Calculus, and because of that “D” in Calculus I couldn’t get into medical school the

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following year and I was looking at another four years of university before I could even get into medical school.

I was kind of dejected and I was in downtown Toronto in an elevator of a tall building. You’ve got to picture, I mean this is the eighties, I had long hair down to my shoulders, I had an earring, and I had a leather jacket on, beat-up shoes with holes in them and blue jeans. I had a Metallica T-shirt. I mean I was good looking. This was 1987 and a lady, she got on the elevator and she was in her early forties, she was very professional looking in a business suit and we’re going down in this huge elevator, a long ride down and she glances at me and she says, “You look like a sharp young man, do you ever look for ways to make extra money?” I stammered, and I swallowed, and I was just lost for words… I looked to make sure she was actually talking to me, and she handed me her business card, and she got off the elevator.

I clutched that business card all the way back to my dorm room at university, and it took me a few days to actually work up the courage to call her, and she introduced me to the world of direct marketing. She was a businesswoman and she had a very successful seven figure business, and she opened my eyes. I was nineteen years old and I had no idea about things like running a business, time management, people management, copywriting, and lead generation. She gave me my start in 1987. It took me years to get good at it, but a decade letter, I had built my own seven figure business in the direct marketing world, and that was the beginning and twenty years ago it was my start in business.

Howie: That’s where I first heard your name was related to direct marketing and I mentioned to some friends, “This guy named David from Toronto is coming to my house and we’re going to spend some time together at this workshop,” and someone said, “David Ledoux from direct marketing?” I said, “You know, I don't know. I’ve got to ask him.” Because it’s not a world that I know a lot about, but what’s interesting is everyone from that world knows your name really well, so it’s funny how there’s a crossover from direct sales into the world of internet marketing. I wanted to ask how you made that transition, because other people, such as Tom Bells, have kind of done similar transitions. So I’d love to hear your story on how you transitioned into the world of internet marketing.

David: I was very fortunate to have gotten a computer in 1984 and in 1984 I was on my old Commodore 64 and I had a bulletin board that I ran while I was going to school. So I was on the internet in the mid-eighties before there even really was an internet and I got onto CompuServe in 1993 I believe and started to use email. We called them websites, but they really were an early version of websites in 1993. What happened to me was in 1996 I went to Tahiti with my wife for a seminar with a very famous financial author named Robert Allen. Robert Allen is the #1 all time financial author

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on the New York Times Bestseller list. Bob and I were close friends. I had been on some training seminars with him and shared the stage.

There’s a scene in the graduate with Dustin Hoffman where this guy says to Dustin, “I’ve got two words for you: Plastics.” Back then in the sixties the future was plastics. This was 1996 and Bob said, “The future is the Internet.” I left Tahiti and I came back and it was February 1996, freezing cold in Ontario, middle of winter, snow on the ground, and I said I’m going to build an internet business – and this is 1996! Browsers didn’t work. You couldn’t take credit cards on the internet. It was chaos and anarchy, but there was so much opportunity.

I started my first project which was a thirty-page training manual for the direct selling industry. It was called The Road to Gold. I put up my first little webpage, and then in 1996 I sold 12,000 copies of this little book. It was a tangible what they called a smart-bind book. We built them ourselves in the basement. We had our own little printing factory going. My wife ran the binding and the shipping factory. We sold 12,000 copies at about $9 bucks a piece. That was my first internet business and that led me to getting into things that in those days nobody was doing. AB testing, testing headlines, traffic generation… I mean back then there was no Google so we could get at the top of the search engines by keyword stuffing. We called Google AltaVista back then. I remember talking to the owner of Yahoo! on the phone. Today he’s like a multibillionaire but I got him on the phone back in 1996.

In 1997 we transitioned into selling picks and shovels. In 1997 we made a fortune selling auto responders, which were the first automated email clients, selling links, selling software that ran websites in a language called ColdFusion. Back in 1998 we were pioneering using audio and video on websites. Here we are ten years later and audio and video have hit a golden age but we were using them way back in 1998, and that’s kind of how I stumbled into internet marketing.

