Tyrone: Welcome to another Internet Business Podcast on the Business Lifestyle Podcast channel with Tyrone Shum here. Today I’ve got a special guest and his name is David Jenyns and he’s from Melbourne. So hi David, I just want to welcome you on the call today. David’s going to be sharing a little bit more about what he does and I actually stumbled across David through FaceBook. Is that right David?

David: Yeah, yeah we started off little bit through there and thought we connect.

Tyrone: Yeah, so it’s a real honor to be able to have you on the call today. I wanted to share with my audience today what you currently do and how you also live the kind of business lifestyle that a lot of entrepreneurs out there on the Internet do. Maybe just give a little background for people who don’t know who you are, what you do and where you live and yeah, how long have you been in this game for too?

David: Yes, so I’m based down here in Melbourne, Melbourne Australia and I’ve been marketing online I’d say for the better part of 10 or 11 years now. First I’ve got interested in way back when I first got interested in stock market and a friend of mine at school was telling me how much money he was making and just like a problem gang blog. Then, he’d said trade, they win or they’ll tell you when they’re losing money.

Tyrone: No way…

David: I thought wow! This is too good to be true. When I finished school, I decided rather than going in University against the better advice of my friends and family, they said you know, you should go to University and get what it takes to get really far and I thought no, I’m going to take out $5,000 loan and go to weekend share trading course to see if I can become a super trader over the course of a weekend. But, I very quickly realized that it takes a little bit more than that to get the stock market down and mastered for one. You have to have a little bit of a trading flow and extra capital behind you unless you go with no money, you can’t really trade what it is that you don’t have. So, once that happened, I realized I need to build up a little bit of extra cash. I’m very interested in stock market that I identified a little bit of a natial exposure, there was a charting package that a whole lot of people were using that they don’t fully understand how to use this charting package. It’s called metastock. The particular trading community or group that I was a part of, a lot of them really just badly use it. So I joined up with another guy and we created a homestudy course for. This was back in 2001 and we wrote this course and it did really well within our community but we realize you can have a perfect product but if people don’t know it exists, it’s not really worth anything. So we have this product sold well in immediate group but beyond that, we needed to get the word out. That’s when we got interested in a lot of old-school direct mail and I got interested in some of the legends — Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, some people here in Australia, type of those guys. Pretty much down the path of learning how to write long form sales copy, copy that converts and then that really I supposed just evolved over online then I thought I still got this Internet opportunity to get that nasty jam. So we registered a domain name and our first name I got interested to use online was kind of called Kennedy behind side sale. That particular program was all about generating fantastic content and value that pre-sells your product. We’ve put off a lot of material out there and that actually ends up being good for SEO reasons as well but it calls out of the pre-sell and took all of that and started marketing the products online. That’s how it kind of evolved into the Internet Marketing and I think when I first got interested in Internet Marketing especially in the stock market niche, we’re very much on the cutting edge when we’re coming out like when we’re doing VEO for about 4 years ago now online, for promoting different products and services that we offered, also the way that we’re bringing the direct mail and long form sales copy that were converting really well back then. When we brought that online in the stock market niche, we were doing extremely well. We’ve picked a very tight niche and quickly positioned ourselves as the experts and then from there, we just started to build up a product line. You know we’ve built up quite large database of clients and just continue to run seminars, workshops, record them and turn them into info products. That business sort of bubbled along on the side and then we went a little bit entrepreneurial and different things popped up along the way. I think another big sort of one of my big client defense I supposed was copycatting a gentleman called Paul Hartunian indeed, he sold the Brooklyn Bridge in the U.S. and he wrote press releases and got some magnificent and we did something similar here in Melbourne Australia where there we’re doing some renovations on the MCG and Australia’s known to be extremely sporting like we’re a sporting nation.

Tyrone: Exactly.

