James Schramko is a leader in the internet business scene. Much of his work is done behind the scenes and is undetectable on the surface hence the term ‘underground marketer’. The connections and network of serious multimillionaire internet entrepreneurs James has built up over the years is astounding.
Based in Sydney, James runs his profitable business from home.
James shares some of the secrets to his success and practical online marketing advice that any business owner can implement.
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Christo: Good day, guys. Welcome back. Today we have a very special guest, James Schramko. James is a leader in the internet business scene. Much of his work is undetectable on the surface, hence the term underground marketer. He does a lot of behind the scenes work for many, many businesses. The connections and network of serious multimillionaire internet entrepreneurs James has built up over the last few years is quite astounding. He‘s based in Sydney. James runs his profitable business from home. And the techniques he uses are often simple, yet powerful.
Good day, James. Thanks for joining us today. Awesome to have you on the call.
James: Thank you, sir. It‘s good to be here.
Franziska: Hey James. I‘m here, too. It‘s Franziska.
Christo: You got the team here. You got Christo and Franziska.
James: Double that.
Christo: Yeah, that‘s right. So we really appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much. And can we start off by maybe you telling us a little bit about you and maybe how you got started in business and where you‘re at now – so a bit about your journey?
James: Well, my main journey was through the wonderful world of sales. I used to, well when we started having babies we needed more money because they‘re very expensive. And I got a job in sales. That was great. I worked my way through to management and then I was pretty much running the store. They were big stores, because they were Mercedes dealerships. And I realized that the limiting factor was that it was someone else‘s business and that I was tied to one income. So that scared me a little bit. And the more that I learnt about entrepreneurship and creating wealth I realized that I need to have my own business.
So I started teaching myself internet marketing about seven years ago. And I did this after hours of course. About four years ago I built up my business to a strong enough point that I could let go of my job. So four years ago I switched to doing my own business full time. And it‘s just gotten stronger and stronger as I‘ve applied many of the business fundamentals that I knew from traditional business to the online world.
Franziska: Before you took that leap of faith, you‘ve got a couple of kids, did you have already solid income? Or did you say, “Stuff it. I‘m going to do this stuff.”
James: The turning point for me was I wanted to match my income. At the time I was earning about $300,000 a year. But as you said, I have kids. I have four kids, and I had a mortgage on a nice house is Chatswood and I had no choice but to earn more money on the other side. So as soon as my own business reached $300,000 in income that‘s when I switched across. I did it on the basis that I could build it up faster focusing on it full-time instead of part-time, which turned out to be accurate. And it wasn‘t long until I was able to reach past that million dollars a year mark
Franziska: Awesome. So you didn‘t just jump. You know a lot of people that we speak with, sometimes they just kind of have to push themselves into it because otherwise they don‘t really have to do much because they still have the security. But you actually pushed yourself while you were working full-time. So you must have worked double shifts almost for a while.
James: Exactly, I worked from about 9:30 at night to about 2 in the morning every night for three and a half years. So I think it‘s probably a mistake to jump into it without an income coming in or without figuring it out first. I see people put themselves under huge pressure. And they‘re probably going to fail because they don‘t have the fundamental skills they need, plus they now have compromise. They have desperation. And there‘s nothing worse than a desperate marketer. You see it all the time and it‘s such a turn off when you see this marketing coming in, this pleading, almost desperation that it‘s such a turnoff as a customer.
What you want to be, a confident marketer who knows what you‘re doing and you‘ve got the system down and you never have to do something. You do it because it‘s the right thing to do for your customer, not because you need to make rent this week.
Christo: That‘s right.
Franziska: Absolutely. You can see it a lot. And obviously people can smell desperation, so I‘m glad you brought that up. Do you drive a Mercedes after having worked in Mercedes dealerships?
James: I do from one of my old dealerships. I paid cash for it because it‘s the car that I always wanted. I also bought my wife a car at the same time. We put down cash for two Mercedes Benz in my old workplace. The funny thing is they sort of remembered my name. Not because I worked there because I‘m that internet guy. So it‘s kind of funny that the little network stories had circulated in the last few years.