Howie: Yeah, that’s a lot of history. For me, I always considered myself being online for a long time and I’ve been focused on this since 1999 full-time and a few years before it dabbling. But you predate all of us by like a decade, which is amazing and it’s a great story on Commodore 64. I remember having mine, and writing games when I was a kid and hitting all the BBS scenes. I was running around New York City the past few days and basically just playing around with the new iPod Touch which is sort of like an iPhone without the phone. It’s got Wi-Fi built in, and I’m browsing, I’m sitting in the hotel browsing the web on this little thing, and now we’re talking about BBS’s and Commodore 64. So, yeah, that’s a great, great story.

One of the fun things now that we’ve spent a lot of time together and I’ve asked a whole bunch of people about your background, a lot of people refer to you as the

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delivery doctor of a lot of the well known marketers that we all learn from and hear from today. Can you tell us a little bit of that story?

David: Yeah, absolutely, Howie. I have been in the shadows and behind the scenes, and I’ve never really been at the stage center with the spotlight on me when it comes to internet marketing. I’ve kind of worked in my own little niches, but I can think of four examples. For example, a gentleman by the name of Dean Jackson, not a lot of people even know Dean personally, but he is the internet marketing guru to the gurus. I met Dean back in 1997 and he was very successful in real estate and I sold him his first website. I taught him about launch strategies and grand openings. He already was a very talented copywriter but over the last decade he’s become probably one of the foremost thought leaders when it comes to developing profit centers for internet marketers.

Dean is really close friends with three of the biggest internet marketers on the planet. I think of John Reese and his Million Dollars Day. I think of Frank Kern and his successes with the annihilation method and pipeline profits and mass control, and of course Eban Pagan who runs a $20 million dollar a year business. These guys have influenced thousands of internet marketers and they consider Dean one of their inner circle advisors. I just consider myself fortunate to have been there in the early days when Dean first got on the internet. He’s brilliant.

The second example would be the Nitro Marketing boys, Matt Gill and Kevin Wilke. I met those guys when they were nineteen years old, just out of college, and I set them up with their own websites back in 1996-1997, taught them the direct marketing business, introduced them to each other and they started a partnership. Today, a decade later, Nitro Marketing is a seven figure business. and what they do is they help authors, speakers and consultants run their business, develop products, launch bestselling books, and run their seminar businesses. These guys are incredibly talented.

From Matt and Kevin I’ve gotten to know internet marketers like Craig Perrine, Eric Owens, and even Joel Christopher I met at one of Nitro’s events.

Joel was sitting in the audience and he was the best note taker I had ever met. He was at every seminar I spoke at. One day I went to Joel. I said, “Show me your notes.” He had like, forty pages of notes on the seminar. I said, “Joel, it’s time for you to stop being in the crowd. It’s time for you to get up on the stage. You need your own product. You know more than most of the guys speaking on the stage.” That’s eight years ago, and today Joel has a seven figure business teaching entrepreneurs how to build mailing lists. He’s known worldwide as the master list builder. He has a couple hundred thousands subscribers to his newsletter.

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The third person I think of is Robert Allen. He wrote the bestselling book Nothing Down and Creating Wealth. Robert opened my eyes to the internet in 1996 when we were in Tahiti. I took massive action. I call it velocity of implementation. I came home, built a site and launched my first product. I was in San Diego a year later in early 1997. I sat down with Bob in his living room, we had lunch and I said, “Bob, look what I’ve done,” and his jaw hit the floor. I said, “Bob, man, do you have any products around here that we could sell to my list?” Robert had a case of vinyl album that he sold through Nightingale Conant called “Multiple Streams of Income,” and he was doing a book tour for his bestselling book, Multiple Streams of Income.

