Introducing My mentor: Mr. PotatoHead

I've always been a self-starter, self-motivated, self-made, self-centered, self-reliant...
You get the point. I like to make my own moves and be responsible for my own destiny.
However, for the past few years, everyone has been talking about the value of locating mentors.
It sounds good but, I'm not accustomed to receiving advice or working closely with someone.

So, my version of the mentoring game is to subscribe to various newsletters. I take aspects from various people and put them together. Soft of like the old Mr. PotatoHead toys.

I'm on about 50 lists and most of my defacto-mentors fall into two major categories:

1. Internet marketers/software developers.

2. Top shelf bloggers.

(These categories have some overlap. But I think I can drive home the point with clarity.)

The internet marketers and developers promote their offerings on sites like jvzoo and the warrior forum. They are aggressive, bold, sometimes spammy, but effective.

I like the fact they have created a cartel of sorts within their industry.
It's kind of like the rap music industry.
Sometimes, rappers are competing against each other or threatening each other's lives.
Other times, they will do songs and tours together.

These marketers are all competing for the same customers. But there are times they will work together to promote a software launch.

I really admire this spirit of co-opetition. It's one of the things I'd like to inject into my business model.
Josh Zamora and Sam Bakker are my two favs in this genre.

When I think of top-shelf bloggers, I envision someone generating enough traffic and engagement to make a high salary off of traffic and engagement.

They have perfectly optimized articles. Their SEO game is ethical. They are well respected.
Instead of sending email newsletters promoting a product, they send notices when they post a new blog article.

Obviously, once you visit the site, they have products and services for sale.  This is an effective method as well.

My favorite bloggers are Matthew Woodward and Neil Patel.

Now that we have figured out where I'm getting my mentoring from, let's tie this thing up.

I don't have the tech connections to compete with Zamora and Bakker.
I don't have the SEO knowledge and support staff to compete with Woodward and Patel.

However, I do have the creativity to borrow bits and pieces from all of them and create my own path.

I was discussing my online ventures with a buddy a few days ago. He is one of these people who only uses the internet to check his email and watch things I won't discuss in polite company.

Because he doesn't really follow my content, he can't get a feel for what I'm doing.
He asked," So, are you the only person who has this technology? Or is this something everybody is doing?"

My reply, "A lot of people have the same software I'm promoting/developing. But I'm the only person in the world who is doing it like me."

My unconventional methods and approach are my core competencies.
Without those, I'm just another big dreamer with a Chromebook.

Business Blender Niche Sites? Hope for the people?? or Hype for the sheeple???

Business Blender Niche Sites?Hope for the people?? or
Hype for the sheeple???

Over the past year, I have been working tirelessly to develop a marketing system that I could release to the public as a software as a service (SAAS). I initially wanted an all-inclusive platform like Wealthy Affiliate or Empower Network. I reverse engineered their methods and realized how they were making money. I could replicate their menu of products and services. Unfortunately, I didn't (and don't) have the technical skills to do the heavy lifting myself and paying competent freelancers is not financially possible.

I still wanted to generate the big bucks so I continuously worked on building a app that people would pay to use. I eventually bought a traffic exchange site from Ebay. I think the lowest membership level I was selling $5 per month. I met an older lady on Apsense at the time of the launch. I remember her well because she reminded me of my mother. I invited her to join the site but she said couldn’t afford $5 per month. She gave me a link to the website she had joined. It was some flimsy gifting scheme that had a religious theme. I think it was $25 per month for the main membership and they had addons to suck more money out of people’s pockets.

I felt bad for this lady’s plight. She was being suckered into an online business farce. I could tell she really wanted to make some money, but all she did was throw her money into the webmaster’s hands. That was a game changer. I shifted my focus from finding creative ways to mask substandard  service to planning and organizing an awareness creation ecosystem. This ecosystem was to be comprised of digital learning modules, optimized video content, and cutting edge software. But I also had to make it affordable.

Fast forward to October 2015. I have invested thousands of dollars into technology. I have learned from my numerous hackings to not to try to build anything as important as this on Wordpress. This needed to be on a more stable foundation. I choose to build everything in a cloud environment. This gives me access to next level capabilities without a sharp learning curve.

Recently, I released a video wall subscription service call The Business Blender™ Video Niche Sites. I haven’t really been promoting it much I’m focused on the next big release that I feel will be more lucrative and bring in prospects for the niche sites. I’ve been posting links to info about everything I’m working on. A member of the Real People Conduct Real Business Facebook group sent me a comment via private message. He watched a few of the explainer videos and he wasn’t impressed by a piece of software that “only embeds Youtube videos.”  

This is a good example of the problem with not having a feedback loop. Thankfully, there was someone who saw a lack of features and spoke up. His comment exposed the fact I didn’t properly convey the value proposition of my SAAS app. It's a very simple tool but it also extremely versatile and powerful.

For the sake of brevity, I will just name 3 of the best features of the tool. These are in no particular order.

1. SEO Boost.

          I’m no SEO expert, but I know a fair amount about crawlers and Googlebots. A major part of  
the way websites are ranked comes from bots crawling through the pages and scanning the 
content. My tool pulls in the entire description from the Youtube video. This means Google will 
read this keyword rich content and give the site preferential treatment as far as rank.

OK, let’s backtrack a little. What is the importance of keywords in relation to building a successful video niche site. The keywords describe the niche you want to dominate. Choosing the right combination of keywords or keyword phrases can be the difference between middle of the first page of results and 3rd page results. This is why SEO companies charge people 100’s to write fresh content for blogs.

You need to also remember this fact. Youtube is owned by Google. When we target the most popular videos on Youtube and pull them into our app, we are basically pulling in all of the authority as well. The more people who search for those popular videos, the more Google juice they get. This makes their placement on a niche site even more powerful.

2. Zero Learning curve.

   I think going viral and conducting successful marketing campaigns is fun. I think learning how to 
use apps is fun. I also know the fact most people don't enjoy dealing with this tech stuff as much 
as I do. The system is completely "fingerprint-free". I do all of the work. The user sends his/her 
info and I design the site. It’s just that simple. There is no other service in the world that offers 
monthly access to a similar tool for $5 per month. If someone finds one, I’d love to see it.

3. Cloud environment.

After my online presence was severely damaged by hackers, I have learned to hide from them i  
instead of defend against them. This service is not on one of my hosting servers. It’s securely 
stationed somewhere in the clouds above The Netherlands. This means your site will probably  
not suffer many instances of downtime.

Hopefully this gives a little more insight into the benefits of this service. It’s obviously not for everyone, but it can help build traction more efficiently and creatively than simply sharing your video URL’s.

The purpose of The Business Blender™ family of products and services is to help regular people make money in the same ways the ‘gurus’ and ‘master marketers’ do.Period.