Franziska: That‘s really funny because Christo wants to get an old Mercedes. I‘m not convinced yet.
Christo: I like the old style ones with the wings and stuff.
Franziska: That‘s off topic though.
Christo: You said obviously working through the middle of the night to get your own business going and your internet marketing business. I guess as Franziska mentioned there‘s that kind of juggle. Like some people dive into it and just go straight up and cut all ties. But obviously for you, what was the motivation to kind of get you going, because I know we find the balance, like people find it hard when they are in their own job full-time to find time to do it. Obviously you must have had some serious motivation to stay up all night. What was it? What was driving you?
James: Well, I wanted more than what I was earning and a better life. I really felt like I was delaying my life until some point in the future, which seemed in-congruent with what was possible. When you hear of other people making a lot of money or travelling or sleeping in or whatever, if you think why can‘t that be me. And the majority of my Mercedes Benz customers owned their own business and they were having some sort of a life. They were travelling, going away, had holiday farms and nice cars. Yet, I was an employee. So I felt it was incredibly dangerous having 100% of your income coming from one place that could be switched off at the drop of a hat. Then the economy started to turn when the American mortgage market fell out. So that was a huge warning bell for me. I felt like my job may have been at risk. I didn‘t want to come back home to my family one night and tell them I‘d be sacked from my job. That would have been a huge kick in the guts.
That actually happened to my parents. So I didn‘t want to bring that back through to my children. So I think what was probably one of the biggest motivators was when I was a kid, my parents lost everything. And I know they suffered tremendously from that from a health perspective and a pride perspective. And I also went through a lot of change, growing up as sort of a well-off child to go out and get a job because we didn‘t have anything anymore. It was such a slap in the face.
I think that having kids and being responsible and understanding that there was a better option was what kept me up those nights. And you know, most people who tell you this don‘t have enough time, they‘re really saying they‘re not motivated enough.
Christo: No.
James: Because they‘ll probably sit there and watch television every single night for two hours. They‘ll probably watch YouTube during the day instead of work. I think people probably only work two or three hours a day and then they entertain themselves the rest of the time.
Christo: Well put.
Franziska: I totally agree. And the other thing, you know better, but working in a Mercedes dealership I‘m sure you‘ve been surrounded by lots of rich people, and obviously you had an okay salary, but you also probably say that there‘s more. You can easily have more if you‘re not employed. Is that right?
James: Well, I would see that a lot of them paid cash for cars, and the ones who financed, quite often you‘d catch a glimpse of their earnings on the paperwork. And when someone‘s making several million dollars and you‘re not, you just think, “Well, what‘s so different about them that can‘t be learned or implemented?” And I also dealt with billionaires and some of the most famous people in Australia. They weren‘t really that different when it comes down to it. They just knew different things and networked better with people and had good contact.
Franziska: The other thing I think I heard you say that really struck me and I do agree with that stuff is obviously you‘ve had billionaires, you were dealing with millionaires and you can‘t see that when you look at them because they don‘t have to pretend. They don‘t have to wear a suit and they don‘t have to pretend to be rich because they are rich. Is that correct? Because I remember reading that and that‘s what I think because there are a lot of people out there that pretend to be rich and pretend…
Christo: Trying to prove themselves.
Franziska: Trying to prove themselves by wearing all this stuff and looking a certain way. But I heard you say something like that guy in the shorts and shirt, it‘s probably the one that‘s actually making the bucks.
James: That‘s absolutely true. The more people tell you about how rich they are, the more you would be concerned that they‘re not. It‘s usually the person buying the very entry level Mercedes Benz, they‘re much harder work than someone buying an upper level car because they didn‘t have that attitude and they didn‘t have to prove themselves. So quite often the more wealth someone has the less they‘ll brag about it and the nicer they‘ll be when you get to know them.
Christo: Awesome. Interesting stuff. Let‘s dive into a little bit of the nitty gritty. What tips would you give so immersed in the online marketing world, what tips would you give a business owner who wants to be found online?