I said, “Bob, check this out,” and I sent an email to my in-house mailing list. I had 1,493 names on that list. I sent a little offer saying, “I’m in the home of bestselling author Robert G. Allen. His course, “Multiple Streams of Income,” six audios and a workbook sell from Nightingale Conant for $79 dollars. The first ten people to respond to this email get the product for $49 dollars. I hit Send… This is 1997, nobody even knew what email marketing was. It went out to my list. Fifty-two seconds later, Bob’s email went “Ding!” Back then people got so few emails you had to set a dinger on your computer and AOL used to say, “You’ve Got Mail.”

Howie: I remember that.

David: You remember that?

Howie: Now if we had that today, I’d jump off the building, because there’s just nonstop flow of email.

David: It was insane back then. Fifty-two seconds later we sold Bob’s first course. I think we ended up selling nineteen or twenty for $50, made $1,000 dollars in a little over fifteen minutes… Bob looked at me and said, “Do you understand what you’re doing? What this would have taken to do when we had to write and mail letters?” And this was the brilliance of Robert Allen is he was such an experienced businessman as he saw the model. He said, “David, we’ve got to talk.” He wrote me a check for $5,000 right there on the spot to build him a website to do that.

Bob created a whole new book called Multiple Streams of Internet Income and that morphed into an infomercial on TV, a course and a consulting program. Bob ended up making $97,000 in 24 hours live. About nine months later, using that as an internet model, it got him on TV; it got him speaking gigs all over the world. He was a genius at that, and because of that Bob introduced me to guys like Mark Victor Hansen from Chicken Soup for the Soul, Bob Proctor… I remember we were sitting in Bob’s living room and he said, “This is how you get a book to #1 in Amazon,” and we actually

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laid out on a napkin, brainstormed an entire direct marketing model to get a book to #1 on Amazon. That was like in the late 90’s before anybody was doing that.

Then finally, the fourth story here, the late great Corey Rudl is still renowned as one of the top internet marketers of all time. Corey was in Vancouver, B.C. and I’m in Toronto. I was Corey’s 11th customer. I knew him very, very well and used to brainstorm with Corey. Corey introduced me to a guy from Texas named Marlon Sanders, and Marlon is the grandfather of the single-page direct selling long-copy website. We were doing that in 1998-1999 because of his background in direct marketing and Marlon introduced me to Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy became my mentor and I was Dan Kennedy’s very, very first Platinum member as an internet marketer back in 2000. He had never accepted an internet marketer into his inner circle. You have to pay $15,000 dollars and be auditioned and go through a trial just to be one of his Platinum members.

When I retired from Platinum two years later, Dan said to me, “Who should be your replacement?” and I recommended Corey Rudl and Yanik Silver. Yanik Silver, through his involvement with Dan Kennedy has become an eight figure marketer, an absolute genius, one of the most gifted copywriters on the planet. Anyhow, those are four examples of internet marketers that I kind of knew back before they were internet marketers, back in the early days of the web.

Howie: It’s such a wild story, because you’ve been able to be behind the scenes and kind of watch so much of the birth and that’s why I see why delivery doctors is a good term because you’ve been able to watch the birth of so many of these marketers. If you meet David and see him, he must look a lot younger than he really is. I’m trying to do the math now and figure in 1986 and he looks a lot younger than he must be unless he went to college when he was ten.

David: 40 now, I’m in my 40th year on this planet.

Howie: Wow, well you don’t look it, I’ll tell you that much. Excellent!

So one of the other stories I heard about you on the news and it’s fun sometimes, digging up some information on people that you get to work with, is I heard that you made $25,000 for a single one-hour speech. We talk about live events and we talk about speaker training and it makes a lot of sense within internet marketing, but $25,000 for a single one-hour speech, I mean how did you pull that off and when did that happen?

David: I’ve been so fortunate to be at the right place at the right time, and they say sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good. I got into direct selling and direct marketing at the age of 19, so by the time I was 25 I had done literally a thousand or

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more speeches and presentations in front of live people. So I had some skills when I transitioned into a lot of the internet marketing. In 2001 the legendary copywriter Carl Galletti was holding an enormous conference, it was called the Internet Marketing Super Conference and the who’s who of internet marketing was speaking there and I wanted to be on that bill.