David: So we’re doing renovations and I pretty much just copycatted his idea and got a lot of scattered culprit and wood and run a press release saying you know, Melbourne man sells the MCG for $2495. To cut the long story short, got a lot of media coverage and with all the skills that I’ve picked up with the direct mail and online, funneled a lot of traffic online to the website that we’ve put up and obviously it converted and sold some things but there have been other bits and pieces that we’ve worked on. There are rock-n-roll clothing music store, unique selling MCDC T-shirts, and it’s like rock items and those type of things. Very much as an entrepreneur, we tried to set that store up as a franchise so we got all the franchise documentation done. Actually a little while ago, we opened our first franchise in Melbourne CBD down here. Yeah, it’s been bubbling along and just recently I supposed because we’ve had some really good success online especially in the stock market niche which I’d say a very high peak, any of those make money niches are very competitive, we started to find a lot of people who were asking how it was that we’re doing, what it was that we were doing. Because we were passionate in the market, I love stock market but I also love marketing. I find it very creative and it’s a great outlet for me. And so, when we have people coming to us, they kind of evolved and it kind of became obvious with enough people asking, we thought what if we set up a search engine optimization camp. Just recently, at the start of this year, we launched Melbourne SEO services where we’re taking what we’re applying in the high peak competitive niches and then applying it to localized local business doing things like you know, Dentist Melbourne, ISO Consulting Melbourne. These parts of phrases and terms that we can very quickly dominate very quick results for our clients and getting some fantastic feedback for that as well. Really shooting my focus a little bit from the stock market. I still very much run the stock market business and that’s how I generate a lot of my primary income, got a good following of my clients, and introducing different products to them during product launches and that types of thing. That’s in a nutshell.

Tyrone: That’s pretty cool. It’s quite interesting taking the path going down to say to University path then going down to get a job and you went down to entrepreneurial path to start up your own business to do share trading or show people on how to do share trading then you’ve evolved into other businesses. How do you think your lifestyle’s changed in that side and what kind of things have you done because of the businesses that you’ve created there that’s allowed you to have more time off, more time with the family, do traveling…what things have you done with that?

David: Yeah, I think when I talk about the 4-Hour Work Week and that type of thing, I think that’s probably about one or two people who actually really unleashed that dream like Yaro Starak as one of the people who I know who does really embodying and embraced that. Whereas I think for me, what I got other things like the 4-Hour Work Week and the way that I structure the time that I work, it’s more about working efficiencies. So making sure that what I am doing, I’m getting the highest leverage from the time that I’m putting it in. As much as I know a lot of people really paint this very succeeding picture of the Internet dream and lifestyle, you know sitting on the beaches, cashing your Clickbank cheques and not having to do any work, I think who’s really successful in any endeavor is putting hell a lot of work. I mean you look at Frank Kern, he really does position himself as the ultimate slacker. I mean they came out with a course called the Underachiever.

Tyrone: Exactly.

David: And, having some spoken to quite a few people, they all say that when he’s focused and when he’s working on a project, he works extremely hard. For me, what building these businesses meant for me is there’s a certain level of freedom and the way I structure my business. When I first started out, you know I didn’t have a project manager on who handled a lot of my projects. I was directly dealing with a lot of our assistants, my time was spent just delegating tasks. I wouldn’t actually get any work done really, because what I was doing was just delegating all of these tasks. The next evolution for me was to be able to get someone to plug in and be the congruent between me and the assistants where I let them know right here the projects that we’re working on. Then they handled through the execution and management of those assistants. So once that happened, that kind of freed me up and I think probably in the last few years, I’ve probably than a lot of traveling than I’ve ever done. I’m trying to travel good 3 and 4 times each year to everywhere from the States. Then, I want to have a month long trip coming out. It took a long time to build to that point like I’m taking the longest breaks for me which I’m having 4 weeks off next month and we’re going over to Italy but while that’s happening, having built everything up, that’ll take over. When we’re here on the ground, I work extremely hard. I do work 5 days a week, probably 2 of the day would be from 9 til 6, then the 3 days of the week would be from 9 til 10, they’re big long days. As I get towards the end of the day, I become less sufficient but usually the way I structure my day, I’ll make sure that I’m working on the most important highest priority stuff early within the day and then when I get to the latter part of the day, it’s about answering emails, jumping on Twitter and engaging with people in the social media space. So as much as like I was saying people paint that picture, I work very hard and it’s something I think I’ll continue to do whether it’s just the way that I operate. I enjoy getting in there and being a part of it. I do like to disconnect and just trying to disconnect during that period but when I come back, I’ll be back into work again.