James: Well, I think it starts with having really high quality information, content we call it. That is beyond words these days, especially images and videos because people like to be entertained that it‘s actually funny. If you put out a good quality image, like we call them infographics, then people will actually share that and start promoting you to other people for free, which I think is fascinating. But with the rise of sites like Pinterest. One of the best things you can do is dedicate some resources to making high quality images for your business or graphical representation of story of what your business does and put it into a picture. At the least, make some videos. At the worst case scenario, at least have really descriptive and useful tips on your website instead of the bland standard that you go to. We‘ve all seen it that you got this horrible ugly website and it says, “Welcome to my website. Blah-blah-blah. Vomit.” It‘s just boring and doesn‘t stand out. You need to really kill people with something interesting.
Christo: Yeah, good points. That‘s interesting with the graphics isn‘t it? You’re totally right. People want to be, they want to enjoy the experience of it. They don‘t want to go there and be totally dry. There needs to be almost like capture the eye, entertaining at the same time.
James: They do want to be entertained. I use the word edutained.
Christo: Edutained, I like it.
James: Educated and entertained at the same time.
Christo: Yeah, and you know the other thing that I was thinking about this morning when I was on the beach it just struck me how people are really consuming so much BS. Now, when you watch TV and I can hardly turn on the TV because there‘s always some reality soap on there. I was thinking, well people love that stuff. So let‘s give it to them. They love those videos where you actually say, “Now, I‘m cooking soup,” you know. Check that bottom pumpkin. So I think as a marketer we need to see what people want, and that‘s obviously what they want. I probably wouldn‘t watch that sort of stuff, but because I know that our market likes that sort of stuff, you have to overcome that and just give it to them I think.
James: Well, I call that a chocolate coated carrot. People want the chocolate, but they need the carrot. So just dip your carrot in chocolate and they‘ll be drawn to it. They‘ll get the stuff they need.
Christo: I like it. Attract them with the chocolate then give them the healthy carrot hidden underneath.
Franziska: Not sure if I‘d like that combination. Have you had chocolate covered carrots?
James: I‘m keen to try them now that I‘ve talked about them so much.
Christo: So what about in terms of search engines and being found on a search engine? Any tips to improve a business owner‘s search engine results to be found on say, Google.
James: Well, the first thing to look for is to make sure the page title reflects the keywords that the person is looking to be found for. One is that the business owner knows what they‘d like to actually be found for. And this can be a bit of a process. I don‘t think many business owners actually know what that word should be. But we spent a bit of time helping people figure that out. Because once they find out that key phrase, that is quite important. They want to be the most relevant result for what someone is typing into the search engine.
So if someone is going to the search engine and typing in chocolate coated carrot supplier, then if you happen to be a chocolate coated carrot supplier, you would want that phrase to be in the page title. Page title is just a tricky way of saying it‘s the words at the very top of your website that show up in the browser. Once that‘s set, then a lot of the hard work‘s already done, because that helps Google identify, and it’s sorted out.
Now, if the rest of the site matches that in terms of relevancy, then you‘re off to a good start and you want to make sure that everything on your website is original. Don‘t copy it from anywhere else or have it on multiple sites. You want to have the only version of yours. Because that‘s more valuable.
Christo: Yeah, very cool. So page title obviously Google will look at it and think, “Okay, the information on this page is about what they‘ve described in the title and as you said, working it out in the first place the words that you want to be found for and the right words that are going to attract the right traffic to your website.”
James: Yeah, and if you want to test it, you could go and type just about any phrase into Google and you‘ll see that the results return on the first page will probably have that exact phrase in the page title or very similar.
Christo: Right. What are your thoughts of people naming their images and things like that? Obviously you said the relevant content throughout the page, but things like naming images and the headlines on the page and so on, what are your thoughts on those?