So I called up Carl Galletti and I said, “Carl, I’m David Ledoux and you’re going to have me speak at your conference.” He goes, “Who are you?” I said, “Do you have a copy of Multiple Streams of Internet Income by Robert Allen?” I knew he was friends with Bob and he said, “Yeah, I do,” and I said, “Turn to page six.” He read my profile and Bob had talked about how I’d sat in his living room and opened his eyes to internet marketing. So then Carl goes, “Okay, you’re in.”

So when 2001 comes around and I’m sitting in the crowd and I’m at the back of the room sitting with Corey Rudl and Marlon Sanders and Kevin Wilke, and Robert Allen is on stage and he has no idea I’m even in the crowd.

Bob is speaking and he does one of the biggest favors he’s ever done for me in my life. Bob tells the story about how I introduced the Internet to Robert Allen, and Robert’s there and it’s like magic. I remember it vividly. He sees me in the crowd and our eyes lock and he points at me in a crowd of like 500 people and says, “David Ledoux, what are you doing here? I didn’t know you were here!” So he points at me and makes me stand up. He says, “Whatever David tells you to do, you do!” and he credentializes me and makes me the obvious expert in the room. Everyone’s looking around me, and I’m sitting between Corey and Marlon and they’re kind of looking at me. Bob goes on and he launches his “Multiple Streams of Internet Income” affiliate program and coaching program.

Long story short, Bob makes $100,000 in sales in 90 minutes from the front of the room. Our jaws hit the floor, we were absolutely shell-shocked. I had never seen the master at work. But because Bob had singled me out in the crowd and credentialized me and given me that incredible gift, the next day when I spoke, I had a coaching program starting there. This is 2001 and nobody really was out there coaching. So I launch my coaching program for entrepreneurs at $500 an hour. Long story short, I sell out my coaching program to the tune of about 50 hours a month, $25,000 from a single speech, but it created a $25,000 per month income from that single speech, from that single event, all because Bob singled me out, credentialized me.

I went up and I got to do my thing with the skill set. I was pretty good at the front of the room. But because I gave that talk, one of the people sitting in the crowd was a man by the name of Steve Siebold. Steve was partners with the late Bill Gove who is

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widely recognized as the father of modern public speaking. These gentlemen were the absolute elite of who’s who of presenters and speakers in America.

Steve took me under his wing and he got me into like a $1,500 per plate Republican fundraising dinners. He got me on the speaking bill with people like Ron LeGrand who is a millionaire in real estate and works with guys like Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump. I got to share the stage with people like Brian Tracy and Dennis Wadley, just mind-boggling stuff all because I called up Carl Galetti and said, “Turn to page six in the book,” and showed up at that conference in Vegas seven years ago. I was in the right place at the right time.

Howie: That’s just a great story. I’m just kind of thinking through this and you couldn’t have even set that up. Like if you would have planned that and said, “Hey guys, I’m going to be in the audience,” it would have never worked out like that.

David: I think a lot of what I’ve been doing is guided, and I’ve just been very, very fortunate that I’ve built friendships with some really amazing people that have helped me out.

Howie: Also, I know you’ve written a number of books. What’s interesting is everyone who has written a book or who has worked with authors has their own systems. I know that you have two systems: you write and then you also teach to your coaching clients. So it would be great to learn a little bit more about those techniques.

David: Okay, I have two methods. I call it the Tortoise and the Hare, and it’s because of the way or the speed in which the books are written. The first book I wrote was called The Road to Gold and that was thirty pages, and it was a training manual, and that was in 1996 – that was not a big deal. I know for a lot of people the thought of writing a thirty page book is scary, but when I was in Dan Kennedy’s Platinum Club in 2000, he says, “Okay, Ledoux,” and if you’ve ever listened to Dan, you know he doesn’t fool around, he means business. He says, “Ledoux, you’ve got to write a book. You’ve got to write a book that we can sell in the bookstores and you’ve got to do it by the Platinum meeting. You’ve got 90 days.” I went home absolutely freaking out. How do I write a book in ninety days?