Tyrone: That’s good man. I think it’s exactly what it is and what you’ve said is honest and truthful thing because I think a lot of people have that misconception about Internet business people or Internet entrepreneurs living that kind of lifestyle, the 4-Hour Work Week. It’s how people do and it depends to how they want to structure it. But I think at the end of the day, if you do is your passion, it doesn’t really become work.

David: Yeah.

Tyrone: It’s more or less something that you enjoy doing to get you going because if you just sat around doing nothing and travel all the time, there’ll be certain point in your life that you go like, “I’m bored. I have to travel and packing out of my suitcase and living with your suitcase for a while is a little bit difficult as well.” So yeah, what you say is going to provide some challenges in your life for doing these kinds of stuff. You should have built difference in your life to live and furthermore, we’re still young so there’s still a lot for us in there wanting to pursue and be entrepreneurs too. You mentioned also about the virtual assistants. Are there virtual assistants that you hire or are they local virtual assistants that you’re working with?

David: I know again, this comes back to the idea of people painting this picture and you look at someone like Eben Pagan and he’s really positioned himself to creating this massive business, this $30M plus business that works for virtual employees solely. For me, it doesn’t work as well because I find these efficiencies that I lose when someone’s not here in the office with me. What I’ll do is the way that I structure is we have about 4 people here in the office that work with me and what they’re working on is they’re really doing things that are very difficult to outsource because in my brand it’s so deeply entrenched in it. For example, a lot of video stuff that we do is in-house and obviously all the copy and sales messages and all those sorts of stuff are in-house, but mainly in graphics, it’s done offshore. But the way that these 4 guys in the office work is they did have assistants underneath them. So that’s when we outsource and we got some other few guys in the Philippines, person in the states, then we’ve got an additional couple of freelances that help us with ad jobs as well. Pretty much here in the office we’ll have project or two that we’re working on then each component of that will go to the assistants here in the office that sort of manages the particular areas, so be it graphics, be it video, be it whatever, they’ll manage it with the assistants underneath them where we’re trying to outsource that. The process really starts off with me in the office having the intellectual IP then teaching the people here in the office the way that IP works then the aid of the game becomes having to take that and systematize it and get a system in place where we could outsource that even further. So the work starts with me and then it gets stripped down the line with the ultimate goal of getting it over to someone in the Philippines. Having the system in place, which it constantly increases the value of the guys here in the office and my time value as well. Because the more I can push those things out, the more I can delegate then the higher level stuff I can begin to work on.

Tyrone: Absolutely. And, do you currently manage these assistants through a project management system? Or, how does it all work, how do you get the work delegated out to the right people? Because obviously you got a team that’s pretty big team you’re able to manage too.

David: Yeah, so the way that we do it we run it through Basecamp, that’s for monitoring. And, working with the virtual team, there’s a lot of different things that we’ve learned along the way. Like again, Eben Pagan has got some really good ideas you know with these end-of-day emails, when someone finishes up a shift they write down what it is that they’ve done, and they tell you when there are issues or problems that they’ve come up against and anything that you can help them out with. Having those end-of-day emails, we log that through Basecamp which is an essential way so that if more than one assistant like a virtual assistant is getting communicated with more than one person here in the office, everybody knows exactly what the thread and where people are up to with different things. That’s why we’ll use Basecamp as the central place. We meet the team here in the office once a week and we talk about the different projects that we’re working on. From day to day point of view, I’ll chat and check with the guys here in the office, like here’s what we’re working on, here’s what needs to be done, manage that with the assistants and the assistants and virtual assistants log a lot of their stuff through Basecamp.

Tyrone: Okay, so that’s really cool there. So you’ve got pretty much a project management system in place, you’ve got virtual assistants and also team of staff in the office with you, and you basically have the projects all managed in the office and basically delegated out to that. Good stuff! Also, just want to get a better feel of firstly you’ve now talked about doing another business which is SEO Melbourne that you’ve just recently launched and you said there’s a demand from your stock market business that you have there. How are you managing say two businesses, say for example an entrepreneur like yourself currently have 2 to 3 businesses running at the same time, where do you focus most of your time on and how are you managing the time you got there? Because obviously you got split businesses to focus on.