James: Well, for images you should name the image what the image is. It‘s certainly a waste if your image says “123XYZ.JPG”. You should name the image with a descriptive name. But the thing that people sometimes do is they get a little bit keyword happy and everything on the page is named the exact key phrase and that is a bit spammy. That‘s called “keyword stuffing.” So you want to just keep an eye on that. Name the images, yes. But keep them relative to the image, not trying to over optimize. Now, with Google‘s latest update called Penguin they‘re very mindful of over-optimization. This is where some people have been too clever and caught themselves out. Now, for headlines I would always recommend you go for a headline that converts. Headlines are probably the most conversion device on the page. And it‘s more important to have people do what you want them to do than to try to optimize it for keyword.
Christo: Yeah, right. Good point.
Franziska: Now, besides SEO, obviously you are an internet marketer. What other strategies do you like? What‘s been a benefit to you? What do you suggest besides SEO?
James: In general probably my over-arching philosophy, which I brought from the city Spence is to focus on that lifetime customer. So a lot of my services or solutions are geared to a repeat customer, where we can deal with that same person over and over again. In business in general I think a lot of people spend so much time and effort chasing that new customers and they forget about the existing customer. But there‘s a lot more profit and it‘s a lot easier to deal with the same people with bigger solutions or repetitive solutions.
Christo: I couldn‘t agree more. It‘s one of the things we‘re often going through with our clients.
Franziska: So just for our listeners, how do you do that, James? Do you just stay in touch? Do you give them some extra value? Do you contact them? How do you make sure that your customers become lifetime customers?
James: Well, I think fundamentally it‘s not giving them a reason to leave. So don‘t do things that annoy people. Even if you contacted them less, but you aren‘t constantly approaching them with an offer for this and an offer for that. That can actually help you preserve a customer. But most importantly it‘s delivering or over-delivering what they‘ve paid you for. If you can give them a better service than what they expected or if you can really deliver everything that they‘ve paid for and they‘re happy with it, then they don‘t have a real reason to go anywhere else.
That‘s why when we look at our repeat customer metrics; they‘re just under 90%. So we know that we‘re really not upsetting people. And then when they do leave, we actually send them an email and ask them about it to find out what we can improve. That‘s basically a feedback loop. So you should have mechanisms to find out why people are leaving. Then you can improve that and optimize your whole services.
So we have also devote a lot of research towards support. We have a number of people whose job it is to support our customers and support the services that we sell so that we can maintain a good level of communication with that customer and reassure them that we‘re aware of that.
Franziska: That‘s awesome. I love that. So it‘s really providing excellent customer service and even putting in resources to make sure that that‘s a given. Even when everybody else is busy you have actually people that look after your customer. That‘s awesome. One other thing that often jumps to my eye when I interact with you is that you‘re always up to date with what‘s going on and new software. There‘s new software coming out every day, but you seem to have an eye for what‘s awesome. And you pick the things that work. You talk about it. How do you find those things and how do you make sure you‘re up to date with the stuff that is coming out, software, the apps, etc.?
James: Well, it‘s a few things there. One is I receive very few emails. So it‘s not from subscribing to 1,000 lists. What I have done is I found one or two techno buffs who send me a short list of stuff that‘s hot. So I‘ve basically got my filters on tight. I‘ve found one or two people who do receive everyone‘s emails and go through everything and they just want to share the ones that are good. So that‘s my first filter. And the second one is usually something that I‘m using and fall in love with. I can‘t help but share with other people, whether I get rewarded for that or not, it doesn‘t matter. I just want my customers to be able to access the same experience that I am. Those are always standouts that I get excited about. And something else that I learned from one of my wealthiest customers who was a stock broker, he would only ever hold two or three stocks at one time. He didn‘t believe in this diversified philosophy where you have 1,000 different stocks and head your bet or whatever. It averages out your wins as well. He taught me to concentrate more on less. And that‘s what I do. When I find something that‘s good I‘ll make sure that I really think it‘s the best, and then I‘ll just drop everything else in that category and only focus on one thing and really champion it.
Franziska: That‘s a great strategy. Because I‘m quite cheeky I just want to ask you, do you want to share who some of those key people are? You don‘t have to.