Well, the great thing about Dan is that he took me under his wing and he kind of whispered in my ear how to do it and I’ve refined it over the years and that’s what I call the Hare Method. That’s fast. So I wrote fifteen topics and each topic had three bullet points. That was something I’ve learned from Bill Gove, who said, “When you’re giving a speech, you make a point and then you tell a story.” So I had fifteen major topics all with a killer copy written headline and then three bullet points for each topic, and each point had a story. So I’d make a topic and then tell three stories, make a topic, tell three stories, and this was my very, very first book-book called

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How I Went From Welfare to Millionaire Without Winning the Lottery. I released that in 2001 and today, seven years later, there are over 200,000 copies of that book floating around. It still kind of freaks me out… It kind of become the de facto book for the direct selling industry and after that I said, “I’m never writing a book in 17 days again. It was too hard.”

So I came up with the Tortoise Method, and today with the blogs it’s even easier than ever before is every day you write five hundred words. So over the course of a year you’ve written a book. Then you hire an editor, a freelancer, an outsourcer, and they take all that work you’ve written over the course of the year and it becomes a book. So using that model I wrote a book a year for five years. So, I guess now I’ve got like six books out. Also thanks to technology now the costs to write and create a paperback book and self-publish are very cheap.

I’ve also gone to more of a multimodal marketing method where the written word becomes content for videos, for presentations when you do live presentations, for audios and podcasts. So it takes that message (you only do the work once) and then you can deliver it to different audiences in different formats around the world, more importantly it’s in a format that they want to consume it.

Howie: I think the concept of using your blogs as a way to get the content; you can kind of write in the moment. You could work with stream of consciousness, it doesn’t have to be really long form and then you just put it together and it’s your voice because you wrote everything in little sections. I think that’s a great way of doing it. What I always love about Seth Gordon’s blog is Seth will talk about concepts and then three or four months later, it turns into a book and it’s like, “Hey, I remember reading little pieces of that on his blog.”

David: Yeah. When I’m working with clients now, every single one of them, one of the first things we do is make a decision to write. Even if they hate writing, anybody can suffer through a 15-minute, 20-minute, or 30-minute session once or twice a week, three times a week, and that’s your best work. You don’t resent it. You let the energy flow, and every one of my clients now writes a book within their first year of coaching.

Howie: That’s great. I mean it’s so important to kind of get out of the mold of saying, “Oh, I don’t like to write,” or “I’m afraid to write,” and that’s why I love blogs and concept management systems in general. It just makes it so much easier to like you said, just get it out there.

So now that we know how old you are, I also know that you’re retired, and that was when I brought your name up someone said, “Oh, I thought David retired,” and I said,

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“I don't know, let me ask him.” So it’s funny because then I realized that it’s not your first retirement and it would be kind of fun to learn about. We think, “Oh, my parents retired.” They both worked for the city of New York for thirty odd years and they retired and that’s it. So it would be kind of fun to learn about what you call cyclical retirement.

David: Yeah, cyclical retirement, because of the internet technology and the way business is changing, the model I was taught in high school was go to school, get an education, go to a university, go deep in debt to get a better education, then get a job. Work that job for forty years, pay off your student loans, save up for a house. By the time you reach sixty-five, retire, and then enjoy retirement on less money then you could barely struggle with during your working years.

Even back then it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But what happened to me was because of my involvement as an entrepreneur, by the time 1997 rolled around I had developed passive residual income streams. So I made six figures a year whether I got out of bed or not. So that gave me the time and the money and the freedom to spend investing in myself. In 1997 I taught myself about the internet and internet marketing and began to align myself with some brilliant marketers, advisers and teachers. I did that for a few years, retired from direct marketing in 2000 and took time off.

Then in 2001 I saw an opportunity in the coaching of entrepreneurs and I started at $500 an hour and over the next few years I had to raise my prices to where I was coaching entrepreneurs for $1,500 an hour because of demand and because of the importance of implementation. I retired from that for a while and I started this global business where for about a year I went all over the world developing agents and offices to serve my business in places like the Philippines and Hong Kong, Australia. I went all through Europe to like fifteen, sixteen different countries.