David: So the primary roles that I say that I take, the hiring role is extremely important and I think as a CEO and entrepreneur that needs to be something that or someone that really focuses and making sure you’re getting the right team on board. Once you get the right team, it just makes everything work so much easy. So we’re just talking about hiring A-players and you know if you want to get up to speed with that, just read Brad’s smart book Topgrading, that’s good place and stuff for hiring people. As far as like the way that I split my attention I think this is something that a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong. The reason I say that is because I’m guilty as charged. It’s starting to many fuss, the best bang when it comes to time is to make sure that you have a really single focus and that’s something that we’ve been working towards here. Look, I’m trying to strip out so many parts of the business that I have been running so I can really focus and make sure that the things that I’m working on all work synergistically. So, we had a big back catalog you know as part of my SEO days, we’ve registered 530 old domain names and we built the map and had them you know, all with unique content and trying to put them across multiple IPs, all those types of stuff which just taking up too much attention and then I decided right, we’ve actually just jumped over a broker here and running a team alone with flipping broker. We’re selling these sites on Flippa. The reason I tell you the story is so you understand that what I’m trying to do here is cow all of that and somehow focus can be really tight now. We decided to drop the stock market niche because we have such a good following, we got a product line and it’s very automated, it’s just easy. We just did a product launch recently for someone else in the stock market niche and they weren’t really familiar with product launches so we pretty much run the product launch and did exclusive product launch to our list. That launch was what can you expect, just a small business with that launch. I’m not just going to drop that business but my attention is starting to shift and trying to go into more Melbourne SEO services. Because the biggest thing that I’ve noticed just recently I’ve got a business coach and what we’ve talked about is being an entrepreneur, a lot of what you’ll find you’ll do is you got these big spots of profitability and this comes from product launches and things like that where you’ll see you’ve got your baseline and sales that come in, and that might be a certain level. Then, every now and then you get these massive sparks. That’s great but the thing is it’s not focusing on building necessarily a business, you got the baseline of sales but it really should be focusing necessarily to build a business and which is why we’re focusing on Melbourne SEO services. We’re targeting and we’re going to go after 12 clients and we’re going for high-end clients who understand that. As long as we’re getting them a positive return on investment, they happen to spend as much cash with us as they like and that business that we’re building is going to provide quite high-end clients providing more than enough money to fund operations here in the office with the overheads and staff. Then have money over and above that, with that money that’s over and above, that’s what we’ll take and look to invest into other businesses because my passion being the entrepeneur is starting and growing businesses. We’re thinking of evolving into being like the Waren Buffett of the online world — we’re buying web businesses, building them up, taking their expertise, refine the systems with the clients that we are working with and those clients will for that overhead. I think we’re shifting away from the stock market stuff but I’ll never let it go completely. My advice for anyone is watching news, the more that you can strip away and have that single focus, the better you’ll do.

Tyrone: Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve spoken to a few entrepreneurs in the past and depending on what the circumstances and what their goals are in the businesses or like you say journey. Some of them just want lifestyle so that they design the business where they just run and take side of it without much intervention. Then there are really other entrepreneurs out there who just want to keep building new businesses and being involved to businesses and growing it and so forth. I can see that that’s the path that you’re looking to head down which is to grow those business and to yeah, create large ones there to be able to go through which is really good because it’s something that I think you can take in both angles, you can learn from each other because it depends on what you want in your life and it’s all a personal preference. For example, Marc Lindsay, he’s got a very successful SEO company up in the Brisbane and a lot of clients all across Australia. He tells me he works 12 hours plus a day because he loves doing it but also he works with the clients hand on hand. Whereas with people like about Yaro Starak, he probably works only 2 hours a day but he enjoys what he does. So everybody’s entrepreneur journey is really different and everybody’s goals are different in life. But it’s really good just to be able to learn in those business aspects with those same principles as you said just focus on one thing at a time rather than have yourself split up all different areas. So that’s really good. Any parting advice I guess in terms of for other people who are wanting to start their business and where they should look at starting first like say maybe three tips in starting an Internet-based business.