James: You wouldn‘t know them. They‘re just subscribers to my business who I‘ve ended up communicating via email. So they‘re not famous or public people.
Christo: They‘re like collectors of everything that filters stuff down for you, people that read everything.
James: They‘re the kind of customer who will buy my product and then ask me 1,000 technical questions in the end. I‘m like well you have far more technical knowledge than I do on this. Thanks for all the questions, but why don‘t you just keep me posted with what‘s going on out there so that I can sharpen up my technical stuff. They take it as a real reward.
Christo: That‘s awesome.
James: Yeah, and I‘ve got people who aren‘t famous who aren‘t well-known helping me all over the place. Like there‘s this one old guy who is, I think he‘s got five stints in his heart and he works from home and he‘s retired and his whole income is commission from my products. And each week he goes through my community and finds the best posts and sends me the short list. Then I can make a quick video from that. He‘s doing that as a job. And I‘m getting the benefit of his wisdom and experience. So it‘s like a good sort of teamwork thing. But it saves me a lot of time and effort to go trolling through every post looking for the things that I think other people will be interested in because I‘ve had someone do that for me. So there are always people that are specialized in stuff that are willing to share information with you if you can identify them.
Christo: Yeah, definitely. Now, we always ask these questions, what would you say to put you on the spot, what would you say has been the funniest or weirdest thing that‘s ever happened in your business?
James: Oh.
Christo: That‘s the usual response. We got to squeeze you a little bit on this one.
James: The weirdest thing was probably last Friday. We had a business get together, like our quarterly team meeting. We meet during the week different departments. Then at the end on a Friday we go out to a restaurant. Now, this restaurant is called Center Stage, and it‘s some video key place. Out of nowhere these two very loud transvestite entertainers were speaking Tagalog which is the Filipino language, like shouting and singing and making jokes. I didn‘t understand a single word. My team were all laughing and also looking confused. I looked to my team leader I said, “What‘s going on?” She goes, “I have no idea.” Apparently this thing came with entertainment, which we didn‘t know about. I thought it would be us singing, but we also got sung to by these very unusual folks. That was certainly the strangest that‘s happened in business lately that I can recall.
Franziska: Did you film it? Have you got a video or something? We need some video evidence.
James: Got photos, but I‘m not so keen to share them.
Franziska: James without a shirt on, dancing.
Christo: We know how involved you got. Yeah.
Franziska: Might be too much detail here.
James: I did a photo op with a wig on Facebook and I got a few comments. It was a very strange event.
Franziska: Awesome. Now, before we wrap it up, let‘s finish off with one or two or three words of wisdom. If you could just tell one business owner one thing, what would it be?
James: Well I think there is this temptation to understand everything before you do anything and continually consume and you end up getting brain fried and overwhelmed and quite often you end up doing nothing once you‘ve become aware of all the options. So my suggestion is just keep it very simple and common sense. It‘s not that hard. You just need to come up with a good message that your target customer will really resonate with. And then construct some content that helps you convey that. Then put in a little bit of effort to help other people find that content through various methods, whatever your favorite method is. You don‘t have to use all of them. There might be just one or two things that you can naturally do as a business owner. It might be just updating Facebook or could be just doing a weekly email out to your customers sending them back to your website. But pick one or two traffic channels that work for you and just do them and just get going with it and keep it simple, and really the key to this business is just doing the right things. It‘s not doing the most things and it‘s not knowing every available option. It‘s just doing one or two things that work, and being consistent with it.
Christo: Yeah. I‘m sure our listeners have got a lot of gold out of today. This has been great.
Franziska: Yeah, it‘s been a great entry. So where can people find out more about you and your business, James?
James: If they go to SuperFastBusiness, they‘ll see I put videos up every few days and talk about different things.
Christo: Is that SuperFastBusiness.com?
James: Yeah, SuperFastBusiness.com.
Christo: Awesome. Thank you James.
James: Thanks to both of you. Lovely to catch up.
Christo: Thank you. It‘s been great. Awesome.