But when I got back from that travelling business and building that business, my wife took ill. She developed a really serious disorder called Irritable Bowel Syndrome and she lost like thirty pounds. She was very, very sick, and for two years, all I did was drive her doctors and specialists and western medicine had no answer for her. Luckily we had streams of income coming in that we could keep looking for answers and finally we found this specialist who was a chiropractor who practiced Chinese philosophy of medicine. He found that she had the spine of an eighty year-old woman and all these problems in the spinal cord were causing her illness. But for two years that’s all my focus was on.

So I found myself in 2005 with a healthy wife for the first time that I wanted to spend a lot of time with so I sold of a couple of my businesses, kept a few of my businesses, hired some managers for that. So pretty much since 2005 I’ve been retired and that’s

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kind of cycles within cycles. Sometimes I work six weeks on and took six days off. Sometimes I’d work for three months on and take a month off. I know that’s one of your favorite methods and rhythms but I’ve been pretty much retired since 2005.

Howie: That’s great and for me, like you mentioned, that’s kind of what I like to do. I like to work five-six months then take a month or two off and then come back and work three-four months, take a month off. It’s important because it allows you I think to recharge your batteries and you just come back so much more focused than when you left. So no, that’s a great way to do it and that’s a lot of retirements in and out too.

David: Yeah, I don’t want to wait until I’m 65 to have to enjoy my life. I encourage my clients and my friends, “Smell the roses now,” and it was the wakeup call of my wife getting ill that I said, “Man, we are going to live now,” and that’s totally changed my attitude towards how people should look at work.

Howie: No, that’s very important and especially that you’re able to take that time off with your family because many people if they’re in a 9-5 grind they can’t even take the time that they need.

So you’ve been out of the limelight for several years with all the retirements in and out, at least when it comes to the internet marketing circles. So what have you been up to? I know that you’ve taken on some coaching clients and so can we say you’re back out of retirement? Is that fair to say?

David: Well, no. In 2005 I was pretty much done. I had some personal one on one clients and a whole bunch of automated income streams using the internet and different forms of leverage. But my wife turned me onto her natural path. We used a lot of alternative medicine practitioners when she was ill. I’m strong like a bull, I’m super healthy but that internet marketing crept up on me without warning and I went to her natural path. So here I am, it’s my thirty-eighth birthday, and I find myself, I weigh 168 pounds at 22% body fat and she says, “Dave, man, you’ve got to get moving. You’re totally inactive. Your body’s at an age now where you’re losing muscle mass, you’re losing bone density, you’ve got to do something.”

I was shocked because I had been an athlete in high school and university and sitting at a keyboard and feet up, living the good life, I said, “Okay, I’m not going to join a health club and walk on a treadmill or do the stair climber,” and I had had an interest in martial arts. By luck, I googled Jiu-Jitsu Mississauga and I found a club called Kombat Arts. I got into martial arts in the summer of 2006 and my body weight dropped. I found out I had an aptitude for fighting and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half. Every other day I take Jiu-Jitsu boxing, Muay Thai Kickboxing, and submission grappling and I’ve been training to be a cage fighter. I’m

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a little bit old and I’m not going to be a cage fighter. I have a bit of one foot in reality, but I’ve been going in submission grappling tournaments which is like fighting without being allowed to punch a guy in the face fully, but I’ve been doing Japanese Jiu-Jitsu and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and grappling.

Last year, I went into the Canadian National Jiu-Jitsu Tournament and I won gold at my weight class and my belt level. I’m the gold medal winner at Canadian Jiu-jitsu Nationals and that’s what I’ve been doing for two years. I’ve been fighting and working with amateur cage fighters and I’ve been loving it, but I had something happen recently. I’ve developed a really good friendship with a number of people at my gym who own businesses, and in the space of ten days I’ve had so many coincidences happen around marketing that I knew it was time to get off my butt and get back into doing business again.