David: Yeah, okay. The first thing that I’d say is get clear. It’s good to work on something that you’re passionate about. I’m fortunate that marketing is my passion so I can then apply that to any niche that I go after like, I really enjoy that. It’s good idea to work on something that you do enjoy. As you said earlier, you really hit the nail in the head like Marc Lindsay can work 12 hours a day because that’s something that he enjoys so I can work the longer hours because it’s something that I enjoy doing. Make sure that that’s something that you enjoy doing. Make sure that you pick out that niche, once you pick out that niche, once you’ve picked out the niche, the best thing that you can do is create the idea. This is something I’ve been thinking about more so recently. A lot of people just don’t do it, the idea of finding out and once you know that niche, pick a person and create a normal around through that person, what the biggest issues are, what are the demographics as well. Get really clear on that so you get inside their head. Make sure that you create a product that fits them that they want so you want to make sure that whatever you create rather than just marketing stuff. Don’t create the product first then look for the market, look for the market first then create the product. So, get clear on that and my other piece of advice is make sure you build a smart business model. This is where I see most people going wrong. Setup an e-book website to sell a $17 e-book and that’s their business. Think about how you’re going to structure over the long hole and what I would think about is make sure that you come out with the front-end lead generator which is your low-end entry-type product that will introduce them to your product line typically at just the second level which might be the higher end level priced product. The front-end lead generator maybe are the free, $7 or $30 something down that low-end, anybody can jump on board. The middle thing is kind of looking between the $97 to $500 or $600. Then, build out that product line and beneath that try to see if you got anything else that you can add it into the mix, continuity or coaching or something like that. Now, I supposed I’m talking a little bit more about service-based business start business there, just plan out what your business model is first and make sure that you’re doing more than just a 17-dollar e-book. Pick the niche, plan out the business model and then make sure that you focus and get a little bit of an action plan together as what it is that you’re going to try to execute and how you’re planning on building that business and then just start buying off small pieces off that and do little bit each day. Always thinking out of your head on how can you increase those efficiencies so is there’s anything that you can outsource that’s always a smart idea. Make sure that you start off by outsourcing those regular menial tasks as quickly as you can. So if it’s checking your customer support, if it’s you know, doing your books for your accounting, all of those type of things that could vary easily to outsource especially if you don’t enjoy it. I say keep it if you enjoy it and then outsource it if you don’t.

Tyrone: That’s certainly that I think a lot of people have been starting to learn and also with a lot of the audience that I know, they’re learning that if it’s not necessary, they’ll eliminate it as much as they can and automate the process as much as you can. It’s all part of streamlining your systems. Actually there’s one thing that I wanted to also ask you as well just for tips for people who got website businesses and you’re the expert in SEO as well. If people have say their website and they want to get it up on the search engines, say for example they’re just starting out for their new website or whatever that business is, any sort of takeaway tips that you can give them as well in terms of SEO to be able to just help them rank better. Maybe 5 tips that you can do that. Just give them parting advice for this too.