Howie: That’s a great story from internet marketer to cage fighter. Yeah, I feel sad. I take my little kickboxing class but that’s it. I’m trying though but I’m not doing any MMA stuff, I’ll tell you that much.

So basically it seems like you really had no intention to get back into marketing and consulting. You were kind of done.

David: Yeah, I was done but I’ve kind of been in the right place at the right time where I’ve listened to these coincidences. I guess I’ve been kind of open and listening to what the universe is telling me. In the space of ten days, my friend Joey who owns the gym, he’s the third largest gym in North America. He is the dominant market leader in Canada. He had three competitors move into his business and try to attack him in his own niche. These are not little gyms; these are major multinational conglomerate competitors.

Joey had me in a headlock, cranking on one of my arms one day and he was telling me about his competition. I kind of mumbled to him, “I think I can help you crush your competition,” and he said, “What?” He stops beating the crud out of me and we went for coffee and I started to show him what I used to do and how I would position his business to stay the dominant market leader.

At his club there is a lady named Carolyn who owns a sports therapy clinic. She actually fixes all my injuries. She has a brand new business and she’s working eighty hours a week and she talked to Joey and she said, “I’d like to hire you to help me grow my business,”

At roughly the exact same time, one of my best friends, Dennis, he owns the third largest vacuum dealership in North America, and he’s making a boatload of money. He doesn’t even have a webpage. He said, “Dave, man, I keep hearing about this

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thing – the Internet. I think I need a webpage for my business,” and I just laughed. I showed Dennis what Google is doing with local search and how to crush Google and block out competition in Google and how to be the dominant result when someone searches locally for results in Google. I used a lot of the tactics that you and I have talked about and some of the stuff that you’ve taught me. So Dennis, Carolyn and Joey, all in the space of a little over a week, it made me realize I’ve got to get back into coaching and consulting entrepreneurs again, especially with the changing media model and how the 21st century is changing all the rules when it comes to building a business, especially online.

Howie: That’s excellent, especially when you see these small business owners. They have no idea what’s going on and they don’t know where to begin and they either do nothing like many do or they go and hire ridiculous services that do nothing but put up brochure where basically a site that’s never going to get properly indexed or they’re running very poorly or really no optimization at all, AdWords campaigns. So there’s just an amazing opportunity for these companies that are also more substantial. We’re not talking about a guy with an idea, like you’re talking about one of the top health clubs in North America. These are significant businesses, so there’s need even at that level. It’s not just the pizza stores for local search that we talked about. It’s these real, substantial businesses that need a lot of help.

David: That’s right.

Howie: So there are a lot of people talking now that you’re ending your retirement and we just talked a little bit about that about how you’re getting back into the game. So can you talk a little more about what you’ve been doing and how you’re coming back into internet marketing?

David: Yeah, about two years ago just when I was winding down, Yanik Silver introduced me to a guy named Tim Ferriss, and Tim was getting ready to launch a book called The Four Hour Workweek, and I got to know Tim a little bit. He also does martial arts and he trains at American Kickboxing Academy. Tim says, “Brother, we share a lot of marketing DNA, man. You’ve got to give birth,” and I said, “Tim, man, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, alright?” His book was brilliant. If you haven’t read The Four Hour Workweek you’ve got to read it! What struck a chord with me is it was almost like the book was talking about my life story. Tim talks about escaping the cubicle, about creating a passive residual, automated income streams, he talks about cyclical retirements.

This book just struck a chord and I guess it implanted in my subconscious. I watched Tim become literally today one of the thought leaders in this type of marketing and I had sent Tim a video of one of my fights. I fought in my gold medal match this six-

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foot tall guy and I’m like 5’7” on a good day, and this guy kicks me in the head, and I set it up to a foot sweep, so he kicks me in the head. I trap the kick to my head. I take this guy down. He gets a triangle choke on me and I end up escaping it to win the gold medal. So Tim says, “Dude, watch the inside sweep to the triangle,” and he says, “Dave, if you ever get back into marketing, email me.” And that’s been in my inbox in my Google mail for two years.

So I guess all the stars have lined up. Joey told me he needs help with his marketing. Carolyn told me she needed help with her marketing. My friend Dennis told me he needed help with his marketing. Yanik told me to get back into it. Tim Ferriss told me to get back into it. So I’ve listened and I’m getting back into it.

Howie: And you’re doing this whole call so I guess what everyone’s wondering is, considering we’re all marketers, are you going to sell something?

David: Oh, of course, absolutely, but not now. I’ve spent the last two years developing a system of teaching entrepreneurs and small business owners how to grow their business and their profits without working harder, and I believe most business owners are working way too hard for way too little profit. When they hire marketing consultants to help them grow their businesses, they invariably end up with these bloated gas bags who pontificate and they blow a lot of smoke so they can appear intelligent and justify their outrageous consulting fees to the business owners or worse, they sell the poor entrepreneur a giant box full of crap and it looks good like with fifty DVD’s and 1,200 pages of manuals, and so much general noise… The entrepreneur just throws it on the pile in a corner and says, “One day I’ll get to that,” and they’re so busy they never touch it.

My approach for the last ten years has evolved and it’s a very, very different way of getting results. I think it takes 15 minutes to drastically change an entrepreneur’s life. Maybe not to totally transform the business from top to bottom, but it’s all about velocity of implementation. Any entrepreneur can easily implement one money making idea a week in under 15 minutes. A mere 15 minutes once a week, when done properly with some guidance and some tracking, can totally make a world of difference.

Howie: How can entrepreneurs learn more about these ideas and resources? We’ve talked about a lot of really powerful things on this call and you’re kind of a hard guy to find now. If you do some research you see some of your old stuff and then you’re popping back in into internet marketing again. So how can we learn more about these methods?

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David: Well, I think the first thing entrepreneurs should do is figure out what’s not working, what’s broken. So let’s figure out what’s broken so we can identify ways of fixing it. I’m giving away a special report right now entitled “Small Business Death Sentence.” It’s free and it’s at my business owners’ resource site at http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com.

Howie: And that’s a fun name. How did you come up with that name?

David: Well, Big Money Free Time is a concept, what Mark Joiner calls a touchstone, what I believe is a philosophy. I have never met a lazy entrepreneur and part of the problem is that we as a community of business owners seem to take pride in working ridiculous hours. http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com is about changing the way we look at our businesses as owners and entrepreneurs, and I am encouraging and supporting small business owners to celebrate making more money than they’ve ever made before in their lives while feeling like every day is the day before a holiday.

Howie: How can we get a copy of that report?

David: It’s “Small Business Death Sentence.” It’s going to shock and upset a lot of entrepreneurs but that’s okay, that’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s at http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com, it’s spelled just like it sounds, it’s one word, and yes, and I have videos, live case studies, podcasts, and profiles up there as well. I go through the Google crush method with my friend Dennis, the guy without a website who dominates the search engines for asthma treatment of his hometown. I talk about the concept of printing your own currency, the power of outsourcing and using virtual assistants. I discuss a strategy, how to become the visible expert in your niche. I talk about the P3 method and much more. I don’t give away all of my best secrets but I do share a lot of them.

Howie: Excellent, and we’re nearly out of time but yeah, I wanted to thank you. This has been a lot of fun and it’s great to just go through the history of this because you have more history than really anyone else in the current internet marketing circle at least, so this has been a lot of fun.

David: It’s been my pleasure, Howie. It’s been a thrill to share this with the listeners.

Howie: Excellent, and I wanted to encourage all of our listeners today to go to http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com. I think it’s a great name and I’ve reviewed the special report, I’ve had the opportunity to work with David personally. We’ve hung out together in a few different cities and it’s just really powerful what he’s giving away on his site. So again it’s

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http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com/





http://www.smallbusinessdeathsentence.com and have a great day, David, this has been a lot of fun.

David: Thanks Howie.

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A Brief History of Internet Marketing

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