David: Yeah, well with SEO there’s really two main components. You’ve got the on-page optimization and you’ve got the off-page optimization. On-page optimization is really quite simple. When you think of the SEO pie, you probably make yourself about 20% of the SEO pie and the off-page optimization makes up better, 80% of the SEO pie. So the things that you do for your on-page optimization, the the most important thing that you could do is to identify who your advertising your target market is first, you get the clear. For on-page optimization, where it all starts is the selection of keywords. Making sure that you’re selection the right keywords means that you have to get into their head of the person who’s searching. Once you’re inside their head, you really think about what are these that they’ll be talking into Google behind your products and services. You start to identify those keywords and there are different tools that you could use, there’s Market Samurai, if you want it free just search through the free Google Keyword Tool, it will come up number one. Identify a set of keywords that you’re going to go after rather than drilling down to keyword patterns. Choose your keywords, just choose a good variety of keywords. Some competitive keywords and vary some long tail keywords as well. Then you do your on-page optimization. Optimize one keyword per page, don’t try to do multiple keywords per page. Make sure you put the keywords and lay some terms may or may not be familiar to your listeners and pass in onto web, who’ll know. Make sure you put it on your title tag, your meta description, your meta keywords. Now, the meta keywords at the moment isn’t playing an impact on search engine rankings but it doesn’t hurt to put it in there just in cases there’ll be changes one day. Then go ahead and put keyword a couple of times on the page but don’t freak out too much about trying to have the certain keyword density. Just put it naturally on the page a few times particularly early and often. So you can have it on the first paragraph, have it in the middle, have it in the end. Try to have about 300 words in the page at least. Put the keyword if you can in the h1 tag and something like that. That’s the basics of on-page optimization, there’s nothing too new or flashy there. Then, the second part of it is doing your off-page optimization. That’s where the bulk of it counts. To get the best bang for your buck for building links, yeah that’s bang it’s a stock market term. To build links the best, the best thing that you need to do with off-page optimization is all about building links back to your website with the appropriate anchor text. So you build links back to your website with the keywords you’re trying to optimize for. You’re going to make sure you vary with those keywords as well because what we’re trying to do anything with SEO is making sure you’re replicating what happens in nature. It’s natural to have all of your links coming back to your website from WordPress blogs so we don’t exclusively use particular method for link building. So look at other methods for link building, everything from posting to EzineArticles, to press releases, to blog networks if you got access to those, blog comments, other article directories and you want to create a system, a process that you can have automatically executed because SEO happens overtime. It’s not a hit and run thing for you to build links so for that race, you need to create a system and this comes to the outsourcing stuff and listening to any of Tyrone’s stuff to get you up to speed on how to outsource correctly.

Tyrone: Thanks.

David: But all you need to do is to get that system in place and make sure that’s continually executed in those links built in natural, organic fashion. At the moment, the big takeaway is where big sites win — the more pages you have, the better. As John Reese said, the more pages you create, it’s like another ticket in the search engine lottery so bigger sites are winning that’s why e-commerce sites rank so well. I know there’ve been slight changes recently with the MayDay effect which is the change in algorithm recently, but the fact is still big sites are working and you just point links to their webpages that you want to have ranked. So SEO in a nutshell, there’s a lot of stuff there and I think a lot of people can really caught up in the details of it as well and searching the gang of search engines. But to get ahead of it, just have good quality product and then just do good quality, white hat link building by getting articles out there and creating videos to help promote because I think one of the biggest easiest ways at the moment to drive traffic back to your website and get ranking is through video. So what you’re doing here Tyrone has spot on. Whatever niche you’re in, find out some experts in the particular niche and try to do it in video, optimize it correctly and all that on-page optimization stuff that I’ve talked about plus you do equally the same over the video space then you drive all of that traffic back and get the easy rankings back to your website.

Tyrone: That’s excellent advice. I know there’s a lot of content there but probably we’ll replay this if you need to listen to it again because Dave has just given so much good stuff there. Well awesome. So David, I thought before we do head off, how can people get in contact with you in terms of your services and probably get in contact with you too?

David: Yeah, there’s two main places to go. If you head over to DavidJenyns.com, so that’s D-A-V-I-D, Jenyns, so it’s J for Jollibee, E for Egg, N for Nitro, Y for Yellow, N for Nova, S for Sand and dot com. I say that because sometimes it’s hard to spell. Or just Google my name and it’ll come up that way. And, if you want any sort of help with SEO related stuff, head over to MelbourneSEOServices.com and we got loads of free videos and we run workshops in that type of stuff. That’s it.

Tyrone: I’ll put that down on my blog post as well and also in YouTube. If anyone wants to get hold of you, they could just click on these links just below this video. Well David, thanks so much for coming onto the interview today. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I’ve learned a lot from you too and I feel that the listeners also gained a lot of great content from you so thanks again today.

David: Thanks Tyrone!

Tyrone: If you want to hear any more of these additional podcasts, or anything like this as well, just hop onto Tyroneshum.com and you’ll find plenty more interviews and podcasts like this. That’s it for today, my name is Tyrone Shum and I’ll see you next time.